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description=10 posts published by PaulR during January 2021;

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vertheless her words often come to mind when thinking of developments in the united states especially when they involve russia for when it comes to matters russo american the cup of irony truly runneth over take for instance the purge of conservatives from social media following the riot in washington a couple of weeks ago in which a mob of supporters of now ex president donald trump invaded the capitol building as anybody who has been even remotely following american politics for the past four years will know trump and his supporters have been repeatedly accused of being puppets of russian president vladimir putin expelling them from social media is thus portrayed as in part a liberation of the united states from years of russia disinformation and behind the scenes manipulation but where have these purged conservatives gone one answer is that they have fled from facebook twitter whatsapp and all the rest of them to the messaging app telegram indeed telegram has been making hay portraying itself as the home of free speech and inviting people to defect to it en masse adverts have been popping up on my computer screen showing a deleted twitter symbol alongside the words leave censorship followed by telgram s symbol and the words choose freedom and then the hashtag leavetwitterjointelegram but what is telegram it s a russian app that s what and it s doing really well from the media purge in america this week the number of telegram subscribers passed 500 million with tens of millions having joined in just a couple of weeks from a russian point of view the irony is sweet suddenly america is the home of censorship and russia the home of free speech more broadly the irony lies in the fact that the assault on russian disinformation has driven tens of millions of people into the hands of the russians you kinda gotta laugh and it s not just telegram also involved in this story is a conservative rival to twitter which goes by the name of parler i ve heard people pronounce this as parlour but americans don t speak french any more than they do irony so i guess we have to forgive them founded in 2018 parler attracted conservatives who felt that twitter was censoring them and to that end it advertised itself as a bastion of free speech until a couple of weeks ago parler had somewhere around 2 million users making it something of a minnow on the social media scene nevertheless it was deemed sufficiently objectionable for the rest of the internet community to gang up to shut it down first throwing it off the various app stores from which people downloaded it and then denying it access to any computer servers so what has parler done about it according to today s news it s moved to russia finding a new home on the servers of the russian tech company ddos guard it expects to be back online and operating again by the end of january heh heh heh just a few weeks ago left wing conspiracy theorists were claiming that parler was a russian asset well guess what it wasn t but then you shut it down and now it is how s that for irony now i want to be clear about one thing i m not a fan of the sort of right wing nutjobbery which got trump and so many of his supporters thrown off social media i don t follow those kind of people have never used parler and don t intend to sadly the internet is in part a beautiful source of wonderfully useful information and in part a cesspool of rotten filth i can see why people want to do something about the latter but part of what makes the cesspool is the fact that the internet encourages people to self isolate among those who share their own out of the way beliefs at least if they are all together on the same platforms there s a chance that they might be subjected to some alternative points of view now and again but that changes once you boot them out at that point you don t actually shut them up as we ve seen above they just find somewhere else to go but now they re by themselves even more than they were before how that is meant to help make things better i really don t know i fear that it will just add to embittered sense of persecution that lies behind so many of america s current political problems meanwhile as american social media rips itself apart russian internet providers are raking in the profits it s ironic don t you think share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading censorship internet parler telegram uncategorized silencing putin s enemies january 15 2021 paulr 21 comments andrei illarionov once vladimir putin s economic advisor but later a devoted oppositionist has become the latest victim of cancel culture being forced out of his position at the cato institute in washington dc read my piece about it here on rt as i discuss the irony of putin s enemies being silenced in the united states share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading andrei illarionov cato institute united states uncategorized general madness january 14 2021 paulr 17 comments back in the days before covid when i walked to my to office i would occasionally take a route which took me past an apartment building named the sandhurst i have no idea why anybody would consider that an attractive name to me rather than warm thoughts of a cosy apartment it always invoked memories of the less than pleasant months i spent confined at her majesty s pleasure in the royal military academy sandhurst back in 1989 anyway it s rather sobering to realize that my generation of sandhurst graduates are now running the show the current chief of the defence staff general sir nick carter is a bit older but his successor could well be a direct contemporary of mine for some reason i find it a bit scary not that my contemporaries weren t good soldiers to be honest if you d had a choice of being led under fire by them or by me you d have been a fool to choose me but those who remain in the service and have climbed up the slippery pole to the rank of general are no longer junior officers we re not asking them to leads troops under fire we want them to display some strategic judgement and in that regard i fear they are rather lacking mark galeotti has quite a good article out today in the moscow times in which he berates the continued presentation of a russian threat that is both outsized and out of control this threat inflation he argues is profoundly problematic for the west itself for if western politicians are seduced by the easy caricature of putin as sauron to the russian mordor and assume both that everything they do is hostile and that they are driven not by self interest but an irrational hatred then this will distort policy well hurrah to that though i ve been saying it for years and nobody has yet to pay attention but i digress let s get back on track galeotti cites an example of what he calls intemperate talk about russia as an existential threat and putin as an all powerful dictator with an irrational enmity for the west this was a statement by the former head of the british special forces lt gen sir graeme lamb who remarked to an online conference that russia was committed to killing our way of life and that we re being boiled like a frog by the russians covert campaigns against the united kingdom the situation claimed sir graeme was like that of the 1930s and if it wasn t careful the uk could find itself in the same mess as it did against nazi germany as galeotti rightly remarks such gross exaggerations of the russian threat and the misleading and insulting parallels between nazi germany and contemporary russia do nobody any good at that point though galeotti makes a mistake in calling lamb s remarks an outlier if only they were unfortunately they re not according to galeotti general carter speaking at the same event was rather more statesmanlike maybe he was but he hasn t been in the past speaking to the royal united services institute in november last year carter complained that the russians were flexing their muscles in our own backyard with an ostentation they have not displayed since the cold war as an example he cited the fact that the week before last russia assembled 10 or so warships and combat aircraft from the northern baltic and black sea fleets in a show of force in the waters off the british and irish coasts this is the point where one demands that generals show some strategic judgment obviously general carter considers it threatening when foreign military forces turn up close to home so what s his response do the same thing as he said deterring these threats signalling to the russian regime that we will not tamely acquiesce should they escalate requires conventional hard power warships and aircraft as well as less conventional capabilities like cyber it requires us to hold their backyard at risk whether that s in the barents sea the high north the baltic or the black sea yikes hold their backyard at risk that s his solution if his response to having russians turn up near the uk is to send troops to russia how does he think that the russians will respond to when british troops turn up near them does he really think that they ll just sit back and do nothing does it not occur to him that just as he feels threatened they ll feel threatened and act accordingly increasing their defence spending carrying out more exercises flexing more muscles and so on why does he think that they are any different in about their very first class international relations students learn about the security dilemma you feel under threat from another party so you take measures to enhance your security but those measures make the other party feel threatened so it takes additional measures itself the result is that you end up less secure than when you started it s hardly rocket science once you start on the ladder of escalation it can be hard to get off walking faster up the ladder doesn t actually help you come down again yet somehow our generals seem blithely unaware of this they also seem to have learnt the wrong lessons from their experiences of the last 20 years carter lamb and so many of their contemporaries have spent lots of time fighting fruitless wars in afghanistan and iraq at the end of it they don t seem to have drawn any suitable conclusions about a the ability of armed force to solve problems or b britain s role in the world you might imagine that iraq would have induced a bit of humility that the top brass might have woken up to the fact that the world isn t a black and white morality show that the british armed forces aren t really a force for good to use their motto during the days of tony blair finally c you might imagine that they d have noticed that if you push people hard they tend to push back and it doesn t leave you any better off but none of it twenty years on and still as flanders and swann once sang the english the english the english are best i wouldn t give tuppance for all of the rest the english are clever the english are good and clever and modest and misunderstood in a way i get it i remember what it was like to be a officer in her majesty s army you have a great confidence in yourself as a member of an ancient and glorious institution with fine traditions of defending blighty and the world from the evil johny foreigner you tend not to enquire too closely into what all those imperial battle honours on the regimental colour really involved you view the world in terms of threats you have no doubts about your own side s righteousness you have a can do spirit and are confident in the enormous professionalism of yourself and your colleagues there s nothing you can t do if only those damn cheapskate slimeball politicians would give you the proper resources live in that sort of environment for 30 years and by the time you re a general well perhaps you really don t have a proper understanding of the world it s kind of sad what s really needed is a lot more introspection a much better understanding that we re not always the good guys that just as we fear others they fear us and that they perhaps have some good reasons for so doing but we don t see to be getting it as galeotti notes in his article kremlin policy is often reacting to perceived western slights and pressures and that it is often both pragmatic and risk averse painting it as the enemy and then ramping up the military pressure on the russians will only exacerbate russians sense of being under threat they will respond accordingly and we won t like it when they do perhaps it s time to think again share this share on x opens in new window x share on facebook opens in new window facebook more share on reddit opens in new window reddit like loading uncategorized fascist blindness january 11 2021 paulr 26 comments yale historian timothy snyder was out banging the fascist drum again this weekend in the new york times in the aftermath of the washington riot by america s version of the old russian black hundreds snyder warns of donald trump s pre fascism this builds on his previous work which portrays trump as tool of the not pre but very genuinely fascist valdimir putin as well as his job at yale snyder has a position as a permanent fellow at the vienna based institut fur die wissenschaften vom menschen iwm institute for human sciences in english in november he gave an interview to the iwm for its online publication eurozine in which he again evoked the spectre of american fascism saying that i think it s impossible to talk sensibly about mr trump without invoking the history of fascism snyder therefore has no problem in seeing fascists except of course in ukraine where fascists are an invention of russian propaganda designed to delegitimize the glorious and democratic revolution of dignity which makes the following rather interesting one of the iwm s focal points is what it calls ukraine in european dialogue as part of which it has an annual competition to appoint ukraine in european dialogue fellows today the iwm issued the following tweet the jury of the ukraine in european dialogue fellowship has been requested by the iwm collegium to reconsider the award of a fellowship to olena semenyaka we take the information recently brought to our attention very seriously and will issue an official statement tomorrow and then four hours later following a decision by the program jury the iwm revokes semenyaka s fellowship with immediate effect we sincerely apologize for the inexcusable misjudgment especially to the ukrainian research community will take further steps to prevent a similar incident in the future so who is this olena semenyaka well she is allegedly the one on the left in this picture holding the nazi flag and doing the hitler salute if you want to know more about ms semenyaka i would recommend an article published in october by george washington university s illiberal...