Stalin is unique. He didn't just kill his enemies.
He purged his closest allies, and went after their families. He sent hardcore communists straight into Hitler’s hands.
On the anniversary of his death, 4 Stalin moments of exceptional sadism: 🧵 1) Stalin exercised a sadistic form of political cuckoldry:
purging the wives of some of his closest friends and associates (obviously on made-up charges).
-The wife of his loyal ‘chief of staff’ Alexander Poskryobyshev was executed in 1939, leaving behind 2 children.
-The wife of Molotov, (his right hand) was arrested in 1948 and spent 5 years in the gulag.
-The wife of Kalinin (the nominal head of state) faced torture and spent 8 years in gulag.

Photo: Molotov and his wife, reunited after Stalin’s death.

If thou think US aid today is a waste, wait til you find out how the USA bailed out Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Literally, US aid saved the communist regime from an early collapse.
THREAD: It’s July 1921. The communist policies and the civil war have created such chaos in Russia, that the Bolsheviks have a famine in their hands.
One of the ‘faces’ of the regime to the outer world, author Maxim Gorky, swallows his pride and begs the West for help in an open letter.
The capitalists were to be thrown to the bin of history, but before that they should bail the Reds out.

'Elon Musk is a nazi' is the Left’s version of
'Kamala is communist' of the Right.
Since I bothered to debunk the latter, let’s also debunk this new politically illiterate moral panic.
To begin with, who is a nazi? At minimum, a nazi has 3 core beliefs:
-collectivism: a supremacy of the group (race, nation) over the individual. The collective, that needs to be racially pure, is embodied in the state.
-racism: a mindset that views the world as a struggle between different races (some superior, some inferior).
-antisemitism: Jews are seen as the race more responsible for undermining the harmonious societies of the white race.
How does Elon fare on these 3 core nazi tenets?

'Postmodernism = bad’ is key in the identity of conservative culture warriors.
Yet, they & postmodernists are close cousins on how they view the world.
See this claim by Yoram Hazony,
prominent intellectual of national conservatism,
on how truth is reached: What is he telling us?
We CANNOT reach a universal truth.
Different groups/traditions come to their own truth.
The horizon for knowledge is not reality out there,
but the consensus of the group in line with its tradition.
(quotes from 'Conservatism: a Rediscovery').

Why is National Conservatism becoming the dominant and popular force on the Right?
Because it fits like a glove the Right's two main characteristics:
Its lack of belief in individual agency, and its aversion to freedom. Why are conservatives so scared of change & see enemies everywhere, from AI to ‘Big Tech’?
Because, just like the Left, they see the individual as a weak & vulnerable subject.
Not trusting reason and agency, they see us as unable to cope in a frantic and changing world.

Impressive how every good principle in self-development books was captured & concretised decades earlier, in Ayn Rand’s work.
3 examples from Steven Pressfield’s ‘Turning Pro’, Darren Hardy’s ‘The Compound Effect’ & Bill Walsh’s ‘The Score Takes Care of Itself’.
THREAD!! In ‘Turning Pro’ Pressfield captures the process when one gets serious about his mission/calling in life, and goes all in on it.

With a crystal clear goal, now life becomes EASIER:

What I find more concerning in the cancellation of #GinaCarano is that it exposes the philistinism in today’s public sphere.
What did Carano do that was ‘abhorrent’? She tried, maybe unsuccessfully, to think based on principles. (...) ...She mentioned the ‘othering’ of Jews in Nazi Germany and how it later led to the horror of Holocaust and implied that something similar is happening in today’s public sphere.
Maybe her example was not tasteful, maybe she’s wrong…but…