We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Samizdata quote of the day – we are at the joke stage The Soviet Union collapsed when the lies of the ruling class were so obvious they became laughable. The liberal world order – with the ‘religion of peace’, ‘woman with a penis’ ‘effective vaccines’ and ‘17 months to save the planet’ is at the joke stage.
– ‘Polish Housewife‘
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Political systems collapse two ways:
If it is a poor country the producers will massively out number the rulers so that turning up en masse at the Winter Palace can bring down the system by force, or the threat of it.
If it is a rich country however, there is so much money that the rulers can afford to both help themselves and buy the support of a large section of the population with jobs and welfare. In this case mass action won’t work because too many people support the government. What happens then is that the producers either quietly pack up and move, or contrive a bad back and go on welfare. The collapse in the tax base brings down the system.
A splendid summary of all the nonsense.
Roué: Ah, the John Galt strategy, as realistic fiction rather than pulp melodrama.
And go where exactly?
But the “Woke”, Frankfurt School Marxist, West is much better at discrediting humour than the old Classical Marxist Soviet Union was.
Being denounced as a “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic”, “transphobic”, “Islamophobic”, “Climate denier” gets ordinary people, lots of ordinary people, to really HATE the target.
“That person telling jokes against the government and partner corporations is a RACIST” (or whatever), works – it really does work with many ordinary people.
Presently a lot of people still believe in these doctrines – they do not want to be “racists” or “Islamophobes” or “homophobic bigots”, so the regime is not utterly discredited as the Classical Marxist Soviet Union was by the end of the 1980s – when even KGB men were telling jokes about how absurd Marxism (Classical Marxism – Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxism, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” was unknown in the Soviet Union) was.
After all, for example, if CO2 is really a deadly poison that is going to “destroy the world”, “end human life”, only a very wicked person could be against measures to reduce it.
As for the “safe and effective” Covid “vaccines” – I would be astonished if the British “Covid Enquiry” told the truth about them – or told the truth about anything else, the Wuhan lab origins of Covid, the smearing of Early Treatments (that could have saved so many lives – but did not fit the agenda), the utter insanity of the “lockdowns”, and so on.
And do most people really want the truth? After all – who wants to admit they were fooled?
What we have got is establishment types being questioned by other establishment types – whilst the public say “I see, the wicked Tories should have locked us down weeks earlier – but they were too greedy for money, and that Boris Johnson ate some cake!”
In the US, Florida and Texas are where people flee to, depending on whether they’re coming from New York or California. Where the escapees from Chicago go, I’m not sure. This is an advantage of a Federal system – to an extent, you have more choices of which government you want to live under.
As an alternate answer, they go into the untaxed cash system.
Which is where they HAVE been going, and which is why the governments are all looking at CBDC systems.
“The Soviet Union collapsed when the lies of the ruling class were so obvious they became laughable. ”
Wrong.
The lies of the communists were obvious from the start. Still they hung on to power for 2 generations (maybe 3) – by brute force.
Jacob said:
Mmmmm… No, the lies were not so obvious to enough of the Soviet Union’s population that they kept right on supporting the regime until it became impossible to deny, mostly to themselves. There was a “willing suspension of disbelief”, mainly because a.) some things did get better, and b.) fear of consequences for not going along with it all.
As well, you can make a case for the Russian people being “natural slaves”. Ugly thing to say, I’ll grant you, but look at the history: Nobody else put up with the totalitarianism of the Tsars or the lengthy period of serfdom. Other countries, other ethnicities? Would have risen up and slaughtered their oppressors. Not the Russians.
Hell, look at the insanity prevalent today, as Putin and his stooges go about trying to recreate the wonders of Tsarism, taking back Ukraine for the Russian Empire they want to recreate. Watch what happens, there: No matter how bad it gets, no matter how many Russian men wind up laying dead somewhere in Ukraine, the idiots aren’t going to revolt and the nomenklatura ain’t going to stop.
Natural slaves. You just tell them what you want them to believe, and they’ll echo that back to you, whether it’s Russian ethnonationalism, Communism, or whatever. There’s a case to be made there, for the Russians being eternal credulous children who just ape whatever the current “strongman” tells them. Zero independence of thought, zero concern about much of anything past conforming to whatever the current shibboleth is. They shifted without a problem between Tsarism to Communism, and from Communism to whatever the hell we decide to call what Putin is doing. They remain as wedded to what the Russian state is doing as when the Tsar was running the place, and do as little real questioning of things as they did then. There’s no demand for even basic competence; they don’t seem to care about whatever it is they’re doing as a nation, so long as they can maintain their illusions and fantasies about “Russky Mir”. It’s pathologically nuts.
In the Soviet Union, people did not eat as much refined carbs and seed oils as people do today (especially in the US, and in the Anglosphere generally).
Which is why so many people today do not get the joke.
Roué le Jour writes:
It is worth noting that Ibn Khaldun claimed that political systems always collapse due to barbarian invasions; which was perhaps true in his time, except for China.
Not sure about this: it seems to me that it’s the people in the capital city that have often been decisive; and the masses in the capital city have not usually been producers.
Agree.
Agree that this happens, but i do not know of a systemic collapse triggered by this mechanism — yet!
Still, a comment worth thinking about.
PS:
Ibn Khaldun, however, claimed that barbarian invasions were only possible because of excessive public spending, leading to economic decline by being on the wrong side of what we now know as the Laffer curve.
Any system of government or finance can be looked at as an exercise in the willing suspension of disbelief: So long as enough people buy into the fairy tale, then things will generally work out.
Once the “systemic credibility” starts to wear off…? Yeah. That’s when it goes away, and people become willing to listen to alternative ideas. You see that today in Argentina, after decades of failed economic “reforms” and so forth.
Russia fell to Bolshevism not so much because of the merits of said Bolshevism, but because the previous regime discredited itself utterly, over generations. The last time the Russian Empire really “worked” for a given value of that term, was back during the early 1800s. The Russo-Japanese War, Crimea, Turkey… All those adventures just served to make people doubt the system, just as WWI delivered the crowning blow. Same thing happened with Communism itself, after decades of systemic failure.
Here in the West, we’re not immune. Right now, if you were to go out and ask the average American if they believed half the bullshit they were being told on the nightly mainstream news, you’d find a steadily increasing majority of people that don’t find any of that BS credible. When the tipping-point is reached, the “Timisoara Moment”, you’ll see some pretty extreme reactions to all of this crap.
The people sitting on top of the volcano, who think they’re in control of it all? They really have no damn idea at all about what is going on in the minds of the majority of their fellow citizens. The “expert class” seems hell-bent on utterly discrediting itself, and driving the rest of the population into outright revolt.
I think there is a case to be made for there being quantifiable dynamic factors in every society, wherein you could work out what social conditions are necessary for massive change to start happening. Consider the differences between pre-Revolution France and Russia; had the conditions of the Russian Empire been extant in France, the Revolution probably would have happened decades, even centuries earlier. There’s a set of cultural features in every society that control these things, and one of the factors that the idiot class doesn’t seem to be aware of is just how close to the bone they are here in the US. This is a nation of malcontents, rebels, that willingly left their home nations to make their lives anew. That’s got to be at least partially laid down in whatever genes control behavior, as well as the culture; you’re going to reach a point with the melange of Americans wherein you’ve totally lost them, and they’re going to just snap. I don’t think the idiots running this clownshow have the slightest idea that this is even possible, nor do they have any idea at all where such a “snapping” might end. Me? I’m pretty sure it will likely go kinetic in my lifetime, if they keep on the course they seem to be deliberately following. The systemic stability will not maintain, what with all the things they’re doing.
What’s really weird is that they are acting against their own self-interest, stated and otherwise. What do you suppose all these Ivy League types are going to do, if people start actually taking all their anti-elite BS seriously? Do they think that by tearing the system down, that they’re somehow going to avoid the consequences?
I’m reminded of a Cambodian I once met, whose family was mostly dead. They’d been mid-level scholars and government officials, mostly; his brother had been a “campus activist” for the Khmer Rouge. When the time came, that brother thought that his “activism” would earn him a pass from all the madness; instead, it brought even more attention to him and the extended family. Most of whom died in the camps, or were slaughtered in their homes… My informant had been out of the country and unable to return. When he did go back, he found most of his extended family was gone. The fate of many of them he was never able to discover, just that they’d vanished into the maw of madness that was the Khmer Rouge takeover. His brother was one of the first to go, straight into (I think…) Tuol Sleng.
You can prod the tiger, but don’t expect to survive the dismount.
@Steven R
And go where exactly?
There are close to 200 countries in the world. Isn’t it worth doing a bit of research to see if any are an improvement? I mean, “better than the USA/UK/AUSNZ”, that is a pretty low bar, right? “Where to go” depends a lot on “What you want” out of life, but here are a few to consider:
* Within the United States, FL, TX and TN all have no income tax and a generally more conservative government. Of course because the United States has largely abandoned the idea of federal power sharing the advantage is considerably diluted, but it is relatively easy and at least a step up.
* Puerto Rico, again still under the Federal government, but it offers two advantages: it is the only place in the world Americans can escape the Federal Income tax (total personal income tax and corporate tax is about 4%, guaranteed for something like 30 years), and it’s government is a chaotic disaster, which means they are too disorganized to oppress you if you are willing to lay low. Of course the disadvantage is that you’d have to learn to speak Spanish — but learning to speak Spanish is a lot easier than transforming your government to be less oppressive. With a bit of effort you can get pretty functional in a foreign language in three months. (Regarding language, this applies below to all countries that don’t speak English)
* Reasonably free European countries: Switzerland probably tops the list here (though it is more and more bending the knee to the inevitable), and some smaller places like Andorra, Lichtenstein and Monaco are generally low tax, and leave-you-alone places.
* Hot places that are commercial hotbeds: there are a few of these, probably Dubai and Singapore are the best candidates. Less of a commercial hotbed is Costa Rica and a few Caribbean islands, but they are beautiful and relatively free. Panama and Chile used to be like that, but they have gone in the crapper the past few years.
* Sleepy places: these are countries that are pretty sleepy, and easy going, which you can get away with a lot. They tend to be less well developed, but they have a certain charm, and the living is easy. Paraguay, Thailand, and a few other South East Asian countries.
* Places bursting with commercial opportunity — these are places that aren’t necessarily free, but have amazing commercial opportunities for those willing to rough it a bit. And places that when you do make a lot of money, you are free because you can readily buy off the right people. Vietnam, Cambodia, Botswana, Rwanda spring to mind here.
Of course none of these places are perfect, and your friends and family don’t live in any of them, and if you are American, outside of PR, the IRS will stalk you like the evil monster it is. But Americans are raised with the “America, land of the free and home of the brave — everywhere else really sucks”. Which was once true, but definitely isn’t true anymore. So it seems to me it is worth at least examining your options. For sure, I am.
Do I really think that countries that are essentially tyrannies or barely democracies like Singapore, and even in some cases subject to Islam like Dubai, are better places to live than America? You bet your ass. You trade your right to vote to live in a place with very low income taxes, huge commercial opportunity, welcoming, eclectic, entrepreneurial people, unwavering property rights, absent the moral bankruptcy of wokeness, and with practically zero crime. Seems like a good bargain to me. And as to Islam — a major Christian missionary (whose name I forget) has said that Dubai is more welcoming to Christian missions than the UK.
A decade or so ago, I turned down an offer of a Costa Rican 35-acre coffee plantation with a small house for less money than a nice Tesla.
Still kicking myself. A friend bought it and says it’s heaven.
I used to toy with renewing my Hong Kong residency, but a combination of events there and too many ties here makes it impractical.
Taxes for residents are not particularly low & the absolute deal killer for me is the canton level wealth tax
Very difficult places to get into unless you’re already minted enough that it probs doesn’t matter anyway. I mean you just arrange your financial affairs in such gaffs, right?
I think I’d be tempted by, of all the places, Fraser mentions… Botswana. Beautiful country, English widely spoken, surprisngly uncorrupt for Africa, rapidly growing economy. Yeah, it got hammered by AIDS but that was quite a while back…
It kinda seems like what the RSA ought to have been.
During our interminable Canadian lockdowns more than a few covid refugees went to Texas and Florida. I had several friends making plans for Mexico and Costa Rica, and I was starting to seriously consider my own exit.
But then the truckers arrived in town and I started to hope that things would get better.
@Perry de Havilland (Wiltshire)
[Re Switzerland] Taxes for residents are not particularly low & the absolute deal killer for me is the canton level wealth tax
I’m not at all disagreeing with you, Switzerland would not be top of my list either — Europe is pretty f–ed. But I think it is worth pointing out that every dollar the Fed prints, and every pound the BoE prints is a tax on your wealth too. At least the Swiss are polite enough to call it what it is. It very much depends on what is important to you. Is higher taxes a price worth paying for more freedom in other areas? Every individual has to make that choice themselves. There are no perfect solutions to this problem, just options worth considering.
@bobby b
A decade or so ago, I turned down an offer of a Costa Rican 35-acre coffee plantation with a small house for less money than a nice Tesla.
That does sound idyllic to me too. However, I’m Scottish and you a denizen of the northern states. All that sunshine and rain that makes the coffee grow might get a bit old after a while.
What is it Sowell is famous for saying — there are no solutions, only trade offs. That does seem quite apropos on this subject too.
FWIW, (and this by no means is meant to be directed at either Steven, BobbyB or PdH that I just quoted, or for that matter anyone here.) But it is easy to sit around bitching about how crappy the USA/UK is. As far as I can see they are banana republics already, and there is no practical route back since the people who vote want it that way.
But that doesn’t mean that we, individually have to suffer for it. On the contrary we have choices. Either we can consider this option of moving somewhere better, or we can build up walls and bubbles around ourselves to block out the majority of the crap. It is easier to fantasize about a libertarian candidate getting elected and solving all our problems, but the people don’t want that. They want soak the rich, hate speech laws, endless wars and jingoism. It is harder to do the things necessary to protect ourselves from the monsters of tyranny banging on the door. But we can. Not 100%, but 90% is better than nothing.
I’d love to see discussion on this second option — what we can do without moving to protect and insulate ourselves.
Snorri Godhi,
Thank you for your considered response.
I have read that this did happen in Rome towards the end, it was forbidden to leave your job to go on welfare and some people did move because “barbarian” taxes were less than Rome’s, but I don’t have a reference for it.
BTW,
Americans should be aware that they are at a disadvantage compared to other Westerners when it comes to moving abroad. When I opened a bank account here in Thailand there was a question on the form amounting to “Are you now or have you ever been a person of interest to the IRS.” An answer in the affirmative would result in rejection as a single US customer would bring the entire bank under the purview of the IRS.
If there’s a joke here, sadly, it’s on us…
“After all, for example, if CO2 is really a deadly poison that is going to “destroy the world”, “end human life”, only a very wicked person could be against measures to reduce it.”
It isn’t though is it? This has been transparently obvious to anyone who is paying the slightest bit of attention to the matter for decades now. The BBC are now openly lying about it to try and keep the scam going as long as possible. The climate crisis bollocks must hit the buffers of reality eventually.
As someone who actually lived there for some years, Switzerland is nice, but has it’s own problems. While taxation is lower than the UK in most places it varies by locality (canton/commune)
So if you want to live in a rural idil like the mountains of Graubünden, then your taxes are going to be low, but if you want to work in somewhere like Geneva then your taxes will be about the same as the UK.
Salaries tend to be higher, but so does the cost of living.
On other matters, the police tend to be a bit more sensibilist, like UK police were back in the 1960’s and they don’t take crap from the Marxists and imported diversity.
Try pulling stunts like Just Stop Oil in Switzerland and you’ll find yourself in jail so fast your feet won’t touch. Same applies to the antisemitic Palestinian mob. There is a certain boundary for protest and complaint, but step outside that and you’re treated harshly.
Owned a company registered in Zug some years ago & I pondered the idea of living in Switzerland, but found the canton taxes made it prohibitive for me due to wealth tax. UK actually worked out cheaper in my case.
“You’re going to reach a point with the melange of Americans wherein you’ve totally lost them, and they’re going to just snap. I don’t think the idiots running this clownshow have the slightest idea that this is even possible, nor do they have any idea at all where such a “snapping” might end.”
On the contrary, the obsession that the US authorities (and indeed those in all other Western nations) have with ‘the far right’ know exactly what is bubbling under and are trying very hard to keep an eye and a thumb on it.
my take was the commie enforcers were busy gettin rich on illegal ways and wanted to keep the loot and stopped enforcing commie ways for everyone
How exactly? It was rebranded as ‘climate change’ from ‘global warming’ for a very good reason – so there could be pretty much nothing that could happen to the global climate that could not be used as evidence that they are right. Even if we hit a period of significantly colder weather triggered by low solar activity (a Dalton or Maunder minimum for example) would that not just be taken as evidence of ‘climate change’ as well?
When the theory says that ‘Climate will change as a result of CO2 emissions’ its actually partly right – climate has changed and always will change. The issue is whether CO2 is responsible. But that link cannot be refuted by real world evidence, as we all know the climate is indeed changing. So I can’t see how the runaway train can ever be derailed by anything as simple as facts.
I suppose the absence of catastrophe for a significantly long period could be argued to be a proof against ‘climate change’, but as we can all see even the pretty normal variations of weather are used (with media manipulation) to be evidence of climate crisis. It rains a bit and floods somewhere, thats a climate crisis. Its a bit hot somewhere – thats a climate crisis. Its a bit windy somewhere – thats a climate crisis.
The only thing one could hope for would be a complete lack of weather related crises for decades, and that just isn’t going to happen.
Just an additional interesting point on wealth taxes and inflation. If you compare the exchange rate of the Swiss franc to the UKP over the last five years it has gone from .75 to .90 roughly speaking. So if I had £100,000 five years ago and converted into Swiss francs I’d have 133,000 CHF. If I converted back today I’d have £120,000 rather than the £100,000 I started with. Which is to say being in sterling costs about 5% pa as opposed to being in CHF because the Swiss maintain a stable currency. Your wealth tax has to be pretty high to offset that, I believe the highest it goes in Switzerland is 1% of some assets. Of course you can get the same effect in forex trading, but my point is that everyone in Britain and the US (and elsewhere) is subject to a wealth tax anyway because of the ongoing currency inflation engaged in by their governments/psuedo governments. It is free money to politicians because people yawn and tune out if you talk about the national debt, and you can always blame the fact that eggs just went up three times in price to some disaster, or the Chinese, or greedy fat cat capitalists or the evils of Walmart (who obviously need to lower the cost of eggs AND pay their workers a decent wage, give them six weeks of paid leave, and 12 months maternity leave too.)
This is just an interesting point — I don’t doubt that PdH did the math in his personal situation and came to the conclusion best for his family. There is a big difference between considering a move abroad and measuring it isn’t for you, and not even looking into it. Given the situation in western countries every smart person should at least do a cost benefit analysis on the options.
Not a whole load of downsides to Barbados.
Jim said:
I’d argue that they really don’t understand much of anything about what is actually going on out in the body politic.
They template everyone else and everything that everyone else is doing on their own habits, their own manner of operating. This is why they think that the NRA and the “Gun Industry” are these vast conspiratorial things that “someone else” is imposing on the nation. They fundamentally do not grasp that the NRA is a true grass-roots phenomenon, and that if they succeed in taking it down, they’ll likely get even more activism out of the people that supported it. Mainly, because those people will see what is going on, panic, and then decide they have to “do something” about it. So long as the NRA is this tamed thing of lobbying and marketing, they’re doing a lot better than if the real extremists out there get a ton of newly-enraged supporters…
At a fundamental level, most of these idiots have never “been to America”, nor do they understand it.
I remember student government in high school being analogous to this BS; the kids running for office were generally the ones from well-off upper-middle class homes, angling for entries on their college applications. The utter indifference that 90% of the rest of us had for their machinations and politicking was incomprehensible to them, and they really had no idea what would or could motivate any of the mass of students to do anything besides be teenagers. Most of that ilk were like their parents; fundamentally sociopathic and unable to understand their fellow human beings. Which fact tends to explain their economic success, but which militates against them being able to understand or navigate the future once they’ve managed to get the masses engaged with the issues they’re causing.
No idea at all which way it will all fall out, but I’m fundamentally convinced that the people running this shitshow have zero idea of what they’re doing, or how to manage all the forces they’ve put into play. They sure think they do, but… I have strong doubts.
Watch what happens over the next few years, as they manage to kill off the NRA; see if that “weakens the gun lobby”. They think there is such a thing, some externality that is influencing Americans to want to own guns. The reality is far different; the majority wants guns because they fundamentally do not trust the powers-that-be, and have been arming themselves in self-defense for decades. When it all goes kinetic, it’s going to be a huge mess, and God alone knows where it will end.
My take is that whatever happens will probably start with something like Concord, replaying the opening stages of the original American Revolution. Or, it will be the Feds going after a state government like Texas because some governor refuses to go along with Federal stupidity… Either way, it won’t be going back into the bag, once initiated.
Frankly, if I were one of the idiots behind all this crap? I’d be looking at the firearms sales reports and going “Uhhmmmmm… Guys? I don’t think we’re heading in the right direction, here…”
Every new-owner gun sale represents at least one person who is concerned with personal security. That those numbers keep going up? That everyone is arming themselves to the teeth and beyond? These are not “leading indicators” that everything is going wonderfully well. Every one of those sales is a negative vote on the continued viability of the current state of the nation, and the fact that they’re being made in the first place ought to be doing two things: Warning the powers-that-be that their position is precarious and threatened by reality, and that people don’t have any confidence in the national situation. At. All.
You can tell a lot from what people actually do, versus what they say. I’ve got a Democrat die-hard acquaintance who tells me what a wonderful job Joe Biden is doing. In the last year, he’s bought a bunch of things that go “bang”, and stocked up on ammo like you wouldn’t believe. He says one thing, does another entirely. I asked him why he was buying the arsenal that he’s acquired (didn’t own a gun, some ten-fifteen years ago, either…) and he just looked away from my eyes and admitted that the world scares the f*ck out of him, these days, and he “…wants to be prepared…”
He’s rational enough that when you ask him who he’s most worried about, he’ll admit that it’s not the local tame Republicans, but the allies of his beloved Democrats, Antifa and BLM.
Ain’t none of that representing anything at all good for the nation. The current lot of idiots running the game are obliviots, who do not recognize the warning signs of high pressure in the social boiler. At. All.
WRT Switzerland: I tried to get a job there, both in academia and in the private sector; but they won’t take lazy sods like me.
I am not wealthy enough to live there without a Swiss salary. And even if i had a Swiss salary, would it make sense to stay there after retirement, considering the cost of living?
Switzerland being out of reach, and not wanting to live in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, i moved to the third most free country in the world. (Go to page 10.)
Fraser:
Not all languages are equally easy to learn for native English speakers.
Based on the experience of the US diplomatic corps, Latin and Germanic languages are easiest: 24 weeks, 25h/week. (Except for French, German, and Icelandic, which are moderately more difficult.)
Most other languages require 44 weeks, still 25h/week.
The following require 88 weeks:
Arabic;
Cantonese;
Mandarin;
Korean;
Japanese.
When Daughter did her DLI-FLC (Russian) stint, these were the breakdowns (at 35 hours/week classroom time):
Category I&II languages – 36 week-long courses:
French
Spanish
Indonesian
Category III languages – 48 week-long courses:
Persian Farsi
Russian
Tagalog
Category IV languages – 64 week-long courses:
Modern Standard Arabic
Arabic – Egyptian
Arabic – Iraqi
Arabic – Levantine Syrian
Chinese Mandarin
Japanese
Korean
(Yes, I’m mostly just bragging.)
Ellen – sadly the FBI can smash down your door and drag you off, at gun point, to face a corrupt court (including a corrupt jury – corrupt juries are a key part of the system, as various people have found to their cost) regardless of what State you live in.
Once in America if an individual or family were being victimised the community would unite to protect them – but establishment policies (over many decades now) have carefully destroyed communities – in order to “atomise” people, make people isolated – easy victims.
And the schools and so on in Texas and Florida are in the hands of the Collectivists – although there is some push back against this.
The FCC may well soon be taking power of the internet – and in a thousand other ways the march of “Progressive” tyranny (DEI, ESG…. whatever the totalitarianism is called this week) continues.
But it will fall in the end – Economic Law will come for the Frankfurt School Marxism of the dying West just as it came for the Classical Marxism of the Soviet Union.
The end, the collapse, will be terrible – many good people will not survive it. But at least it will be the end.
Tragically even Poland may join the parade – only a few decades after escaping Classical Marxism, going down the rathole of Frankfurt School “Woke” Marxism. “We want to be like Europe!”, “We want to be like America!”
Western Europe and the United States may have been, relatively, well governed a long time ago – but to copy these societies NOW (to copy what they have become) is terrible folly.
Ukraine please note.
OTOH Italy, Sweden, Finland, Chile, and maybe the Netherlands* have left the parade.
I call it a bargain.
* although i trust Geert less than i trust Giorgia; but his likely partners will probably hold him in check.