Albrenia wrote:No. Eastern Europe and Russia are not 'more free' than the West. The West has problems, sure, but you'd have to be a bit boneheaded to look at Russia right now and think people are happy with their ability to express themselves.
In terms of free speech, there is no country that
even comes close to the United States of America. Human rights like the free press, free speech, jury trials, and so on are guaranteed as
negative liberties and, unlike the "enlightened" Europeans, they cover """"""""hate speech"""""""" and unpopular opinions and beliefs. On steroids.
Russia is not more free than the West. You can get arrested for criticizing the government in Russia. If that can happen, you are a slave, not a freeman.
Putin is a thief and the whole government is oppressive. There is no justice in the courts, no fair investigations, no nothing. Russia is inherently corrupt and miserable, as both my Russian friends and my American grandfather, having lived through the entire Cold War, can attest.
What Russia is free from is the West's foremost issue: decadence, degeneracy, and cultural decay.
There are no humiliation rituals where one group is taught to hate themselves, there aren't next-to-literal commissars in every Russian HR department, there isn't a drive to out-worship the latest fad demographic, and when a man says he's a woman in Russia, no one else is forced to play make believe with him*.
Russian men are encouraged to be men, and Russian women are encouraged to be women. The concept of marriage and childbearing, and healthy familial relationships are expected. Masculinity is celebrated and weak effemenite men are looked down upon.
So is Russia a better place than the west? Far from it! I would rather die a freeman with a lone voice in a world of degeneracy, than a slave to a world where societal and mental expectations are correct but I can't even criticize the President when he
plundered my pension fund to buy his sixteenth mansion.
Unless the EU mythology of a NEW HITLER AND NO PRESS FREEDOM IN POLAND is true, I consider Poland a better place than the rest of Europe. In Poland, I can criticize the government and talk smack about the courts all day and not go to jail. I also don't have to deal with all of society being reoriented to worship at the altar of sodomy, and I won't have to put up with my countrymen murdering their children.
Societal rot and degeneracy are worse problems
overall, but getting those back, to me, is not worth laying down my human rights. That's why I would rather be an American than a Russian any day of the week.
As for the Twitter, I agreed with the "private company private rules" spiel until I watched the Parler get purged by Amazon and read about the Times Magazine
confessing there was indeed a massive conspiracy and cabal to destroy Trump. (
You can read the original confession here.)
Trust-busting and opposition to monopolization are not anti-capitalist. Only a natural monopoly (such as Google) can exist without government intervention, and even then, the natural monopoly uses Regulatory Capture to secure itself.
Adam Smith himself believed that breaking monopolies was true to the spirit of competition, which is the bedrock of capitalism.
A telephone cannot disconnect you from using their service just because you happened to say the N-word over their lines. Public utilities are such because their existence is so universal, and so vital to the public discourse, that failing to prevent them from denying service to everyone and everything would cause such great isolation and harm that it is just that, literally
an utility.
There are nine companies that own almost all communications in America,
a whopping ninety percent.
Of these, eight are leftist: General Electric (Comcast/NBC/MSNBC/Universal Studios), Disney (ABC/ESPN), Viacom, Time Warner (CNN/HBO/Time Magazine/Warner Brothers), CBS, Amazon, Google, and the Facebook.
Only one is rightist: little (by comparison) News Corporation, the master of Fox and Wall Street Journal, as well as irrelevant radio firms. Who listens to Rush Limbaugh anyway?
The Facebook, the Twitter, and Google, combined, own
all widespread social media and mass media platforms on the Internet, including everything from Youtube to Instagram, and the flagship services themselves.
Bit Chute and AOL? LOL, who?
One hundred percent of the major Internet social media platforms are
extremely left-leaning and have consistently, and demonstrably, suppressed right-wing thought of all stripes.
This means that one political idelogy controls
nearly all institutional power in corporate America. This ideology
has confessed to its total control over American communications and culture and its successful attempt to organize and destroy the American right, manifested the most in Donald Trump.
Google and friends have used their power to manipulate elections. A poll asking about this stated that a whopping
five percent of Biden voters would have not voted Biden (but not necessarily Trump)
if they knew about Biden's various scandals. Up to a third of those surveyed hadn't even heard them mentioned.
Five percent may not sound like much, but if those five percent all voted Trump, he would have won in an Electoral College landslide. Again, those five percent said they would
not vote Biden if given that information, as opposed to voting Trump, so Trump could still have lost.
This trend needs to stop,a nd every leftist that says it's okay would never say the same if it was in reverse.
Like telephone lines, social media are public utilities and should be regulated as such.
* = Sadly, this also leads to situations where Russians will commit acts of violence against innocent people afflicted with mental illnesses, such as Gender Identity Disorder, or deviant sexual behaviors. Physical violence against such people is both a sin and an abomination.
Posted: Sat Feb 06, 2021 5:14 pm