Wow, it’s totally like those idiot lefties who were trying to emigrate from the US to the USSR at the height of Stalinist purges. There were over 50,000 of them and they were as deluded as the poor fools who believe that Russia – with its sky-high abortion rates and most children growing up without their fathers – has “traditional” values. I mean, yes, it’s traditional for Russia but for nowhere else.
Smells like a money-making scheme to me!
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“emigrate from the US to the USSR”
If I had a gazillion dollars I’d find a way to make a documentary about these poor saps….
It could be a great tragicomedy. They’ll never know what hit ’em….
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I’m going to write a separate post about one of them because the story is amazing and completely true.
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” write a separate post about one of them”
That should be interesting. Sometime after WWII about 5000 Greeks emigrated to the Polish people’s republic (which is weird) which means from time to time you come across someone with a Greek name…
Once in Krakow met a descendent of a Brit who’d emigrated to Poland around the same time (he had an English last name though he didn’t speak a word of the language).
I was referring more to the saps who might move to russia thinking it’s a traditional Christian country (ha ha ha). That would be a great show.
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It would be great to have a documentary about both groups. It’s been almost a 100 years, and these poor idiots are still at it.
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Hal Freeman?
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They were talking about recruiting people from SA a few years ago. I don’t think many actually went.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/why-russia-is-wooing-south-africas-white-farmers/2018/09/23/3308a7c4-b6a3-11e8-ae4f-2c1439c96d79_story.html
Rod Dreher would be one of the first to move there. He’s now living in a “self-imposed exile” in Hungary because he’s so afraid of all the trannies taking over America.
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Rod seems like some kind of manic-depressive head case.
But I do sometimes look to where our current political/economic climate is headed, and wonder if there’s any safe haven from it. Purely speculative for me, of course, because I haven’t got the resources or skills to expatriate successfully (if only I had known! I would have gone for a degree in geology!). But I do have a wee bit of… I dunno. Not sympathy exactly, but perhaps respect for people who also see some ugly coming down the pike, and are willing to stake their personal resources on a long-shot bet that they can move themselves and maybe their families somewhere things will be less ugly. Some people just talk. These folks may be deluded, but they’re putting their money where their mouth is. In the bigger picture, people aren’t just gambling on Russia. I’ve read stories and comments from people who’ve gambled on all sorts of places for the same reasons– Romania, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Mexico, the Caribbean, India, Japan, Singapore… seems to depend more on where they have connections than on where they think things will be ideal. Emigrating is hard.
None of us knows yet whether any of them will win that bet. I think the odds are kind of long, but who knows? If I were, say, an expert veterinarian and could move anywhere and still get a job, maybe I’d go for something with less name recognition… Paraguay?
Some people saw the writing on the wall and left Europe in the 30s, before everything went up in flames. What did their neighbors think of them? Poor deluded arseholes? How many countries did they place their bets on, for good or ill? Yet many were better off than those who left during the war, on the run with whatever they could carry, or after the war, having lost everything already. There’s no foolproof way to gauge that, beforehand. Pay your money, take your chances.
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This is the best country in the world. People play these nutso games with pronouns and everything else because they don’t have any serious problems. I now watch the Matt Walsh show, and it’s good but every time I’m amazed that life is so good that people can get so invested into such extremely trivial stuff. I watch the show for the calming effect it has on me.
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Absolutely. And I’ve been a couple other places for more than a weekend and still prefer to live here 😉 But I don’t think these people are leaving based on what they think of the present state of affairs. It’s a gamble based on where they see that present state going in the near future– and none of us really know how that’ll turn out. You can laugh all you want at the guy placing his bet on the funny-looking horse, but until the race is over… (shrugs).
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“People play these nutso games with pronouns and everything else because they don’t have any serious problems”
Which is weird because the US has very serious problems of the type that people used to be able to tackle… but now this seems impossible.
Again, this seems like the Latin-America-ing of the US where the middle and upper classes simply disengage from the massive countries in the problem and instead focus their attention on trivial bullshit….
There are ‘activists’ but they can’t get anything positive done (seemingly by design).
A handful of people seem to be having an effect on some issues but it’s far from enough.
I incline to the theory that people play these nutso games because there are real, and serious, problems that are likely to get worse, and which may not have good solutions (monetary policy, military recruiting, failure of family formation, real-estate speculation, school failure, resource depletion, infrastructure degradation, skill loss), but noticing them is incompatible with their carefully-constructed religious worldview (Progress uber alles: everything only gets better, Utopia is inevitable). It’s imperative, when challenged by contradictory evidence or opinions, to retreat deeper into the cardboard-box fort, cover one’s ears, and shout the current approved slogan, until all challenges to that worldview go away, whether that’s “RESPECT MY PRONOUNS!!! LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” or “TAX CUTS WILL SOLVE EVERYTHING!! LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
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Hah! Honestly never got so intimate with the politics (I could tell you about my neighbors, the buses, and the food all day long!). But it’s distressing to see US politics being Latinized.
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Civic religions seem to be fairly common.
At least in SA, the challenge has to come from the people who are supposedly benefiting from the wonderful diversity pointing out that actually their lives are not getting better.
https://www.politicsweb.co.za/opinion/the-end-of-our-splendid-salvation
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Civic religion… I like that term for it.
The US at least– maybe the broader Western world to some lesser extent, has a problem with limits and boundaries. This has manifested itself in all sorts of wacky ways– Manifest Destiny (no geographical limits!), Fukuyama’s “End of History” (my Dad bought that hook, line, and sinker because it was so bias-confirming for him- no economic limits!), the current War on Biology (no physical limits!), the persistent belief that computer hardware will keep getting better and cheaper forever, despite all the evidence that progress in that field is grinding to a halt, that medical technology will keep improving until we can all be immortal and free of sickness, that solar/wind/nuclear/etc. will swoop in and save us all from the inevitable decline of fossil fuel extraction so we can continue living air-conditioned suburban commuter lives forever and throughout all generations… the transhumanists are a classic outgrowth of this mindset, and so are the colonize-mars people.
You also see it in the way that no new tech can be questioned. Everything new is automatically good. 5G everywhere? Unmitigated good. Mrna for everybody without the usual human testing? Unmitigated good. New way of teaching reading? Unmitigated good. Electric cars? Unmitigated good. Got questions or doubts about any new whiz-bang thing that just came along? Heretic! How dare you?
Progress is their god, Limits are their Satan. Frugality and humility are their chief heresies.
IMO, as the inevitable decline of the empire really sets in, this is going to turn into death cults among those incapable of letting go of it.
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“now living in a “self-imposed exile” in Hungary”
That is hilarious to anyone who knows very much about Hungary… back in the early 90s there was a conscious government plan to help build up the post-communist economy by becoming a European haven for sex-tourism (I’m absolutely serious).
The plans didn’t come to much beyond kick-starting a local porn business.
I remember when walking in some areas of downtown Budapest was annoying because of the guys trying to drag random passers by into strip clubs.
I can’t imagine Dreher (from his writing) being able to learn Hungarian (or the local system) so he’s probably in a little bubble and gets all his info from local handlers.
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It’s so weird seeing so many conservatives and Republicans so in love with Russia and Putin. A few decades ago that would be treasonous. What ever happened to the party of Ronald Reagan?
At this point Putin’s best chance for victory is for Trump to get re-elected.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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