Posts by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
(DIR) Post #B2sT1iQ6OaYivaV4BU by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T12:32:47Z
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@s8n @Bernard I can't stand intellectual bullshit. BTW, here's another very good article on fascim by Umberto Eco: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
(DIR) Post #B2sUuY8sPT2Qvu9b3Q by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T12:57:42Z
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@Sternritter-C @Bernard @s8n Fascism is a political ideology. Liberalism is also a political ideology. Not capitalism which, in economy, refers to a mode of production. Also, historically, all fascists were very friendly of their national capitalists. So, not exactly true. "Fascism had a complex relationship with capitalism, both supporting and opposing different aspects of it at different times and in different countries. In general, fascists held an instrumental view of capitalism, regarding it as a tool that may be useful or not, depending on circumstances."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_fascism
(DIR) Post #B2sZca78q3v1bias5o by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T12:22:54Z
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@Bernard @s8n Sorry, I'm really tired of having this conversation. It's perfectly easy to identify a set of distinctive features that characterize fascism as a political ideology. And TRUMPISM IS FASCISM:https://archive.fo/VB18Y
(DIR) Post #B2sjmm8A12dHJTZOEa by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T15:32:35Z
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"Measured using objective criteria spanning 10 domains including the use of state force against civilians, political prosecution and the independence of the judiciary and civil service, I find that the US slide during Trump’s second term stands out as the most rapid in contemporary history. It outpaces the early stages of backsliding under Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, where similar steps unfolded over several years.The resulting dataset of 139 instances where erstwhile democracies were gradually eroded also allows us to consider a crucial question: is the US under Trump’s second term hurtling inevitably towards the same destination as these other cases?To answer this it is useful to explore how the different backsliding episodes have taken place. Specifically, have they been characterised primarily by one-time unilateral executive actions and shows of force, or durable changes to policy and legislation facilitated by weak or co-opted institutions?And here, a difference emerges. In the cases of Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela, erosion came about through both channels. The likes of Putin, Erdoğan, Orbán and Hugo Chávez were able to consolidate power by exerting considerable control over the courts, media and electoral and political systems in addition to direct executive actions, locking in durably favourable conditions for themselves and hostile environments for their opponents. In Trump’s second term, by contrast, most of the action has taken the form of shocking acts or events that bypass rather than permanently corrupt institutions."https://www.ft.com/content/b474855e-66b0-4e6e-9b73-7e252bd88938?accessToken=zwAGSbCfepa4kdO0dIVeZrBObtObc34lK9iJOA.MEQCICsl-wnbkT-zHL1ucGdIU4o9IzZ1_M0Vy0qdxb7vUAtFAiBjN9PiR_5XQC1WmAKGp19wO2ppR9PaHyvusfIJqCZHaA&sharetype=gift&token=bd398d72-3953-4f44-a757-0fc09ad1c3ed#USA #Trump #Authoritarianism #Fascism #Democracy
(DIR) Post #B2sjmnwXHEWQw098OO by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T15:35:26Z
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Just to avoid any kind of relativism/postmodernism/whataboutism bullshit: "The Scale of Liberty, Independence and Democratic Erosion (Slide) is an index created by the author, consisting of the following 10 items, each scored from 0 (no erosion) to 3 (severe erosion). Electoral integrity, judicial independence, media freedom, central bank independence, civil service & bureaucratic autonomy, toleration/encouragement of political violence, use of state force against civilians, legislative constraints on executive, targeting political opponents, and civil liberties & human rights. Full definitions and criteria for each score are available here. Special thanks to Anne Meng, associate professor in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, for methodological review." https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTNz8J13MV_ZLQ8BT-AsRNTn4lADHidb3KRYpuQ7ZiA895SgDGwz2PaCi3KQeHpEdjcOMUl4bVs6qNn/pub
(DIR) Post #B2sknAfurNvpOH6xrU by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T15:55:56Z
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@magicalthinking I'm just quoting what the author of this article, who is located in the U.K., concluded. BTW, is that an argument?
(DIR) Post #B2sl027RywWIcT7hvk by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T15:58:15Z
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@magicalthinking Sorry if rational, non-subjective data hurts your feelings. I guess the MAGA team is just too "woke" for the truth...
(DIR) Post #B2slMyV1beIy3N5c6C by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:02:18Z
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@magicalthinking I guess the truth worth since you're spending so much time trying to insult me...
(DIR) Post #B2slZYzpjmPYinVEPY by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:04:41Z
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@magicalthinking That explains why you seem to be devoid of any actually thinking ideas and arguments AKA critical thinking.
(DIR) Post #B2sm6WX7upxQdfnARc by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:10:38Z
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@magicalthinking Definitely, it would improve your critical thinking AND reading skills.
(DIR) Post #B2sma7iwikjkNiR184 by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:15:57Z
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@magicalthinking Sorry if the articles that I quote are messing around with your notions of the truth. You've been brainwashed. Trump is no friend of the common worker. He is just a friend of billionaires and kleptokrats. In any case, your side must be really desperate. Only that explains why they're trolling people telling the truth about what's happening in the U.S. right now.
(DIR) Post #B2so6YpRa5sBfNVNdQ by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:22:01Z
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@Bernard @Sternritter-C @s8n "We should evaluate these systems based on how they were actually implemented rather than theory."I disagree. That goes against the notion of calling something as capitalism and the other thing as communism. Concepts have defitinions associated with them. We should strive to achieve a minimum degree of rigour. If not, there's not even a need to discuss ideas.
(DIR) Post #B2so6aUbOYOEpJllQW by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:24:32Z
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@s8n @Bernard @Sternritter-C I see that you continue to not even make an effort to find a consistent argument of corpus of ideas.
(DIR) Post #B2so6bLmCqvNUEeEJE by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:27:24Z
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@s8n @Bernard @Sternritter-C You surely must be a parody joke of the typical reactionary troll that has no consistent thinking. You're so predictive and so easly offended 😄
(DIR) Post #B2soJBoSStKU3449J2 by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:33:57Z
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@Bernard @Sternritter-C @s8n You're talking about social systems that are ever-changing. That's why social scientists keep coming with new words to describe these systems. While they tend to disagree all the time, they acknowlege their ideas. But f you come up with interpretations of the real behavior of these social systems without even contextualziing them with differerent interpretations made by other thinkers think about these social systems, then I don't have any reason to take it seriously.
(DIR) Post #B2sspKMgbUTDeheiwK by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-01T16:52:47Z
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@Bernard @Sternritter-C @s8n Ezra Pound did became crazy... https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/16/the-gift-of-lewis-hydes-the-gift/About anti-semitism, I would recommend you to read this article by Moishe Postone: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/moishe-postone-anti-semitism-and-national-socialism. In any case, I guess by now you all became so brainwashed that you can't really grasp a thought about social reality that requires more complexity than those formulaic simplistic anti-semitic tropes. I guess anti-semitism is really the socialism of fools: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/socialism-of-fools/9780231170383/
(DIR) Post #B31DgVeGvzvMLZCIy0 by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-05T15:40:58Z
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"The Metropolitan Police investigation into Peter Mandelson over the leaking of sensitive information to Jeffrey Epstein has established an unambiguous principle: those who seek to compromise the UK’s secrets to a foreign intelligence-linked sexual predator forfeit their access to power.Mandelson was sacked as US Ambassador, has resigned his membership of the Labour Party, and has been forced to quit the House of Lords over ongoing revelations about his relationship to Epstein.He now faces potential criminal charges for misconduct in public office.Yet, the same convicted sex offender who received state secrets from Mandelson, was simultaneously a “co-owner” through a significant limited partnership investment of a Silicon Valley venture fund controlled by Peter Thiel – the billionaire founder of defence analytics giant Palantir Technologies, which now holds more than £670 million in UK Government contracts spanning nuclear weapons systems, NHS patient records, Ministry of Defence operations, and police intelligence databases.More than 100 documents from the files released by the US Department of Justice, seen by Byline Times, reveal that Thiel personally solicited and maintained a business partnership with Epstein that stretched from 2014 through 2019, all the way up to Epstein’s final arrest.During this period, Epstein was a “co-owner” of Thiel’s Valar fund..."https://bylinetimes.com/2026/02/04/jeffrey-epstein-and-peter-thiel-co-owned-venture-fund-as-thiels-palantir-entered-uk-government/#UK #Palantir #Thiel #Valar #VentureFund #NHS #Epstein #EpsteinFiles
(DIR) Post #B31DgWx65UZoOF0qwq by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-05T16:06:46Z
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"Embedding Palantir into the UK’s most critical and sensitive systems represents an urgent national security risk precisely because its chairman, Peter Thiel, was a co-owner with a convicted sex offender operating as a vector for malign foreign influence, through whom he cultivated his own connections to senior Russian officials.This is not a company that shares Britain’s values. It is a company controlled by a billionaire who actively partnered with a Russian intelligence-linked sex trafficker, and granted access to Britain’s most sensitive systems by a lobbying firm whose founder had compromised himself to that very same trafficker.The British government moved swiftly to sever Mandelson’s ties underscores the extent to which his secretive intimate relationship with Epstein posed an ongoing national security threat.The logic that removed Mandelson must now be applied to Palantir. Britain’s nuclear weapons programme, NHS patient data, military operations, and police intelligence should not be controlled by a company whose founder was Jeffrey Epstein’s business partner."
(DIR) Post #B31DgdVLj3XYiD5IAa by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-05T16:00:54Z
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"In December 2021, Peter Mandelson’s Global Counsel and Palantir jointly hosted a webinar on “the next steps the UK should take in realising the UK’s life sciences vision.” Swindells chaired the meeting. The webinar marked the formal release of a Palantir white paper that bore striking similarities to the NHS data strategy published six months later in June 2022.Throughout this period, Mandelson maintained a financial stake in Global Counsel even after stepping back from day-to-day management. When Starmer travelled to Washington in February 2025 for a meeting at Palantir’s headquarters, it was Mandelson who arranged the Prime Minister’s visit through the British Embassy.Less than seven months after that Starmer-Palantir meeting, in September 2025, Palantir won a £240.6 million Ministry of Defence contract without a competitive tender. Defence officials used a “defence and security exemption” to justify the direct award."
(DIR) Post #B39fPzCMASop3HjG76 by remixtures@tldr.nettime.org
2026-02-09T19:44:05Z
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RT @RnaudBertrandThis is probably the single feature that makes China most unique as a civilization in human history: it is pretty much the only one where religion never had a say in political affairs.We often wrongly believe that China's secularism came with Communism but this couldn't be more wrong. The roots are far, far more ancient than this.Think about any other civilization - India, Persia, ancient Egypt, European civilization, the Incas: they all had a priestly class that held considerable political power. China? Never.Never, ever? Actually China, in its very early history, had a brush with theocracy during the Shang dynasty in the 2nd millennium BC. And it is precisely this episode - or rather what came afterwards - that decisively de-linked religion from government affairs.How so? Because around 1046 BC, the Zhou overthrew the Shang and immediately faced a big problem of legitimacy. The Shang had claimed to rule because Heaven had chosen them. If that were true, then the Zhou had just committed the ultimate act of sacrilege. How do you justify going against God’s will?The answer the Duke of Zhou (who can thus be credited as the - perhaps unwitting - inventor of secularism) came up with was essentially to say that Heaven's mandate is not a birthright but a contract - conditional on the virtue of the ruler and good governance.It might not sound like much but this idea completely changed the whole equation: suddenly the legitimacy of power didn’t rest on God’s will but on man’s moral judgement, on whether the ruler had virtue (德, Dé) and governed well. Which meant that, ultimately, the people - as opposed to a God - became the arbiter of whether a ruler is legitimate.https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2020748828497109185