John CEFD

Yes, you're right, i'd say most of the brainpower behind the globalist agenda are cynical or, at least, ruthless enough to put their beliefs in "hold" in order to get a reasonable degree of control and then put the ideas on practice. I mean, the left has always been this way and now most socialist or "progressive" ideas are being funded by the State-cartels of banking and big corporations for at least a century now, destroying the free-market (most efficiently by the control over the production of fiduciary money and generalized inflation) and putting the blame on the free-market itself, e.g, look at the occupy Wall Street movement some years back, when the disaster was caused, once gain, by expansive fiduciary credit not backed by savings and bubbles via State Central Banking and the idiots wanting more regulation and State control over the banking and credit sector. It's even funnier when you realize the the "cold war" wasn't the classical portrait of "America vs USSR", but the american government, in some administrations and under the globalist elite, helping the USSR via loans or helping american/western government-friendly corporations selling technology to the backwards communist block (as with Chinea in the 90's); not to mention the total control that the globalists have had over education on america and the western world over the last century, with new educational theories stating the the role of school is to produce "socially responsabile" citizens, or to teach, not exacly technical stuff such as grammar or arithmetic, but how the capitalist system opresses (insert 50 pg list of opressed whatevers), things that the Frankfurt School and Gramsci have been teaching and telling the left at least since 1920 onwards (not to mention that Stalin and the bolsheviks knew about it loved the idea! But he was clever enough to not bring it to the USSR itself, but to, on his own words, "make the west rot, and the smell even worse". So, yea, even today, the real and ultimate power-struggle in the world is bettween globalists (with the help of keynesians economics; socialism/comunism/progressivism) vs Nationalists (in here are gathered everyone who opposes a centralized world or western State, being conservatives, liberals, anacaps, libertarians etc.), or, in the other words, the Nation State and it's cultural values/heritage against Global State/progressivism.

Indeed, to make people interested in anything for that matter is just really difficult. It's like selling some product, you can have the most outstanding and friendly commercial showing how people can improve their lives with your product, but they won't buy it unless themselves realize the importance of the product. A way to introduce the libertarian germ into people's head is to make analogies with something regarding their life (specially their wallets) and how it could be better if there were less government etc., etc. And, for the most part, Dale Carnegie got it right: "When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion."

Nationalism is an double-edge sword: on one side it can be used to strengthen a people's will to endure in face of external agression or big catastrophe, or even to reinforce/save traditional values that are in danger; but it can also be used to, you know, support dictators or cults of personality suchs Mao, Stálin, Mussolini etc. Don't get me wrong, i'm a libertarian and anti-State individual, but it is important to not condemn straight away nationalism in this statist world: some nations/States are better than others. So i tend to analyze nationalism in an strategic manner. For instance: i tend to support western democracies (even though i loathe the concepct of democracy, that is, public owned government) and even to the point (sometimes) of their military build up, specially when facing China/Russia/Iran etc. And, on the cultural level, i tend to support Donald Trump (yes, yes, he's a minarchist and probably a little crony-minded), because the werstern tradition is on severe fire by those "cultural marxists" (you get the idea), and he's the one who's been out there fighting the barbarians inside the gate. And this is really serious, in my home country, Brazil, we've had an left-wing intelectual hegemony for the last 40 years, and the damage is so severe we're still struggling to get an reaction on action, but there's been considerable success. Just to show you guys, things here were so complicated and the left-wing movemente so strong that they even have a continental take-over plan (through organizations such as the São Paulo Forum, founded by Lula, yes, our former president, and Fidel Castro in 1990) to make a new USSR here in latin-america (Fidel Castro's words). Plus the unimaginable intellectual damage to the nation, it's gonna take years to take some sanity back to universities here... If we had a guy like Donald Trump running for president here, it would be a blessing, someone who would speak up to the socialist stablishment with all the economic and ideological support he has... Americans should be glad they have someone like him, 'cause here we are still closed on the left-wing clutches and still trying to get some traditional right-wing nationalism back on track.

Well, nothing new under the sun here. Aldous Huxley commented in his Brave New World Revisited (http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/): "In the light of what we have recently learned about animal behavior in general, and human behavior in particular, it has become clear that control through the punishment of undesirable behavior is less effec­tive, in the long run, than control through the rein­forcement of desirable behavior by rewards, and that government through terror works on the whole less well than government through the non-violent manip­ulation of the environment and of the thoughts and feelings of individual men, women and children. Pun­ishment temporarily puts a stop to undesirable behav­ior, but does not permanently reduce the victim's tend­ency to indulge in it. Moreover, the psycho-physical by-products of punishment may be just as undesirable as the behavior for which an individual has been pun­ished. Psychotherapy is largely concerned with the de­bilitating or anti-social consequences of past punish­ments. The society described in 1984 is a society controlled almost exclusively by punishment and the fear of pun­ishment. In the imaginary world of my own fable, pun­ishment is infrequent and generally mild. The nearly perfect control exercised by the government is achieved by systematic reinforcement of desirable be­havior, by many kinds of nearly non-violent manipula­tion, both physical and psychological, and by genetic standardization. Babies in bottles and the centralized control of reproduction are not perhaps impossible; but it is quite clear that for a long time to come we shall remain a viviparous species breeding at random. For practical purposes genetic standardization may be ruled out. Societies will continue to be controlled post-natally -- by punishment, as in the past, and to an ever increasing extent by the more effective methods of reward and scientific manipulation." Now, ostracism has always been a mechanism by which societies could repel the antisocial and damaging elements for self-preservation, it's a natural thing, and it is natural to happen in the large economic life and market process too: if you take loans and don't pay, you get a bad credit rate and will find problems from other economic agents plus bad reputation; and States have been using it in all sorts of ways in the past as well, by insufflating nationalism and then using citizens to or support the repel of anti-States elements is anything but new. But the catch now is the grandiose scale of the thing, thanks to new technologies, specially in internet and comunication. It's a Brave New World unfolding folks, marvelous ain't it?

Well, this is correlated to the problem of wanting to preserve property "values" instead of physical integrity. In this problem, someone entering the market would depreciate other owner's property value due to competition, that is, "harming" trhough passive acting towards the "victims". This is obviously insane. If we follow the guy's logic there would be no civilization at all, since anyone could simply outright murder someone else simply because they would be "threatening" him by mere existing, just as the newcomer in the market would be "threatening" the other owners. This logic fails to acknowledge property rights, just because we say there is competition on scarce resources doesn't mean that if A would not consume those resources, they would be used by B, and not by C, D or whatever; hence having no real claim to those scarce resources or base to prove that "threat". A, by mere existing, does not pose a real threat to B because B has no way to prove that what A has/consumes would be his; and A, assuming his resources were acquired through home-steading, production or exchange, hasn't directly harmed B on the use of those resources didn't decreased B's wellbeing but has crated extra-wealth.

Thanks for the answer, gonna take this in consideration on my next decision regarding my German studies.

No i haven't, Dylan, unfortunately. And now i'm lacking the time for it, just being able to focus on books exercises; but if i somehow stumble onto a good one, i'll tell you.

Yes, its pretty much blunt old fascism dressed up in a messed up ideological soup, that serves the old Communist elite, and now the ruling FSB elite, pretty well. It would be really awesome if Stefan makes one "Truth about Aleksandr Dugin" or something related; the only problem is that his political and philosophical thinking is so messed up that it would require some real time and dedication (who better than Stefan, right?). Dugin contradicts himself every 5 pages or so, but it isn't an idea for people who want to grasp how reality works, its a mere ideological propaganda to recruit militants. Wikipedia states this: Dugin is Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations of Moscow State University. Although he claims to have been fired from this post in early July of 2014, the university claims the offer of a department chairmanship resulted from a technical error but that he remains a professor under contract until September 2014. From what i heard, he was actually fired because he openly said in a web-debate to be in favor of mass-killing of Ukrainian people (probably learned from his old hero Stalin); wheter he's back at Moscow State University or not, i don't know. So we can pretty much see who funds his ideas.

Yes, that's obvious; but its amazing how cynical they are. Coming from hardcore communist-atheism to suddenly holding up the flag of "good old religious morale and against western immorality" (even though were the Soviets themselves who butchered their own people like pigs).

What Putin really stands for is his grip on power and the potential expand of Russia. His ideological background is the Fourth Political Theory; and its founder, Aleksandr Dugin, is also the cofounder of the National-Bolchevism party of Russia; its all in all a grotesque mixture of Fascism, geopolitical Russia-loving and environmental doctrine called Eurasianism. In his debate with brazilian philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, which was turned into a book, he says that the free-market (in his conception embodied in the West, USA, Nato, UN etc.) is destroying religious and conservative beliefs. And says that to, in sense, save this good old religious morale, its necessary to create a counter-part to American Empire who, according to him, wants to stablish a world-market (lol); that counterpart would be an union of Russia, middle-east and China, the Eurasian union.Even though he openly says in the debate to be a Christian, he despises the classical authors who pretty much were forerunners and founders of Christian thinking (Plato and Aristotle, Aquinas, St. Paul etc.), and apllaud authors historically known to be, directly or indirectly, against Christianity/religion at all. And he actually rewrote world's history to be an eternal battle bettween the ocean powers and the earth powers, for instance, Rome x Carthage; and that now is represented by the USA and its allies and Russia and its allies.The funny thing is that, suddenly both, Putin and Dugin, have become paramount defenders of conservative morale and beliefs; Putin who said that the breakup of the Soviet Union (the most anti-religious State ever) was the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century; and Dugin, a former Communist himself and cofounder National-Bolchvism.It's all bullshit, Putin is still an Atheist, and so is Dugin; they're just power-hungry warmongers clothed in this massive ideological soup.

No doubt the situation there is pretty messed up; and trying to understand things is all around confuse, given the russians are pretty good at desinformation.If someone is interested, Jeffrey Nyquist blog (jrnyquist.com), has really good articles about the situation in Ukraine. Some of them are: Russia Prepares for War; Is Moscow Abandoning the Nationalists at home and the Rebels in Ukraine?; Strategic Possibilities and Dialectical Games.

Until i was 19 i had never enjoyed reading, i would fall asleep halfway through and just quit. I don't really know why, but maybe it was because of my anxiety problem that i've turned myself to books, especially classical literature, as a way to focus on something else. It really helped, i got through my problem and what was supposed to be just a short-lived help became a hobby. I would say to you that, if you wanna become more interested in reading, you should have a reasong for it, not to just read for the sake of reading, but doing it as something that is really worth doing. All in all, it might help you start reading short but intense books. Take a look at Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, a short novel with intense psychological narrative per page.

First time here, taking a look around the place and i've already found this really helpful topic. What Tyler said is really accurate, as it worked for me with English, i try to immerse myself as much as i can in the new language (German, in my case). I switched my computer and Steam settings to German; i try as most as i can to listen to german bands (good thing i enjoy Rammstein) and watching german movies; and now i'm gonna look for kid books and watch more Deutsche welle.By the way, i was thinking about using Pimsleur (pimsleurdigital.com), does anyone here know if it is any good?