Final Countdown

Оставляя в стороне экзистенциальное напряжение американских выборов, обратим внимание на дополнительные штрихи к истории, которые всплыли в последние месяцы.



Прояснились в частности некоторые детали разговоров Трампа с Путиным в Гамбурге в июле 2017. Бывшему госсекретарю Тиллерсону (автору выражения "fucking moron"), пришлось разгребать последствия обработки клиента по вопросу Украины.

On July 7, 2017, after President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia shook hands in Hamburg, Germany, to conclude their first face-to-face meeting, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson walked out of the sterile conference room, removed notes from his pocket and gave anxious White House aides a summary.
"We've got work to do to change the president's mind on Ukraine," Mr. Tillerson said.
The secretary of state had just watched Mr. Putin, the former K.G.B. spymaster, put on a master class in seeking to shape the thinking of the new American president.
The Russian leader disparaged Ukraine, a former Soviet republic with aspirations of joining the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, he told Mr. Trump, was a corrupt, fabricated country. Russia, which had seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine three years earlier and backed pro-Russia separatists in a border region, had every right to exert its influence over the country, he insisted.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Putin that his administration was considering giving weapons to Ukraine. "What do you think?" Mr. Trump asked, to which Mr. Putin said it would be "a mistake." <...>
Mr. McMaster and Mr. Bossert prepared Mr. Trump for the Hamburg meeting with Mr. Putin. The tough stance they supported toward Moscow was evident in a speech Mr. Trump gave the day before the summit. On July 6, 2017, Mr. Trump stood before a jubilant crowd assembled at Krasinski Square in Warsaw, Poland, and sent a stern message to Mr. Putin: Stay out of Ukraine.
Russia, Mr. Trump said in a line included in the speech at Mr. McMaster's insistence, should "cease its destabilizing activities in Ukraine" and join "responsible nations in our fight against common enemies."
But the next day in Hamburg, sitting across from Mr. Putin, the American president listened as Mr. Putin delivered a monologue. Mr. McMaster wrote in his book that Mr. Putin "used his time with Trump to launch a sophisticated and sustained campaign to manipulate him."
Beyond his usual points about Ukrainian corruption, Mr. Putin made an argument that he had a duty to protect Russian speakers in the eastern part of the country, along the border with Russia, from "ethnic cleansing."
Mr. Putin even brought up an episode from American history to defend Russian military operations. Just as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, advanced by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904, justified American intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American countries, he said, so was Russia justified in operating inside Ukraine to protect Russian-speaking citizens there.
Fiona Hill, a senior member of Mr. Trump’s National Security Council staff who was in Hamburg for the summit, said she believed that Mr. Putin most likely referred to Roosevelt in the meeting “because he did his homework” and knew that Mr. Trump had a fixation on the former “strongman” president.
When Mr. Tillerson huddled after the meeting with several of Mr. Trump’s advisers, including Mr. McMaster and Ms. Hill, Mr. Tillerson said that the Russian president had done his “K.G.B. shtick” on Mr. Trump, Ms. Hill recounted. Mr. Tillerson, she said, stressed that they all had work to do to counter Mr. Putin’s anti-Ukraine rhetoric.
“Putin was basically telling him that you can’t trust Ukraine, and don’t give them anything,” Ms. Hill recalled about Mr. Tillerson’s briefing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/05/us/politics/trump-putin-ukraine.html

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Рассказ в посте пойдёт о двух сынах Германии, идеи которых остаются актуальными для понимания мира в наше время.

Первый из них - Карл Левенштейн (Karl Loewenstein). Левенштейн был успешным юристом в Германии, после прихода нацистов в 1933 потерял работу из-за своего еврейского происхождения и переехал в США, где переквалифицировался в политологи. Его знаменитый вклад - идея «воинствующей демократии» (militant democracy) из статьи в двух частях "Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights", опубликованной в 1937 в журнале APSR (American Political Science Review) https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/militant-democracy-and-fundamental-rights-i/7C5EF30572005FB60B70F4A7D6FC0654# Для Европы это был вполне мирный год, за исключением Гражданской войны в Испании. В нацистской Германии незадолго до этого без особых эксцессов прошли Олимпийские игры. Не было еще ни аншлюса Австрии, ни Мюнхенского соглашения, ни других предвестников грядущей войны.



Левенштейн обращает внимание на катящуюся по Европе фашизацию - диктаторские режимы растут, как грибы, в разных странах, заимствуя идеи друг у друга:

"Fascism is no longer an isolated incident in the individual history of a few countries. It has developed into a universal movement which in its seemingly irresistible surge is comparable to the rising of European liberalism against absolutism after the French Revolution. In one form or another, it covers today more areas and peoples in Europe and elsewhere than are still faithful to constitutional government. Fascism's pattern of political organization presents a variety of shades. One-party-controlled dictatorships rule outright in Italy, Germany, Turkey, and, if Franco wins, also Spain. The so-called "authoritarian" states may be classified as belonging to the one- party or multiple-party type. To the one-party authoritarian group, without genuine representative institutions, adhere at present Austria, Bulgaria, Greece, and Portugal; while Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, and Lithuania may be classed together as authoritarian states of the multiple-party type, with a semblance of parliamentary institutions. Poland is at the present time in process of being transformed from a multiple party state into a one-party dictatorship. Without being nominally fascist, all of these states are authoritarian to the extent that the group in power controls public opinion as well as the machinery of government."

Читая статью сегодня, трудно справиться с ощущением дежавю. Волна фашизации ныне катится по миру (Турция, Венгрия, Индия и т.д.) В отдельных странах (США, Бразилия) ее пока удалось приостановить, но волна встречала препятствия и в 1930ых (во Франции, Бельгии, Нидерландах и т.д.) Левенштейн отмечает, что апеллирование фашистских демагогов к эмоциям масс является настолько мощным психологическим орудием, что против него не действуют обычные демократические нормы. Он утверждает, что фашизм - не столько идеология, сколько средство для прихода к власти, и замечает, как фашисты странных стран заимствуют методы друг у друга.

"General discontent is focussed on palpable objectives (Jews, freemasons, bankers, chain stores). Colossal propaganda is launched against what appears as the most conspicuously vulnerable targets. A technique of incessant repetition, of over-statements and over-simplifications, is evolved and applied. The different sections of the people are played off against one another. In brief, to arouse, to guide, and to use emotionalism in its crudest and its most refined forms is the essence of the fascist technique for which movement and emotion are not only linguistically identical. It is a peculiar feature of the emotional technique that those who are brought into play as the instruments, i.e., the masses, should not be aware of the rational calculations by which the wire-pullers direct it. Fascism is the true child of the age of technical wonders and of the emotional masses."

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На фоне фашизации американской политической культуры накануне выборов в Конгресс происходит небольшое вливание антисемитизма. Как говорил когда-то комедиант Крис Рок, «этот поезд никогда не опаздывает».

Politico’s Jonathan Lemire put Trump’s latest threat in context:
"This tweet comes at a moment where bias incidents and hate crimes, anti-Semitic incidents are already skyrocketing, they have been on the rise in recent years, and it feels like we know the president has inspired the violence of January 6th, called for supporters to be violent other times, related to the Mar-a-Lago case, sending out warnings, and threats to the FBI, and the fear here is this could be interpreted by his followers as a moment to potentially commit violence against Jews, and that is deeply worrisome…"
Trump’s outburst also came amid Kanye West’s ongoing anti-Semitic meltdown.
Meanwhile in Pennsylvania, the GOP nominee continues to send out anti-Semitic signals, which is hardly surprising, given Mastriano’s track record.
Democrats have highlighted Mastriano's ties to white supremacists and antisemites – in particular Gab, the social media platform that serves as a haven for the far-right – in hopes of swaying independent voters. Gab founder and CEO Andrew Torba is the co-author of the just-published book “Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide to Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations” that has recently been among Amazon's best-sellers.
The reaction?
Even amid evidence of rising anti-Jewish violence, the normally voluble right-wing media could not even be bothered to shuffle its feet. Elected Republicans could hardly muster a tired shrug among them; they are, apparently, too worn out, beaten down, and numbed to be outraged.
Fox News ignored, or shrugged off, the whole thing. Tucker Carlson edited out Kanye’s anti-Semitic rants from his broadcast interviews. The Daily Wire’s Candace Owens jumped to his defense, while her boss, Ben Shapiro, explained that Kanye’s anti-Jewish rant was “clearly anti-Semitic” and “disturbing,” but, but, but, “Kanye’s moves toward pro-life, faith, and family conservatism are encouraging.” Days later, Kanye announced he was buying the right-wing troll platform Parler (whose CEO is Candace Owen’s husband). After that news broke, Politico reports, Kanye and Trump spoke by phone. “West placed the call, during which the two confirmed plans to have dinner though nothing is currently scheduled.”
Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has speculated about Jewish Space Lasers, continues to rise in the GOP ranks and is poised to assume a much larger and powerful role in a GOP-controlled Congress.
https://morningshots.thebulwark.com/p/the-right-normalizes-anti-semitism



Об истории взлёта Марджори Тэйлор Грин, одного из заметных представителей американского антисемитизма, рассказывается в новой книжке "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind". Когда Грин лишили членства в комиссиях Конгресса, в том числе за антисемитские высказывания, они объяснила коллегам, что в объятия культа QAnon ее подтолкнуло расследование Рашагейта.

A week after Greene’s past musings were disclosed, the House G.O.P. conference convened to discuss whether to remove Liz Cheney from her leadership post after she voted to impeach Trump. But midway into the four-hour discussion, the other elephant in the room stepped up to the microphone.
“Well,” Greene began, according to a recording of the meeting I obtained, “many of you I’ve enjoyed getting to know in my one month that I’ve been here in Congress. But there’s also many more of you that I haven’t gotten to meet yet, and you haven’t gotten to know me. Some of you attack me every single day, and usually I find that it’s those of you attacking me are the ones that don’t know me, and that’s unfortunate.”
Greene then tried to explain how it was that she came to embrace the conspiracy theories of the QAnon community that now scandalized the Republican Party and jeopardized her political career. “I was upset about Russian collusion conspiracy lies that I was seeing on the news every single day,” Greene recalled to her colleagues. “So I looked into the internet — and was like, ‘What is going on?’ I stumbled across something called QAnon. Yep, I did. I read about it, I posted about it, I talked about it, and I asked questions about it.”
Here, more precisely, is what she did: By the summer of 2017, Greene had made contact online with a counselor in the New York public school system who shared her affinities for both President Donald Trump and dark conspiracy theories. That July, she began writing for the counselor’s online publication, American Truth Seekers, under her great-grandmother’s name, Elizabeth Camp.
Greene’s argument was that the “Russian collusion conspiracy lies” had created a kind of permission structure in her mind. As she would say on the House floor, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true.”
In this passive-voice explanation, Greene was “allowed to believe” that a Democratic staff member named Seth Rich had been murdered by Hillary Clinton’s top adviser, John Podesta, in order to cover up the fact that it was Rich, not Russia, who had leaked Democratic emails to WikiLeaks. (Later, Greene would modify this conspiracy theory: It was the Latino gang MS-13, “the henchmen of the Obama administration,” who had murdered Seth Rich.) Greene was “allowed to believe” that Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, was actually quietly working to bring down the Clintons. And that “many in our government are actively worshiping Satan.” And that Trump was single-handedly battling evil — that, as she reposted from the website MAGAPILL, “thousands of Pedophiles and Child Traffickers have been arrested since Trump was sworn in.” This “Global Evil,” she was allowed to believe, was all being funded by the Saudi royals in concert with Jewish billionaires: George Soros and the Rothschild family.
Greene believed all this, she claimed, not only because the media had made up lies about Trump but also because in some dark corner of the internet, an anonymous person claiming to have military intelligence “Q clearance” had said so.
She concluded her monologue to her new G.O.P. colleagues with an admonition: “Let’s make sure we keep our eyes on the enemy. Because they’re really wanting to take all of us out.” About a third of her colleagues rose to applaud her as she took her seat among them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/magazine/marjorie-taylor-greene.html

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В. Путин: При этом активно применялись присущие «майданным» технологиям элементы силовой и информационной поддержки протестов. Использовались хорошо организованные и чётко управляемые группы боевиков, о чём Президент Токаев только что и сказал…
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67568

Под разговоры о неуловимых террористах элитные подразделения спецназа ВДВ на деньги российских налогоплательщиков поработали охранниками коррумпированных казахских предприятий.

Подразделения миротворческого контингента коллективных миротворческих сил ОДКБ, направленные в Республику Казахстан, выполняют задачи по охране важных государственных и социально-значимых объектов страны https://t.co/xMIxhrRqKP#ОДКБ #Казахстан pic.twitter.com/BHhKFwhD7l

— Минобороны России (@mod_russia) January 12, 2022

Казахстанец Кайрат Сатыбалдыулы указан единственным учредителем офшорной фирмы Skyline Investment Company S.A., владеющей более чем 24 процентами акций казахстанской телекоммуникационной компании «Казахтелеком», следует из документов люксембургского реестра LRB. Имя, фамилия, дата рождения учредителя полностью совпадают с персональными данными племянника бывшего президента Казахстана Нурсултана Назарбаева.
«Казахтелеком», монополист на казахстанском рынке телекоммуникационных услуг, ранее заявлял, что среди его совладельцев есть люксембургская компания, но не раскрывал конечных бенефициаров. Информация о Кайрате Сатыбалдыулы стала доступной благодаря тому, что Люксембург обнародовал данные о собственниках зарегистрированных в этом европейском государстве компаний.
Люксембург на протяжении многих лет хранил в тайне информацию о зарегистрированных в стране офшорных компаниях. Но три года назад Европейский союз в рамках борьбы с отмыванием денег обязал государство рассекретить сведения.
https://rus.azattyq.org/a/31107946.html

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Граф на картинке из 2013 изображает идеологов неореакции (так называемого «темного Просвещения»). В основном это маргинальные персонажи, выпихнутые на обочины публичного пространства. Но их совокупное политическое влияние оказалось выше, чем можно было бы ожидать в 2013 - цепочка через alt-right и “двух Стивов“ (Стива Бэннона и Стивена Миллера) протянулась до Трампа 2016-2020.

В недавние годы ключевые идеи неореакции отмываются через деятелей так называемого IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) и вдохновленного неореакцией миллиардера Питер Тиля, который продолжает делать крупные ставки в политической игре по скатыванию Америки в авторитаризм - если не через второе пришествие Трампа, то с помощью его идеологических преемников.



Аббревиатура HBD в центре облака связей относится к “human bio-diversity”. Термин был украден у антрополога Джонатана Маркса и не просто перевран, а вывернут наизнанку - подобно тому, что Трамп проделал с термином “fake news”. Изначальный смысл термина относился к нетривиальному разнообразию человека, как биологического вида. Идеологи Протемнения используют его, чтобы выкопать из могилы псевдонаучный расизм и свести человеческое разнообразие к различиям между расами и врожденному превосходству отдельных рас над другими.

For me, it increasingly seems as though my lasting contribution will be to have coined the phrase “human biodiversity” in my 1994 book of that name. Unfortunately it has come to mean the opposite of what I meant, due to the distortions of internet racists. In fact, they have even abbreviated “human biodiversity” as a meme for the semi-literate, HBD. Journalist Angela Saini describes the appropriation of the phrase in her recent book, “Superior: The Return of Race Science.”
I was proud of the coinage a quarter-century ago, because I intended it to encapsulate the major discovery of the science of biological anthropology over the course of the 20th century. That century began with the scientific assumption that the human species came naturally divisible into a fairly small number of fairly discrete and homogeneous pseudo-taxonomic groups. We called them “races”. By century’s end, however, a great deal of empirical research had shown that our species does not in fact come structured that way.
“Human biodiversity” was intended to label our newer understanding of the patterns by which people actually differ from one another, as an alternative to the earlier “race”.
“Race” and “human biodiversity” are quite simply different things, two sets of patterns that map very poorly onto one another – and it took the better part of the 20th century to demonstrate it. The subtitle of my book was “Genes, Race, and History” – to suggest that genes demonstrated that the proper place for race in science lay in its history, along with phlogiston, pangenesis, and creationism.
Race exists, of course, but its reality is not primarily biological. The reality of race is in the domain of the symbolic. Race is most real in the sense that, as is well-known, Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his black slave, Sally Hemings. Yet according to the only extant descriptions of her, Sally Hemings had light skin and long, straight dark hair. Why? Because only one of her four grandparents was African. She was a slave because of her symbolic ancestry, not because of her biological ancestry or her appearance.
Race is thus now recognized to be very real, as a system of human classification, as lived experience in a society of inequality. While it sometimes correlates with biology, the proper study of race lies in the study of law, discrimination, sociology, and political economy; the primary exception being in how social prejudice can affect the body itself.
“Human biodiversity” was intended as an alternative way of talking about human variation without the overarching assumption that our species sorts out into fairly discrete, fairly homogeneous races – as was assumed by scientists a century ago. But in the late 1990s, racists began to coopt the phrase as a more genteel and sciencey way to simply say “race”. In other words, they began to synonymize what should be antonyms.
http://anthropomics2.blogspot.com/2019/12/i-coined-phrase-human-biodiversity.html

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AG Barr: Democrats are now the "Rousseauian Revolutionary Party that believes in tearing down the system"

"They're not interested in compromise. They're not interested in [a] dialectic exchange of views. They're interested in total victory...It's a substitute for religion." pic.twitter.com/92Gx7GZFBo

— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) August 9, 2020

Среди трампистов ругательным стало не только слово "марксизм", но и слово "руссоизм".

Генпрокурор Барр был, вероятно, вдохновлен сочинением некоего Уильям Смит из Католического университета (CAU) под названием "Understanding Antifa":

"With Rousseauism, we see a window into the modern progressive revolutionary mindset and Antifa. Like the Jacobins, who were so much influenced by Rousseau, Antifa objects to institutions that, they believe, are repressing the downtrodden. 'Institutional racism' must be overcome, they say, by attacking those who protect it, such as the police. Antifa does not offer a platform of positive change. In the fashion of Robespierre, they seek to overthrow “the privileged” and they assume that this violence and destruction will inflame an uprising that will usher in a pure democracy of equality."
https://lawliberty.org/understanding-antifa/

Tulsi Gabbard,is “one of 12 advisors of a foreign policy center at the Washington, D.C.-based Catholic University of America”. “The Center for the Study of Statesmanship was founded in 2017 with a $2.65 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation”. https://t.co/0SI0B0qNpj

— seeshell (@Tentoads4truth) October 19, 2019

Смит работает в "Center for the Study of Statesmanship" (CSS), который был основан в 2017 на деньги Кохов (Charles Koch Foundation). Среди его официальных советников - пропутинские демократы Денис Куцинич и Тульси Габбард.

В мае этого года он озвучивал кремлевские мечты, призывая поделить мир на сферы влияния и позволить наконец Путину разделить Украину.

"Sinic civilization would be led by China, Orthodox civilization by Russia, and Western civilization by the United States. Since the Islamic world has no natural leader, a struggle for leadership would take place between Sunni and Shia and between the leading nations of the Middle East such as Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
These core states are key to managing the challenges that would emerge in cleft nations such as Ukraine. Rather than sponsoring a proxy war in Ukraine and risking a bigger war, the leaders of the core states need to step back and acknowledge that both Russia and the West have legitimate claims in Ukraine and that a diplomatic solution is the only path forward. Whether that solution is a partition of Ukraine, a federation where the aspirations of both parts of the country are respected, or some other compromise—only sincere efforts at diplomacy on the part of Russia and the United States can solve this problem."
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine-and-clash-civilizations-153636

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До того, как появилось пресловутое открытое письмо в Harper's, обращенное непонятно к кому и призывающее непонятно к чему, было открытое письмо Anti-Defamation League о кампании "Stop Hate for Profit". Акции призывает компании, размещающие рекламу в Фейсбук, воздержаться от этого в течении одного месяца (июля 2020), чтобы вынудить Фейсбук принять меры к распространителям ненависти и лживых теорий заговора. Идее кампании помогло обращение Сашы Бэрон-Коэна.

"If civil society can expect civil discourse in the public square, then why not on the social spaces we inhabit online, where arguably the majority of public speech is taking place today?
Luckily, given where Facebook is now, improvement is not that hard: Clamp down on common misinformation and conspiracies. Stop recommending hate. Make a number of clear, common-sense changes to ameliorate and mitigate hate - we’ve made a list. Provide human beings to help people when they are being brutally harassed.
But while those steps are easy, we’ve learned that Facebook won’t take this seriously unless forced. So we invite businesses and all people of good conscience to join us, our partners, and the companies that have signed on already. Together, we can make sure that Facebook is good not only for advertisers, but also for society."
https://www.adl.org/news/letters/an-open-letter-to-the-companies-that-advertise-on-facebook

Our movement is working. We thank these advertisers and the hundreds more who have come together to tell Facebook that enough is enough, it is time to #StopHateForProfit. https://t.co/Jgr4egRNu2 pic.twitter.com/9nrh7P0hbM

— ADL (@ADL) July 9, 2020

В объяснении существуюших проблем с Фейсбуком на сайте "Stop Hate for Profit" говорится: "Large groups dedicated to hate and violent conspiracies grow unchecked, and Facebook often recommends users join these groups. Political ads contain bald-faced lies, and even outright voter suppression. Misinformation and conspiracies on COVID-19, vaccines, climate change and the Holocaust are considered matters of debate." https://www.stophateforprofit.org/faq

Следует сравнить с заявлением письма в Harper's "The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

После этого становится понятным, кому понадобилось это письмо. Руководство Фейсбука пока не поддается давлению "intolerant society" и не собирается осуществлять изменений, которых от него требуют правозащитники.

"It was abundantly clear in our meeting today that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team is not yet ready to address the vitriolic hate on their platform. Zuckerberg offered the same old defense of white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and other hateful groups on Facebook that the Stop Hate For Profit Coalitions, advertisers and society at large have heard too many times before. Instead of actually responding to the demands of dozens of the platform’s largest advertisers that have joined the #StopHateForProfit ad boycott during the month of July, Facebook wants us to accept the same old rhetoric, repackaged as a fresh response.
The only recommendation they even attempted to address is hiring a civil rights position but were unable to commit to the crucial piece of the position being at the C-suite level or what the requirements for the position will be. However, they offered no attempt to respond to the other nine recommendations. Zuckerberg offered no automatic recourse for advertisers whose content runs alongside hateful posts. He had no answer for why Facebook recommends hateful groups to users. He refused to agree to provide an option for victims of hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook representative. He declined to adopt common-sense content moderation policies and practices like the ones put forward by the Change the Terms coalition, or develop a process to ensure that their terms of service are fairly applied and do not bend to political expediency. And he did not offer any tangible plans on how Facebook will address the rampant disinformation and violent conspiracies on its platform. Instead, he offered a retread of the same old talking points from last week – tweaks around the edges – with no details or timelines around the MRC audit they have touted, with only the barest minimum of labeling misinformation in political speech, with a Civil Rights audit we asked for years ago, and empty refrains of we are trying.
None of this is hard, especially for one of the world’s most innovative companies whose founder coined the term move fast and break things. Mark Zuckerberg, you aren’t breaking things, you are breaking people. With a stroke of a pen, you could make Facebook better for your users, your advertisers, and society. We hope that you continue thinking about the consequences of what you have wrought and come back to the table soon with real change."
https://naacp.org/latest/statement-stop-hate-profit-meeting-facebook/

Как и в случае Fox News, издержки от потери рекламодателей окупаются олигархической близостью к власти.

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Берия рассказал следующее: когда началась война, у Сталина собрались члены Политбюро. Не знаю, все или только определенная группа, которая чаще всего собиралась у Сталина. Сталин морально был совершенно подавлен и сделал такое заявление: "Началась война, она развивается катастрофически. Ленин оставил нам пролетарское Советское государство, а мы его просрали". Буквально так и выразился. "Я, - говорит, - отказываюсь от руководства", - и ушел. Ушел, сел в машину и уехал на ближнюю дачу. "Мы, - рассказывал Берия, - остались. Что же делать дальше? После того как Сталин так себя показал, прошло какое-то время, посовещались мы с Молотовым, Кагановичем, Ворошиловым (хотя был ли там Ворошилов, не знаю, потому что в то время он находился в опале у Сталина из-за провала операции против Финляндии). Посовещались и решили поехать к Сталину, чтобы вернуть его к деятельности, использовать его имя и способности для организации обороны страны. Когда мы приехали к нему на дачу, то я (рассказывает Берия) по его лицу увидел, что Сталин очень испугался. Полагаю, Сталин подумал, не приехали ли мы арестовать его за то, что он отказался от своей роли и ничего не предпринимает для организации отпора немецкому нашествию? Тут мы стали его убеждать, что у нас огромная страна, что мы имеем возможность организоваться, мобилизовать промышленность и людей, призвать их к борьбе, одним словом, сделать все, чтобы поднять народ против Гитлера. Сталин тут вроде бы немного пришел в себя. Распределили мы, кто за что возьмется по организации обороны, военной промышленности и прочего".
http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/khruschev1/17.html



Что имелось в виду в лозунге избирательной кампании Рейгана "Let's make America great again"?

Бывшим демократам на Юге, переметнувшимся в республиканцы в результате "Южной Стратегии" Никсона и составившим существенную часть коалиции Рейгана, в этом могла слышаться ностальгия по блаженным 1950-ым и времени законов Джима Кроу.

Но сам Рейган имел в виду несколько другое. Война во Вьетнаме, скандал Уотергейта и другие события подточили веру американцев в свою страну и их доверие к правительству. Президент Картер был тревогу в своем обращении к народу в июле 1979:

"It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America. <...>
The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world."
https://www.historyplace.com/speeches/carter-confidence.htm

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Алгоритмы искусственного интеллекта способны точно предсказать политическую ориентацию человека (левую или правую) по его физиологической реакции на одну единственную картинку. Для этого используются изображения, вызывающие чувство брезгливости.

Повышенная брезгливость выявляет людей правой (консервативной) ориентации. Логичный результат, если вспомнить что правая мораль связана с чистоплотностью и имеет генетическое происхождение.

В более недавнем исследовании британских ученых трампистов с авторитарными склонностями распознавали по их брезгливости по отношению к телесному запаху.

We hypothesized that body odour disgust sensitivity (BODS) might be associated with authoritarianism, as chemo-signalling is a primitive system for regulating interpersonal contact and disease avoidance, which are key features also in authoritarianism. We used well-validated scales for measuring BODS, authoritarianism and related constructs. Across two studies, we found that BODS is positively related to authoritarianism. In a third study, we showed a positive association between BODS scores and support for Donald Trump, who, at the time of data collection, was a presidential candidate with an agenda described as resonating with authoritarian attitudes. Authoritarianism fully explained the positive association between BODS and support for Donald Trump.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.171091



Сведения о личной гермафобии Трампа остаются под вопросом, особенно если учесть, что с порнозвездой Сторми Дэниелс он общался без презерватива.

Но на инстинктивную чистоплотность и брезгливость своих поклонников он давит вполне сознательно - в частности, когда рассказывает про то, как Стена на Южной границе предохранит их от полчищ пришельцев, загрязняющих чистоту.

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Мир трампизма обладает способностью привлекать разного рода проходимцев. Характерный пример - молодая девушка по имени Christianné Allen, которая вдруг оказалась пресс-секретарем у Руди Джулиани. Про ее похождения - длинное расследование в Politico.

For the past three months, Trumpworld has been both abuzz and baffled by Christianné Allen, a little-known Instagram personality who became Rudy Giuliani’s director of communications in September. She accompanies him wherever he goes, recently appearing by his side in Ukraine, where he’s working on a documentary defending himself against accusations that he ran a malicious campaign to get a U.S. ambassador fired. She’s his media strategist, technology consultant and the employee who helps field reporters’ daily onslaught of inquiries — or, at least, tries to do so. <...>
Allen’s Twitter bio, LinkedIn, and old personal website list an array of suitable credentials: representative of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, the official joint fundraising committee for the re-election campaign; and video columnist for the Daily Caller. Spokeswoman for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Executive director of the Middle Eastern Women’s Coalition.
According to representatives of these entities, these titles are embroidered at best, and completely untrue at the most. She is, however, an “ambassador” for both Turning Point USA and Liberty University’s Falkirk Center, titles she gained this year. And there’s no question she enjoys Giuliani’s confidence.
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/10/christianne-allen-giuliani-079762

Here’s the new Keep America Great #Trump design by ⁦@andresoriano⁩. We’ve got your back Mr. President! #KAG #Trump2020 pic.twitter.com/hCiMr0UPKc

— Alice Butler-Short (@vawomentrump) June 27, 2018

Интересно упоминание в качестве "крестной матери" Аллен прохиндейки постарше британского происхождения, Элис Батлер-Шорт из организации Virginia Women for Trump.

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