Watch this shitshow explode as Brussels approves a 6th round of sanctions, replete with extraordinary amounts of gaslighting and virtue-signalling by France and Germany
And when you starve to death, the bugs eat you. It's the circle of life, innit?
Have you read Ida Auken's full essay, the origin of the "You will own nothing and you will be happy" phrase? Horrifying stuff! It's been taken down from the WEF page after gaining notoriety but you can find it via Wayback:
"My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages."
This is what she and the WEF presents as the negative, wrongbad thing opposing their perfect technocratic engineer's communist utopia. It's late nineteenth/early twentieth techno-techno-fetischism-saves-The World all over again. And what ideas and ideals came as a reaction to that folly last time around?
"Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs"
Yeah, and WHO imposed that exactly?
About ten years ago, a guy called me up from NatWest, my bank at the time. He asked me to sign up for Internet banking. I said I wasn't interested, would much rather speak to a human, wanted the responsibility for any screw ups to be on bank employees and told him explicitly that he was talking himself out of a job.
I don't think he had a clue what I was talking about.
To me (due to my background?) this was the key part which stood out:
"Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it."
Now, in english this might look outright bad enough, but since I can read danish and understand more idiomatically than lexically due to having some danish ancestry in my family tree and Denmark and Sweden being siblings culture-wise, what she implies here is not people doing the Amish thing and just opting out amiably and peacefully; the subtext of her phrase "turned against it" when understood in danish (or swedish or norwegian or icelandic) means 'violently, physically hostile to' or 'enemy of'.
The phrase thus subtly places all blame for not approving her techno-communist EUtopia on those who criticise or reject it, making then enemies and she also thusly states that no-one individual has the right to actively oppose and work to change or counter said political system - pure authoritarianism.
These people are monsters, they think they are the new aristocracy, as opposed to public servants. They are also historically illiterate, such behaviour doesn't generally end well for the people.
With that said though, I do wonder if they are expecting people to turn violent.
As a matter of fact, I recall a workshop I participated in back in December 2019: one of the other participants mentioned, in passing over drinks and dinner, that virtually all scenarios that (German) police are training include adversaries that intend to overthrow the government--albeit from the right-of-centre (ironically, I'd add).
As far as more directly-related contacts among police tell me (my brother-in-law is an officer in Vienna, Austria), police knows that violence is coming to 99.9% from left-wing extremists, such as 'Antifa' and the 'Black Bloc', but for political reasons (think: Greens in government) they cannot do anything.
Also, my in-law remarked that no-one of his fellow officers would 'catch a bullet' for any of these political hacks.
Been a long-time reader, and while NC's US-themed stuff is great, their European materials (excl. their awesome Brexit coverage) are much less solid, though, in my estimation.
I like Greens as they deal in concepts worthy of consideration. The problem is found in concentrations of people, they can not possibly live there using less fossil fuels.
Some old paintings highlighted the coppiced trees growing sticks for Kachelofens, of course, there also was no reliance on electricity in the not so distant past. No fossil fuels necessary. People back then were smart enough to keep close ties to a community and think about local resources for the immediate future.
Now they are tee'd off about Russian's charging them money for resources. How dare them.
As always, I always look at Greens as behaving badly. They ought to be pushing for laws that allow for people to go back to the land, and they should go back too its really quite a nice and satisfying lifestyle with gardens and trees all about.
Well, that's only partially true, I'd argue: the 'Green' movement originated in the US in the 1960s (think: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) as 'old labour/liberal' failed to proprly account for the 'side-effects' of material progress, i.e., pollution and environmental destruction.
By the 1970s, the dual oil shocks and the rising environmental awareness culminated in protests against, e.g., acid rain, etc., which (convntiently) accompanied much of the (self-) destruction of the 1980s in what we call the 'Rust Belt' today.
Yes, 'neo-liberal' thought (ahem) playd a role, but the party-political failure to provide the environmentally aware with a political home effectively broke the back of old labour in W Europe, hence the emergence of 'Green' movements.
Yes, 'new labour' struck back (the 'New Democrats' of the 1990s), manifest in the Clinton, Blair, and Schröder gov'ts around the turn of the millennium. No worries, it wasn't really 'new', but they sold out the remnants of the working people--who today have no-where else to go other than 'right-wing populism' (they at least speak to them without condescension, hence Trump, Brexit, et al.)--while moving ever more to the 'progressive' pseudo-leftish positions, hence 'red-green' coalitions, like in Berlin, Vienna, and many other cities around 2010.
Now, with the Greens back in power in Germany, you can see who they really are: mainly transatlanticist warmongers (e.g., FM Baerbock) who also side with the WEF.
Yes, some ideas were good in the 1980s and 1990s, but the Greens now--esp. on the national level--are as bad as everyone else: craven sellouts, blindly obeying the US, and they don't give a shit about the majority of 'deplorables'.
Yes yes, I am not so detailed in my comments! No doubt the Greens are not really environmentally conscious is my point. I'm only being nice about it. Ha!
Heinrich Böll must be rotating in his grave with such speed he could power Berlin by now.
Really struggling here not to make inappropriate jokes on her name.
About Vald the Impossible: something all his fellow KGB officers noted when he was stationed in GDR acting as facilitator for german anti-WEst terrorists re: getting wepons, explosives and training, was his chameloen-like ability to read a person and then mimick exactly a behaviour taht would that person at eae and start to trust him. Charisma as a tool with an on/off switch basically.
As for sanctions, nothing would be easier than for the EU commission to order the immediate seizure and subsequent confiscation of all assets of russian oligarchs from the Jeltsin years to present, deposited in european banks (mainly swiss, british and italian, what else?) from the mid-nineties to present day.
Of course, the fallout from that could well be very dangerous, with lots of politicians and bankers suffering car accidents and a wave of suicides. Given Putin's job after GDR collpased, being intermediary between the St. Petersburg mobs, the legal governement of the town and oblast, and the KGB, such methods are not beyond him or his backers. A few select deaths and people fall into line. This is of course the last resort, corrupt and compromised people are far more useful alive since you can then use kompromat against them and infiltrate their organisations with yet more corrupt officials.
Putin the Incorrigible and his bunch never left the Cold War mindset and the corruption and looting threatening to sunder Russia into a mega-Balkan (duing Jeltsin's last year in office before resigning governors were talking openly about seceding and some stopped forwarding taxes to Moscow) is still seen by them as an attack byt the US-led West aiming to subjugate Russia for all tme.
Right or wrong, we must not discount this, which our leaders (Orban and the other eastern ones excluded) when looking at Russia. "Beware the Young Turks" as they say.
See? It is all Putin and Trump's fault!
Ahem, of course ^_^
The worst thing is--'they' are doing all of this in public, without hesitation, remorse, or shame.
With people like Scholz and Macron in charge, who actually needs 'enemies' like the two gentlemen you named?
I don't know if I have anything new to say anymore....
Tl;dr: You vill not drive anywhere, you vill almost freeze and starve to death for Ukraine and you vill be happy. Now eat ze bugs.
And when you starve to death, the bugs eat you. It's the circle of life, innit?
Have you read Ida Auken's full essay, the origin of the "You will own nothing and you will be happy" phrase? Horrifying stuff! It's been taken down from the WEF page after gaining notoriety but you can find it via Wayback:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20161125135500/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is]
"My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages."
This is what she and the WEF presents as the negative, wrongbad thing opposing their perfect technocratic engineer's communist utopia. It's late nineteenth/early twentieth techno-techno-fetischism-saves-The World all over again. And what ideas and ideals came as a reaction to that folly last time around?
"Ida Auken was as the first Danish politician chosen to be a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum"
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/authors/ida-auken
Imagine my shock.
Quelle surprise. So is Sebastian Kurz, by the way, the former Austrian chancellor pictured in my piece above.
What a fantastic post, thank you very much.
"Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs"
Yeah, and WHO imposed that exactly?
About ten years ago, a guy called me up from NatWest, my bank at the time. He asked me to sign up for Internet banking. I said I wasn't interested, would much rather speak to a human, wanted the responsibility for any screw ups to be on bank employees and told him explicitly that he was talking himself out of a job.
I don't think he had a clue what I was talking about.
I used to red pill normies with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRFsoRQYpFM&t
That was over ten years ago. Nothing that is happening surprises me in the slightest, this is exactly how they implement their agenda.
Interesting video and conversation, gentlemen.
The most insidious aspect is the pervasive nature, if not outright normalisation, of these absurdities.
Re the video, by the way: did the red-pilling work?
To me (due to my background?) this was the key part which stood out:
"Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it."
Now, in english this might look outright bad enough, but since I can read danish and understand more idiomatically than lexically due to having some danish ancestry in my family tree and Denmark and Sweden being siblings culture-wise, what she implies here is not people doing the Amish thing and just opting out amiably and peacefully; the subtext of her phrase "turned against it" when understood in danish (or swedish or norwegian or icelandic) means 'violently, physically hostile to' or 'enemy of'.
The phrase thus subtly places all blame for not approving her techno-communist EUtopia on those who criticise or reject it, making then enemies and she also thusly states that no-one individual has the right to actively oppose and work to change or counter said political system - pure authoritarianism.
Thank you for this as well.
These people are monsters, they think they are the new aristocracy, as opposed to public servants. They are also historically illiterate, such behaviour doesn't generally end well for the people.
With that said though, I do wonder if they are expecting people to turn violent.
Well, I certainly think they do.
As a matter of fact, I recall a workshop I participated in back in December 2019: one of the other participants mentioned, in passing over drinks and dinner, that virtually all scenarios that (German) police are training include adversaries that intend to overthrow the government--albeit from the right-of-centre (ironically, I'd add).
As far as more directly-related contacts among police tell me (my brother-in-law is an officer in Vienna, Austria), police knows that violence is coming to 99.9% from left-wing extremists, such as 'Antifa' and the 'Black Bloc', but for political reasons (think: Greens in government) they cannot do anything.
Also, my in-law remarked that no-one of his fellow officers would 'catch a bullet' for any of these political hacks.
Drip-drip-drip…
Nice to see NakedCapitalism referenced here! I'm a big fan of their analytical approach to many of the big economic news stories.
Been a long-time reader, and while NC's US-themed stuff is great, their European materials (excl. their awesome Brexit coverage) are much less solid, though, in my estimation.
I also found their coverage of the Greek debt crisis excellent.
I like Greens as they deal in concepts worthy of consideration. The problem is found in concentrations of people, they can not possibly live there using less fossil fuels.
Some old paintings highlighted the coppiced trees growing sticks for Kachelofens, of course, there also was no reliance on electricity in the not so distant past. No fossil fuels necessary. People back then were smart enough to keep close ties to a community and think about local resources for the immediate future.
Now they are tee'd off about Russian's charging them money for resources. How dare them.
As always, I always look at Greens as behaving badly. They ought to be pushing for laws that allow for people to go back to the land, and they should go back too its really quite a nice and satisfying lifestyle with gardens and trees all about.
Well, that's only partially true, I'd argue: the 'Green' movement originated in the US in the 1960s (think: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring) as 'old labour/liberal' failed to proprly account for the 'side-effects' of material progress, i.e., pollution and environmental destruction.
By the 1970s, the dual oil shocks and the rising environmental awareness culminated in protests against, e.g., acid rain, etc., which (convntiently) accompanied much of the (self-) destruction of the 1980s in what we call the 'Rust Belt' today.
Yes, 'neo-liberal' thought (ahem) playd a role, but the party-political failure to provide the environmentally aware with a political home effectively broke the back of old labour in W Europe, hence the emergence of 'Green' movements.
Yes, 'new labour' struck back (the 'New Democrats' of the 1990s), manifest in the Clinton, Blair, and Schröder gov'ts around the turn of the millennium. No worries, it wasn't really 'new', but they sold out the remnants of the working people--who today have no-where else to go other than 'right-wing populism' (they at least speak to them without condescension, hence Trump, Brexit, et al.)--while moving ever more to the 'progressive' pseudo-leftish positions, hence 'red-green' coalitions, like in Berlin, Vienna, and many other cities around 2010.
Now, with the Greens back in power in Germany, you can see who they really are: mainly transatlanticist warmongers (e.g., FM Baerbock) who also side with the WEF.
Yes, some ideas were good in the 1980s and 1990s, but the Greens now--esp. on the national level--are as bad as everyone else: craven sellouts, blindly obeying the US, and they don't give a shit about the majority of 'deplorables'.
Re the last paragr.: I'm with you on this!
Yes yes, I am not so detailed in my comments! No doubt the Greens are not really environmentally conscious is my point. I'm only being nice about it. Ha!
I thought Yves was a man’s name.
She's not, as explained here: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/bloggers
Heinrich Böll must be rotating in his grave with such speed he could power Berlin by now.
Really struggling here not to make inappropriate jokes on her name.
About Vald the Impossible: something all his fellow KGB officers noted when he was stationed in GDR acting as facilitator for german anti-WEst terrorists re: getting wepons, explosives and training, was his chameloen-like ability to read a person and then mimick exactly a behaviour taht would that person at eae and start to trust him. Charisma as a tool with an on/off switch basically.
As for sanctions, nothing would be easier than for the EU commission to order the immediate seizure and subsequent confiscation of all assets of russian oligarchs from the Jeltsin years to present, deposited in european banks (mainly swiss, british and italian, what else?) from the mid-nineties to present day.
Of course, the fallout from that could well be very dangerous, with lots of politicians and bankers suffering car accidents and a wave of suicides. Given Putin's job after GDR collpased, being intermediary between the St. Petersburg mobs, the legal governement of the town and oblast, and the KGB, such methods are not beyond him or his backers. A few select deaths and people fall into line. This is of course the last resort, corrupt and compromised people are far more useful alive since you can then use kompromat against them and infiltrate their organisations with yet more corrupt officials.
Putin the Incorrigible and his bunch never left the Cold War mindset and the corruption and looting threatening to sunder Russia into a mega-Balkan (duing Jeltsin's last year in office before resigning governors were talking openly about seceding and some stopped forwarding taxes to Moscow) is still seen by them as an attack byt the US-led West aiming to subjugate Russia for all tme.
Right or wrong, we must not discount this, which our leaders (Orban and the other eastern ones excluded) when looking at Russia. "Beware the Young Turks" as they say.
I suspect that he does, but then again: he's probably not the only one.
Interesting bit about Mr. Putin: I don#t doubt this for a moment, but I do suggest that he must be the world champion in self-control.