[Majorityrights News] Trump will ‘arm Ukraine to the teeth’ if Putin won’t negotiate ceasefire Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 12 November 2024 16:20.
[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Italy’s former interior minister Matteo Salvini took to the streets on Monday in an ethnonational protest against the new coalition government’s moves to undo his signature hardline policies.
Last week the 21 members of the new cabinet signalled a softer approach to immigration at their first meeting.
One of their first moves was to challenge anti-migrant measures introduced in the northeastern region of Friuli Veneto Giulia, a stronghold of Mr Salvini’s [...] League Party, branding them “discriminatory”.
Mr Salvini last month sank the coalition government between the League and [...] Five Star Movement (5SM). His plan to return as prime minister via an early election was foiled by the 5SM agreeing to join a new coalition with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD).
“Challenged by the new government,” Mr Salvini tweeted in response. “It does not harm Salvini, but the citizens.”
Mr Salvini used his role in the previous government to promote his party’s aggressive stance against the European Union and wage war on charity vessels saving migrants in the Mediterranean.
The new interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, an unaligned technocrat, has the delicate task of adapting Mr Salvini’s handiwork without scrapping the policies that have made him the country’s most popular politician - with support still running above 30 percent.
Ms Lamorgese is a 65-year-old civil servant who has served interior ministers from the left and the right in the past. Unlike her predecessor, she does not use social media and few are sure of what to expect.
“We could see the partial removal of the previous government’s security decrees that allowed for the seizure of migrant ships and arrest of NGOs,” Lorenzo Castellani, political science professor at Rome’s Luiss University, told the Telegraph.
“The new government is trying a softer approach but the electorate has not changed its mind on immigration,” he said.
The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, welcomed the new government last week but some Brussels diplomats expressed their reservations.
“To be honest we are not sure it will make a difference,” said one EU diplomat. The moment she (the minister) lets a migrant ship dock she will be slaughtered by Mr Salvini.”
Mr Salvini has told his supporters to keep their heads up. He is focusing on regional elections in October that will give voters their first chance to say what they think of the political winds of change.
Poland – Krasiczyn Castle in southeast Poland, near the city of Przemyśl, hosted some 350 young Hungarians and Poles from 26-30 August for the second edition of a new annual event: the Polish-Hungarian School of Leaders,organised in the form of a summer university. The event is obviously of some importance in the eyes of Hungary and Poland’s current leaders,as in addition to the main instigator of this event, Marek Kuchciński, until recently speaker of the Sejm (replaced at the beginning of August after he was criticised for having family members fly with him many times on a government plane), two deputy parliamentary speakers took part in the first day of discussions: Ryszard Terlecki of the Polish Sejm and János Latorcai of the Hungarian National Assembly.
The main organiser of the event is the Wacław Felczak Institute of Polish–Hungarian Cooperation, a Polish institution established by an act of parliament of 8 February 2018, a year after the creation of its Hungarian sister organisation, the Wacław Felczak Foundation. Felczak was a researcher on Polish-Hungarian relations, who during the Second World War organised a secret courier service leading through Budapest between the Polish Home Army (AK) and the Polish government-in-exile based in London.
Relations between the two countries have been close and almost always friendly for centuries, with a long tradition of mutual support in difficult times. But since Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS) came to power in Poland in the autumn of 2015, and since Kaczyński and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán declared that Europe needed a cultural counter-revolution during their meeting at the 2016 Krynica Economic Forum, attacks from Brussels against both Central European capitals have prompted them to reinforce their cooperation and bolster their region’s integration in order to counterbalance a Franco-German duet whose dominance in the EU is bound to become even more oppressive for smaller countries after Brexit.
If relations between the two Central European countries are already so good, why then organise such summer universities? Professor Maciej Szymanowski, director of the Felczak Institute, explains: “We have just conducted an opinion survey which shows that nearly 90% of Hungarians want their country to have good relations with Poland, and well over 50% want those relations to become even closer. On the other hand, in particular among the younger generation, we can observe that awareness ofthe realities of contemporary Poland is declining. And I am afraid it is much the same thing the other way around. The goal of our summer university is precisely to raise awareness about Polish-Hungarian relations, mutual knowledge about Poland and Hungary, and about the challenges both countries are facing now and are going to face in the 21st century.”
So who are the young people invited to participate at the Polish-Hungarian school of leaders? They are “people who, in spite of their young age, are already active in their surroundings, in universities, in clubs, in local government and in their communities, in editorial teams, and so on,” Szymanowski says. “Many of these people will probably soon have to shoulder some responsibility for their country, for Poland or Hungary.”
The special relationship between Hungary and Poland has been central to the revival of regional cooperation since Law and Justice (PiS) won the Polish elections in 2015. Poland’s ruling party and Hungary’s Fidesz have much in common. As was stated in Krasiczyn during a discussion panel with Kuchciński, Terlecki and Latorcai, because they have preserved a sense of their identity deeply rooted in Christianity, 30 years after the fall of communism the nations of Central Europe are the ones which can divert Western Europe from its current self-annihilating course.
Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman nterviewed on Fox Business Network, 27 Apr 2018. Photo: Richard Drew/AP
TWO BRAZILIAN FIRMS owned by a top donor to President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are significantly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention.
The companies have wrested control of land, deforested it, and helped build a controversial highway to their new terminal in the one-time jungle, all to facilitate the cultivation and export of grain and soybeans. The shipping terminal at Miritituba, deep in the Amazon in the Brazilian state of Pará, allows growers to load soybeans on barges, which will then sail to a larger port before the cargo is shipped around the world.
The Amazon terminal is run by Hidrovias do Brasil, a company that is owned in large part by Blackstone, a major U.S. investment firm. Another Blackstone company, Pátria Investimentos, owns more than 50 percent of Hidrovias, while Blackstone itself directly owns an additional roughly 10 percent stake. Blackstone co-founder and CEO Stephen Schwarzman is a close ally of Trump and has donated millions of dollars to McConnell in recent years.
“Blackstone is committed to responsible environmental stewardship,” the company said in a statement. “This focus and dedication is embedded in every investment decision we make and guides how we conduct ourselves as operators. In this instance, while we do not have operating control, we know the company has made a significant reduction in overall carbon emissions through lower congestion and allowed the more efficient flow of agricultural goods by Brazilian farmers.”
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The port and the highway have been deeply controversial in Brazil, and were subjects of a 2016 investigation by The Intercept Brasil. Hidrovias announced in early 2016 that it would soon begin exporting soybeans trucked from the state of Mato Grosso along the B.R.-163 highway. The road was largely unpaved at the time, but the company said it planned to continue improving and developing it. In the spring of 2019, the government of Jair Bolsonaro, elected in fall 2018, announced that Hidrovias would partner in the privatization and development of hundreds of miles of the B.R.-163. Developing the roadway itself causes deforestation, but, more importantly, it helps make possible the broader transformation of the Amazon from jungle to farmland.
The roadway, B.R. 163, has had a marked effect on deforestation. After the devastation that began under the military dictatorship and accelerated through the 1970s and ’80s, the rate of deforestation slowed, as a coalition of Indigenous communities and other advocates of sustaining the forest fought back against the encroachment. The progress began turning back in 2014, as political tides shifted right and global commodity prices climbed. Deforestation began to truly spike again after the soft coup that ousted President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party in 2016. The right-wing government that seized power named soy mogul Blairo Maggi, a former governor of Mato Grosso, as minister of agriculture.
Yet even as deforestation had been slowing prior to the coup, the area around the highway was being destroyed. “Every year between 2004 and 2013 — except 2005 — while deforestation in Amazonia as a whole fell, it increased in the region around the B.R.-163,” the Financial Times reported in September 2017. That sparked pushback from Indigenous defenders of the Amazon. In March, Hidrovias admitted that its business had been slowed by increasing blockades on B.R. 163, as people put their bodies in front of the destruction. Still, the company is pushing forward. Hidrovios recently said that, thanks to heavy investment, it planned to double its grain shipping capacity to 13 million tons.
amazon-destruction-map-1-01-1566850165Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
The Amazon, where a record number of fires have been raging, is the world’s largest rainforest. It absorbs a significant amount of carbon dioxide, a major contributor to the climate crisis. The Amazon is so dense in vegetation that it produces something like a fifth of the world’s oxygen supply. The moisture that evaporates from the Amazon is important form farmlands not just in South America, but also in the U.S. Midwest, where it falls to the earth as rain. Protection of the Amazon, 60 percent of which is in Brazil, is crucial to the continued existence of civilization as we know it.
During a recent speech, Hungary’s nationalist-populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán attacked the idea that replacement migration should be used to solve the demographic problems that many Western countries face.
Orbán’s speech was delivered at Budapest’s 3rd Demographic Summit that was held on the 5th and 6th of this month. During the speech, Orbán emphasized that the most important problem currently facing Europe is its population decline, Hungary’s 888 online newspaper reports.
“Why is this the case? It’s most certainly not because of some sickness of Christian civilization – after all, the number of Christians are rising all around the world. This is a sickness of Europe in general,” Orbán said.
For the Hungarian Prime Minister, immigration must never be regarded as a solution to demographic problems.
“We must never accept population exchange,” Orbán declared.
Orbán also noted that his government was currently working towards a strong policy which prioritizes the family and incentivizes having children.
Without families and children, the national community will disappear, he explained, “and if a nation disappears, something irreplaceable will disappear from the world,” reports Hungary Today.
According to Orbán, the future of a nation and people can only be secured if the nation’s families are guaranteed better financial opportunities to have children as opposed to not having children
“We win only if we can build a system where those who bear children live significantly better than if they hadn’t started a family,” Orbán continued.
This is the way by which the Hungarian government is pursuing its pro-family policy.
Orbán also criticized the “meaningless” so-called green argument that Europeans should stop having kids to save the earth, saying that this kind of talk should be completely dismissed.
Posted by DanielS on Friday, 06 September 2019 08:06.
Taylor Swift, “Lover”, 2019
..to be encouraged into the YKW/Liberal programmatic deception that miscegenation with blacks is not only harmless, but a paragon of “love” and virtue.
This program has been foisted through music videos for over three decades now, beginning with Sumner Redstone’s MTV, as it jammed the pre-internet media with Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video.
Note: to see White woman / black man couples in public was still very uncommon in the mid 1980s.
The Taylor Swift video begins egregiously enough, making it clear that the target perspective is of little girls and that they should be paying riveted attention to this.
...encouraging girls to have"compassion”, lots of gifts, tidings and reward for universal maturity..
..into the fish bowl with our people…..not like its a trap…
...easy as fishing in bath tub for predators, where White men are prohibited from discriminating against opportunistic, predatory species who would take advantage of the sublimated and protracted maturity that life spans within our evolutionary pattern entail…
It’s widely assumed in thriller movies that if ever the truth is allowed to leak out about a powerful institution’s fundamental corruption, then its reputation must come crashing down once and for all.
But in real life, multiple disgraces can have negligible impact on an organization’s reputation in the prestige press as long as it continues to serve its function in furthering The Narrative.
I notice that among intelligent but naive young people of a scientific bent, there is a recurrent assumption that once the facts get out, then everything will change. If the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment about the speed of light turns out negative, then the Newtonian model is shattered and eventually there must be a paradigm shift to Einsteinian relativity.
But that’s not the way it works in public affairs, where control of The Megaphone is what matters because most people can’t remember much. You have to repeat the facts over and over and over to have any chance of ever moving the needle.
For example, since the 1990s close observers of the Southern Poverty Law Center, one of America’s most profitable nonprofits (endowment in fiscal year 2018 was $471,000,000, up from $319,300,000 just two years earlier), have recognized that it is America’s most lucrative hate organization.
The SPLC’s legendary founder Morris Dees (currently on his sixth wife) is basically a sleazy Southern TV preacher type, but one who long ago figured out that poor Southern Baptists had less money to send him than rich Northern liberals. This junk-mail genius realized he could monetize the regional, ethnic, and class hatreds directed against his own people.
But isn’t it a little crass to whip up hatred of poor white Southerners among rich white Northerners? Morris had the perfect answer: He’s not the hater; it’s the people he hates who deserved to be hated because they are the haters.
“I just want to give you a sense for what liberalism is. The United States is a thoroughly liberal country. It is a liberal democracy. Both Republicans, who we sometimes refer to as conservatives, are liberals and Democrats are liberals. I’m using the term liberal in the John Lockean sense of the term.
The Unites States was born as a liberal democracy. The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights, these are thoroughly liberal documents.”
We are a liberal people, okay? But what exactly does that mean? It’s very important that you understand it, because you have to understand what liberalism is to understand liberal hegemony and what went wrong. Then, it’s very important to understand what nationalism is.
John’s argument is very simple here.
Nationalism is the most powerful ideology on the planet.
And in a contest between liberalism and nationalism, nationalism wins every time.
And what I want to do is explain to you what liberalism is, what nationalism is, and why nationalism defeats liberalism. Then what I want to do is talk about what liberal hegemony is. What does it mean to say that The Unites States is interested in remaking the world in its own image? So, I’ll describe that. Then I want to talk about why we pursued liberal hegemony.
...of course I tipped you off by telling you that The United States is a thoroughly liberal country, but there’s more to the story.
Then I want to tell you what our track record is. I want to describe our failures ...in the Middle-East, with regard to NATO expansion, and Russia, and with regard to engagement in China. Lets talk about the evidence that we goofed.
Then I want to talk about why liberal hegemony fails, and this, again, is basically as story about nationalism and realism trumping liberalism. And then I want to make the case for restraint, what I think is a wise foreign policy, okay?
Let me start with what is liberalism…
There are two bedrock assumptions that underpin liberalism:
One is, that it is individualistic at its core.
And number two is that there are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties.
...to reach agreements about first principles or questions about the good life.
And what exactly am I saying?
You have to decide, when you think about politics, whether you think human beings are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts or if you think that human beings are fundamentally social animals, who carve-out room for their individualism.
Right? This is very very important to think about alright?
Liberalism is all about individualism. Liberal theorists are known as social contract theorists because they believe that individuals come together and form social contracts, so the focus is on the individual.
The assumption underpinning liberalism is not that human beings are social animals from the get-go.
That’s the first point.
The second point is that liberalism assumes that we cannot use our critical faculties - we cannot use reason to come up with truth about first principles (think about issues like abortion, affirmative action - you cannot get universal agreement on those issues, right?). And I’ll talk about this more as we go along.
But the roots of liberalism are traced-back, in my opinion, to the liberal wars of Britain between Catholics and Protestants. And the fact is that you cannot use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice a versa, or whether atheism is superior to both of them ..or Judaism or Islam is superior to Catholicism and Protestantism, Who knows? Right? You just can’t reach agreement. You just can’t reach agreement. There are real limits to what we can do with our critical faculties, okay?
So these are the two bedrock assumptions: One, you focus on the individual, and number two, you accept the fact that you can’t reach universal agreement.
Now, central question - how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence?
And you say to yourself, what does he mean, potential for violence?
The fact is that Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in huge numbers, not only in Britain, but all over Europe. People today, Shias and Sunnis, kill each other, because they can’t agree on whether Shi ism or Sunnism is the correct interpretation of Islam ..or communists versus liberals, people can’t agree on first principles. And when they can’t agree on first principles, if they feel really strongly about them, there is potential for violence.
So, when you have all these individuals running around, who, don’t agree, they may agree in some cases but don’t universally agree, there’s tremendous potential for violence.
So, liberalism is basically an ideology that’s based on conflict, and the question is, how do you solve that conflict?
There’s a three part solution:
And this should be dear to all of your hearts.
The first is, you focus on individual rights. Remember, the importance of the individual. You know The Declaration of Independence, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” - those are natural rights, those are inalienable rights.
This means that every person on the planet has a particular set of rights, sometimes defined as freedoms. This is to say, you, if you want to be a Protestant, have the right to practice that religion, and if I want to be a Catholic, I have the freedom, I have the right to be a Catholic.
The name of the game is to recognize that everybody has these freedoms to choose. This makes perfect sense when you think about Catholics killing Protestants, right? Or Jews killing Muslims or whatever group you want, atheists killing believers, communists killing whatever, right?
The point is, you want to focus on the individual and let the individual choose for him or herself what kind of life they want to lead. You want to let them lead, as much as possible, their version of the good life. And, very important, every person on the planet has that right, and let me get ahead of myself here, just put this seed in your brain.
If you focus on individualism and inalienable rights, you go almost automatically from an individualistic ideology to a universalistic ideology, right? Because again, you’re focusing on the individual, you’re saying every individual has a set of rights, every individual on the planet. And that individualistic ideology becomes a universalistic ideology. But we’re talking about the individual here.
The second is, you purvey the norm of tolerance. We talk about tolerance all the time. Universities are really big on tolerance. We’re supposed to tolerate opinions that we don’t like. You bring in speakers, or you allow speakers to come in who say things that you find reprehensible, right? Tolerance really matters.
But the fact is that tolerance only takes you so far. because you’re dealing with people who sometimes are so committed to their beliefs. Somebody who believes that abortion is murder is willing to murder a doctor who practices abortion, alright?
So, you need a state, that’s the third element of the equation.
You need a state that’s effectively a night watchman. That makes sure that those people over there who want to live as Protestants don’t attack those people who want to live as Catholics and vice versa.
This is the liberal solution.
This is what America is all about.
Individualism - we talk about it all the time. We talk about rights, everybody has rights. My kids, over the years, have always reminded me when I tell them that they have to do X, Y and Z that they have rights and I cannot interfere with their rights, right? It’s the way we’re educated from the get go and of course, we’re a remarkably tolerant people as societies go. Not completely, but that’s, of course, why we have a state, right?
You’ve got to have a police force, you’ve got to have a system of courts, right?
So, that’s what liberalism is all about, right? Liberalism focuses on the individual, purveys the norm of tolerance and accepts the fact that you need a nightwatchman state.
Now, let’s talk about nationalism. Different animal…
Nationalism is based on the assumption that human beings are social animals.
We are born and heavily socialized into tribes.
We are not born in the state of nature.
We are not individuals, born and left alone in the woods.
We are born into groups. We are very tribal.
So, you see in terms of starting assumptions, or bedrock assumptions, what underpins nationalism, what underpins liberalism, very very different.
And individualism takes a back seat to group loyalty, right?
Somebody around the world kills an American, ISIS kills an American, it’s fundamentally different than killing a Saudi, or killing a Brit, because you’re killing one of us. This is the tribe, right? You’re an American. Americans look out for other Americans.
We are social animals from the get-go.
And aside from the family, the most important group, remember I said that you are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups ...tutting aside the family, the most important group in today’s world, is the nation (I’ll say more about that in a second).
What’s nationalism?
Here’s my simple definition:
It’s a set of political beliefs which holds that a nation, a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. Think of the word nation-state.
Nation-state. Nation-state embodies what nationalism is all about. It says the world is divided up into all these tribes called nations and each each one of them wants its own state.
If you think about the world today, just look at a map of the world today, it is completely covered with nation-states. Nothing but nation-states.
If you went back to 1450 and looked at a map of Europe, there isn’t even a single state on that map. Over time, the growth of the state, and then the growth of the nation-state, you move to a world that is filled with nothing but nation-states. Look at the Palestinians and Israelis. The Jews who believe in Zionism, what is Zionism all about? It’s all about having your own Jewish state. Theodore Herzel, who is the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called, The Jewish State, Jewish nation-state.
What do the Palestinians want? Two state solution? Palestinians want their own state. Palestinians as a nation, want their own state.
The planet is filled with nations, many of which have their own state, almost all of which want their own state, nation-state, right?
That’s what nationalism is all about.
Take it a step further. Nations place a enormous importance on sovereignty, or self-determination, which is why they want their own state.
The Palestinians don’t want the Israelis deciding what their politics should look like. Palestinians want their own state. Jews want their own state.
Germans want their own state.
Americans want their own state.
..because they believe in sovereignty.
[...]
Liberal hegemony is based on intolerance. It says that everybody has to be liberal…
[...]
Mearsheimer argues against trying to impose liberal democracy, as it is necessarily a failed foreign policy against staunch nationalism, but he defends “liberal democracy” as a good way of life for The US.
However, he does not observe that The U.S. has failed democratic principle in important ways - notably in the open border/ opening of group boundaries policies in exploit of the “civic nationalist” concept that his YKW people have perpetrated through power niches in cahoots with liberals/right wingers to overturn democratic will (for closed borders) ..open borders and boundaries, weakening The United States nationhood and putting The U.S. effectively, on a trajectory of non-nationhood.
Note Mearsheimer’s use of the pejorative word “purportedly” when discussing nationalist claims to distinguish their people in ways (e.g., important biological differences) requiring a nation-state to protect their differences; i.e., that they are only “purportedly” different from other people in significant ways which require national boundaries/borders to protect them.
Nevertheless, in places, Mearsheimer makes the point, quite eloquently, that people are social, very profoundly social, from the start; thus making nationalism as it protects their sociality something they care about more deeply than liberal democracy. They will defend more ardently the security, social order and stability that provides for general fairness and just recourse against the secondary priorities, bullying ‘prerogatives’ of individual liberal choice over the security of group interests. Noting our deep social nature (including Europeans) from the start is correct, and is the point of correction that Whites need to understand and prioritize as opposed to right wing reaction (itself a species of liberalism) reaction to Jewish didacticism.
TOP FINANCIER OF TRUMP AND MCCONNELL IS A DRIVING FORCE BEHIND AMAZON DEFORESTATION
Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman nterviewed on Fox Business Network, 27 Apr 2018. Photo: Richard Drew/AP
Map: Soohee Cho/The Intercept
Hungarian PM Viktor Orban - Photo Credits: MTI
SPLC Founder, Morris Dees