However I’m too lazy and stupid to do due diligence and anyway the only things I know about the Dutchies are canals and giant cheeses. I’ll leave it to the experts.

Shirehome, have you got any pointers to that news about Austrian police/military not going along with enforcement? I’m checking around my usual sources for news from Germanophone space and not seeing this yet, but it would interest me very much to be convinced that this is happening at a scale that would matter.

–H.P. Lovecraft, “The Call of the Cthulhu”
_________________________

Zaphod:

HP had it knocked. A true poet.

Always a pleasure to exercise my inner reptile in debates with you.

Lizard People are real, you know!

I figure there’s something afoot in the collective unconscious: Lovecraft and Zombie Movies.

One could argue: ‘But what if that women was you?’

Fair point.

But what if you were Derek Chauvin just doing your job on any given day?

If I had to choose, I’d pick the less random wager with the Devil and choose to be born Chinese in 2021. Doing your mundane quotidian job is one thing. Flying close to the light (being a celebrity or a politician or a billionaire) is another thing.

Do you get my point? The average Han Chinese today is safer than the average American White Male. Reach for the Brass Ring and the odds start to fluctuate.

Well, that’s pretty clear. I still disagree. I’ll still take the fairy tales about the Constitution and Human Rights. But clear.

We will fence again another time.

Re: Lovecraft

I discovered that Lovecraft has become big in the last ten years. There was a Lovecraft renaissance in the 1970s, but this is bigger. All sorts of movies, a doco, websites and multiple premium leather bound editions of his work.

I’d say Hollywood has run out of Philip K. Dick to steal from. Lovecraft really is the motherlode of modern horror.

Better one prominent woman disappears for a bit than 1.4 billion person society is rocked for 2 or 3 years with a #MeToo movement which destroys many innocent careers and lives along with some guilty ones.

There are zero limits to the pragmatism of whoever holds real power in your society or in China. Were there any limits when your rulers decided to export all your factories to China so that they could grow richer than Croesus whilst impoverishing and destroying their own working people? Were there any limits when they decided to steal an election or to unleash AntiFa on you?

The only real limit is the threat that the armed American populace throws away the rule book and resorts to unlimited warfare on the ruling elite. Still waiting for that to happen. Limit? Unlimited? My head hurts now.

Limits and Constitutions are fairy stories we tell ourselves around campfires in the cave while the sabre tooth tiger roars in the dark. Someone should make a Lovecraftian Parody of the Federalist Papers 🙂

The only question is whether or not the pragmatism of those wielding power is more or less aligned with the interests of those they rule over. I posit that there is presently more alignment in China in 2021 than there is in USA and Rest of the West in 2021. In fact in the West interests of ruler and ruled are mostly now at best orthogonal if not sometimes diametrically opposed.

Relative alignments were certainly different in 1800 and 1900 and maybe even 1980. But I am interested in the world we have to live in now and for the immediate future.

I believe I misunderstood your Ayers/Dohrn point. However, I’m not sure of your point in @9:48.

If a MeToo accusation threatens or is perceived to threaten the government, then it’s OK she be disappeared?

What are the limits, if any, to this pragmatism?

Let’s say that this female tennis star told the unvarnished truth and that nasty ugly commie politburo member made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.

It might amuse you as an American to see said member’s member get an airing and see some ‘justice’ being done and you might see it as opening up a chink in some monolithic Chinky Tyranny.

Obviously from the rest of the Politburo’s view, this would be a Bad Thing and therefore it ain’t going to happen. Although my reading of the I Ching and the finest Longjing Tea Leaves suggests that the member with the dishonourable member is likely to draw the short straw in a forthcoming corruption investigation after a suitable face-saving interval.

From the viewpoint of the stability of the entire Chinese polity and the Common Weal… having a mass movement of female hysteria taking things real and imagined out on their menfolk sweep the land would be a Net Doubleplus Ungood.

And I mean that last sentence with zero irony. Only a certain kind of brainwashed Westerner(*) could believe that airing it all is always good.

In the West, you ‘win’ in politics by Defecting to the More Left every single time. This breeds chaos. Chinese have seen enough chaos and will utterly crush anyone who looks to be upping the entropy.

* Make no mistake, we too have been brainwashed our entire lives to believe certain things are so true that they don’t need any further thought or investigation and should just be axiomatic. The question is whether or not in 2021 our brainwashing is more or less adaptive than their brainwashing.