Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Britain Is Arresting Prominent Pro-Palestinian Activists

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On September 2, 2024

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For “supporting a proscribed organization”. Aka. Hamas. The arrests are by counter-terrorism police.

Sarah Wilkinson’s arrest:

The police came to her house just before 7.30am. 12 of them in total, some of them in plain clothes from the counter terrorism police. They said she was under arrest for “content that she has posted online.” Her house is being raided & they have seized all her electronic devices.

Others who have been arrested include Richard Barnard, Richard Medhurst and Craig Murray.

This is the law they are being charged under:

I have long opposed all “proscribed organization laws.” They destroy freedom of association and freedom of speech. In the US RICO is the primary culprit, justified by being used to go after the Mafia, but they’re all bad and they all wind up being misused. If someone commits an actual crime they should be charged, but freedom of association is fundamental and should not be abridged. RICO should be unconstitutional, but somehow isn’t. As for Britain, well, the laws on the books are draconian but were often not enforced.

Starmer, Britain’s PM, has always treated his job as crushing the left. This was clear when he was leader of the opposition and purged the party of the left, and now he’s done something even the Conservatives did not do, and done it to protect a genocide. When you look at the austerity politics his government is enforcing, it’s clear that he’s actually slightly worse than the Conservatives, which is quite the achievement. A monster in all regards.

In general the West, and especially Europe, is cracking down on freedom of speech. Strong, confident elites don’t need to do this. “Say what you want, it doesn’t matter” is how they think and feel, and they know it’s better to have people shooting off their mouths than acting.

But weak elites; scared elites; crack down.

A lot of this comes down “when times are good, people talk but rarely do.” In the best of times, most people fundamentally support the system. They want changes, yes, but they aren’t actually a threat to elites. But life in Britain has been getting worse for over forty years now and Corbyn scared the Labour establishment: he should never have been able to be elected leader and he should never have come within a hair of winning his first election.

So crush, crush away. Make examples of people.

The same is true of France’s arrest of the CEO of Telegram. This is all about instilling fear. Stay within the lines or we’ll crush you.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 1 2024

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On September 1, 2024

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by Tony Wikrent

 

Strategic Political Economy

John Kiriakou: The Slide Into Authoritarianism

John Kiriakou [Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 08-28-2024]

 

The Social Recession Is Accelerating 

Charles Hugh Smith [via Naked Capitalism 08-25-2024]

A reader asked about the term social recession which he’d noted in my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy. Here is the paragraph:
“Stagnation in opportunities to work and earn (i.e. a financial recession) leads to social recession, a loss of opportunities for adulthood: a rewarding career, family, and a home of one’s own. In a social recession, unemployed young people may be mired in adolescent narcissism, eschewing ambitions not just in work but in romance and marriage.”….

In the purely financial / economic terms of growth of GDP, household income, corporate profits and the value of assets, the US has only been in an economic recession for a few months in 2008-09 and at the start of the pandemic lockdown. But when measured by the ability of just about anyone willing to work hard and practice basic frugality to buy a house and start a family, the US has been in a social recession since 2009. Demographics / economics analyst Chris H., who tweets as

CH @economica, recently posted charts which reflect this social recession, most strikingly in the collapse of the US birthrate that started in 2009. He asked: “The largest childbearing population in US history has gone on strike…maybe we should know why?”….

The social recession began as a direct result of policy responses to the Global Financial Meltdown in 2008-09, policies that favored capital and those who already owned assets, at the expense of everyone who did not inherit wealth/assets or was too young to buy assets such as houses when they were still affordable to average workers….

As I often note, average wages have stagnated for the past 45 years. This stagnation was tolerable as long as the cost of a house, childcare and healthcare insurance remained somewhat affordable to average workers, but once the engines of financialization transformed the US economy into a Bubble Economy of soaring real estate / stock valuations that then inevitably crash, triggering an even larger bailout / stimulus response that inflates an even greater bubble, the costs of home ownership, childcare and healthcare soared out of reach of all but the top 20%….

GRAPH Wage earners’ share of gross domestic income (GDI) declined from 1970’s 51% to 43% in 2022. $149 trillion in GDI was shifted from labor to capital.

Did wages rise 10-fold to match the 10-fold rise in the cost of a modest house? No. That is social recession in a nutshell. When this fact is raised in conversation, those in the top 10% protest, but their protest rings hollow, for what they’re really saying is: since I’m doing great and all my friends are doing great, everyone’s doing great. There’s a word for this: denial. Denial cannot solve problems, it can only make them worse.

 

Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia neo-confederates argued that their economy was under siege by socialists

Heather Cox Richardson, August 28, 2024 [Letters from an American]

…on August 15, when Trump talked at reporters for more than an hour at his Bedminster property… he said …: “All we have to do is define our opponent as being a communist or a socialist or somebody that’s going to destroy our country.”

Trump uses “Marxist,” “communist,” and “socialist” interchangeably, and when he and his allies accuse Democrats of being one of those things, they are not talking about an economic system in which the people, represented by the government, take control of the means of production. They are using a peculiarly American adaptation of the term “socialist.”

….What Republicans mean by “socialism” in America is a product of the years immediately after the Civil War, when African American men first got the right to vote. Eager to join the economic system from which they had previously been excluded, these men voted for leaders who promised to rebuild the South, provide schools and hospitals (as well as prosthetics for veterans, a vital need in the post-war U.S.), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to rise to prosperity.

Former Confederates loathed the idea of Black men voting almost as much as they hated the idea of equal rights. They insisted that the public programs poorer voters wanted were simply a redistribution of wealth from prosperous white men to undeserving Black Americans who wanted a handout, although white people would also benefit from such programs. Improvements could be paid for only with tax levies, and white men were the only ones with property in the Reconstruction South. Thus, public investments in roads and schools and hospitals would redistribute wealth from propertied men to poor people, from white men to Black people. It was, opponents said, “socialism.” Poor black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina” and should be kept from the polls.

This idea that it was dangerous for working people to participate in government caught on in the North as immigrants moved into growing cities to work in the developing factories….

Any attempt to regulate business would impinge on a man’s liberty, wealthy men argued, and it would cost tax dollars to hire inspectors. Thus, they said, it was a redistribution of wealth. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia brought the fears of a workers’ government to life, Americans argued that their economy was under siege by socialists….

The powerful formula linking racism to the idea of an active government and arguing that a government that promotes infrastructure, provides a basic social safety net, and regulates business is socialism has shaped American history since Reconstruction. In the modern era the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954 enabled wealthy men to convince voters that their tax dollars were being taken from them to promote the interests of Black Americans. President Ronald Reagan made that formula central to the Republican Party, and it has lived there ever since, as Republicans call any policy designed to help ordinary Americans “socialism.”

Global power shift

Patrick Lawrence: “The End of Days” 

[Scheerpost , via Naked Capitalism 08-27-2024]

…Three-quarters of the French stood with Chirac, whose refusal to enlist France in Operation Iraqi Freedom strained Franco–American relations for several years. Remember “freedom fries” and the French as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys?” This was the level to which Bush II brought American discourse as he manipulated public opinion prior to the invasion. Good guys, bad guys. Black hats, white hats.

There is one detail of the U.S.–French confrontation over Iraq that remains very little known. Just before the 20 March 2003 invasion, Bush II called Chirac in a late-hour attempt to persuade him to change his mind. The exchange was very heated. Bush II made a vigorous argument that with the events of 11 September the prophesied war of Gog and Magog had at last begun. I can only imagine what went through the worldly Chirac’s mind, or indeed the look on his face, as Bush II discoursed in this manner.

I know of only one account of this conversation. It is in The Irony of American Destiny: The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy (Walker & Co., 2010), a book William Pfaff published late in his life. The book sits at the end of Pfaff’s long and principled career as a sort of summation. It is rightly read as his causes-and-consequences critique of American exceptionalism. And it includes, inter alia, a description of the Bush–Chirac exchange. He got it, if I recall correctly what he told me later, from a high source in the French Foreign Ministry.

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Open Thread

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On August 31, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

How Many Americans Will Die From Civilization Collapse?

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On August 30, 2024

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These are elevated comments by GrimJim.

What’s useful about this is that the estimates are made explicit. — Ian

Eleven percent of Americans use insulin to survive. They are dead within three months of the power going out.

Between 17 and 20% of Americans need weekly if not daily mental health medication. They are all either dead or reduced to needing constant care within three to six months. (Ian-probably an overstatement, many will be functional once they come off, but a non-tapered withdrawal from most ant-depressants or GABA drugs is ugly.)

Altogether, some 66% of Americans take some kind of life-saving or life-supporting medication daily. Let’s say that at least half of those are dead within one year of the lights going out. That’s 33% of the population.

During the Rwandan Genocide, about 75% of the Tutsi population was killed in merely 100 days. Like Rwanda and unlike Bosnia, there will be no one trying to stop it, no outside forces intervening. Imagine the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists killing 75% of the “undesirables” they can get their hands on. Imagine many more of those American “undesirables” being able to fight back as they are being genocided (the Tutsis died en masse, not generally have the resources to fight back). It will quickly become tit-for-tat, with no mercy on either side, as the “undesirables” will no longer grant any mercy once they figure out what the Pseudo-Christian White Nationalists plan for them. So that’s about 75% of 40% of the remaining population.

Then there will further be a much more massive death all around due to the lack of medical supplies and services. Add in pestilence and plague, and that increases the number.

And about a year in, the survivors will have used up remaining food stocks. If they have been unable to start farming, on a traditional MINIMAL level of about 5 to 10 farmers per 1 non-farmer, there will be starvation.

So…

345,000,000 Americans to start…
less 33% or 113,850,000 from medical issues = 231,150,000
less 75% of 40% (69,345,000) from Genocide = 161,805,000
less ~10% from plague and pestilence (16,180,500) = 145,624,500
And less ~20% due to starvation (29,124,900) = 116,499,600.

My estimate is that there will be only about 116,000,000 Americans left within two years of the collapse and the start of ACWII. That’s a 66% death rate within two years. That’s a minimum, with my being generous on all the numbers.

Estimates based on an EMP attack that takes down the entire USA power grid have been a 90% death rate in merely one year. So I’m actually looking at things with rose-colored glasses…

And Elevated Comment two (on farms and food)

Note: Right now only 2% of Americans live on farms.

TWO PERCENT.

And all those farms, with the exception of Amish and some Mennonite farms, depend on gasoline and machines. and most of those machines are modern, complex, computer-based machines, which will be useless within weeks or months of the economy collapsing.

During the Great Depression, 20% of Americans lived in farms. This is the only reason starvation was not rampant. Just about everyone was related to or knew someone who had a farm, so they could count on them for some support.

Now, almost no one knows anyone who lives on a farm that is sustainable without advanced technology and gasoline. And the way monoculture has taken over American farms, along with dependency on chemical fertilizers and insecticides, plus the lack of remotely enough dray beasts, classic farming can’t be rebuilt fast enough to service teeming millions.

And so teeming millions will die.

That’s not counting destruction and attrition from refugees from the cities. Refugees are not going to care where or how they get their food; they will take it if need be, over the dead bodies of whoever gets in the way. And they will vastly outnumber the local farmer folk and their local friends. It will be like that end scene in The Day After, when the refugees took the farmer’s cow and slaughtered it, and he went out to complain. He didn’t even threaten them, and they just mowed him down.

That will be played out over and over again, everywhere. 80% of Americans live in a city, which is a literal food wasteland. When they start moving out, it will be like locusts, and anyone who gets in their way simply dies.

Ian – all this assumes a hard collapse as opposed to a slow withering. But that scenario is entirely possibly with hard enough shocks, and we’re doing almost everything we can to ensure they happen.

 

What if We Threw a Civil War and Nobody Came?

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On August 28, 2024

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UPDATE: I forgot to include a hilarious bit of business involving the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation vs. the Millersville (TN) Police Department. Have added it below:

Sean Paul’s post on the 2nd Amendment got me thinking about the prospects for civil war in the USA, in particular this spicy quote:

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

It won’t be lard-ass militias that matter if there is a civil implosion in the US.

These things always come down to intra-elite splits and/or intra-military splits.

There seems to be a split between the Trump-supporting majority of American police forces, right-wing military personnel, some military officers & at least some FBI vs the Trump-hating “Deep State” CIA, NSA, Pentagon elite and the rest of the active duty military.

As NPR reported in 2021, some po-po’s were even willing to put their bodies on the line for whatever it was they were trying to do on Jan 6.

Nearly 30 sworn police officers from a dozen departments attended the pro-Trump rally at the U.S. Capitol last week, and several stormed the building with rioters and are facing federal criminal charges as well as possible expulsion or other discipline.

The officers are from departments large and small. There was veteran officer in Houston, the nation’s eighth-largest department; a sergeant in the small town of Rocky Mount, Va., and a group of Philadelphia transit officers.

Note that caveat in the headline about the vast majority of them being retired. Are we too “demographically advanced” ie old to get a war on?

Also check these nifty stats from Seton Hall’s “A Demographic and Legal Profile of January 6 Prosecutions”:

The government has won all but 12 cases brought to date (five died, four fled, one acquitted, two dismissed);

517 of 716 (72%) were charged as the result of tipsters and informants;

Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California are home to 43.9% of those charged;

Only states not represented among the 716 arrested were North Dakota, Nebraska and Vermont;

35.1% of defendants were identified as going to the Capitol alone;

25% were armed;

18.5 % had a background in law enforcement or the military;

Largest employment group identified is the Business Owner group, which accounts for 24.7%;

Only 35 of the 716 individuals were identified as unemployed;

22.2% had a criminal record.

Note that a disproportionate amount of the Jan 6ers came from just five states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New York, and California.

And two of those states are “solid blue” and even the red and purple states each feature very Democratic cities.

If there’s no geographic continuity to the two sides are we just going to have a nationwide running gun battle instead?

But wait, the case for imminent civil war has a couple more points to make.

TX Gov Greg Abbott turning the Texas National Guard against the US Border Patrol was a very ominous sign:

Most explosively, Texas Governor Greg Abbott in January deployed the state National Guard to block the U.S. Border Patrol from accessing a 2.5-mile-long section of the border in the city of Eagle Pass. The section includes Shelby Park, a 47-acre city park along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general who fled to Mexico rather than surrender. Border Patrol officials had been using the park for processing encountered migrants. Now, they are effectively locked out of the park, and are mostly unable to access a heavily crossed border area to do their jobs.

Fl Gov Ron DeSantis’ creation of the Florida Guard outside federal control and his proposal to send them to the Texas border is another clown show that is also actually quite scary:

DeSantis established the Florida Guard on June 15, 2022, purportedly to enhance Florida’s capacity to deal with hurricanes. It was announced as a civilian force of approximately 400 volunteers to supplement the Florida National Guard, which balances both state and federal government control. The governor asked for $2 million.

Within a year, DeSantis and the super-majority Republican Legislature converted the small volunteer force into DeSantis’ expensive private army.

MORE BUDGET, MORE POLICE POWERS

House Bill 1285 skyrocketed the budget to $107.6 million, with half of the funds designated for “military” equipment. The number of “volunteers”— handpicked by the governor — increased from 400 to 1,500, and they were granted “police powers” to detain and arrest.

Although there is a titular head of the volunteers, the Guard may be “activated only by the governor and is at all times under the final command and control of the governor as the commander in chief of all military and guard forces of the state.”

And it is not under the state’s military control because the law further provides that: “The division [i.e. State Guard] shall not be subject to control, supervision or direction of the Department of Military Affairs in any manner…”

DeSantis moved quickly after that. He set up a military training center for millions of dollars and hired a combat-training company to recruit and train members of the Guard. The contractor was awarded a non-competitive $1.2 million contract and the company’s manual provides for hand-to-hand combat, busting down walls and interdiction in the sea.

These developments show an ominous willingness to escalate political fights into military conflict on the part of the two southern GOP governors.

But militarily this is pipsqueak stuff at this point. Were a war to erupt between the Feds and Abbot and DeSantis it would be over in a few savage minutes, as long as it takes for a pit bull to maul a baby.

And the yokel governors are not the pit bull in this scenario.

But things get very interesting, in the ancient Chinese curse sense, if Trump wins the presidential election and actually manages to place loyalists in key positions at the federal level.

But that’s a big if.

Politically Trump seems way off his game from 2016. Steve Bannon’s in jail and Trump has his head up his own ass. The rousing populism and ‘did he really say that?’ demagoguery are missing.

That makes it less likely that he could motivate supporters to truly crazy extremes.

Does Trump really seem to care enough to organize a civil war?

Also there’s the matter of social cohesion — oddly, it’s a critical ingredient for a civil war. Each side has to at least some internal unity to present a sufficient problem to the other side necessary for the brouhaha to go from “civic disturbance” or “riot” to CIVIL WAR.

Aurelian argues we don’t have enough social cohesion to get a war on.

For all the fashionable talk of “civil war,” a civil war requires organised parties competing for control of the future of the political system. We don’t have that, we just have individuals, and small groups without much cohesion, united only in their detestation for the system.

It may be the case that we can bumble our way into something really nasty without  leadership on either side capable of catalyzing discontent into a coherent force.

If there’s a major economic collapse or a military disaster on a foreign front all bets are off.

But even in those scenarios, I’d anticipate more of a gradual disintegration into warlordism than an 1860 type thing.

UPDATE: I can’t believe I forgot to include the piece de resistance. This is a classic real-world example of a conflict between MAGA chuds in power locally vs. a state law enforcement agency:

In a perplexing pair of podcast interviews, the Millersville chief of police says the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has begun limiting his department’s access to certain sensitive law enforcement data.

It follows a scandal first dug up by NewsChannel 5 Investigates into the troubled police department for the community of 6,000 just north of Nashville.

“Once we start getting this bad publicity, our access starts getting cut off to financial reports, FinCen,” Chief Bryan Morris said in an interview with far-right podcaster Tom Renz. The interview was posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We can’t do investigations,” the chief continued. “We don’t have everything in this office that we need, you know.”

Renz chimed in, “You need the tools provided by federal law enforcement and other agencies, and state agencies.”

“And now we’re being denied that,” Morris insisted.

…

Morris — who also serves as interim city manager — claimed his department is now cut off from one of the most sensitive law enforcement data sources available.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network — sometimes known as FinCen — is a program run by the U.S. Department of Treasury that can give police access to certain banking and other financial records of individuals when there is a legitimate law enforcement purpose.

Morris claimed that, because of NewsChannel 5’s investigations into his conspiracy-minded assistant police chief, Shawn Taylor, the TBI has now cut them off.

Renz asked, “Have they given you a good reason that they are denying you access?”

“No,” the chief answered. “I’ve actually called down there and talked to them, and what I’ve been told is we’re on hold because they are auditing us.”

As part of Taylor’s many bizarre conspiracy theories — including claims that some of the nation’s most powerful political figures are involved in child sex trafficking — Taylor has sometimes boasted about having access to sensitive data linked to some powerful people.

That includes the banking records for U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn’s campaign.

 

Short Take: Why We Have a Second Amendment in the USA

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On August 27, 2024

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In the two hundred years before the American Civil War there were more than 250 slave revolts involving more than 50 slaves. Most involved between 50-150, but some we much larger.

So, Sean Paul, what does this have to do with the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms?

Everything to do with slavery, and nothing to do with holding our government accountable. Seriously, do you honestly think a couple thousand Texans with AR-15s could out fight an armored brigade? GTFOH.

The Second Amendment was specifically designed so that white slave holders had enough firepower–not pitchforks–to put down any serious slave rebellion. Look what they did to Gabriel Prosser in 1800?  Bet you never heard of him, have ya?

Here is another fun fact: I have one BA, one MS, and an MA for good measure, and no teacher or professor in any of my classes ever discussed slave revolts in the United States. Yes, François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture was lionized. But he was Haitian revolting against the French. I have 20 years of primary, secondary and tertiary education and no one, not even once, ever mentioned a slave revolt in the United States. They talked about how well slaves were treated–which is balderdash–but never mentioned slave revolts. Maybe that’s because I was mostly educated in Texas, a kind of sort of part of the South, but really just home to a bunch of loudmouth assholes and dipshits who think they are better than everyone else in the United States because Texas was its own country for nine years. What’s that joke about bullshit and Texans? Texas begged to be let into the Union every chance it got.

Last but not least, the stench of slavery lingers on in the institution of the Senate in general, which is first and foremost the most undemocratic insitution in the United States, and in particular the filibuster, which to this day is used the vast majority of the time by Southern Senators to derail any real progress in the United States.

So, now you know.

You Can’t Make Good Decisions If You Believe Lies

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On August 27, 2024

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Nate Wilcox recently wrote about the signal to noise ratio in the information we receive:

Coming in a context of other tweets about Germany’s up is down policies declaring Jews who oppose genocide in Palestine to be anti-semites, a nominally left wing publication disinforming their readers about Brazil’s Lula, relentless economic gaslighting, a seemingly cooked-up online conflict between Black Americans and Palestinians, and the MI6 blaming Russia for the UK’s recent racist pogroms…

Just before the Iraq war, 72% of Americans believed Iraq was behind 9/11. Official inflation numbers, as I’ve written often, complete fiction at this point. The propaganda around mass rape and beheading on Oct 7th has proven to have no physical evidence. Olds will remember the stories, in the original Gulf War, of how Iraq soldiers were bayoneting babies in hospitals. The NYTimes, also a prime purveyor of October 7 atrocity propaganda, systematically lied about Iraq WMD to justify the Iraq war. An academic study found that the British media lied about Corbyn around 80% of the time, and they managed to convince many Brits that the long time anti-racism protestor was anti-semitic. The WHO and the CDC denied that Covid was airborne for ages and pretended children weren’t particularly at risk.

And these are just highlights. One could make a list of thousands.

We are swimming in an ocean of shit.

No one can make good decisions: who to vote for, who to support, what to believe, or what to do, if they believe large numbers of lies.

And it truly is an Ocean of Shit: there’s so much that no one can keep up, certainly no one who doesn’t make it one of the main things they do.

Further, the lies send many people spiraling off into the worst kinds of conspiracy theories. “Conspiracy theory” isn’t a synonym for “wrong” there are plenty of real conspiracies (lately lots of them to raise prices, to pick a perfectly mundane one), but when you know you’re being lied to, and when it’s systematic, it’s hard to find a foundation point to build from, and from that to construct a relatively accurate model of reality.

If Corbyn’s an anti-semite, Putin loving, lying commie, perhaps you shouldn’t vote for him.

If Iraq was behind 9/11 then invading them makes sense.

And so on.

And this disease infects the professional and managerial classes the worst. Economists believe the figures coming out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics then propose or implement policies based on fictional numbers, for example.

Reality isn’t allowed to intrude until it’s beyond undeniable, at which point the major mistakes have already been made and the situation is often un-recoverable.

There’s more to it that this, of course. Almost everyone in our societies has been trained to be an order-taker, with lives that involve first doing what teacher says then doing what the boss says. Our ancestors called such people wage slaves and they were right. We’re also a consumer society: we pick from choices offered to us by others, we don’t produce our politics or our homes or our food or almost anything else: we don’t create and thus our choices are just from a menu offered by others.

People conditioned all their lives to do what they’re told, pick from a menu and swimming in an ocean of lies can’t make good decisions. It’s that simple.

The first step in fixing any problem is always facing and acknowledging the truth. If you can’t do that, all you can do is make another bad decision.

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Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, Arrested In France

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On August 26, 2024

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Durov’s Russian, and an interesting guy. He refused to cooperate when Russia asked him for user information, for example. He appears to believe in the principle of freedom of speech, which is radical at this point. Telegram was banned in Russia from 2018 to 2021.

As most people know Telegram is where most uncensored information on the Russia-Ukraine and Gaza wars are to be found. Some of it, perhaps even a lot of it is bullshit, but if one really wants to know what’s happening, Telegram is one of the better places to find out, though it takes judgment and discretion. There are certainly Telegram channels which are far more accurate and honest than any major Western press outlet, just as there are those that are sewers of propaganda and lies.

France claims the arrest is because Telegram doesn’t moderate in line with EU law, which is probably true. The laws, however, are bad laws which make freedom of speech essentially impossible. The idea of misinformation has been weaponized to mean “what the government says is true” and since most governments are lying about both wars, well…

As Truman said, “I don’t give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it’s Hell.”

Telegram is one of the few places left which somewhat lives up to the promise of the early internet of a place without censors or gatekeepers, where anyone could have their say. It’s understandable that governments and powerful people don’t want that, before the internet you could only be heard by large numbers of the gatekeepers would let you, and mostly they don’t. Youngs don’t remember that world, but it felt like there was constantly a gag on: there could be no honest speech which wasn’t approved.

There’s no sense in pretending it’s all upside, it isn’t, but the downsides are the price of actually allowing meaningful freedom of speech. In the old days we just didn’t hear from those the gatekeepers wouldn’t let thru. Oh, there were some exceptions, but they were exceptions.

So fuck France and fuck Macron. Just another fascist neoliberal who wants to remove freedoms and use them to enable war and genocide.

As for Pavel, he made a mistake traveling in Europe. It’s a hard balancing beam he’s on. Though Russia’s currently supportive, as Telegram is a way for their side to get their message out, they haven’t always been. There’s really no major free speech country left, and the fact is that even CEOs are at the mercy of states. You need a state to protect you, and there isn’t really a trustworthy one around any more.

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