2025-05-24
Baudet on the Free Market
A strong argument in favor of capitalism is that “power corrupts” and a free market introduces competition to the market, so it distributes power. Based on this video.
A strong argument in favor of capitalism is that “power corrupts” and a free market introduces competition to the market, so it distributes power. Based on this video.
From On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice by Adam Kirsch:
If the definition of a progressive movement is that it believes the future can be better than the past, then the ideology of settler colonialism is not progressive, because it believes the past was better than the future.
The idea of communism is that inequality is reduced by getting rid of rich people. Once communism gets under way, everybody is equal. Except the government. Or as Orwell wrote: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”. In the DDR, you could recognize a party-member by the fact that they drove a Volvo. Normal people drove a Trabant.
Transcript of a speech by Frans Timmermans in 2015. Frans Timmermans is the former Executive Vice President of the European Commission for the European Green Deal and European Commissioner for Climate Action:
Diversity is now, in some parts of Europe, seen as a threat. Diversity comes with challenges. But diversity is humanity's destiny. There is not going to be, even in the remotest places of this planet, a nation that will not see diversity in its future. That's where humanity is heading. And those politicians trying to sell to their electorates, a society that is exclusively composed of people from one culture, are trying to portray a future based on a past that never existed. Therefore, that future will never be. Europe will be diverse. Like all other parts of the world, we'd be diverse. The only question is, how do we deal with that diversity? And my answer to that is, by ensuring that our values determine how we deal with diversity and not giving up our values to refuse diversity, that will bring us down as a society. If we don't get this right, I truly believe Europe will not remain the Europe we've built. Europe will not remain a place of peace and freedom for very long.
A quote from Joseph Stalin at the beginning of the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization by Stephen Kotkin:
I propose a toast to simple, ordinary, modest people, to the "little cogs" who keep our great state machine in motion. . . . No one writes about them, they have no high titles and few offices, but they are the people who maintain us. . . . I drink to the health of these people.
From pathsofstoicism:
Best mental reset I’ve learned:
If your mind is loud — Write.
If your mind is empty — Read.
If your mind is racing — Walk.
If your mind is tired — Sleep.
If your mind is sharp — Build.
Most problems are just mismatched energy. Get the inputs right, the rest follows.
In a 1983 lecture (transcript), Yuri Bezmenov explains how Russian propaganda typically aims to weaken opposing societies. Here I want to go through his lecture and make some notes comparing it to the situation in the West today. By the West, I mean not a geographical place, but mean the group of countries that have largely joined into the same institutions. For example, the United States, Australia, the Netherlands, England, Japan, and South Korea all belong to the West.
This is the transcript of a lecture by Yuri Bezmenov (alias Tomas Schuman), a Soviet KGB defector. He "explains in detail his scheme for the KGB process of subversion and takeover of target societies at a lecture in Los Angeles, 1983." The transcript was generated by OpenAI whisper and manually verified and improved:
Subversion is the term, if you look in a dictionary or criminal code to that matter, usually is explained as a part of activity to destroy things like religion, government, system, political, economical system of a country. And usually it's linked to espionage and such romantic things as blowing up bridges, sidetracking trains, cloak and dagger activity in Hollywood style. What I'm going to talk about now has absolutely nothing to do with the cliche of espionage or KGB activity of collecting information. So the greatest mistake or misconception I think is that whenever we are talking about KGB for some strange reason, starting from Hollywood movie makers to professors of political science and "experts on Soviet affairs" or criminologists as they call themselves, they think that the most desirable thing for Andropov and the whole KGB is to steal blueprints of some supersonic jet, bring it back to Soviet Union and sell it to the Soviet military industrial complex. This is only partly true. If we take the whole time, money and manpower that the Soviet Union and KGB in particular spends outside of USSR border, we will discover-of course there are no official statistics unlike with CIA or FBI-that the espionage as such occupies only 10 to 15 percent of money, time and manpower. 15% of the activity of KGB. The rest 85 percent is always subversion. And unlike a dictionary of English, Oxford dictionary, subversion in Soviet terminology means always a destructive aggressive activity aimed to destroy the country, nation or geographical area of your enemy. So there's no romantics in there, absolutely. No blowing up bridges, no microfilms in Coca-Cola cans, nothing of that sort, no James Bond nonsense. Most of this activity is overt, legitimate and easily observable if you give yourself time and trouble to observe it. But according to the law and law enforcement systems of the Western civilization, it's not a crime because [it's only] misconception and manipulation of terms. We think that subverter is a person who is going to blow up our beautiful bridges. No, subverter is a student who comes for exchange, a diplomat, an actor, an artist, a journalist like myself was ten years ago.
Stephen Kotkin at 47:00:
And in the process of doing it, [Stalin] caused famine and was undermining, potentially, the party's own rule. He just kept going all the way through because he had the courage of his conviction. And then when they complained about him he made a mental note of that and he enacted his version of revenge on them a few years later for their criticisms of him when he did this. So he did this because he believed in the Marxist/Leninist fashion that this had to be done. He himself felt a man of destiny and therefore he could do this and he was looking to find the shock troops to galvanize the half-educated youth to take violence out on these gulags and to force the villagers into these collective arrangements. And so what he did and so this is what totalitarianism is: he galvanized people's agency and those people using their agency destroyed their own agency. They disempowered themselves by by taking up this call.
Jordan Peterson at 1:14:16: “The honest podcasters they’re trying to get smarter and they are bringing their audience along for the ride.”