Western (Il)liberal Democracy, The "GDR-ization" of Germany, The Self-Pity of the Wannabe National Censor, China De-Dollarization, UK's Dead Musical Tribes
The producer of TV show Full House bought the property, tore down everything, and then built a monstrosity on top of it, while changing the number to 10066. He put it up for sale recently.
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The overreach of Tusk's - weak - government and the lack of support for the side being trampled by Western institutions leaves only two options for half of Poland:
1. Submit and keep your head down
2. Do a Budapest autumn 2006
The second won't be ignited by legacy Conservatives (PiS), per the Hungarian example, although Orban, after losing in 2002 and again in the spring of 2006 kept his civility, largely because he still had the German Conservatives' - mostly nominal - backing in the EU. It required a truly hopeless and double digit dissident Far-Right for the streets to burn.
If Brussels was filled with smarter people, they would be placating PiS with all the gestures they can afford to make them play ball, but the people there are dumb and impatient.
It's never wise to weld shut the pressure release valves. You can chop wood on the back of a Hungarian - can you do the same with a Pole?
The most important factor in PiS' future is their ground game: if they have it throughout Poland, and Tusk's slop coalition is only held up by foreign support, they have a chance.
Superior ground game can overcome the Glacier.
Note: Fidesz's ground game, after 14 years of almost absolute power, is dogshit. (Even they recognize that succesful politicians within the party all settle in Budapest, losing touch) Did PiS grew complacent in power?
Hello Eric as an atheist, I also have difficulty with Frank Wright’s God as the solution. I guess that’s the point of faith, faith being the trust in something beyond the scope of our understanding. I have a lot of patience with this theistic position because I experience a lot of fear. Fear is underrated.
I am undaunted by the God thing, it feels natural and warm, and my alternative is just not much to behold. But, but, I say, and resoundingly, I commend his analysis as a bullseye and an immense accomplishment. I read broadly. Very few people are able to pull together such a large and disparate analysis and make it clear. The vast majority of people get lost, unable to see the forest for the trees. I think his explication of where we are is spot on.
Ignore the god stuff, which for me is moot but fun: why not! I mean, based on my 60 year track record I’m almost always wrong, so what the fuck!
Camus argument is correct -truth I can’t understand is a lie - but I reject that as nihilism, itis just blah pouting, venal and a misapprehension of our corporeal existence and the fun that it entails. Why so serious? It’s so arrogant this pursuit of truth and vilification of the lies we must tell ourselves. Please forgive yourself for the reality of our psychological makeup, we are overclocked chimps, it’s not our fault or failure. Forgive yourself and do it asap because death is stalking us and life is fun in the interim. Really why so serious. Camus is a dick.
A man saved in the name of Jesus Christ here. I think quite a few the right-wingers propose God as the cure-all, but more in terms of the fact that He's the end, and once oriented to the proper end, the ills of our age will be cured* because we will properly ordered. But yes, quite a bit of the rhetoric, even the reasoning, is often more in terms of God as means than God as end.
*To qualify this, Christianity has always, and I mean always, taught that, although God's grace unites us to Him, and that we can be cleansed from sin, we will always have those "carved pathways" or predispositions to sin. Therefore, we hope that a Christian society will participate in God's work of making us holy through grace, but that is left to our own wills to cooperate. So we will always, at some level, have to accept that the charge of "WhY dO YoU sAY YOuR hOlY BuT aRE MEaN jerKs ?!?!" does have merit. I'd be right there with Cortes, conquering the cannibal idolators of the New World, but I would be lying to say that gold and venting of the spleen weren't right up with spreading the Gospel.
I have less and less belief that we as Europeans can do something to turn the tide of shit that’s going on. Admittedly the whole Ukraine situation in particular exposed terrible political class, but even before/after, there seems to be very little out there that actually has some idea moving forward. To say that polish right is good with their anti Russian jihadism would be a reach, as much as Tusk makes them look better.
My take on it all, and not only in Poland, is the absurdity of corruption - supposedly conservative movements (Hungary, Poland) still can’t do a shit without money from Brussels. They (the ones who genuinely believe in the shtick) all also think that magical thinking is somehow gonna turn back time and bring them back to some idealized past (in future). Politicians at the forefront of these movements are corrupted fucks.
To me it feels like all this eventually blends into the same system that resists any meaningful change anyway.
What my hope was that different-thinking people would eventually leave the confines of cities and corporations and establish communities that prosper on these different grounds: men can’t be pregnant, Foucault is a fraud, growing up is hard but necessary, your feelings have very limited value (and validity date)… but as you said, Nico, being cool with the big brother is easier, and we are in the “good times make weak men” phase
Totally. As I said to my Dutch friends: they can vote Wilders as much as they won’t but the Arabs they want to expel already had like 6 kids while they were arguing on Reddit…
But "Nothing exists except Power and who gets to inflict it" is the height of wisdom, the Marquise de Sade couldn't have said it better.
Foucault is Nietzsche's dingleberry but he was kind enough to leave behind an all-purpose excuse note for the angry spoiled infants of the West:
"I hate you, Mom and Dad, and I'm not doing my homework because it's an oppressive patriarchal imposition designed by the ownership class to inflict its bioregime upon me!"
The man was just giving the kids what they wanted to hear...
"I have less and less belief that we as Europeans can do something to turn the tide of shit that’s going on. Admittedly the whole Ukraine situation in particular exposed terrible political class, but even before/after, there seems to be very little out there that actually has some idea moving forward. To say that polish right is good with their anti Russian jihadism would be a reach, as much as Tusk makes them look better."
Europeans like being slaves. Europeans have less self-respect than whipped dogs, and I say that as a cat who doesn't like dogs very much.
It's hilariously one sided, but worth listening to, it's far above Spiegel quality.
The very first speaker is an insanely delusional swamp creature. All of this presented as expert objectivity. All the people on this show 100% believe that they are on the Right Side of History and Facts.
"On the panel this week:
- Mujtaba Rahman (Eurasia Group) (Also an expert on Hungary, per his public profile. Take a guess!)
- Michał Baranowski (German Marshall Fund)
- Edward Hunter Christie (FIIA)"
There are thousands of these people working 24/7, golden parachuting from NGO to NGO to "independent" state and EU funded think tanks. Elite overproduction turned into a priest class.
I agree. So does the Eurasia Group, Action for Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, The Helsinki Institute for Human Dignity, Snopes, etc. WE ALL AGREE.
They couldn't prop up the East German economy to the level of the west si they decided to bring down the west economy to the level of the east. Equity achieved.
I remain very skeptical about China’s ability to ‘de-dollarize’. Economic amateurs are perpetually talking about what currency things are priced in (muh petrodollar!!), but the essential question is one of economic asset flows: a reserve currency’s issuer must have open capital accounts and the willingness to run trade deficits. China has neither.
If anything, China seems to be going to the other way - as the real estate investment that powered the economy for so long collapses, they invest ever-more in manufacturing capacity, presumably expecting ever-larger export surpluses. Well, someone has to consume those surpluses… and there’s only one country on Earth willing and able. And that country just so happens to pay in dollars.
Soldo, I am a much frequented poster on this blog as i am a big fan but I think you u have a blind spot amongst many others who possess the same. i have a background in economics so as much as thats worth (not much) I'd like to at least offer a plausible alternative to the current paradigm in Germany. The collapse of the Germany economy is actually an attempt to preserve the Euro as Germany's economy has artificially propped up the Euro in terms of trade imbalances with respect to the service lead economies in the South. The Euro is a crazy currency that has monetary policy dictated by the ECB but each nation within the Euro possesses it's own fiscal policy which is crazy if one thinks about it considering all nations are beholden to a single currency but each nation (a collective of completely different economy focused nations) has a different fiscal policy.
Draghi spoke about this before during the 2011 Greek debt crisis but it's coming to fruition now considering Germany was the economic powerhouse that drove a huge economic imbalance where the Germans were propping up the Euro causing the Southern nations (France, Italy, Greece, etc) to have to constantly contract/austere in order to maintain Euro parity for global competitiveness. Now that Germany is declining, it allows the rest of the European nation (theoretically) to take its own piece of the pie which academically will permit the Euro to survive. IOW, before Germany was so efficient it forced service lead economies (the olive oil side of the olive oil/butter divide) to have to austere in order to maintain the Euro monetary policy of all the EU members as a global competitive currency. But with Germany's decline, it takes off pressure from the Southern states who need relief in order to enhance their fiscal policies by virtue of a weakened Euro. Having a combined monetary policy aka the Euro with an entire collective of individual fiscal policy choices is a fucking disaster of epic proportions (Draghi mentioned this several times post Greek sovereign debt crisis)..
So there are economic implications to destroying the Germany economy but the last time there was this level of austerity on Germany (and Japan for that matter) was the 1930s and we all know what happened next. Japan with the Showa Depression (the greatest drop in GDP per timeline history- 50% decline in GDP in 2 years) and every time the German finance minister in the 30s cut public spending to remain internationally competitive, the Nazi vote elevated in response). Who knows what happened next but public spending cuts means public angry. History!
2. Re Nina J, when one becomes the protagonist in the story, one has jumped the shark.
3. When in gov’t I met with reps of the Chinese market regulators (2019 or so). By then they had nascent futures exchanges (think “Trading Places” and pork bellies) which have grown apace since. Markets result from the nearby development of commodities (or commerce); a country can use those markets to propagate strength by basing those contracts in its own currency. China was on its way to doing this and has been aided greatly by Western sanctions on Russia, confiscation of dollar-denominated foreign reserves, and Western green energy incentives for machines that rely on battery technology / rare earths. Per the first sentence, this is all planned by the PRC. No need to make it this easy for them. Won’t topple USD by itself but the seeming lack of thought on financial markets in geopolitical terms in America is staggering.
"None of that came as a surprise for Hans-Georg Maassen, former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution who lost his position under Merkel for questioning the reality of “Neo-Nazi mobs hunting down migrants” in an incident happening in Chemnitz in 2018, in which one person lost his life."
That doesn't fully capture how insane the events in Chemnitz were. "The person who lost his life" was a local of mixed German-Cuban ancestry. He had supposedly often been the victim of racist discrimination in his life, but he wasn't murdered by Neo-Nazis. He was stabbed to death by a group of Kurdish asylum seekers (they also seriously wounded two acquaintances of his, of Russian-German background iirc). So the incident that started it all was a brutal murder by "refugees". There were demonstrations in reaction to that (and it wasn't the first murder committed by asylum seekers, there has been a long string of horror crimes committed since the influx of 2014/15), but the alleged hunting down of migrants never seems to have happened, it was pretty much made up. But the German media and the establishment fitted it all into their frame of reference from the 1990s and pretended the story was about skinhead mobs targeting foreigners. There were antifa concerts, the German president expressed his support, in social media the slogan "Wir sind mehr" ("There's more of us [than the Nazis") became popular. It was total lunacy, a shocking demonstration that a significant part of the German population (not least those running the country and shaping public discourse) are just running their "antifascist" script, no matter how much it's contradicted by actual events.
Off-topic: the NYR has a long piece on 1923 in Weimar Germany, which will be of interest to those who read the "Revolution in Bavaria" book series here:
The producer of TV show Full House bought the property, tore down everything, and then built a monstrosity on top of it, while changing the number to 10066. He put it up for sale recently.
Hit the like button at the top or bottom of this page to like this entry. Use the share and/or re-stack buttons to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you to do so.
And please don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
The overreach of Tusk's - weak - government and the lack of support for the side being trampled by Western institutions leaves only two options for half of Poland:
1. Submit and keep your head down
2. Do a Budapest autumn 2006
The second won't be ignited by legacy Conservatives (PiS), per the Hungarian example, although Orban, after losing in 2002 and again in the spring of 2006 kept his civility, largely because he still had the German Conservatives' - mostly nominal - backing in the EU. It required a truly hopeless and double digit dissident Far-Right for the streets to burn.
If Brussels was filled with smarter people, they would be placating PiS with all the gestures they can afford to make them play ball, but the people there are dumb and impatient.
It's never wise to weld shut the pressure release valves. You can chop wood on the back of a Hungarian - can you do the same with a Pole?
Poles tell me that PiS strategy is to split this government quickly and have new elections be called sooner rather than later.
The most important factor in PiS' future is their ground game: if they have it throughout Poland, and Tusk's slop coalition is only held up by foreign support, they have a chance.
Superior ground game can overcome the Glacier.
Note: Fidesz's ground game, after 14 years of almost absolute power, is dogshit. (Even they recognize that succesful politicians within the party all settle in Budapest, losing touch) Did PiS grew complacent in power?
They certainly no doubt did...but I'll leave it to Poles to better answer that question.
This guy is spectacular! I just found him are you aware of this find fellow
https://open.substack.com/pub/frankwright/p/life-liberty-and-the-loss-of-god?r=j0s6f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hello Eric as an atheist, I also have difficulty with Frank Wright’s God as the solution. I guess that’s the point of faith, faith being the trust in something beyond the scope of our understanding. I have a lot of patience with this theistic position because I experience a lot of fear. Fear is underrated.
I am undaunted by the God thing, it feels natural and warm, and my alternative is just not much to behold. But, but, I say, and resoundingly, I commend his analysis as a bullseye and an immense accomplishment. I read broadly. Very few people are able to pull together such a large and disparate analysis and make it clear. The vast majority of people get lost, unable to see the forest for the trees. I think his explication of where we are is spot on.
Ignore the god stuff, which for me is moot but fun: why not! I mean, based on my 60 year track record I’m almost always wrong, so what the fuck!
Camus argument is correct -truth I can’t understand is a lie - but I reject that as nihilism, itis just blah pouting, venal and a misapprehension of our corporeal existence and the fun that it entails. Why so serious? It’s so arrogant this pursuit of truth and vilification of the lies we must tell ourselves. Please forgive yourself for the reality of our psychological makeup, we are overclocked chimps, it’s not our fault or failure. Forgive yourself and do it asap because death is stalking us and life is fun in the interim. Really why so serious. Camus is a dick.
Very well said, and believe it or not that actually comports with my take, which I may have failed to capture
A man saved in the name of Jesus Christ here. I think quite a few the right-wingers propose God as the cure-all, but more in terms of the fact that He's the end, and once oriented to the proper end, the ills of our age will be cured* because we will properly ordered. But yes, quite a bit of the rhetoric, even the reasoning, is often more in terms of God as means than God as end.
*To qualify this, Christianity has always, and I mean always, taught that, although God's grace unites us to Him, and that we can be cleansed from sin, we will always have those "carved pathways" or predispositions to sin. Therefore, we hope that a Christian society will participate in God's work of making us holy through grace, but that is left to our own wills to cooperate. So we will always, at some level, have to accept that the charge of "WhY dO YoU sAY YOuR hOlY BuT aRE MEaN jerKs ?!?!" does have merit. I'd be right there with Cortes, conquering the cannibal idolators of the New World, but I would be lying to say that gold and venting of the spleen weren't right up with spreading the Gospel.
The rational animal, godly and the venting of spleen. That’s the deal. Excellent post.
Thanks.
No, first time seeing him.
Invest 10 minutes this guy is a monster
word up
Is this fellow as enormous is I think?
I have less and less belief that we as Europeans can do something to turn the tide of shit that’s going on. Admittedly the whole Ukraine situation in particular exposed terrible political class, but even before/after, there seems to be very little out there that actually has some idea moving forward. To say that polish right is good with their anti Russian jihadism would be a reach, as much as Tusk makes them look better.
My take on it all, and not only in Poland, is the absurdity of corruption - supposedly conservative movements (Hungary, Poland) still can’t do a shit without money from Brussels. They (the ones who genuinely believe in the shtick) all also think that magical thinking is somehow gonna turn back time and bring them back to some idealized past (in future). Politicians at the forefront of these movements are corrupted fucks.
To me it feels like all this eventually blends into the same system that resists any meaningful change anyway.
What my hope was that different-thinking people would eventually leave the confines of cities and corporations and establish communities that prosper on these different grounds: men can’t be pregnant, Foucault is a fraud, growing up is hard but necessary, your feelings have very limited value (and validity date)… but as you said, Nico, being cool with the big brother is easier, and we are in the “good times make weak men” phase
There is no common European vision, despite appeals to "human rights", "democracy", and "tolerance". These things don't stir emotions.
Totally. As I said to my Dutch friends: they can vote Wilders as much as they won’t but the Arabs they want to expel already had like 6 kids while they were arguing on Reddit…
Europe needs an enemy, whether man or nature, to create the Euro identity. Libs are calling their enemy....the sun (ok climate change) and Russia
"Foucault is a fraud..." !!
But "Nothing exists except Power and who gets to inflict it" is the height of wisdom, the Marquise de Sade couldn't have said it better.
Foucault is Nietzsche's dingleberry but he was kind enough to leave behind an all-purpose excuse note for the angry spoiled infants of the West:
"I hate you, Mom and Dad, and I'm not doing my homework because it's an oppressive patriarchal imposition designed by the ownership class to inflict its bioregime upon me!"
The man was just giving the kids what they wanted to hear...
"I have less and less belief that we as Europeans can do something to turn the tide of shit that’s going on. Admittedly the whole Ukraine situation in particular exposed terrible political class, but even before/after, there seems to be very little out there that actually has some idea moving forward. To say that polish right is good with their anti Russian jihadism would be a reach, as much as Tusk makes them look better."
Europeans like being slaves. Europeans have less self-respect than whipped dogs, and I say that as a cat who doesn't like dogs very much.
German politics are becoming ever more parochial, zealous and hysterical. Like a North Korea in the middle of Europe.
If it wasn't for eugyppius, I would think they've all lost their will to communicate with the rest of mankind.
Hey!
The incredibly swamp powered The Red Line podcast's (https://www.theredlinepodcast.com/guests) latest episode is about Poland.
It's hilariously one sided, but worth listening to, it's far above Spiegel quality.
The very first speaker is an insanely delusional swamp creature. All of this presented as expert objectivity. All the people on this show 100% believe that they are on the Right Side of History and Facts.
"On the panel this week:
- Mujtaba Rahman (Eurasia Group) (Also an expert on Hungary, per his public profile. Take a guess!)
- Michał Baranowski (German Marshall Fund)
- Edward Hunter Christie (FIIA)"
There are thousands of these people working 24/7, golden parachuting from NGO to NGO to "independent" state and EU funded think tanks. Elite overproduction turned into a priest class.
Quite the diversity of opinion on display
I agree. So does the Eurasia Group, Action for Democracy, the German Marshall Fund, The Helsinki Institute for Human Dignity, Snopes, etc. WE ALL AGREE.
It's a miracle. Or science.
"It's a miracle. Or science."
As they say, "'I' before 'E', except after 'C'." #SCIENCE, bitch.
They couldn't prop up the East German economy to the level of the west si they decided to bring down the west economy to the level of the east. Equity achieved.
Ha!
I remain very skeptical about China’s ability to ‘de-dollarize’. Economic amateurs are perpetually talking about what currency things are priced in (muh petrodollar!!), but the essential question is one of economic asset flows: a reserve currency’s issuer must have open capital accounts and the willingness to run trade deficits. China has neither.
If anything, China seems to be going to the other way - as the real estate investment that powered the economy for so long collapses, they invest ever-more in manufacturing capacity, presumably expecting ever-larger export surpluses. Well, someone has to consume those surpluses… and there’s only one country on Earth willing and able. And that country just so happens to pay in dollars.
Soldo, I am a much frequented poster on this blog as i am a big fan but I think you u have a blind spot amongst many others who possess the same. i have a background in economics so as much as thats worth (not much) I'd like to at least offer a plausible alternative to the current paradigm in Germany. The collapse of the Germany economy is actually an attempt to preserve the Euro as Germany's economy has artificially propped up the Euro in terms of trade imbalances with respect to the service lead economies in the South. The Euro is a crazy currency that has monetary policy dictated by the ECB but each nation within the Euro possesses it's own fiscal policy which is crazy if one thinks about it considering all nations are beholden to a single currency but each nation (a collective of completely different economy focused nations) has a different fiscal policy.
Draghi spoke about this before during the 2011 Greek debt crisis but it's coming to fruition now considering Germany was the economic powerhouse that drove a huge economic imbalance where the Germans were propping up the Euro causing the Southern nations (France, Italy, Greece, etc) to have to constantly contract/austere in order to maintain Euro parity for global competitiveness. Now that Germany is declining, it allows the rest of the European nation (theoretically) to take its own piece of the pie which academically will permit the Euro to survive. IOW, before Germany was so efficient it forced service lead economies (the olive oil side of the olive oil/butter divide) to have to austere in order to maintain the Euro monetary policy of all the EU members as a global competitive currency. But with Germany's decline, it takes off pressure from the Southern states who need relief in order to enhance their fiscal policies by virtue of a weakened Euro. Having a combined monetary policy aka the Euro with an entire collective of individual fiscal policy choices is a fucking disaster of epic proportions (Draghi mentioned this several times post Greek sovereign debt crisis)..
So there are economic implications to destroying the Germany economy but the last time there was this level of austerity on Germany (and Japan for that matter) was the 1930s and we all know what happened next. Japan with the Showa Depression (the greatest drop in GDP per timeline history- 50% decline in GDP in 2 years) and every time the German finance minister in the 30s cut public spending to remain internationally competitive, the Nazi vote elevated in response). Who knows what happened next but public spending cuts means public angry. History!
I appreciate the effort, but please include paragraphs next time as it's very, very difficult to read walls of text.
Thanks for the highlights, Niccolo. I read Lyons’ article with great concern. I’m very fond of my Polish friends.
They know my door is open, should they ever need it.
A small and far fetched thing, but you never know.
Nina uses the word “pollution” to refer to speech of which she disapproves. It’s always the language of cleanliness with these types.
As it's said, they're the ones who believe it's possible to "pick-up a turd by the 'clean end'".
Great as always:
1. The EU/EC exists now to subvert democracy.
2. Re Nina J, when one becomes the protagonist in the story, one has jumped the shark.
3. When in gov’t I met with reps of the Chinese market regulators (2019 or so). By then they had nascent futures exchanges (think “Trading Places” and pork bellies) which have grown apace since. Markets result from the nearby development of commodities (or commerce); a country can use those markets to propagate strength by basing those contracts in its own currency. China was on its way to doing this and has been aided greatly by Western sanctions on Russia, confiscation of dollar-denominated foreign reserves, and Western green energy incentives for machines that rely on battery technology / rare earths. Per the first sentence, this is all planned by the PRC. No need to make it this easy for them. Won’t topple USD by itself but the seeming lack of thought on financial markets in geopolitical terms in America is staggering.
"None of that came as a surprise for Hans-Georg Maassen, former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution who lost his position under Merkel for questioning the reality of “Neo-Nazi mobs hunting down migrants” in an incident happening in Chemnitz in 2018, in which one person lost his life."
That doesn't fully capture how insane the events in Chemnitz were. "The person who lost his life" was a local of mixed German-Cuban ancestry. He had supposedly often been the victim of racist discrimination in his life, but he wasn't murdered by Neo-Nazis. He was stabbed to death by a group of Kurdish asylum seekers (they also seriously wounded two acquaintances of his, of Russian-German background iirc). So the incident that started it all was a brutal murder by "refugees". There were demonstrations in reaction to that (and it wasn't the first murder committed by asylum seekers, there has been a long string of horror crimes committed since the influx of 2014/15), but the alleged hunting down of migrants never seems to have happened, it was pretty much made up. But the German media and the establishment fitted it all into their frame of reference from the 1990s and pretended the story was about skinhead mobs targeting foreigners. There were antifa concerts, the German president expressed his support, in social media the slogan "Wir sind mehr" ("There's more of us [than the Nazis") became popular. It was total lunacy, a shocking demonstration that a significant part of the German population (not least those running the country and shaping public discourse) are just running their "antifascist" script, no matter how much it's contradicted by actual events.
What doomed Poland was going along. With increasing frenzy a positive mania DC is betraying everyone.
Off-topic: the NYR has a long piece on 1923 in Weimar Germany, which will be of interest to those who read the "Revolution in Bavaria" book series here:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/08/fragile-resilient-weimar-germany-1923/
Thank you!