Everyone who liked John Stewart or Bill Maher or Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins in their heyday of 10-15 years ago was always a midwit jerkoff. They all sucked.
None of it was ever 'smart' it was all smarmy bullshit the whole time. Don't pretend *they* changed if you liked them.
@WorkerUnit1 @Midwest_Midwit @restoreorderusa Yeah the real issue for businesses is that they are unwilling to take the risk of investing and having it not pan out. If you took the option of cheap foreign labour off of the table it wouldn't be an issue because all of their competitors would be in the same boat.
@TheWorthyHouse@TheBlackHorse65 It depends on what you mean by circulation. In my view reformers beating out the hardliners was an initial circulation. Then the forces that they unleashed caused a 2nd circulation which brought people like Yeltsin in and ended the whole communist system.
@TheWorthyHouse@TheBlackHorse65 My point though is that the protests were entirely preceded by a circulation of the elites. The soviet system collapsed from the top down, not the bottom up.
@TheBlackHorse65@TheWorthyHouse They enabled the popular protests by allowing public criticism of the regime and refusing to use the mikitary to crack down on protestors. By the time that the old guard began to react against this it was too late and the reformers were able to oversee a transition to liberalism.
@TheBlackHorse65@TheWorthyHouse The problem with @TheWorthyHouse's analysis of the eastern bloc collapse is that he sees the tail wagging the dog. Gorbechev and other reformist minded leaders had already worked their way into the upper echelons of the communist system by the time of the popular protests 1/2
@RadicalLib@TheBlackHorse65 The Serbian Black Hand Society is probably the best example of what form a successful dissident movement would take if peaceful regime change was not allowed. Targetted actions against rival elites, rather than random, nihilistic acts of terror on innocent bystanders.