Vlad Lungeanu

Pontifex minimus: bridging gaps.
🇷🇴🇺🇸🇮🇱🇬🇧🇺🇦

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

#FreeIran

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Karl Marx – The Man.

You know him as the author of the Manifesto.
But behind the manifesto there was a man – an envious, deceitful and lazy one – constitutionally averse to productive work. The theory is just a result of that. It is the man, elevated into a system.

Do you recognize any of this in the socialists and communists around you? Read on.

1. His father Heinrich was a hardworking lawyer from Trier who wrote his son letters in the tone of a man watching a slow-motion disaster he cannot stop. Not angry – exhausted. "Is your heart in accord with your head, your talents?" he wrote in 1837. "Is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?" The tone was like: "My heart often sinks when I think of you and your future." The despairing correspondence of a disciplined, hardworking man who cannot understand what is wrong with his brilliant, promising, and comprehensively useless son. A loving father watching his brilliant son consume money, accumulate debts, drink heavily as a student, produce poetry of remarkable mediocrity, and demonstrate a comprehensive inability to translate intelligence into anything useful. A father asking his clever son whether he is a visionary or a catastrophe. The answer turned out to be both. Heinrich died before seeing the full scope of the disappointment. He was spared the Manifesto.

2. He never worked. The foundational fact about the man who devoted his life to the theory of labor. For most of his adult life he was kept by Friedrich Engels – son of a factory owner, manager of a Manchester textile mill – who spent his days doing the precise capitalist management the theory condemned, so that Marx could theorize about it in comfort. Engels also paid the rent, covered the debts, funded the cigars, and at one point claimed paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child – born to the family’s unpaid servant – to protect his friend’s reputation. The servant was not paid. The child was not acknowledged. The theory of "liberation" was produced in conditions of domestic exploitation that would have embarrassed a Victorian mill owner. If you remember Rousseau you’ll notice a pattern here…

3. Helene Demuth – cooked, cleaned, raised the Marx children, and managed the household through decades of poverty that was chronic not because of capitalism but because Marx could not hold a job and would not try. Her specific working-class life was spent in unpaid service to the man theorizing about her liberation. He did not liberate her. He did not pay her. He fathered her child, denied it, and let Engels take the blame. The secret held until after both men were dead. Engels confessed on his deathbed.

4. The debts are almost comic. In one year at university he spent 700 talers – his father noted with incredulous precision that "the richest spend less than 500." Expelled from Belgium, France, and Prussia. Ended up in London, stateless, in damp apartments, pawning the family silver, writing to Engels for money with the regularity of a man who has made extracting funds from a friend into an art form. Several of his children died young in conditions produced by his inability to earn. Marx noted the deaths in letters and continued the manuscript.

5. The envy is the key to everything. A brilliantly clever man who felt the world had not given him his due – who watched others succeed and experienced their success as an offense requiring theoretical explanation. The result: the most sophisticated intellectual expression of resentment ever produced. A complete systematic account of why the successful are guilty, why their success is stolen, and why the man who has not succeeded is the true repository of value. A theory of envy with footnotes. Nietzsche called this ressentiment. He was describing the same type, from a different angle, at roughly the same time.

6. He died in 1883. Eleven people attended the funeral. Engels compared him to Darwin – generous, since Darwin spent twenty years accumulating evidence before publishing and Marx spent twenty years accumulating debt. His wife had died two years earlier, exhausted. His servant had spent a lifetime unpaid. His illegitimate son grew up unacknowledged. The Manifesto was by then on its way to inspiring experiments that would kill approximately a hundred million people.

7. The Manifesto was not written from the bottom. It was written by a clever man funded by a factory owner’s son, who had never done a day of proletarian labor, who exploited the people closest to him, whose father despaired of him, and whose considerable talents were deployed entirely in explaining why the world owed him more than it had given. Look around you. The envious intellectual who has never built anything but knows exactly what is wrong with everything others have built. The "man of the people" who cannot manage his own affairs. The revolutionary funded by the people he condemns. You have met this person. You may have voted for him.

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

The season finale of Season 3 of Silo drops tomorrow night.

It's on Apple TV+.

If you like dystopian sci-fi, Silo is an amazing series, with incredible writing, acting and character development, and never-ending mysteries as to why these people are living in an underground silo 300+ years in the future.

For every mystery solved, three more emerge.

It's really an amazing show and highly bingeworthy.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Sartre n’était pas un philosophe qui s’est trompé.

C’était un homme qui a choisi. Le camp des bourreaux. Puis le camp de ceux qui touchent les enfants. Et la France l’a porté en triomphe.

On va le prendre par A + B. Pas par l’ambiance. Par les actes.

A. Le communiste.

Sartre n’a jamais eu besoin de la carte du Parti. Il a fait mieux. Il a mis le prestige de la France au service d’États qui assassinient, tout en restant l’intellectuel « libre » de Saint-Germain.

1952. Il devient compagnon de route du PCF. Il écrit Les Communistes et la Paix. Il lâche la phrase qui résume l’homme : « tout anticommuniste est un chien. » Il préside l’Association France-URSS.

1954. Premier voyage à Moscou. Le Goulag est connu. Kravchenko a déjà témoigné à Paris, sous serment, en 1949. Sartre sait. Il rentre. Il accorde à Libération une série d’entretiens. Il déclare que le citoyen soviétique jouit d’une « entière liberté de critique ». Cinq ans après le procès. Un an après Staline. Ce n’est pas une erreur. C’est un mensonge au service d’un État qui tue.

1956. Les chars écrasent Budapest. Il condamne. Il rompt avec le PCF. On croit que c’est fini. Ça ne l’est pas. Il reviendra. Onze voyages en URSS entre 1954 et 1966. Le marxisme, écrit-il, reste « la philosophie indépassable de notre temps ». Il préface Les Damnés de la terre et légitime la violence. Il visite Castro. En 1973, quand Soljenitsyne publie L’Archipel du Goulag, Sartre trouve encore le moyen de le traiter d’élément nuisible.

1970. À 65 ans, le philosophe le plus célèbre de France devient directeur de La Cause du peuple, journal maoïste. Il le vend sur les Champs-Élysées. Il se rapproche des hommes de la Gauche prolétarienne. En 1973, avec Serge July et Benny Lévy, il fonde Libération. L’enfant déclaré de Mai 68.

Voilà le communiste. Pas un militant de cellule. Un commissaire du prestige. Il n’a pas tiré. Il a couvert ceux qui tiraient.

B. L’autre dossier.

On ne va pas broder. On va citer.

Le 26 janvier 1977, une pétition paraît dans Le Monde et dans Libération. Elle défend trois hommes accusés d’attentats à la pudeur sur des enfants de 12 et 13 ans. Le texte parle de « caresses » et de « baisers ». Il affirme que les enfants étaient « consentants ». Il pose cette phrase : « Si une fille de 13 ans a droit à la pilule, c’est pour quoi faire ? »

Sartre signe. Il a 71 ans. Beauvoir signe. Deleuze signe. Barthes signe. Lyotard signe. Philippe Gavi, cofondateur de Libération, signe.

En mai 1977, une deuxième lettre. Elle demande que la loi reconnaisse « le droit des enfants et des adolescents à avoir des relations avec qui ils choisissent ». Sartre signe encore. Foucault signe. Derrida signe.

Ce n’est pas un égarement de soirée. C’est une position. Le philosophe officiel de la gauche française a mis sa signature au bas d’un texte qui demandait qu’on cesse de traiter comme un crime le sexe avec des enfants de douze ans.

Et ce n’était pas tombé du ciel.

Des années plus tôt, Beauvoir pêchait dans ses classes de lycée. Bianca Bienenfeld a 16 ans. Beauvoir la prend, puis la « passe » à Sartre. Bianca l’écrira plus tard : on a abusé d’elle à seize ans. Natalie Sorokin : Beauvoir est révoquée en 1943 pour détournement de mineure. Olga Kosakiewicz, élève, entre dans ce qu’ils appelaient « la famille ». Sartre avait un mot pour ce qu’il faisait : la « dévirginisation ».

Le système était en place. Les lycéennes d’abord. La tribune ensuite. Même logiciel. L’interdit bourgeois est le vrai crime. Donc on casse l’interdit. Y compris celui qui protège un enfant de douze ans.

Maintenant la vie, d’un seul tenant.

1905. Naissance bourgeoise à Paris. Père officier mort tôt. Enfance dans la bibliothèque du grand-père Schweitzer. Louis-le-Grand. ENS. Agrégation. La Nausée en 1938. L’Être et le Néant en 1943. L’existentialisme devient une mode, une cave, un manteau. Il refuse le Nobel en 1964 — le seul geste élégant d’une carrière publique. Il meurt en 1980. Cinquante mille personnes suivent le cercueil au Montparnasse.

Entre ces deux dates, que fait-il de l’intelligence qu’on lui a donnée ?

Il construit le personnage de l’intellectuel engagé. L’homme qui parle au nom de l’Histoire. L’homme dont la signature vaut une armée. Et il met ce personnage au service du pire.

Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Barthes, Lyotard ont philosophiquement quitté son humanisme. Ils n’ont pas quitté son tribunal. Ils ont grandi dans sa cour. Ils ont appris, en le regardant, qu’un philosophe français n’a pas à rendre des comptes au réel, seulement à la cause. Ils ont signé les mêmes textes. Ils ont occupé les mêmes revues, les mêmes éditeurs, les mêmes chaires. Sartre n’a pas écrit la French Theory. Il a créé la fonction. Le pignon sur rue. L’impunité morale de la caste.

Sans Sartre, ces idées restaient des séminaires. Avec Sartre, elles sont devenues une institution. Gallimard. Les Temps modernes. Vincennes. Libération. Le lycée. La terminale. L’État.

Le siècle a donné raison à Camus point par point. L’URSS s’est effondrée. Les Khmers ont tué. Soljenitsyne avait raison. La pétition de 1977 est aujourd’hui indéfendable. Sartre s’est trompé sur tout ce qui comptait — et a aidé à couvrir, par le prestige de sa signature, tout ce qui méritait d’être combattu.

Pourtant c’est encore lui qu’on laisse au centre. Camus au rayon littérature. Sartre au Panthéon moral.

Il faut inverser.

Sartre au sous-sol. Pas par esprit de revanche. Par hygiène. Une civilisation qui confond cet homme avec une conscience ne peut pas se défendre.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@NiohBerg Witcher 3 have the absolute best music ever heard in a video game, hands down. Not to mention story and characters.

[shay 🇮🇱🇺🇸 @judeanceo]

The UN is a JOKEEEE.

They lost me when UN staff members participated in Hamas’s October 7th massacre…

Or maybe it was when the UN put the Iranian Islamic regime on the Human Rights Council…

Or maybe when Israel (the only democracy in the Middle East) became a permanent punching bag at the UN?!!?

So pleaseeee stop quoting UN votes as moral law… it’s actually quite the opposite.

[Emanuel Conțac 🇺🇦 @vaisamar]

Biografia ascunsă a generalului Pahonțu: a făcut parte din trupele de represiune ale lui Ceaușescu și a participat la masacrul din 21 decembrie 1989 https://t.co/b35EGXFgHM

[Gad Saad @GadSaad]

It is astounding. Imagine having a guy who was an utter academic fraud (including orgiastic plagiarism) and a narcissistic liar of the highest order (who made up countless stories about his life's story) being elevated to the status of a martyr because he was black. This is what the cancer of the DIE (diversity, inclusion, and equity) cult looks like. Yes, it is tragic that a man committed suicide but to blame it on "racism" is an insult to human causality and human reason. He is solely to blame along with the degenerate progressive academics who enabled him to achieve such unearned academic status. To try and demonize those who spoke out against his fraudulence is an attack on personal agency.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@Airaasayss Actually, 10 would is the right answer only if we count the VISIBLE holes. The question is "HOW MANY ARE?". And the answer is BILLIONS of microscopical ones, plus the visible 10.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@RockChartrand Credit where credit's due: Aya Cash is an absolutely amazing actress.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@SirBylHolte We have just finished Everwood (2002). We were both amused and annoyed, since it was exactly between two worlds: quite conservative (pro-family, against abortion, a lot of nice Jews), and quite woke (smart females vs. clueless males, gender studies). But great & beautiful actors!

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@BenShapiroShow Very much true, with a single caveat: if your mind is set on finding a marriage partner, it might blind you to details actually showing incompatibility between you two. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Have marriage as a goal, work for it, keep your eyes wide open.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@brivael Saying that Hitler and his party were not on the left because they killed leftists is like saying that Stalin was not a communist because he killed communists (somewhere over 40,000, and only counting the leaders).

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@brivael Saying that Hitler and his party were not on the left because they killed leftists is like saying that Stalin was not a communist because he killed communists (somewhere over 40,000, and only counting the leaders).

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

Remember: genocide means a deliberate attempt to exterminate a group, simply for being members of that group. That’s what “genocide in Gaza” alleges: that Israel is unsuccessfully attempting to exterminate every last Palestinian.

Now, stand fast the fact that the only really high rate of Gazan deaths happened in the first months of the war and dropped to barely registering after the ceasefire (see graph below). One might suggest that had Israel been intent on wiping out everyone indiscriminately, they would have maintained their rate of killing.

But what about the overall population of Gaza? If Israel had wanted to wipe out every Palestinian, you’d expect that overall total to fall, right?

At some point, the word genocide has to survive contact with arithmetic. Gaza’s own records now sit in open contradiction with the claim that Israel attempted to destroy its population: approximately 121,000 live births since 7 October 2023, against a reported direct war death toll of just over 73,000.

The extermination narrative looks increasingly absurd. More babies have been born in Gaza during the war than Gazans have been recorded as killed, including both civilians and combatants.

The usual escape route is to say that genocide need not succeed. That is legally correct and intellectually evasive when deployed to make every contrary fact disappear. Genocidal intent still has to be proved, and the ICJ has held that, where it is inferred from conduct, the destruction of the group must be the only reasonable inference available.

In Croatia v Serbia, it examined whether civilians had been spared, evacuated or allowed to survive when their supposed destroyers had the opportunity to kill them. Conduct preserving members of the protected population counted against genocide.

Now apply that reasoning to Gaza.

Start with polio. In September 2024, while Israeli troops were still fighting across the Strip, Israel agreed daily, area-specific pauses so Palestinian and international medical teams could vaccinate Gaza’s children. The first round reached 559,161 children under ten, around 95 per cent of the eligible population.

Israel then agreed to do it again. The second round reached 556,774 children, with 448,425 children between two and ten also receiving vitamin A. The campaign required the delivery of 1.6 million vaccine doses, refrigerators, freezers, ice boxes and hundreds of vaccine carriers. WHO and UNICEF planned for the vaccines and cold-chain equipment to transit through Ben Gurion Airport before entering Gaza.

A third campaign followed in February 2025. It vaccinated 602,795 children under ten, reaching 102 per cent of the estimated target because medical teams found children missed during earlier rounds.

The combined figure is 1,718,730 administered polio doses. (That represents repeated protection of roughly 600,000 individual children, rather than 1.7 million different children.) Almost the entire under-10 population was reached again and again.

These vaccines were administered by Palestinian health workers, WHO, UNICEF, UNRWA and their partners. Without Israeli cooperation, the campaigns could not have happened.

UNICEF’s end-of-year report says the outbreak had been interrupted by July 2025. It also records 49,000 children under two receiving catch-up vaccinations, with coverage exceeding 80 per cent. BCG vaccinations rose from 37,471 in 2024 to 47,556 in 2025.

It was an enormous public health enterprise, run over several months, involving thousands of workers and protecting nearly every child in Gaza from paralysis.

That is the physical reality of what Israel enabled: the children it was supposedly trying to destroy were repeatedly protected against a disease that could disable or kill them.

A coherent programme of genocide cannot be inferred by treating every Israeli action that preserved Palestinian life as irrelevant.

The birth figures deepen the problem for the accusation. A reconstruction using Gaza Ministry of Health and civil registration records suggests approximately 12,000 babies were born during the final quarter of 2023, around 38,000 during 2024, 49,267 live births during 2025, and roughly 21,000 so far in 2026. The latest portion is necessarily estimated because complete July and August registrations have not yet been published.

Many babies born during the first months had been conceived before 7 October. That explanation expired nine months into the war. Tens of thousands of children were subsequently conceived and delivered while Israel supposedly pursued the biological destruction of Gaza.

Births fell below their pre-war level, hardly surprising amid displacement and combat. Miscarriages, premature births and maternal complications also rose. Nothing about those conditions was humane or desirable.

However, the comparison remains devastating. Approximately 121,000 live births against just over 73,000 reported direct war deaths leaves a difference approaching 48,000. The number killed includes combatants as well as civilians, of course.

Gaza’s overall resident population fell because the calculation includes outward migration, the missing and other demographic changes. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics estimates that around 100,000 people left Gaza during the war. A decline driven substantially by people leaving a war zone cannot simply be relabelled as physical destruction.

No Israeli advocate needs to pretend that civilian life in Gaza was tolerable. It was an urban war fought against an enemy dug into hundreds of miles of tunnels beneath neighbourhoods, hospitals, schools and camps. Hamas designed that battlefield to make civilian deaths unavoidable and politically useful.

Israel issued evacuation warnings, created corridors and humanitarian zones, admitted food and medicine, coordinated medical evacuations, paused military operations and enabled almost 600,000 Palestinian children to receive repeated protection against polio. Around 121,000 babies were born during the war, far exceeding the reported direct death toll.

The genocide allegation survives only by declaring every piece of exculpatory evidence meaningless. Births supposedly tell us nothing. Vaccinations tell us nothing. Food deliveries tell us nothing. Humanitarian pauses tell us nothing. Failed famine predictions tell us nothing. The absence of measured famine mortality tells us nothing.

Such reasoning insulates the genocide accusation from reality. Every Palestinian death becomes proof of genocide, while every Palestinian life preserved through Israeli cooperation is dismissed as public relations.

The simpler explanation: Israel fought a devastating war against Hamas, accepting extraordinary military and political costs while repeatedly undertaking measures to preserve Palestinian civilian life. Those measures were imperfect and sometimes failed, as measures do in war.

Gaza’s own birth records, vaccination figures and famine evidence have hollowed out the allegations. A country attempting to destroy a people does not enable more than 120,000 births, facilitate 1.7 million childhood vaccine doses and support humanitarian operations feeding virtually the entire population.

That is war, with all its brutality and tragedy. It is not genocide.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

À bon entendeur, salut!

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Le plus gros scam idéologique du XXe siècle a une date et des auteurs.

Avant 1933, personne ne rangeait le national-socialisme à droite.
Les nazis se disaient socialistes. Leur programme économique était du contrôle des prix, de la planification, de l’étatisation de fait. Mussolini sortait du socialisme. Hitler parlait de socialisme national. C’était une guerre interne entre courants socialistes : marxistes d’un côté, nationalistes et corporatistes de l’autre.

Puis la machine soviétique a réécrit le spectre.

En 1924, Staline et Zinoviev inventent la théorie du « social-fascisme » : la social-démocratie est l’aile modérée du fascisme.

En 1928-1933, la Comintern pousse cette ligne jusqu’à l’absurde. Les communistes allemands traitent les sociaux-démocrates de social-fascistes et refusent toute alliance contre Hitler.

En août 1935, au VIIe Congrès de l’Internationale communiste, Georgi Dimitrov impose la définition officielle qui va durer 90 ans :

« Le fascisme au pouvoir est la dictature terroriste ouverte des éléments les plus réactionnaires, les plus chauvins et les plus impérialistes du capital financier. »

C’est le moment exact où le national-socialisme est expulsé du camp socialiste et collé à l’extrême droite. Non pas parce que c’était vrai, mais parce que les marxistes-léninistes avaient besoin de monopoliser le mot « socialisme » et de présenter tout concurrent comme l’ennemi capitaliste ultime.

Après 1945, les Soviétiques sont les vainqueurs. Leur version devient la doxa. Les manuels occidentaux, les universités, les médias l’adoptent. Hayek avait déjà écrit en 1944 que les racines du nazisme étaient socialistes. Mises avait démontré que l’économie nazie était du socialisme allemand (propriété privée nominale sous contrôle total de l’État). Ils ont été ignorés.

Résultat du tour de passe-passe :
un spectre linéaire avec un totalitarisme à chaque extrémité.
Le centre devient magiquement le seul endroit « raisonnable ».
On produit des Macron à la chaîne.
La droite est contaminée par association.
La gauche se lave les mains de tout totalitarisme économique pendant 80 ans.

Si on replace le national-socialisme là où il était vraiment — dans la famille des collectivismes —, alors le vrai clivage réapparaît :
contrôle vs liberté.

Et la droite redevient viable.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On a réussi le plus gros scam idéologique du XXe siècle : coller Hitler dans la case « extrême droite ».

Prenez l’intégralité du programme économique nazi (pas les citations sorties de leur contexte) :

- contrôle des prix et des salaires
- planification industrielle massive
- nationalisations et étatisation de pans entiers de l’économie
- stigmatisation des « profiteurs » et des « capitalistes » comme boucs émissaires
- obsession du contrôle de la localisation du capital et de la production

Remplacez quelques mots et vous avez exactement la même logique que celle d’un Bernie Sanders ou de n’importe quel socialiste qui veut « reprendre le contrôle » sur l’économie au nom du peuple contre les élites.

Le national-socialisme n’était pas « de droite » parce qu’il était autoritaire et raciste. Il était socialiste dans sa structure économique et dans sa méthode : désigner un bouc émissaire, concentrer le pouvoir, et planifier.

Appeler ça « droite » a permis à la gauche de se laver les mains de tout totalitarisme économique pendant 80 ans. Et c’est exactement ce qui pourrit encore le débat politique aujourd’hui.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@BadBalticTakes If you think about it, the Marxist you quote is right: he is even more idiotic than his Soviet ancestors.

[Vlad Lungeanu @apolodor_doi]

@Nastradinn @BadBalticTakes I can testify that the exact same thing happened to Romania.

[Annamária Amik (Ladaru) @Metanoia_79]

Opiul maselor nu este religia, cum susținea Marx, ci tot ce se comportă ca religie: naționalismul, umanismul sincretist ajuns la marginea transumanismului, consumerismul cu aere iluministe.