Trying so hard to be Soviet, and failing.

Within the lifetimes of any adultsi reading this, the Soviet Union consciously collapsedii more or less into its constituent parts. Prior to this it was held in some esteem in the West, at least as much as was necessary in order to create the atmosphere of tension – of creative destruction – so essential for peace and prosperity. Nothing focuses the mind like a clear enemy and the USSR was it for the West.

Only after 1991 was the Soviet Union’s previously spit-n-polished opacity scrubbed away to reveal the grimmer innards of what was otherwise a carefully crafted narrative both within and without. While the Soviet system never managed to convince its denizens to anything like the degree accomplished by more recent carbonistas and their patently racist race-to-the-bottom egalitarianisms – the Red party line being something of an “in” joke amongst all and sundry – their crushing material poverty was impossible to deny just as it is for the teeming mobs of Ikeaniks today.

But behind the Iron Curtain such material inequality was concealable, the Internet not having yet laid bare the scope and scale of a globe populated by billions of homosiii nor the environmentaliv ramifications of ersatz pablum writ megalarge, but the world today offers no such protections to states aiming to fleece their denizens in private. This is as evident in my own backyard – Canada – as anywhere. Quoth :

asciilifeform: ‘On June 9, the telecoms got an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that gives a plaintiff access to a defendant’s home, without notice, to search for and seize relevant evidence before it can be destroyed. A Federal Court judge would later declare the Anton Piller order in this case “unlawful,” but that was weeks after a group of men arrived at Lackman’s door at 8 a.m. on June 12. Lackman says the group included a bailiff, two computer technicians, an independent counsel and a lawyer representing Bell, Rogers and Videotron. Lackman’s belongings still haven’t been returned. Nor can he access the TVAddons website or its social media accounts, which were also seized as part of the original order. That’s because Bell, Rogers and Videotron have appealed the court decision and a Federal Court of Appeal judge has ruled that until the appeal can be heard, Lackman will get nothing back.’
asciilifeform: ^ achtung pete_d et al. Who said Pinkertons went out of style.

mod6: Pantsuits.v Pantsuits everywhere.
phf: What is that BingoBoingo says, Pence in our time.vi

mircea_popescu: Not surprising, is it ? ~Whole point of fiat corp is to keep the lawyers in yachts.
asciilifeform: noshit.jpg aha

pete_d: Aha. Actually saw that already this morning. “The whole experience was horrifying,” says Adam Lackman, founder of TVAddons and defendant in a copyright infringement lawsuit launched by the television giants. “It felt like the kind of thing you would have expected to have happened in the Soviet Union.” << My fav quote from piece. Like, no shit dude, WTF kinda revelation is this. Another quiet #t reader, apparently.
mircea_popescu: He’s exactly right, at that. Precisely the sort of thing that happens in Soviet Unions.

pete_d: The difference being, Pravda didn’t used to publish post-interrogation bitching by defendant. Now… does.
mircea_popescu: I don’t see this in Pravda. I see it in the same samizdatvii as always.

pete_d: CBC = Canadian Pravda.viii It’s official mouthpiece of Truth.
mircea_popescu: Ah is it ?

Ya, it is. Hard to believe as it is, and yet not hard to believe at all, these latest Soviets are soft, slow, and generally inept relative to their frequently bumbling but forged-by-fireix predecessors. Our Soviets confusedly publish in Pravda what was once the sole dominion of the Samizdat. Then again, with these open, inclusive, holocratic, gender-soup times, how could they not be confused as to who does what and when and how and oops maybe I shouldn’t have written that but omigersh now it’s too late.

Too late indeed.

___ ___ ___

  1. Just because your parents are dead or you have kids of your own doesn’t make you an adult. Adults are of independent means and abilities, making them about as rare as faberge eggs in Canada, the US, and the rest of the “civilised” world.
  2. “Consciously collapsing” is like “conscious uncoupling” for celebrity states, of which the USSR was undeniably one.
  3. Mostly of the sapiens variety. Mostly.
  4. More the social than the physical, and more the human than the ecological, but really all of the above suffer in no small degree from plastic shit everywhere.
  5. “Pantsuit” is a term of art referring to SHillary and her merry scary band of wreckers.
  6. “Pence in our time” is a Bingoism from Qntra’s open-eyed 2016 election coverage – US VP Mike Pence obviously being the inspiration.
  7. Samizdat, (from Russian sam, “self,” and izdatelstvo, “publishing”), literature secretly written, copied, and circulated in the former Soviet Union and usually critical of practices of the Soviet government. […] The major genres of samizdat included reports of dissident activities and other news suppressed by official media, protests addressed to the regime, transcripts of political trials, analysis of socioeconomic and cultural themes, and even pornography.

    ~Britannica

  8. Specifically, CBC = Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, an entirely publicly funded fake news organisation whose radio arm is the primary refuge of classical music appreciators. It’s very much a mixed bag.
  9. The gulags served their purpose.

3 thoughts on “Trying so hard to be Soviet, and failing.

  1. […] After more than half-a-decade of intensive decluttering, simplifying, trimming, minimising, economising, filing down, honing, and pruningi most every aspect of my life with engineered efficiency, much of it in the name of security in an ever-shifting world, it feels time to recapture life’s neglected beauty once more – to unearth the shimmerous splendour and glimmers of optimism from beneath the crumbling, often colourless edges of the WannabeSoviet Empire. […]

  2. […] to power grids to paper and pens – is better served by using the best of the remnants of the decaying Empire than reinventing every last nut and bolt. […]

  3. […] architecture proposals, is very much mirrored in the ONLY TWO TERMS limits on the Presidency and other formalistic voodooism. Clients ultimately hire architects to imagine, and seeing what they come up with before handing […]

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