REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed", the Fourth Turning, and nihilism

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Thursday, March 23, 2023 20:55
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 1965
PAGE 1 of 1

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 5:16 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

[Attack of the Nihilists
Did Dostoevsky's Demons Predict Wokeism, Antifa and the Gender-Benders?
Kevin Barrett • March 8, 2021 • 2,800 Words • 110 Comments • Reply

“’Are these the Nazis, Walter?’ ‘No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’” -The Big Lebowski

Since the so-called insurrection of January 6, big media, big government, and big corporations have been demanding the collective scalp of the Trumpian alt-right. If we don’t somehow make those 70 million Trump voters disappear, the subtext goes, American democracy is doomed.

The alt-right agrees that American democracy faces an existential threat, but disagrees vociferously about the nature of the threat. Whereas Democrats and corporate media consider Trump’s cult of personality a fascist regime in the making, and his followers deluded and none-too-bright storm troopers, the deplorables, for their part, view the corporate Democrats as TDS-addled censorship-loving election thieves bent on establishing a “woke” dictatorship.

What does all this sound and fury really signify? What we are witnessing is a clash of barely-coherent yet increasingly frenetic ideologies—something the previous generation never imagined when it famously proclaimed the end of ideology. Its seems that Francis Fukuyama never read his Dostoevsky. If he had, he would have understood that the collapse of the grand récit of modernity would not lead to universal satisfaction under neoliberalism, but instead to ideological extremism, chaos, and bloodshed.

Dostoevsky literally wrote the book on ideological extremism and its causes and consequences. That book is Demons, otherwise known in various translations as The Devils, The Demons, and The Possessed. The author’s penultimate novel, it details the process by which liberal parents and educators produce radicalized, ideology-maddened children bent on tearing down the world into which they were born. This unquenchable thirst for destruction—call it nihilism if you will—is the engine of all post-religious political ideologies, be they of the left or right. Socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism, Nazism, woke-ism: all share a barely-concealed urge to blow up the inherited social order, ostensibly to rebuild it as some sort of nebulous paradise on earth. But all those rebuilding plans are just window-dressing. It’s the destruction, only the destruction, that counts.

Dostoevsky originally envisioned Demons as political polemic, but it expanded into a polyphonic masterpiece in the writing. Horrified by news reports of nihilist leader Sergey Nechayev’s orchestration of a pointless political murder, Dostoevsky set about fictionalizing the story, hoping to shed light on how the sensitive, genteel, well-meaning liberals of the 1840s had prepared the way for the 1860s generation of nihilist lunatics. (Today, we might ask ourselves how the complacent neoliberals of a generation ago, especially their avant-garde academic fringe, managed to midwife the emergence of today’s woke generation of sanctimonious COVID-masked rioters, Antifa thugs, social media censors, gender-denialists, statue-smashers, and others bent on the nihilistic extermination of American and human tradition if not reality itself.)

Demons, published in 1871-1872, predicted the rise of even worse nihilisms—and future developments, including the emergence of Bolshevism and Nazism, seemed to fulfill its prophecy. But what Dostoevsky foresaw was not so much particular events as a recurring pattern: Liberal parents neglect the religious education of their children, who grow up to embrace radical political ideologies as a poor substitute for faith and the spiritual life. That’s why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries, with no end in sight. The only off-ramp, as Dostoevsky never stopped screaming from the rooftops, would be a decisive return to religion. That seemed a pipe dream in the 1870s. But one hundred years later, the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Awakening would restore it as a conceivable option.

Dostoevsky’s rogues’ gallery of 1860s nihilist intellectuals includes Nikolai Stavrogin, a high-born charismatic rule-breaker with a penchant for cruel and shocking actes gratuites including pedophilia and other experiments that “could have taught the Marquis de Sade a thing or two”; Peter Verkhovensky, a volubly mendacious activist and organizer dedicated to overthrowing his “oppressive” society by burning everything down, BLM-Antifa style; and Alexei Kirilov, who believes he can simultaneously overcome belief in God and fear of death (two sides of the same coin) through suicide. Finally, and perhaps most prophetically, there is the historian Shigalov, who can see where it’s all heading: “Proceeding from unlimited freedom I end with unlimited despotism.”

The liberal Dr. Frankensteins responsible for breeding these demonic intellectual monsters are represented in the novel by Stephan Verkhovensky, Peter’s father and Stavrogin’s tutor. A self-styled freethinker and legend-in-his-own-mind who fancies himself a threat to the status quo, Stephan is in fact pathetically ineffectual in his slavish but worse-than-useless devotion to the modern, Godless, socialistic ideas arriving in Russia from the West. His pupils, the up-and-coming generation of 1860s nihilists, will, unlike their teacher, at least make a real effort to live out the implications of those ideas—with tragic consequences.

Today’s equivalent of the Stephan Verkhovenskys are the postmodernists, who conquered the humanities wing of the academy in the 1990s and planted the flag of nihilistic relativism on its ramparts. Their attack on the real, the true, the absolute, the just, the transcendent—on God, really—was, like Stephan Verkhovensky’s logorrheic effusions, a purely imaginary campaign, conducted within a well-remunerated “safe space,” with few if any direct real-world effects. But their pupils listened, took heed, and eventually acted.

The chief lesson of the Stephan Verkhovenskys of the world, deeply imbibed and put into practice by the Peters and Stavrogins and Kirilovs, is rejection of reality, both natural and social. They are in deep-seated revolt against God, traditional authorities who claim to be His representatives, and anything else that inhibits their freedom to be and do whatever they like. Since the world, its traditions, and its authorities (not to mention God) are constantly frustrating their capricious desires, they are driven by hate even when they profess the most humanitarian ideals. “It is all the fault of the system, the fault of our evil traditions, the fault of the authorities! Burn down the cities! Smash the statues! Defund the police!”

Some even hate their own God-given chromosomes and hormones and genitalia so much that they are driven to extremes of medical self-mutilation. Their carnival barkers, woke ideologues, only slightly less uncomfortable in their own skins, launch ferocious campaigns to “cancel” anyone who refuses to join the game of million-gender make-believe.

The scene in Demons in which an elegant society ball, featuring liberal literary speechifying from the 1860s Russian version of today’s Democratic Party, is organized as cover for Peter’s nihilistic socialist goons to burn down much of the town, reads like something out of today’s headlines. Julia von Lembke, the organizer of the society ball, plays the role of Nancy Pelosi, while Peter and his murderous arsonist friends represent Antifa-BLM.

Another startlingly contemporary concern of Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel is the central role of pedophilia. Stavrogin, the iconic central character or “antichrist” if you will, harbors a dark secret: Many years ago, his efforts to live amorally, as though God genuinely didn’t exist, led him to perpetrate a terrible seduction-rape of an innocent child, who subsequently committed suicide. But though logic tells him that in a world with no God and hence no ultimate basis for morality he had no good reason not to follow his desires to their limits and beyond (shades of Woody Allen) he is nonetheless tormented by extreme remorse.

Stavrogin’s situation recalls not only that of Woody Allen and other accused celebrity sex criminals, but also looks forward to the way pedophilia has become the last sexual taboo and hence the last resort for sexual blackmailers. Meyer Lansky, the mob boss who owned J. Edgar Hoover and (indirectly) almost everyone of consequence in the postwar 20th century USA, didn’t need pedophilia; he could blackmail his targets with photos of just about any non-marital liasons. But today, we are living in a world ruled by Jeffrey Epsteins and their Israeli intelligence bosses, who know too well that “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that underage swing.” Even consensual cannibalism and incest are losing their transgressive luster. Our absurdly “sexually liberated” culture, awash in birth control pills and abortions and pornography and viagra and celebration of almost all varieties of deviance, is still ashamed of pedophilia, a century and a half after Nikolai Stavrogin. Apparently the Antichrist hasn’t quite achieved 100% control of our sex lives…at least not yet.

In a world without God, where is the transcendence? You can’t just get rid of it. Yearning for transcendence is hard-wired into the human soul. In Demons, ideologies of Godless freedom lead to warped attempts at transcendence: Stavrogin transcends morality by raping and suiciding a child; Peter through elaborate orchestrations of gratuitous destruction; and perhaps most interestingly, Kirilov through directly assaulting God by committing an elaborately thought-out suicide.

Today, some seek to transcend the banality of secular materialism through wokeness. By joining an ostensibly idealistic movement attempting to radically change society and make history—or better yet, erase history—the wokester lives for something larger and greater than himself, or so he imagines. Such feeble simulacra of spiritual awakenings pale in comparison to the Kirilov-like planetary suicide attempts currently being engineered by the transhumanist movement and their singularity-seeking allies in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, artificial life, and nanotechnology. These folks, like Kirilov, think they can challenge God by killing themselves…along with the rest of us. (No, Marvin Minsky, we will not get lucky and they will not keep us as pets; it, not they, will be a self-reproducing toxin, a cancer on the planet and perhaps the universe.)

Dostoevsky couldn’t have foreseen the singularity. But he did see how nihilist revolutionaries were pushing Russia towards the destruction of the old order by way of an unprecedented bloodbath…and how the forces driving the destruction were generational and rooted in the way each succeeding generation cares for, or fails to care for, its children. In Demons, the liberal intellectual Stephan Verkhovensky is the absent father (of Peter) and the irresponsibly irreligious teacher (of Stavrogin), and it is ultimately his failure as a father figure that turns the next generation into demons. We see the same kind of abdication of paternal/religious authority in the erosion of patriarchy in contemporary America. In the black community the socially-engineered destruction of patriarchy and religion (the two are related because only religion gives a man sufficient reason to sacrifice himself to protect and care for his family) has produced unprecedented rates of crime, drug use, and out-of-wedlock birth. Other US ethnic groups, including the white majority, have also been devastated, though quiet desperation and antidepressants and ID-politics idiocy among the middle and upper classes, and opioids and alcohol and Trumpolatry in the working classes, are more common than street crime.

Since the baby boom began after World War II, increasingly absent fathers have produced increasingly disturbed (or “demonic”) generations of children, culminating in the mass psychosis of the Woke generation. Will the Wokesters ultimately stage a new Bolshevik revolution-cum-civil-war, a 2020s American bloodbath? That is what Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning theory predicts. As I recently wrote in Crescent Magazine:

Some who expect the worst, including Trump’s sometime advisor Steve Bannon, cite the Fourth Turning theory of sociologists William Strauss and Neil Howe. According to that theory, cyclical generational changes driven by child-rearing patterns have created an 80-year cycle in American history. At the end of each 80-year cycle, a cataclysmic bloodbath occurs, destroying the previous dispensation and opening the way for a new one.

If Strauss and Howe are right, we are right on schedule for a bloodbath. Around each of the years 1780, 1860, and 1940, oceans of blood were shed, generating new American myths that drove new political dispensations. 1780 marked the first American civil war, a bloody series of fratricidal atrocities mythically remembered as “the American Revolution.” 1860 brought the Civil War. 1940 brought World War II and its many holocausts, including those of Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki (and the sacrifice of over 300,000 American lives, a small portion of the global tally of 75 million).

How much bloodshed will emerge out of the yawning chasm opened by America’s internecine conflicts of 2020? All three of America’s previous bloodbaths were won by equivalents of the blues—the people who wanted to tear down the old order. The Revolutionists of 1780 demolished the British colonial order and built a union of largely independent states. The Yankees of 1860 annihilated that loose union of sovereign states and replaced it with federal tyranny. And the pro-war party of 1940—a minuscule portion of the electorate, which overwhelmingly opposed US entry into World War II—put federal tyranny on steroids by turning power over to an unelected military-industrial-banking complex and its permanent Deep State.

Based on historical precedent, we might expect the red-vs-blue war of the 2020s to end in yet another decisive blue victory, erasing all vestiges of tradition and enshrining an even more extreme form of tyranny (if such a thing is possible). But as an Arabic proverb says, “a thing that exceeds its limit turns into its opposite.” If what Alan Sabrosky calls “the Blue Terror” goes too far, stampeding over its opponents and censoring and silencing dissent with excessive hubris, a red reaction might be spurred to some sort of victory, however pyrrhic—whether by establishing its own tyranny of terror, or by breaking the nation into pieces.

Is the red reaction, represented by such groups as the Proud Boys, a voice of sanity? Or is it just another “demonic” and ultimately nihilistic ideological movement? If Dostoevsky were a columnist at the Unz Review (the only site that would publish him if he were alive today and participating in the American culture wars) he would undoubtedly argue that the Proud Boys and most of the rest of the alt right are correct about the necessity of patriarchy, but wrong about grounding it in ethnicity rather than religion. You are calling yourselves European chauvinists? he would sneer. Are you out of your minds? Europe is the source of the infection! Come to Mother Russia! Return to the Holy Orthodox Church and to Christ! Work to restore the Czar, and in the meantime make do with the next best thing, Vladimir Putin!

If he could overcome his provincial prejudices, the author of Demons would also look favorably on the Islamic Awakening, especially its manifestation in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Instead of Church and Czar, Islamic Iran is ruled by a clergy headed by the Supreme Leader on one side of the balance of powers, and a democratic-republican government on the other. That kind of balance between religious and worldly authority was the norm everywhere until the illuminati nihilists uncorked the French Revolution and let the demons of totalitarian secularism out of the bottle.

In any case, returning to America and Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning, it’s worth noting that although the American nihilist revolutions that occur like clockwork every four generations have always been won by the blues, they also have always succeeded in re-establishing patriarchy, for an all-too-obvious reason: The new regimes emerged from bloody all-out wars that were fought and won by extremely masculine people, XY and even occasionally XYY chromosome people with more high-IQ outliers and an average of 30 times as much testosterone as those other people who are born with XX chromosomes (are we still allowed to say “men” and “women”?) When the the testosterone-crazed hairy-chested killers come home from the wars and shack up, they tend to re-establish masculine authority in the households they form. And thus the four-generation 80-year cycle starts anew.

So if everything proceeds according to schedule, today’s Fourth Turning, the one that started around the year 2020, will presumably turn into some sort of bloodbath, at home and/or abroad, after which the victorious killers will once again re-establish (relative) patriarchy. Can you imagine the Woke generation of gender-bending nihilists doing that? I can’t. So something will have to give. Either the reactionary pro-patriarchy relatively religion-friendly reds will finally win one, or the blues will undergo a bloodbath-catalyzed metamorphosis and emerge as reconstructed patriarchs. (Or, quite plausibly, Strauss and Howe will be proven wrong, and the Fourth Turning will be a dud.)

What could make the Fourth Turning different, and a real pattern-breaker, is the likelihood that the Woke Yankees will finally lose a big war. If the US tries to lead the maritime and rimland powers against a Russia-China-Iran alliance defending the Eurasian heartland, Eurasia may very well defeat Oceana, with catastrophic consequences for the Yankee aggressors. Following the string of victories in the Fourth Turning bloodbaths of 1780, 1860, and 1940, a loss in the 2020s would shake Leviathan to its foundations. Who knows what, if anything, would emerge from the rubble.

It’s hard to predict the future, as Yogi Berra said, because it hasn’t happened yet. But however the red-vs-blue clash plays out, and whatever geopolitical dispensation emerges next, one thing is reasonably certain: People will keep reading Dostoevsky, and even the non-reactionaries will admit that his Demons got a lot of things right.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 6:34 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



I read that book, but I was in my 20's when I read a lot of Dostoevsky's works, and don't remember as much as I should. Perhaps it's time to revisit it when I have some spare time.

free to read at Project Gutenberg


http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8117/8117-h/8117-h.htm


As I think about it, I remember my rather undigested problem with the novel, specifically the dependence on the idea of God capital G. Because it doesn't make sense globally, or anthropologically. There are plenty of stable cultures that posit unprovable beliefs, without necessarily God.

Since then I've come across the idea that the thing that allows humans to act together in large groups that don't have direct, familial ties or even knowledge of each other, is language - specifically the language of the non-existent (beliefs, fables, religions). Then of course, and as Signy pointed out a long time ago, there's the study that shows that children will believe what's told to them about the workings of a mysterious box, even when their own direct experience and sight contradict what they're told. So humans are particularly directed by the things we are told, whether those things exist or not. And those things form us into groups - tribes, if you will.

Personally, I have an idea about what we should be teaching out children, which was a mantra that grandmothers around the western world would admonish their grandchildren with - if everybody did it, what would the world look like? As Jesus said, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As Confucius said, What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men. As the Iroquois Great Law of Peace said, in every decision, be it personal, governmental or corporate, we must consider how it will affect our descendants seven generations into the future. Or as those New Orleanians would say - what goes around, comes around.

And that's a very direct, very observable moral standard that requires no God, or gods, or beliefs.

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 7:32 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


"My friend, real truth is never true-to-life, did you know that? In order to make the truth true-to-life you really have to stir a bit of falsehood into it" – Dostoevsky

"My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it." – also Dostoevsky, The Possessed or, The Devils

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 7:51 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Posted this not because I believe in God, or gods, or a deity of any sort but because it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.

I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"

If I had to substitute a word for God it might be "reality"... that there is something greater than us, stronger than us, to which we all eventually submit. But there are people who believe they can escape their bodies and even escape death.

Anyway an interesting opinion worth reading, even if not agreed with.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

THUGR posts about Putin so much, he must be in love.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 8:06 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Oh, OK.

So, I'll think about our 'society' some, and whether or not we have a cohesive set of values that'll keep us going generation to generation.

But just off the top of my head, I can think of a huge disruptor in the US about 100 years ago from previous ethea (ethoses, plural forms of ethos) which were largely agrarian and stable - and that's the intentional directive towards the primacy of personal happiness, and specifically consumerism, above all. (A Century of Self)


NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 8:51 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SignyM:
Posted this not because I believe in God, or gods, or a deity of any sort but because it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.

I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"

If I had to substitute a word for God it might be "reality"... that there is something greater than us, stronger than us, to which we all eventually submit. But there are people who believe they can escape their bodies and even escape death.

Anyway an interesting opinion worth reading, even if not agreed with.

Dostoevsky's answer was simple: "But what Dostoevsky foresaw was not so much particular events as a recurring pattern: Liberal parents neglect the religious education of their children, who grow up to embrace radical political ideologies as a poor substitute for faith and the spiritual life. That’s why Western culture has been trapped in an oscillating dynamic between liberalism and nihilistic radicalism for roughly two centuries, with no end in sight. The only off-ramp, as Dostoevsky never stopped screaming from the rooftops, would be a decisive return to religion. That seemed a pipe dream in the 1870s. But one hundred years later, the collapse of Communism and the Islamic Awakening would restore it as a conceivable option."

Maybe Dostoevsky's answer was not simple. He didn't account for the varieties of religious experience.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/14/if-the-u-s-had-100-pe
ople-charting-americans-religious-affiliations
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, March 11, 2021 6:07 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Quote:

Originally posted by SignyM:

... it points out our lack of cohesion around any particular identity or ethos that holds us together, and the centrifugal forces of narcissism, individualism, and the supremacy of wish-fufillment pulling us apart.

I get that impression every time I ask "What are Americans' interests?" and the response I get is .... "AMERICA?"

I think you're right.

The concept of common futures, common troubles, common interests, and community efforts have been all but stamped out. 'America' is no more than a slogan people chant when they want to (spend money we don't have to) bomb some poor country so that 'Americans' can feel important.

But that dissolution didn't happen by accident.

And given how easily Americans can be made to pivot, I think it could actually be reversed - if tptb would - for some strange reason, want to.


NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, March 11, 2021 7:30 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 1KIKI:

The concept of common futures, common troubles, common interests, and community efforts have been all but stamped out. 'America' is no more than a slogan people chant when they want to (spend money we don't have to) bomb some poor country so that 'Americans' can feel important.

But that dissolution didn't happen by accident.

George Washington warned what would happen if Americans weren’t careful. Americans didn't heed the warning.

In his farewell address, Washington, like a father chiding his bickering children, advised his countrymen, no matter what their political passions, to consider the fundamental bonds that connected them as Americans. Political parties were useful to check the worst instincts of a monarch, he wrote, but, in a democracy, a party agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection. It opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which find a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

The Founders were suspicious of “factions,” as parties were then called, fearing that powerful blocs would put their own regional or commercial interests above the common good, and endanger the fragile union of the new nation. That is exactly what happened. Americans weren’t careful to avoid the worst possibilities of political parties.

George Washington Warned Against Political Infighting in His Farewell Address
https://www.history.com/news/george-washington-farewell-address-warnin
gs

As he stepped down from the presidency, Washington urged Americans to always place the interests of the nation over their political and regional affiliations.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 1, 2022 8:48 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 1, 2022 3:10 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


I find old posts more interesting than today's poverty of partisan thought.

But what foes this Russian order have to do with thr original topic? Tacking posts on the ends of random threads just makes it difficult to maintain a conversation with gou.

AFA the order, there is a distinct lack of specificity in M$M reporting, ans Mosdow Times is a vehemently anti-Russian establishment site.

Most often I find western reports "about" Russia to be either misquoted, taken completely out of context (For example, when SECOND supposedly quoted Putin about a "purge", it wasn't a purge of people, as you might think, a full quote makes it clear that it is a purge of west-leaning policies) or simply made up.

So, this order: It was published by the FSB suoosedly, but not the Duma.

Who does it apply to? The military? The FSB? Everyone?
What are the penalties? Bc it doesn't seem to have the force of law, how do you enforce it?
It is much different than "Lose lips sink ships"?

More detail is required. If you find out more, thanks.




-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 1, 2022 3:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
I find old posts more interesting than today's poverty of partisan thought.

But what foes this Russian order have to do with thr original topic? Tacking posts on the ends of random threads just makes it difficult to maintain a conversation with gou.



Thank you.

I backed off of Jaynez after you said that you appreciated his necroposting many months ago, but it's getting WAY out of hand now and there will be 4 different places he's posting about the same thing, and sometimes it's even outside of the RWED.

I have to go back 10 or more pages sometimes to find a topic I want to refer to now because of it.

--------------------------------------------------

Growing up in a Republic was nice... Shame we couldn't keep it.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 1, 2022 4:10 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Most often I find western reports "about" Russia to be either misquoted, taken completely out of context (For example, when SECOND supposedly quoted Putin about a "purge", it wasn't a purge of people, as you might think, a full quote makes it clear that it is a purge of west-leaning policies) or simply made up.

Are you referring to this article, written by Russians, using "purge"?

Military operation in Ukraine 25 Nov, 12:17

Russia used to live by someone else’s rules, going through purge now — Putin

The president said that "ultimately those who tried to control us - it’s thanks to their efforts, by and large, that we ended up in that situation, including in the zone of the special military operation"

NOVO-OGARYOVO, November 25. /TASS/. Russia used to live by someone else’s rules, and is going through a purge now, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday.

"What happened in the previous years was largely because we played, lived by someone else’s rules. The events of today are a path to some internal purging and reinvention," he said as he met with the mothers of the servicemen that participate in the special military operation.

He said in the 1990s and the 2000s "it seemed to us everything would be okay, but it wasn’t so."

"Moreover, we started to live and play by someone else’s rules and we took a delight in the fact that someone was trying to control us," Putin said.

He said "ultimately those who tried to control us - it’s thanks to their efforts, by and large, that we ended up in that situation, including in the zone of the special military operation."

"They pushed us to do this," the president said.

He said "nothing would have happened" if it hadn’t been for the coup in Ukraine in 2014 that toppled the government in that country.
https://tass.com/politics/1542117

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 1, 2022 4:36 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Which makes it clear to anyone with two neurons that he's talking about policies

"we started to live and play by someone else’s rules"
Rules, about "privatization", capital flow, geopolitics, LGBTQX, nationalism, economy, "rules based order" etc, coming from abroad.

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, March 23, 2023 8:55 PM

JAYNEZTOWN


The current Left shares much with bolseviks


but don't worry they will probably ban Dostoyevsky' and other such offensive alien cultures soon



NOTIFY: N   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
A.I Artificial Intelligence AI
Thu, October 31, 2024 19:16 - 237 posts
Kamala Harris for President
Thu, October 31, 2024 19:06 - 592 posts
How do you like my garbage truck?
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:49 - 2 posts
Trump on Joe Rogan: Full Podcast
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:05 - 7 posts
Israeli War
Thu, October 31, 2024 18:04 - 62 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, October 31, 2024 17:58 - 4657 posts
Elections; 2024
Thu, October 31, 2024 17:45 - 4425 posts
Spooky Music Weird Horror Songs...Tis ...the Season...... to be---CREEPY !
Thu, October 31, 2024 16:19 - 56 posts
Sentencing Thread
Thu, October 31, 2024 15:11 - 381 posts
human actions, global climate change, global human solutions
Thu, October 31, 2024 14:25 - 921 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, October 31, 2024 13:46 - 7408 posts
No matter what happens...
Wed, October 30, 2024 23:43 - 21 posts

FFF.NET SOCIAL