Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.
Kagi gets flak from time to time for getting some of its search results from Yandex[1]. Whether that means it is compromised or isn't compromised (or doesn't mean either) is a question I think different people will decide differently depending on their own geopolitical leanings, but if your question is meant sincerely[1] then you should probably regard them as less "compromised" than you otherwise would have.
[1] I think the usual concern is more "they pay Yandex, and Yandex has ties to the Putin regime, so they are indirectly funding bad things done by Russia" than "their results have whatever biases Russia forces Yandex to have", but the latter could definitely also be a concern; there have definitely been allegations of Yandex results for e.g. searches related to Ukraine having pro-Russian biases.
[2] Rather than as a way to remind people who would object to Kagi's use of Yandex that it's happening.
As someone who is very left curious/sympathetic recently (though no doubt that only goes one way)... is there not a massive contradiction in how you describe your beliefs?
I believe in a better future where we abolish wage-labor and tear down unjust hierarchies, I don't believe in the legitimacy of things like copyright or borders
Open Borders to me is the most hyper capitalist thing in the world. It's all clearly designed to drive down the price of labour, continuously and without end. All the window dressing about everyone holding hands and enjoying different foods is a lipstick on the pig of the profit motive.
Author dislikes yarvin because he's a white supremacist.
I dislike him because he denies Israel exerts control over US foreign policy, while repeatedly saying the Gaza Strip should be ethnicaly cleansed. He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker, but when you peel away the layers it's just another Randy Fine lurking within.
But apparently white supremacism is worse than this... other kind of supremacism he has. The supremacism we dare not prefix but which kills orders of magnitude more people.
> He tries to pretend he's this subversive free thinker
This is one of the greater ironies about him and the people who admire his writing and ideas. They have a tendency to be firmly connected to rails, incapable of reflection or deviation from the course they've chosen. Regardless of if the ideas are workable or remotely sound, they charge forward.
I suppose most ideologies rooted in notions of subversion or free-thinking tend to suffer in similar ways. Any time you start to believe you've figured something out that others haven't, or that you're outside the confines of conventions, you're either a genius or very ignorant. None of these people are geniuses.
I was a fan of his at one point. I did enjoy him talking about the English Civil war and Glorious Revolution, the US War of Independence, etc etc. He introduced me to the "Whig View of History". And his substack post about the ludicrousness notion that the occupation of the US Capitol my a mob in 2021 was a serious attempt at a revolution/coup was a welcome antidote to the hysteria at the time.
But the thing with Yarvin is - he's widely read, but if you dig deeper into any one thing, his reading is shallow.
And like most extremists I have read (from communists to anarcho capitalists), he is pretty good at diagnosing problems but awful at proposing solutions.
You and I are on different pages. From here in Canada, that occupation of the US Capitol was (and still is) a dark moment in history for me, and a signal of worse things to come. There is no hysteria in my opinion, and the way things have unraveled since is a clear demonstration of why the outcry and outrage was very well-founded.
I also don't agree that extremists are particularly good at diagnosing problems. Instead, they tend to be confidently wrong in a way that's exceptionally compelling if you're emotionally vulnerable to their cause. This is why they rarely succeed in creating collective movements that involve broad cooperation and collective structures that can function and endure. They've misdiagnosed the issue, and they typically can't recruit people based on ideological merit, shared purposes, goals with clear outcomes, or other cohesive and productive substrates. They're more like cults and less like cooperative, coherent, purpose-driven organizations. Yarvin and his set fit squarely into this bucket.
These people typically talk too much and don't actually do anything. It's because there's nothing _to_ do when your ideology is a nebulous, discordant, illogical, and emotional dump.
I think you have a monolithic view of the US Right.
2016 Trump Admin is heavily populist, and his administration contains a lot of genuine political outsiders. People are very dis-satisfied, and genuinely excited about these "deplorables" shaking the establishment.
2024 Trump Admin is the establishment. Nearly textbook neocon, it's only innovation is its sophmoric conduct. To paraphrase Nietzsche... "if you drain the swamp too long, does not the swamp drain into you also?". Of course that assumes a draining attempt was made... regardless, it's populated almost entirely by those who were "never trumpers" during the first admin - including the Vice-President.
As for the man himself...I do not seem him as a deep or long term thinker. He's cleary attached himself to any vehicle which brings him to power. The idea that he planned and master-minded some "insurrection" in 2021 that was supposed to install him as a dictator, and his current Swamp Creature administration is somehow a continuation of that, just lacks credibility. It was a populist outburst of supporters of the first populist admin.Disillusioned protestors occupying a building is not a viable way to topple regimes (indeed it failed to do so in Hong Kong a few years earlier). These things do not work without institutional and military support, and the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.
A final note - the famous picture of the Jan 6 guy with the painted face and viking horns? He is now staunchly against Trump. Remember Trump is an egotist and an opportunist, not an ideologue. He wouldn't know what to do with a coup if he tripped over it.
> These things do not work without institutional and military support, and the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.
I don’t think it was a threat in that sense; I think it speaks volumes about the state of the country, though.
I wasn’t making a broad statement about the right at all. I don’t see a monolith in the United States. Perhaps that’s part of the problem, in a sense. There’s so little unity, the only common thread and binding force at the moment seems to be fear and uncertainty. This is perhaps Trump’s greatest strength and opportunity. Without it he would have remained irrelevant in my opinion.
> the left trying to make this out to be a serious threat played a big part in their loss of credibility.
As a leftist I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, especially the Israeli/neocon influence (to put it mildly).
But, you’re making the same mistake many do on the right. Neoliberals are not “the left”. They are right wing with a patina of left wing messaging (at times). They are warmongering Zionists who love insurance companies and mainstream media. The Democrats are a corporate party. You’ll find more allies on the left (like Massie did) if you make that clear distinction.
For the record, I never gave a shit about Jan 6th. More people should hold our government accountable like that. Their biggest mistake was not grabbing Pelosi’s hard drive and publishing it as a torrent.
Based. I always thought there must have been red-blooded leftists who enjoyed the photos of the politicians cowering on the floor as much as I did. Even if the "wrong people" made them do it.
Yes, our government is fully corrupt and Zionist occupied. There is no voting our way out of it, direct action is required. We probably also agree that the "Russian interference" hoax was little more than propaganda runup to their little adventure in the Ukraine. Liberals have an unfathomable obsession with Russia, China and Iran. The latter is lessening though, as even they are tired of doing Israel's dirty work for them.
Where we probably disagree, but maybe this conversation will shift your perspective, is on ACAB and the BLM riots. Bombing a police station is equally based to storming the Capitol. I also support direct action against ICE. Imho this government is far beyond redemption and should be dissolved.
If anyone is interested in more perspective similar to this, I recommend these two twitter accounts:
I have been encouraged by some of the right wing (not Republican) perspective on Gaza. They were disgusted by the genocide and that's something I can align with. My hope that is in the fight against Zionism we can reach a place of racial harmony and understanding. We all have a common enemy.
If right wingers can have sympathy for Palestinians and Arabs in general, I have hope that they can recognize that Black Americans and Indigenous Americans were treated the same way. Seeing a genocide live-streamed has flushed out those of us who care and those of us who don't, and it turns out there were some unexpected allies (or potential allies) in places you wouldn't expect them.
Most of my friends are starting to talk like models (myself included), it's actually concerning to an extent, because we spend most of the time interacting with AI instead of humans, we are starting to mimick their behavior and speech.
Yes it's odd how this supposed "non-communist" first planned to flee to the Maoist Mainland when his security clearance was revoked, not the ROC in Taiwan, considering he had far more connections with the nationalists.
I feel like this article is leaving some important bits out for the sake of a narrative.
From Wikipedia
By the early 1940s, U.S. Army Intelligence was already aware of allegations that Qian was a communist
This predates the red scare - at the time the US was in bed with "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
While at Caltech, Qian had secretly attended meetings with J. Robert Oppenheimer's brother Frank Oppenheimer, Jack Parsons, and Frank Malina that were organized by the Russian-born Jewish chemist Sidney Weinbaum and called Professional Unit 122 of the Pasadena Communist Party.[43] Weinbaum's trial commenced on August 30 and both Frank Oppenheimer and Parsons testified against him.[44] Weinbaum was convicted of perjury and sentenced to four years.[45] Qian was taken into custody on September 6, 1950, for questioning [7] and for two weeks was detained at Terminal Island, a low-security United States federal prison near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. According to Theodore von Kármán's autobiography, when Qian refused to testify against his old friend Sidney Weinbaum, the FBI decided to launch an investigation on Qian.[46]
This seems incredibly pertinent to the story as well.
The FBI's practice of tracking "suspected communists" literally comes from the Red Scare. The McCarthyist era, which you seem to be calling "The Red Scare", is known as "The Second Red Scare". The First Red Scare followed the October Revolution pretty much immediately, and is the condition under which the FBI started surveiling suspected communists in 1919.
When Qian was asked to testify against Sidney Weinbaum, it was during the Second Red Scare.
All of this is absolutely tied up with those moral panics.
There were a large number of actual, convicted communist spies at high levels in the 1940s and 50s. Soviet penetration was massive. The Manhattan Project, State Department, Intelligence Agencies... this was around the time the US had an arms embargo against the Republic of China while the USSR supplied the Chinese Communists with weapons captured from the Japanese in Manchuria.
This revisionism that it was all just paranoid weirdo (McCarthy) harassing innocent people is a very common trope, but an a-historical one.
Every other intellectual and artist was a communist or socialist back then, but not in any way that seriously threatened the state. They all happily worked on the bomb, after all.
It does not detail those facts. I gloss over them in my reading of the article because I think the topic is been well covered elsewhere. For example, the Oppenheimer movie did a fair job of depicting the communist party activities among intellectuals in the late 1930s.
The fact that those activities led to a thing called McCarthism in the early 1950s is pretty well documented.
Imprisoning Qian for 5 years for a meeting in the late 1930s after his contributions to the war effort was very Red Scare consistent.
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