See reply to Orcinus above. I’m mostly just going off things I remember reading about Russian and Soviet history; I’ll try to put some sources here later.

I hope I’ve gotten the history right. My understanding is that the Bolsheviks repealed the entire Tsarist legal code, which included prohibitions against (male) homosexuality, and didn’t make any laws on it one way or the other. This made homosexual relationships technically legal, but also, given the general conservatism of Russian culture at the time, put them in a kind of strange gray area, since many officials persisted in considering homosexuality bourgeois decadence and identical with pederasty. Then the government started regulating homosexuality much more strictly, as part of an effort to stamp out “bath-houses” and other illicit sexual entertainment venues that were causing a spread of venereal disease. Under Stalin, who got several things wrong despite being one of the greatest men in modern history, the ban on homosexuality was made explicit. It seems that Soviet psychology in the 1930s, being like all psychology of the time influenced by Freud, believed that fascism and homosexuality were heavily linked – i.e., if you’re that into guns and tight uniforms and virility and the inferiority of women, there’s clearly something phallic going on.

So it’s a mixture of bad science and trying to fix, without really knowing how, certain genuine social and medical problems. Along with homosexuality, abortion was made illegal, and divorce became harder to obtain. Kollontai, interestingly, actually campaigned for some of these “conservative” changes – not criminalization of homosexuality, but certainly banning abortion and tightening divorce laws. Soviet women’s organizations were behind them as well. Apparently there was a perception, I don’t know how justified, that some women were taking advantage of the loose divorce laws that existed in the early Soviet Union to “poach” mates, thus undermining the cohesion of local communes, and engaging in a type of social parasitism; if today, in our fairly liberal society, there exists a strata of conservative women who think that all other heterosexual woman are just temporarily embarrassed homewreckers, the perception can only have been stronger in a country just emerging from feudalism.

Nothing you said is wrong, but the simple version: it’s fascism, essentially. The socialist world and its (more-or-less) allies are fighting against capitalism gone completely psychotic, just as in 1941. We shouldn’t be surprised to find that the capitalists commit crimes on the level of the worst atrocities of Imperial Japan.

It was systemic among Russian aristocrats before the revolution. People rightly criticize Lenin and the Bolsheviks for their stance on homosexuality, but they forget what motivated it: the Bolsheviks were keen to stamp out elite pedophilia (“pederasty”), and they accepted the common medical opinion at the time that homosexuality and pedophilia were somehow linked. The most evident practitioners of non-traditional sex in pre-revolutionary Russia were not workers and peasants genuinely in love with each other, but Epstein-like aristocrats whom everybody knew were up to stuff behind closed doors.

Also, I never want to hear a liberal talk about Beria again.

On the Chomsky business: Here’s two principled “libertarian socialists” having a discussion about how Venezuela isn’t real socialism.

Mental impairment for physical reasons certainly exists, and there can be little doubt that some (at least) of the unfortunate persons who suffer from it hold absurd views on politics and many other things. But in general, I am not convinced that defects of the physical complex from which arises cognition – which complex we call, without really understanding it, the “brain” – are as common or as all-determining as most persons make out. Such people, having a smattering of what they think is Science, apply it crudely and mechanically, and believe that in reducing everything to a second-hand formula they have realized materialism; when in in their failure to recognize a concept as anything but a withered husk, a conclusion without the living sap of argument or struggle, they merely reproduce in themselves the immediate substantial world of belief. Thus, in a kind of miscarriage of Spirit, they give birth, not again to the living, multifarious world around them, but to a kind of stillborn and distorted image of the same; and their attribution of all opposition to what their stillborn conception of Science considers the most fundamental defect betrays only the poverty of their own conception.

How often have we met persons who, though given every advantage of culture, have yet failed to realize a full and living conception of the world; and conversely, have we not met persons who, though lacking in all the usual advantages toward knowledge, have yet realized in themselves the world as becoming! When the new world is born from the old, and further, its Notion has born fruit in the whole concrete richness of life, its essence is easy to grasp; when the old still exists, externally the same as ever but with the old meaning lost or changing, to grasp the essence is difficult, since it seems, the most real thing, to be unreal, fleeting, and with no genuine relation to substantial life. Who grasps it must do so in struggle, heroic and human, in concrete time; which is to say, such a one must be at the apex of the embodied struggle; and here we find the full essence of what is commonly termed “environment.”

(Apologies for the language. I was trying to crack Hegel last night).

Mao: “Oppose book worship” (writes greatest book ever)

Deng: “liberalize the economy” (puts socialism on a firmer basis)

Xi: “Complete the reform and opening up” (eliminates absolute poverty, curbs corruption, re-emphasizes Marxism, and strengthens the state sector like a boss)

Chinese leaders’ troll game is on another level.

The western media always brings her up, I notice, in some sort of dehumanizing sexualized way. (You probably remember the disgusting “Kim Yo-Jong step on me” stuff liberals were doing online a few years back). It’s a way to get gooners and idiot racists vaguely interested in supporting US foreign policy.

What we’ve lost most since the airlift, when the US and UK poured into Europe money, information power, and military might for the first time in peacetime, is mojo. We held back Stalin with a remarkable resilience, and one damn great, if not entirely true, story. It’s good we’ve grown more truthful, but not that we’ve lost fighting spirit.

This becomes funnier if you imagine it said by some 80-year-old guy in overalls, sitting in his rocking chair and chewing a straw.

For lack of a better word, yes

Don’t take this the wrong way, but you could have a brilliant career as a ghostwriter to some US politician.

MSS head Chen Yixin here – we’re honestly kind of surprised it worked. Either this Gordon G. Chang guy is a disinformation genius, or Americans are just a whole lot dumber than we thought.

Cyberbullying with Chinese characteristics

Adrian Zenz adding Mzuark to his list right now

At this point I’m convinced that a whole lot of the people defending the sex industry online – those who aren’t, as you indicated, feds – are sweaty dudes sitting in their bedroom, and deciding to pen a manifesto in between rounds 2 and 300 of jerking it to violent porn. Call it the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism-Epsteinism.

All is in chaos on heaven and earth.

I’ve made headway simply by being non-apologetic. “The DPR Korea is a nation which forges its own path. They do not interfere in the affairs of other nations, nor do they let any other nation interfere with them. They do not let America or anybody else dictate to them their past, their present, or their future. As a democratic citizen, you are free not to like the path the Koreans have chosen, but it is a strong as well as a difficult one, and nobody asked you to walk it. Your main obligation toward the Korean people right now is to ensure your government minds its own business.” People seem to respect that.

Weird how we are just now entering a kind of 1950s sci-fi level of battlefield tech.

So that way most of the actual “thinking” is being done by a human brain somewhere else. Then the machine learning control mechanism just takes that and uses it to know what to do.

Yes, I can see that too. The AI in that scenario would be kind of like the motions we perform “automatically” once we’ve learned some skill like playing the piano – while the conscious mind is focused on other things like “what interpretation do I want to give this passage,” etc.

armoured vehicles and air superiority are the next most significant in modern war, and infantry comes a distant third.

That’s not entirely true. To actually hold an area, you need infantry, hence why all warfare ultimately comes down to a ground assault. Bombing campaigns kill (murder) civilians and destroy infrastructure, but it’s harder to take out soldiers that way: since by the time your planes get there, most of the men and equipment will be dispersed and spread out. World War II proved this, and the lesson has been reiterated many times, notably in Korea and in Yugoslavia.

From what I understand, the idea of bombers and missiles coming out en masse and wiping out the enemy is largely a creation of Hollywood. In actual military tactics, air power is considered a “force multiplier,” i.e., it enables you to attack or defend as if with more men. Armor is also not nearly as invincible as often assumed. Its tracks are its weak point, and once immobilized it becomes very vulnerable – basically a standing artillerypiece. It is for this reason not very useful in urban fighting.