Comment by cedws
4 days ago
Remember when they arrested Pavel Durov? I don't buy their official reasoning.
Dear European friends, our leaders are tightening the screws. If we don't make our voices heard this is only going to get worse.
4 days ago
Remember when they arrested Pavel Durov? I don't buy their official reasoning.
Dear European friends, our leaders are tightening the screws. If we don't make our voices heard this is only going to get worse.
I remember. It helped expose his lies about not traveling to russia and not collaborating with russian security services.
care to expand/provide some more info?
Durov had long claimed he was in exile from Russia and couldn’t return and that he was a UAE/French citizen. then records leaked that showed 120 border crossings from 2016-2021 and that he still held a Russian passport. One such border crossing was a flight from St Petersburg on June 18, 2020 which happens to be the same day that Telegram was unblocked in Russia… Lots and lots of smoke..
The Kyiv Independent article is a good summary.
https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-examining-telegram-found...
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I mean, Durov has been trying to push for Russian puppets to get elected in Romanian and Moldovan elections, by pushing to everyone (at least in Romania, he might've just posted on twitter for Moldova) that the French government is trying to interfere in the Romanian elections. I mean, it turns out, Russia was, on behalf of the candidate he was talking about... so take from that what you will.
Oh, yeah, and he calls himself DuRove now. Hats off for that one, but I hope he rots in prison for advancing the Russian agenda.
I mean, sorry, but the EU essentially installed puppets in both Romania and Moldova, what are we even talking about here?
I'm sure you're very familiar with the politics of both countries, but tell me...
How is Nicusor Dan a puppet of the EU? More than Calin Georgescu? The guy who actively tried to stage a coup? More than George Simion? Granted, there's no PROOF he's a Russian puppet, but he's a far right twat that has views friendly to Russia.
How is Maia Sandu and PES a puppet of the EU? And... let's look at BEP. Voronin, Russia friendly ex President, he was very against Moldova trying to get closer to the West. And Dodon? The guy who is being indicted for treason, who's a friend of Plahotniuc (he stole 1 billion dollars from banks and fled the country)? Yeah, sure, puppets of the EU, vs corrupt fucking puppets of Russia.
I know it's easy to look at this stuff from the outside and say, oh, yeah, the EU is interfering in elections, but there's a lot of history here that you obviously don't have. I like Maia Sandu more than Nicusor Dan (his positions on gay rights were disgusting a while back, he now just stopped talking about them), but compared to the obviousness of the Russian support for their opposition, I think the fact that the EU supports them is just insignificant.
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You know I didn't use to understand libertarians, but after years of watching boundaries being overstepped again and again I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want? Security is beyond a laughable excuse for things like chat control. Power tripping elitists will never be happy until they have the entire population under 24/7 camera surveillance and can read every thought in our heads as it occurs. If you make crime impossible, you make free will impossible.
> I think I see the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods.
AFAIK, you're not allowed to live in a cabin in the woods in Europe.
Except in Finland :)
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The same reason there's only more regulations being piled on top of previous ones. Sadly only wars and similar catastrophes work as reset buttons for these things historically. A peace as long as the current one is somewhat of an untested ground
The libertarians that want to live in the woods have a point.
The problem is the libertarians that want to burn it all down and build a corpo-state.
"... the appeal of burning it all down and living in a cabin in the woods."
I hope that's not what you think libertarianism is about. I'm sure there are libertarians who DO feel that way, but it's not a core tenet to personally isolate and live off the land.
Libertarianism sees not left vs right, but instead the people against the government. Libertarians focus on personal liberty and solving problems together, voluntarily, as individuals cooperating. A libertarian would say, for example, that if I think a bridge should be built, then I should either build it myself or convince other people to help me out voluntarily - but not use government to force people to help (via taxes, etc).
Libertarians are against force/coercion, and see government as the ultimate expression of force.
There are some loony libertarians, as there are of any political party, but most of us have pretty ordinary and mainstream beliefs and priorities.
Libertarians reject governmental force but provide no barriers to corporate force. There are innumerable documented examples of corporate force having greater control over the population than a government. These examples are not just historical but also include the time we are currently living in.
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I agree with your overall sentiment, except:
"Like, in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms"
Russia. Putin.
The chances of Russia invading a NATO country are essentially zero simply because it would, almost certainly, lead to nuclear war. The idea that nukes wouldn't come out is contradicted both by decades of wargaming. In fact this is exactly what led to the end of the Cold War.
At one time the US thought we could end the Cold War by waving a bigger stick. But Proud Prophet [1] was an extremely elaborate war game played out in the 80s that demonstrated that literally every single aggressive strategy, regardless of how innocuous, invariably spiraled rapidly towards nuclear war and the depopulation of the Northern Hemisphere.
This led the US to sharply scale back rhetoric against the USSR, drop ideas of successfully fighting a nuclear war, and a sharp shift towards de-escalation and away from strong-arming. 7 years later the first McDonalds would open in the USSR. The next year, the USSR would collapse.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proud_Prophet
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I'm talking about our society internally, not potential external attacks on it. It's reasonably high trust and crime is rare outside a few outlier cities. We could not be further from warranting these sort of fascist style crackdowns. Ironically yes we could be spending funding used for domestic surveillance and bureaucracy on buying more Himars.
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try it, like these people https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7iJDMU43iUk
It’s important to defend libertarian values even when things are good. Small violations of civil rights have a tendency to stick around and snowball into something worse.
The katamari will grow until morale improves.
> in Europe we already live in a completely safe society in historical and geographic terms, what more do you fucking want?
For people not to get killed, abused, and exploited? You don't sound like a "libertarian" you sound like an anarchist.
You know who has a large part of the population under global 24/7 surveillance right now? Google, Facebook, Microsoft.
> We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.
Read: "Hi, I'm a right-wing populist."
Tradition is virtue signalling to them. Sovereignty is to fuel this anti-EU trend (a Russian propaganda point).
Durov is a Russian asset, I'm sure of it. Why, cause he got ties with the underworld, that is why. He didn't want to act on warez, narcotics, criminals, scams, etc. None of that he took serious, because in the viewpoint of a Russian criminal (the Russian state is the head of the criminal enterprise) all of that is just business. Which is also why he gets along so well with Trump. But when he didn't want to act on child pornography, he went too far. Because approximately all adults oppose that sexual preference. That is when France got his ass handed on a silver plate.
If this guy would care about free speech he'd be a lot more vocal about Trump and Putin instead of France and EU. The EU is under attack by Russian trolls, ask anyone who works in SOC. It has become worse...
> I don't buy their official reasoning.
Why not? Have you used Telegram? Before Durov’s arrest there was open drug trade everywhere, afterwards they started to actively ban groups.
In the Pavel case, it involved child pornography groups on Telegram and the fact that they ignore a court order.
But I agree with you for the authoritarian logics in Europe (even America) with Chat Control and other actions like the French gov. just did....