Tinsley

If you don’t follow a religion, what do you base your morality on?

It’s strikes me as a really long stretch to argue that suspending multiple entry Schengen visas for Russians is somehow making the West complicit in Russia’s war on Ukraine. Most Russians who travel on these visas are not opposition members. They are part of the privileged elites who can afford the luxury of European vacations. Nearly 60% of Russians said they couldn’t afford to travel abroad back in 2019, and 77% said they hadn’t been abroad over the past five years in 2022. That’s before the war made most of them worse off. These elites are the beneficiaries of Putin’s kleptocracy and whatever their opinion of the war is does not matter because almost none of them are going to risk their privileges over that. Will some Russians be caught in this who probably shouldn’t be? Sure: people traveling to visit relatives, or for medical procedures, etc. So for them, the process will be costlier. This cannot be helped. The idea that Russians have some inherent right to travel whenever they want to while their country is waging a genocidal war on its neighbor is morally repugnant. It takes extraordinary tone-deafness to demand to be treated as an innocent bystander in the crimes committed by your own government. This holds not just for elites who are active beneficiaries and supporters but also for people who are not. Russians online are up in arms about collective responsibility but unlike collective guilt, collective responsibility very much is a thing. At the very least, one should start by accepting that by not actively opposing the regime, one is providing a permissive environment for it to operate in. And before you come with some version of “Putin has repression, they can’t do anything, why don’t you go and protest” let me be clear that I am not saying that they should protest: this is up to them to decide. But I am saying that when they choose not to, they become enablers and so must expect to be treated as such. (And yes, some of us did participate in protests against repressive governments back in 1989, so I know what I’m taking about.) Third, I don’t understand the logic of saying that this helps Putin. Helps him how? Russians get upset that they cannot visit Amalfi and go, fuck these Europeans, let’s support Putin? I mean, this makes Russians sound totally infantile. Almost everyone understands that the reason for the restrictions is the war in Ukraine. If you oppose the war, you are not going to start supporting it now because you understand that Russia is the cause of the restrictions. If you support the war, well, you will just keep doing it — or maybe actually start to think how come the Europeans are suddenly so against you, so perhaps you might reconsider. I am not holding out much hope on this front but I am saying that restrictions should weakly work against the Kremlin (which is why Moscow is constantly denouncing them and trying to stop them). As I put it in early March 2022 when the Russians were at the gates of Kyiv, “The inescapable conclusion is that since Russia is a threat and cannot be trusted, the West must embark on a difficult path of securing itself from it yet again. Rearmament, transitioning crops to replace lost imports from Russia, replacing gas/oil with green sources of energy, enforcing borders yet again, all of this is coming.” “And so it has come to pass that we are yet again in a fight to defend our way of life against Putin’s alternative. The US administration still waffles about how much we must help Ukraine. It still does not really believe the Ukrainians could pull it off. But I beg to differ. With enough help and timely supplies, it is possible that Putin’s forces will never take Kyiv.“ “The stakes are frighteningly high. The gears that are separating the West from Russia have started to turn, and are revving up with increasing ferocity. If we do not match the stakes with effort, we will fall short, and not just the Ukrainians but all of us will pay the price afterwards.”

Communism failed in Cuba. Communism failed in Venezuela. Communism failed in the USSR. Communism failed in Eastern Europe. Communism has NEVER WORKED. Zohran's Communist policies will undermine themselves & NY will now experience the disaster of this failed ideology first hand.

Peter Thiel: If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time. The rupture of the generational compact isn’t limited to student debt, either. I think you can reduce 80 percent of culture wars to questions of economics—like a libertarian or a Marxist would—and then you can reduce maybe 80 percent of economic questions to questions of real estate. It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.”