Not any more than literally every government agency. But staffing of government agencies can be influenced by elections.
Elections do have some influence, but the real problem is our institutions of higher education, and the quality and type of individual that they are producing. If all the job candidates are fully brainwashed from the start, then that's all the CIA and the FBI and NSA will ever get.
Do the migrants who show up to turn your cities into camping grounds give a fuck about your experiences while doing so?
This is not a time for empathy ethics, this is a time for shoving match ethics.
100% of conquering and pillaging in history was done by human beings too.
Well, that's pretty bleak. I guess we're still far off from Gene Roddenberry's idea of a utopia, if it was ever attainable in the first place.
Wait, I know what you will say. In spite of the technologies we already have, it is a ridiculous idea to expect any part of Star Trek to become reality. Hopelessly naive. Even juvenile.
There was, however, a time where I really did hope to see post-scarcity tech, technological immortality, and other such wonders within my lifetime, no matter how much we had to bend the laws of physics to accomplish it. I figured, if most conflicts were over resources, and most of our fears and superstitions were based around the inevitability of death and the hope of an afterlife, then the best way to eliminate the worst aspects of the human condition would be to defeat scarcity and death in a single mighty blow.
The way I envisioned it, fusion reactors and massive desalination plants and indoor farms would be built in every country, practically eliminating energy and clean water scarcity for a good long while. Fusion torches would be used to recycle unused materials into their underlying elements. Robots would quickly and cheaply print people houses out of concrete. Medical science and regenerative medicine would advance to the point where things like Yamanaka factors could be used to reset people's cells to a more youthful state. AI would invent miraculous new metamaterials and healing nanotechnologies. In the grip of this wondrous revolution, all the old hates and fears would slip away into nothingness.
Now, I have many doubts. Humans are much too power-hungry, paranoid, and distrustful of each other for this to ever come about. And, even if any part of this were to come to pass, we would always find something new to argue about and kill each other over. The end of scarcity and death would not be the end of the fanatic, the cultist, the maniac. There is a sickness in our souls that is too deep for technology to ever excise so neatly.
As my perspective has shifted, all of the people I once regarded as my heroes have turned into villains overnight. There was a time, in the past, that I would have been on Klaus Schwab's side. However, upon realizing the technocrats' murderous intent, I now rebuke them. I cannot in good conscience share an ideology with ruthless killers such as these.
The way things are going right now, we're less likely to end up in
Star Trek and way more likely to end up in some horrible mashup of
Brave New World and
Forever Peace, where people are split up into biological castes and vegetate behind monitors watching head cam vids from teleoperated killbots. By the 2050s, the top streaming channels will be guys piloting Boston Dynamics bots with helmet-mounted BCIs and mowing people down with miniguns. A streamer will get suspended after exclaiming "Watch me SLAY these poor sand-n*****s!" and people will be more upset over the slur than they are over the televised bloodshed.
I have grown very bitter over all this. This is not the future I wanted to live in.
It was exactly the sort of security Erdogan is "providing". AKA he was blackmailing much more powerful states with the threat of stopping doing so. He was even more open about it as Erdogan, who is widely considered as ambitious and scummy. But Erdogan is a bit smarter about it still, and knew when to be careful with his demands and shenanigans, so he survives so far.
Threats is the term.
But at least the service was real rather than imaginary, even if it
was a racket.
The NGOs do have a place in that story, but you are really stretching reality with that claim. The place of NGOs answers the question of "how", not "why". If the NGOs were taking them to China or North Korea they would be having very few people willing to take their travel aiding services.
True. They do have preferred destinations, of course. Nevertheless, there is a rather disturbing amount of institutional support for basically importing people from third-world countries and conflict zones into Europe and North America by the boatload.
Cults do to not care about what those who are not their leaders would prefer to know, that's the idea. Plenty of cults out there, and unlike JW some are in the mainstream and have the mainstream media support them, like the one Greta Thunberg is a famous leader/victim of.
Well, I guess that's why I'm no longer in it. I had a little too much to think.
That's not how global politics work. World powers fight and compete, not "allow" their declared enemies a breather to fight them better. And if they get one, it still is not a guarantee of success (see India who is practically begged to fix its shit up to be a bulwark against China).
Let's leave the idea of giving a fuck about the well being of the Islamic world *after* they start giving a fuck about ours, because so far they explicitly never did.
In what way is the Islamic world our enemy?
*Cue Marduk saying they've been our enemy for a thousand years*
*Something, something, since the Crusades*
Okay, yes, I realize all of that. And I certainly do recognize their ongoing, centuries-long belligerence. However, all the Islamic nations that I've seen destroyed by the West in my own lifetime
weren't actually doing anything. They were just kind of sitting there. And then we arbitrarily steamrolled them into dust.
The conflicts in the Middle East over the past 30 years have made about as much sense to me as a kid playing SimCity and then opening the disaster panel and sending meteors, tornadoes, earthquakes, and so on, to wipe the slate clean. It just seems like pointless sadism that accomplished nothing. And given that when we pull out of these regions, they revert right back to electing the sort of dictatorial strongmen and Islamic theocracies we often try to depose, they actually accomplish less than nothing.
For that matter, our enemies really,
really suck at modern conflict. America invading Iraq was like watching an 800 pound gorilla jump into the ring with an armless toddler. It's not even an exciting, close-run contest of strength. Not at all. It's just kind of sad to watch.
Also, given that we have a lot of ally Islamic nations in the form of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, and so on, and have Malaysia and Indonesia as trade partners, it just seems odd that the typical neocon reasoning for why we should go to war with Middle Eastern nations is
because they are "Islamic savages" with a "culture fundamentally incompatible with ours". Clearly, we don't go after
all Islamic nations just because they are Islamic. And the utterly dishonest and despicable shitlib explanation for going to war with them - civilizing them and bringing them the benefits of modernity and democracy - doesn't hold water either. We don't do that. We never do that.
So why the hell
do we kill these people? What the hell for?
In which case you may have also noticed - a lot more nerds come from some cultures and societies than from some others, compared to world demographics the differences can be quite stark.
Yes. Primarily from the US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Greece, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Japan, China, Russia, with enclaves in the Balkans, Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore. Not a comprehensive list, but just the most common ones off the top of my head. Mostly, the core techno-industrial nations with a lot of universities.
This is how it was until 1960's, and if you haven't noticed, there was absolutely no shortage of interventionism before the cultural revolution of 1960's. Hence my absolute conviction that refugee waves are not a matter of interventionism in itself, but *other changes* in the West, and West specifically.
Yes. Our oligarchs fund pro-immigration NGOs and import millions of people into our countries by the truckload who refuse to properly assimilate into our culture, creating an atmosphere of anarchy and chaos and dread that those oligarchs then exploit for sociopolitical advantage, just like ancient tyrants did.
To quote Aristotle:
It is also a habit of tyrants to prefer the company of aliens to that of citizens at table and in society; citizens, they feel, are enemies, but aliens will offer no opposition.
Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.
This all sounds very familiar, doesn't it?
If we recognize the signs of tyranny, why do we not act?
A surprising amount of them of them are not from the convenient for this lefty propaganda "muh interventionism" line locations, like Pakistan or Nigeria, who no one bombed.
Again, remove enough gatekeeper nations standing in their way, and they'll cross the Mediterranean in droves.
en.wikipedia.org
Sorry, i don't take world politics advice from some weirdo sectarians repeating leftist idiocy. I'd sooner talk down to them about geopolitics stuff than take their word for anything, they are worse than useless as a source of information.
That's not the same SOTT.
It's a story for lefty sheep.
If it's true, why didn't it work at all in the age of colonialism? Western interventionism was on steroids back then. No, this shit only became possible in 1960's. And more so, do not delude yourself that not starting wars won't get you refugees.
What wars did Canada, Sweden and Ireland start? They are some of the worst hit by third world migration.
It is tolerance of lefty pro migration bullshitting that begets refugees, not wars. If your country does not eat up such bullshit, you can be getting as many refugees as Japan, Israel or Saudi Arabia. In Poland we have a common saying that translates as "If you want to have a soft heart, you better have a tough ass, because you will be getting kicked in it often". It is the most soft hearted nations who get most refugees, not the most warmongering, though the oddity is that few are high on both, helping lefties push their lie. And it makes perfect sense - why would refugees prefer to go to any place where people are not soft hearted and has money to throw behind its sentiments?
You and I have very different perspectives on warfare. Like many conservatives, you still see war as a contest of wills between men. While this may have been the case in the ancient past, it is no longer the case today. Today, what we have are human beings who are industrially processed like cattle in factory farms, and our leaders dare call it warfare. People are called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice, but it isn't actually in service of any creed. We visit countries where our presence isn't wanted, again and again, and we prune people like weeds.
It's basically an exercise in eugenics. Some rich oligarch bastards somewhere decide that some poor people we don't even know on the other side of the planet have to die, and then, a "modern army" - itself a historical aberration, a teeming horde of celibates wrapped in kevlar who fight not for honor or loot or land, but for realpolitik and intelligence chicanery too complex for them to understand - descends on them and efficiently processes them like meat, before disappearing and leaving behind nothing but rubble and abandoned vehicles.
We don't fight to colonize a people, or to steal from them, or to do anything rational to them. We don't take their territory for our own and fill it with our own people and our own culture. We didn't make Iraq and Afghanistan into the 51st and 52nd states. We just dispassionately pruned them back, like trimming an overgrown hedge, and then we left. And then our oligarchs enjoyed a windfall in currency arbitrage that produces no useful goods of any value to anyone. It's fucking repulsive to me.
At least Norsemen raiding in their longboats took things of value. They took slaves, they took gold. What trophies do we take from the countries we slaughter? Nothing. Not a damn thing at all. What strange sport. Like shooting a deer and leaving the whole thing to rot, antlers and all.
I don't like modern wars. Not because they are wars, and because they are violent, but because they are too organized, too whitewashed, directed by committees of these soft little mincing center-left dweebs who'd get asthma if they had to so much as lift a garden trowel, much less a rifle.
See, if we were to go full Senator-Armstrong-level Egoism and Social Darwinism, and wage war honestly, just to destroy people and take their stuff like proper cavemen, and if we just straight-up told people that was exactly what we were doing, I could at least respect the sincerity in that. But there is no honesty in these wars we fight. Only lie after lie after goddamn lie. One false pretense after another.
We are told that we're saving people from themselves, that we're deposing evil tyrants, that we're stepping in and delivering democracy and civilization to people, but we aren't. We're just crushing them to keep them from possibly becoming a threat in the future, while maintaining the power and wealth of an Elite who hate our guts and are trying to replace us with immigrants as fast as they can.
Leave off the lefty soundbites about affordable housing while not saying clearly what they mean.
Speaking of things unspoken, there are dirty secret over the nature of such social problems that make them less sympathetic on closer look than the lefty idealist media version.
Take this average homeless American who wants affordable housing. But there are unspoken qualifiers. A log cabin in midwestern farmland is not what he wants. If you sent him to one he would spend his last dollar to get back to the city to be homeless there. Even though it would be very affordable. He probably wants "affordable housing" in one of cities with most unaffordable land prices in the country. Why? Because that's where all the drug dealers and bleeding hearts who will give him drug money to bring to the former are. If you can't solve this conundrum, you can' solve this problem.
People do drugs when they're hopeless and down on their luck. As in, when they cannot find gainful employment or have a stable home life and a family, because they put in their resume at forty different places and still got tossed out on their ass because they didn't have any prior experience or enough education.
We would have less of a drug problem if we had more jobs for the uneducated, for the rejects. Not everyone can go to work for Apple designing the next iPhone. Not everyone can code apps from their basement in comfort. Some people are quite simply too stupid to be employable in a highly modernized, information-based, and deindustrialized society where all the menial jobs have dried up. It's not politically correct to say it, but I don't give a fuck. If you have a 90 IQ or less and a brain fit only for repetitive and simple tasks, society has abandoned you. It's just a fact.
It's no wonder these people turn to opioids. They're unemployed, unemployable, and miserable.
If we let the Overclass have their way, then anyone with less than 120 IQ will also become unemployable, because AIs will do all of the sub-120-IQ jobs. What kind of a society is that? Who the hell wants to live in a society where only a teeny, tiny minority of people - the cream of the crop of all thinkers - can still make a wage, and everyone else is left behind? That's not a society. It's madness.
Then obviously the dividing line is not capitalism or opinions of it. There are others, like patriotism.
GOP=/=neocons=/= right wing. There are very surprising and complicated overlaps between these groups. The attitude towards "free" trade with China is quite an indicator of who takes the economic security seriously and who's just pretending.
We are agreed on at least one thing, I would hope: we in the West absolutely need our own industrial base. We need coal mines and steel mills. We need it all to come back. Immediately.
We have outsourced too many things that are indeed security-critical. If you want to fight a modern war, you need metals. Lots of 'em. You need mile-long trains with sheets of steel and aluminum and titanium and great big spools of copper.
Be careful of what you wish for, you may get it, not necessarily in the way you want. Egalitarianism doesn't work without either force or high level of sociocultural homogeneity. Communists have the former. Places like Japan have the latter. Putting one or another into action on current year US cities would go like a lead balloon politically, which hints at one of those options more than the other.
That's only been "field tested" in the covid panic, and yes, there is some chance of massive fallout in next decade or three if this gets polished up more.
And yes, the economic shockwave it could hit major urban centers with may end up being devastating like a nuclear bomb (as in few years later some significant parts of many cities may well look as if one detonated nearby).
Cultural homogeneity it is, then.
Have you looked at the news of what is happening in Eastern Europe? It's a leftist lie that cold war ended. Of course the same treasonous shitlibs who sold the idea that there is no problem with moving all the industry to China and the greens who helped by obsessing about energy/CO2 emissions locally also tend to support it or pretend it has nothing to do with the consequences of what they are pushing.
Our elites love China. They love the cheap labor in the form of teeming masses of obedient and practically expendable slaves, the lack of environmental and occupational regulations, and the totalitarian and technocratic societal model advanced by the CCP. The last thing they actually want is war with China. It would mean a trade embargo and very,
very costly reshoring for them. It would mean employing American workers that they can barely conceal their disdain for.
They want to export China's social model everywhere else. They want us all walking around with a chip in our hand and cashless transactions, so they can cut off our bank accounts if we exceed our meat quota for the month.
Who in their right mind would fight a war on behalf of an Elite who want to do this shit to us?
Our ancestors fought for freedom. We fight for the right to be enslaved by the guy with the biggest whip.
0.2% is a territory where a lot of handwaving and error can happen, depending on how one measures, doubly so in the middle of actual covid spread.
Half of 3% of all age brackets dying of heart disease within 2-3 years we would easily notice, so we shall see.
I sincerely hope that we don't see a death toll like that. The social fallout would be insane.
He's a historian that's Schwab's hanger-on, there's a lot of "fake it till you make it" in this elite circle. Just because he wants something tech wise in no way means it can work.
Unfortunately, there actually are armies of scientists working on
highly questionable tech right now.
No one ever did, unless they were *made* to respect them, by force or threat of it.
There is purity in your perspective. You're not ashamed to say that might makes right. At the very least, I admire that.
THASF: do you really believe that Putin, Xi and the Bilderbergs are all one happy family? No bro... no. Why should Putin and Xi share power with the Western elites at all if they don't have to?
Putin and Xi work for them. You don't reach the highest levels of public office in any country unless you're "in". These people are following a script. Kabuki theater to keep the proles afraid and in line.