𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

This is a draft email from Epstein to himself. We don’t have the actual emails that prove any of this.

If you look at just about any country anywhere, you’ll find that party membership does not really correlate with election success, but rather with more radical beliefs or activism. The national election results of the CPRF had been on a downward trend well before the war broke out as well. Their membership may have increased, but electorally they lost about 70% support. Even in wartime that’s hard to ignore.

I also don’t think you’ve been paying attention to what the propaganda efforts of the Kremlin have been putting out. As a result, you have cause and effect reversed. They’ve been boosting national pride through the “great history of Russia”, which inevitably means highlighting the Soviet Union and the great patriotic war. But the Soviet sympathies created through it are a side-effect of this.

This also explains why polling suggests that sympathies for the Soviet Union mostly (not fully) consist of cultural and military pride. Yet sympathies for the Soviet economic system is low in comparison. It’s also heavily influenced by current geopolitics. Ukraine used to be the most pro-communist member state, but these days the majority no longer regrets its dissolution. In East-Germany, there’s a significant chunk of people who believe life was better in the GDR, yet that effectively translates into nationalist support for parties like the AfD (who of course are fascist, not communist). In Hungary, a large majority believe they were better off under communism than they are now, yet a large majority of 70% supports the move to a market economy. Uzbeks believe the Soviet government better responded to their needs, yet only a tiny minority believe life was actually better in the USSR.

But this is all largely besides the original point, which is that the graphic showing the Soviet referendum results is used in a misleading narrative that suggests people did not want the Soviet Union to dissolve, as that wasn’t on the ballot and subsequent referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence and dissolution. And as election results in former Soviet states prove, support for a return to communism or a more socialist system is fairly low, despite a complicated nostalgia for the Soviet Union in some member states.

Party membership is a bad indicator for national popularity, as evidenced by the historically bad election result that followed the first article you linked.

The second article does not have anything to do with the popularity of the party.

The third article contradicts the sentiment you express in your own paragraph; you suggest the Russian government is taking advantage of rising Soviet sympathies, as if it’s “just happening”. But as your article explains, those Soviet sympathies are being expressly fuelled and created by the Russian government, as part of their propaganda efforts to promote the great patriotic war (which Putin now claims they’re in another one of course, fighting the west). It’s artificial, not natural.

CPRF support rising rapidly? You must live in a fantasy world. Their electoral results have rarely been worse, their 2024 presidential election candidate receiving a mere 4% of the vote (a record low for the party).

Protests were already widespread in the Union. Several member states had already declared nominal independence from Moscow. Gorbachev was doing damage control and trying his best to keep the Union from fracturing further. Elections in member republics saw huge rises in popularity for noncommunist parties.

The referendum was an attempt to gain the political momentum required for reform, in an ultimate effort to keep the Union together. It was essentially a kind of propaganda attempt to display large support for the reformed Union, made possible because dissolution was not on the ballot.

There was widespread civil discontent before the referendum. Elections saw noncommunists rise to power and several member states declared independence. Then I am somehow to believe that the population first swung all the way back to “actually the Soviet Union is great and we don’t want to leave it” and back to “we should leave the Soviet Union” in a matter of mere months? That is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, which you don’t have. The truth is far simpler: at every point once the civil unrest started, the population voted in favour of less Soviet Union and for more independence, and not the other way around.

My point regarding the phrasing of post-Soviet polling is that the wording drastically changes the outcome. Sure, people aren’t happy about how the 90s turned out and they feel they’re not part of a superpower anymore. They’re not happy with being screwed over by western nations. They say those things were better under the Soviet Union. But ask them if they would go back to such a Union, and suddenly support evaporates. And in several former member states even the first few questions don’t find much Soviet sympathies (eg the Baltics). They want to live in a stronger nation, akin to the Soviet Union, but they do not want to go back to what once was. It isn’t a simple case of “boy we sure had it good”, that does a huge disservice to the diverse and complicated opinions of the Union.

such as in the US Empire, where within a single month sentiment on Israel flipped from overwhelmingly positive to majority negative.

It didn’t go from +90% to -90%. That’s what I mean with the huge ‘swing’ seen here. Negative attitudes on Israel went from 42% to 53% in 3 years time. Yet this supposed “total reversal of opinion” happened in months? Nonsense of course. Remember, the Soviet referendum did not have “dissolution” as an option. People picked the option closest to it.

the large majority of people in post-soviet countries feel worse off and/or regret its fall

This is irrelevant to the false notion that the Soviet Union dissolved against what the people wanted at the time, which that graphic is often used to misleadingly suggest.

Even then, opinion polling on the subject is highly unreliable. Even the same pollster slightly rephrasing the question nets wildly different results. In the Baltics opinion is pretty consistent that the fall of the USSR was a good thing. But Belarusians tend to disagree with that. But when Belarusians are asked if they prefer to follow a Soviet system or a western democratic system, they choose the latter. And when another pollster asks them again in the same year, opinions flip again.

There’s certainly a strong sentimental nostalgia towards the Union, though not in all former member states. Yet it seems unlikely the population would be willing to vote it back into existence.

Right up to the end, the majority of people in the USSR wished to retain both the USSR and the system of socialism. This is proven not just from eyewitness reports of support, but also vote totals

This isn’t entirely true. The question posed essentially meant the USSR would reform into a more supranational organisation, granting more sovereignty and independence to the constituent republics. Voting “yes” was basically a vote for “‘less’ Soviet Union”, as there was no option to vote to dissolve it entirely. It’s also why after the yes-vote won, Soviet hardliners tried to coup the government.

When the New Union Treaty wasn’t fully implemented, member republics took it upon themselves to run full independence referendums, which were passed with overwhelming numbers (see the results on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Referendums_in_the_Soviet_Union, 90%+ pro-independence in most countries. Remember, most happened in 1991 just like the Union referendum, and no large population swings to the complete opposite direction that fast). The massive disapproval of the communist party was also very visible, as the vast majority of republics started electing non-communist leaders.

And of course there were people still in favour of the Union, but they were largely outnumbered. Pro-union manifestations were met with large protests that often ended in police action to suppress them. Pro-Union sentiments started increasing again after the economic crises post-collapse, but it has never become so popular again to lead to a reformation.

Well, only on the right screen sizes it is. Otherwise the ‘classic’ variant gets disabled.

As a shareholder, you are financially incentivised to not question narratives the company presents if they supposedly present the company in a good light.

Suppose you do ask, the narrative unravels and the share price tanks. Congrats, you’ve just lost a buttload of money. Why would you do that?

No, best option is to applaud loudly, tout it in the press and watch useful idiots buy your shares at inflated prices.

The people who do ask the questions are the people the company doesn’t feel obliged to answer.

When the battery dies, the glasses continue to function as a traditional pair of single-vision specs, ensuring the wearer is never left in the dark or have safety compromised such as when driving or operating machinery.

He’s authored 60 repos on Github and has forked another 95.

https://github.com/marcj?tab=repositories&q=&type=source&language=&sort=

He also founded companies and used to be CTO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marc-j-schmidt-957875110

So I suppose he’s both.

Some of them are protesting for it, judging by the pro-shah chants. Not sure how widespread it is though.

Ja

I did.

Entra is derived from the Latin intrare, meaning “to enter”, which makes sense for access management/id verification software tbh.

Whether or not she is in Russia is disputed btw.

According to the article, the price wasn’t the only incorrect thing, the kit itself was also out of stock. Corsair currently isn’t accepting pre-orders for this kit at all, so they’re not hiking the price for this product because they’re not selling it.

A global, world-ending nuclear war is still unlikely at this point.

There’s a fair few steps in between filled with horrors that we get to pass first. Such as when superpowers realise that since nobody can realistically use nukes, conventional warfare is back on the table (e.g. if China invades Taiwan and the US intervenes, will either side nuke the other’s population centers? Probably not).

Then follows the realisation that superpowers can use nuclear weapons in a conventional war, but in a more tactical way (as a little treat). Don’t bomb a city, bomb a navy, or an airfield or army base instead.

Global nuclear war would only happen if a nuclear state is threatened with total destruction. But fully destroying a state hasn’t been the playbook for some time now. Instead, take whatever peripheral stuff you want, and strategically weaken the enemy state in key areas (e.g. take out an important figurehead, like the US did with Maduro, or fund/arm insurgencies like in Syria). Let civil unrest then do the rest and topple the government for you. Then use diplomatic/economic/military pressure to sway the fledgling new government into your sphere of influence. With a bit of luck the country itself isn’t totally ravaged and can become profitable fairly soon.

Half-Life Alyx came out in 2020 and was pretty good.

Microsoft doesn’t earn more than 90% of their revenue from gaming, so it’s not on here.