Holy shit.
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@JdeBP @fgbjr @cstross @militant_dilettante that’s a very low bar for sanity
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@cstross @fgbjr A good strategy, although there is one wrinkle in this storyline (do not tell Liz about it!). V.V.Putin was totally devoted to Germany, and Germanosphere. I doubt he knows even the basic conversational English.
On the other hand, all this East Germany, BRD business of the balding little man could have been one big ruse, and he might be secretly very language-proficient, and a huge UK-nerd (or a general British Isles nerd).
@militant_dilettante @cstross @fgbjr I don't know how devoted Putin is to all things German. But having watched the broadcast of his speech, many years ago, to the Bundestag, I can confirm that his German is very good.
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@militant_dilettante I suspect there used to be some who weren't, who genuinely thought they were doing the right thing for their nation … and they got shoved out of the way or trampled by the mob. And then there's Liz Truss, who *believes* every scam, fraud, and grift they feed her and earnestly regurgitates them without understanding what it's really about (she's the comic relief on the lecture circuit).
@cstross @militant_dilettante When AfD was formed, it was not a nazi party. Its founders were ordoliberal* economists whose idea was to withdraw Germany from the eurozone to alleviate the Greek debt crisis. (As a € state, Greece could no longer kill debt by devaluing the drachma. AfD figured German withdrawal would effectively devalue the euro.)
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@cstross @militant_dilettante When AfD was formed, it was not a nazi party. Its founders were ordoliberal* economists whose idea was to withdraw Germany from the eurozone to alleviate the Greek debt crisis. (As a € state, Greece could no longer kill debt by devaluing the drachma. AfD figured German withdrawal would effectively devalue the euro.)
1/n@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.
They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
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@cstross @militant_dilettante These were pretty right-wing guys, but more from the business than from the blood & soil faction. They weren't nazis, and they were true believers.
They were all (including the founder) purged in about 10 seconds by the nazis and expelled from the party. One of the leaders of the (now) homophobic, economic-populist, xenophobic AfD is a lesbian ex-investment banker who lives in Switzerland with her Sri Lankan partner.
2/n@cstross @militant_dilettante * Ordoliberals are not like liberals in the UK sense, let alone the American. They are spiritual heirs to the British ministers who refused to stop food exports from Ireland during the Famine because that would have violated the sacred laws of The Market.
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@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
@militant_dilettante @cstross I keep coming back to lack of empathy on this subject. People without empathy are born grifters. Elon Musk is clearly stated that he views empathy as a weakness. The thing that actually saves us, is that doing anything with the power they’ve managed to gain, governing, negotiating, requires an understanding of what the other parties involved want. And if you haven’t got empathy, you will never get that, and cannot execute your plans.
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@cstross @militant_dilettante * Ordoliberals are not like liberals in the UK sense, let alone the American. They are spiritual heirs to the British ministers who refused to stop food exports from Ireland during the Famine because that would have violated the sacred laws of The Market.
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Orban functioned as a conduit for Putin's foreign threat funding for years.
Petrostate despots and oil oligarchs fund a lot of fascism globally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/20/us/politics/koch-network-2024-election-trump.html
Republicans & the Epstein Class cannot resist fossil fuel public corruption.
Konstantin Nikolaev—the Putin ally behind Mike Johnson campaign donation
The Russian oligarch gave money to the Republican's 2018 congressional campaign via a U.S-based company in which he owned a majority.
Newsweek (www.newsweek.com)
The N.R.A. Spent $30 Million to Elect Trump. Was It Russian Money?
Congressional Democrats, the F.B.I., and Robert Mueller want to know why Putin-tied oligarchs took such an interest in American gun ownership.
Vanity Fair (www.vanityfair.com)
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@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
@militant_dilettante @cstross I wonder more often recently: shouldn’t ‚traitor‘ also be on that list? And some corresponding prosecution, ideally?
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@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.
Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.
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@peterbrown It starts with the Problem of Armies; once some neolithic king uses a storable food surplus to make a deal with the lower two-fifths of the male population that they can act like they have high primate status if they'll fight his enemies, you've got to have an army yourself or you get used as a status object.
Feudalism is a response to not having enough social organization to maintain centralized power; you can't have a nation state or a god-king autocracy.
@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen.
One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I.
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@peterbrown Once you have enough organization for professional armies and centralized power (that is, you've got a working bureaucracy and can more or less tax reliably), you can get back to god-king autocracy (Great Harry, in the UK) and from there you get to the beginnings of an aristocratic oligarchy with very low social mobility, only two things happen.
One is the creation (by adopting ship-crew social norms into wider society) of the Pirate Kingdom by Elizabeth I.
@peterbrown The second thing is that by the time of the protracted struggle over who has the biggest world empire/colonial holdings/external cash inflow with the French, the UK is far enough into maritime norms that their oligarchs will accept that the choice between Napoleon guillotining them all and sharing some power socially ought to come down on relaxing the utility of incumbency.
Combine that with the institutions created to supply the navy and industrialization.
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@peterbrown The second thing is that by the time of the protracted struggle over who has the biggest world empire/colonial holdings/external cash inflow with the French, the UK is far enough into maritime norms that their oligarchs will accept that the choice between Napoleon guillotining them all and sharing some power socially ought to come down on relaxing the utility of incumbency.
Combine that with the institutions created to supply the navy and industrialization.
@peterbrown Industrialization includes enclosure; private property was already extending, agriculturally, to a whole lot of things that had been historically common, but now it's coal seams and iron ore and so on. Extractive norms get added to the mix. ("I have the right to nigh-all the profit from extraction based on a philosophical abstraction"; this is a more or less linear progression from pirate->colony->mineral rights.)
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@peterbrown Industrialization includes enclosure; private property was already extending, agriculturally, to a whole lot of things that had been historically common, but now it's coal seams and iron ore and so on. Extractive norms get added to the mix. ("I have the right to nigh-all the profit from extraction based on a philosophical abstraction"; this is a more or less linear progression from pirate->colony->mineral rights.)
@peterbrown From 1860 for about the next century there's a hiccup, because from 1860 or so power rests on rifle regiments (and after 1914, industrial mobilization) and you have to get the majority of the male population to believe they're in on it; thus the Century of the Common Man, universal suffrage, and so on.
This ALSO involves the maximum territorial expansion of territory under colonial (=purely extractive) administration, because rifle regiments are North Atlantic.
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@cstross a person, whose Telegram channel I'm reading since 2022, has this take: every known (far-)right politician contemporary to us is a scam, a fraud, a con artist, a grifter, and a thief. This heuristic more or less holds, with almost no exceptions.
@militant_dilettante @cstross I think the word here is axiomatic…
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@peterbrown From 1860 for about the next century there's a hiccup, because from 1860 or so power rests on rifle regiments (and after 1914, industrial mobilization) and you have to get the majority of the male population to believe they're in on it; thus the Century of the Common Man, universal suffrage, and so on.
This ALSO involves the maximum territorial expansion of territory under colonial (=purely extractive) administration, because rifle regiments are North Atlantic.
@peterbrown From there you get the VLSI Oops, the resulting gold rush, displaced incumbents (or at least incumbents with rivals), and the semblance of innovation. The problem is the only actual innovation was to create a global panopticon, and suddenly the administrative possibilities, stuck on quill-pen-and-ledger for millennia, change. Which means the kind of state you can have changes, and the whole progression has been toward extraction.
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@peterbrown From there you get the VLSI Oops, the resulting gold rush, displaced incumbents (or at least incumbents with rivals), and the semblance of innovation. The problem is the only actual innovation was to create a global panopticon, and suddenly the administrative possibilities, stuck on quill-pen-and-ledger for millennia, change. Which means the kind of state you can have changes, and the whole progression has been toward extraction.
@peterbrown All wealth arises from work and if you want to be really rich you have to capture the work of others, which means the whole progression of the norms of enclosure (which are functionally a selection pressure; the better you are at this, the greater your relative success, and that includes "my culture colonizes effectively so children born to it eat better") is about "how much of this person's life span can I structurally compel them to use for my purposes?"
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@peterbrown All wealth arises from work and if you want to be really rich you have to capture the work of others, which means the whole progression of the norms of enclosure (which are functionally a selection pressure; the better you are at this, the greater your relative success, and that includes "my culture colonizes effectively so children born to it eat better") is about "how much of this person's life span can I structurally compel them to use for my purposes?"
@peterbrown It's not precisely slavery; or at least, it doesn't have the chattel aspects. It's just really hard to do anything but the stuff that surrenders your lifespan to another's purposes, because the penalties for non-compliance are death by exposure or starvation.
And this really gets going as an identifiable, post-aristocractic-autocracy stultification thing, with the Pirate Kingdom of Elizabeth I and just kept rolling on selective advantage thereafter.
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Holy shit.
Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC
Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.
Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC
Péter Magyar called the payments a “crime” and said his government would stop the funds.
The New Republic (newrepublic.com)
@cstross
Them: "American conservativism is a legitimate political movement advancing sincerely-held, patriotic American ideals and is not at all a front for pro-Russian foreign operatives trying to destabilize our country."News story: "The [former, pro-Putin] Hungarian government has been bankrolling the Conservative Political Action Conference for years."
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Holy shit.
Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC
Magyar noted that his government will be investigating Orbán’s expenditures, and will no longer finance CPAC or other right-wing institutions abroad.
Hungary’s New Leader Reveals Viktor Orbán Was Paying CPAC
Péter Magyar called the payments a “crime” and said his government would stop the funds.
The New Republic (newrepublic.com)
@cstross There have been rumors in the U.S. about Saudi money paying for various organizations also, podcasters, etc. Making millionaires dependent on outside money like might explain not only why there are more rich people, but why they behave like they do, politically. This CPAC funding might lend some credence to those rumors.
