What Even Are the Rules, Anymore?

Are we allowed to talk about anything at all?

Another day means another article about the ongoing arrests of Satano-Nazi terrorists within Russia.

RIP to this guy:

I’ve opened up a whole can of worms by taking a peek at who has been getting arrested in Russia since the Not-Mutiny [NOTE: this guy got sentenced recently, which is why it was in the news] and I confess that I am very baffled and alarmed by what I am reading.

Here:

The Abakan court of Khakassia sentenced the editor-in-chief of the New Focus publication Mikhail Afanasyev to five years and six months in a general regime [prison] colony in a case of disseminating fake news, the regional prosecutor's office reported. He was found guilty of disseminating false information about employees of the Russian national guard.

The defense intends to appeal the verdict.

Afanasyev was detained in April of 2022, his home was searched. Later he was sent to a pre-trial detention center. The prosecutor's office indicates that the Investigative Committee opened a case under paragraph “a” of Part 2 of Art. 207.3 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (public dissemination of knowingly false information about the use of the Russian Armed Forces, the exercise of their powers by Russian state bodies) based on materials from the FSB department for Khakassia.

We talked about this article last time as well. It seems extremely broad. I don’t really understand how it is even legal, despite it being part of the law now, obviously, because it seems to be a direct violation of free speech guarantees in the Russian Constitution. The Russian authorities used free speech as an argument many times as justification for allowing Western propaganda and smut to flow into Russia for the last three decades when asked to do something about it by the socially conservative peasant population. Ironic.

So, why is it suddenly illegal to post opinions about the Shoigu or the spooks?

Maybe I’ve sent too much time around the legally-minded Anglos because I just don’t get these Byzantine machinations. But maybe I will have better luck understanding what the actual thing he posted about was and why it offended the spooks if we read on together:

According to investigators, Afanasyev published false information on the New Focus website and on his social networks “under the guise of reliable messages” regarding the participation of riot police officers and SOBR of the Rosgvardia department for Khakassia in the military operation in Ukraine.

“In particular, under the guise of reliable information, the publication presented information about dead, missing, captured and injured employees, improper performance of official duties, etc.,” the prosecutor’s office points out.

Wait, what!?

I asked around with my friends who also read the article and all I got back were confused shrugs back. Is this guy actually in trouble for claiming that OMON and SOBR participated in the Special Needs Operation? Is it illegal to claim this? If so, I disavow anyone who posts information about SOBR and OMON units participating in the SMO, even if they were just faithfully transcribing firsthand accounts from the operation.

In the defense of bloggers reporting on the fact that the OMON and SOBR (which are internal police units) were being called on to participate in the special policing action in Ukraine, the authorities have never once outlined the rules for reporting on any of this.

That is what is so frustrating and unnerving — and it was probably calculated to be so!

Like, we still don’t know what Strelkov did to merit his arrest! We are left speculating about why that teen got nabbed by the FSB for posting about Wagner’s nukes on Telegram (dismissed, thankfully). We don’t even understand the nature of the charges leveled against the priest who didn’t like Shoigu or the NKVD!

Again: it all boils down to what this “fake news” term means that the law is talking about.

You know, in America this term was thought up by the spook-controlled mainstream media to be leveled at samizdat bloggers and vloggers who were pushing back against the MSM. Trump simply puckered up his lips and glowered into the camera before saying “no, you!” thereby declaring that actually the MSM was the real fake news and through sheer force of personality and the devotion of his fans, the term came to be reversed in America to actually mean the MSM. That is why it is so strange for me to see the Russian government prosecuting people for “fake news” as if they didn’t get the memo from Langley to come up with a new term.

Look: maybe all these arrested people really are secret anti-SMO terrorists or traitors to Russia, I don’t know! It could be the case!

But I do have some common sense heuristics to work with that make me doubt that this is the case. Like, if the Russian spooks are now shutting down Liberals, why are so many prominent, visible and confirmed pro-West Liberals still unarrested and unmolested sitting pretty at the big companies and at every single level of the government?

Like, if this really was a purge of traitors that ZAnon is claiming that it is, then why is Nabiullina still there? Abramovich? Deripaska? Ernst? Gromov?

There’s a full list here:

Are they starting small and working their way up?

You know, ZAnon might be able to fool Westerners to whom all these Russian names are too confusign to figure out anyway, but people in Russia know who is who and literally no one thinks that someone like Vladimir Kvachkov is actually a secret Liberal and pro-Westerner who Shoigu bravely purged a month ago:

In fact, upon further consideration, the arrest and trial of Kvachkov is so absurd that it deserves a digression because I don’t think I’ve talked about it before yet. So here we go:

In Moscow, a court fined retired Colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate ( GRU ) Vladimir Kvachkov for discrediting the Russian army . He will be forced to pay 40 thousand rubles for posts on the Odnoklassniki social network criticizing the conduct of the special operation.

The reason for the accusation was three posts on the Odnoklassniki social network, which were posted in 2022 in the group “Vladimir Vasilyevich Kvachkov” (19 thousand subscribers), reports BFM.ru. According to investigators, it was Kvachkov who administered the group since 2019.

The posts criticized the special military operation (SVO), the actions of the leadership of the Russian Armed Forces and top officials of the state.

“To reproach me, a Russian officer, for discrediting the Armed Forces is insulting and humiliating for me. I consider this statement slanderous and false,” Kvachkov said at the court hearing.

The retired colonel also stated that he had nothing to do with the group and had previously complained about it to  Roskomnadzor due to slander. Kvachkov said that the police showed him the group, and he was never even registered in Odnoklassniki.

So did you catch that? Kvachkov is in trouble for posts made in a group that is supposedly being run in his name or rather, under his name. But he denies this and, frankly, he is far too old for me to seriously believe that he runs any social media. The man was born in ‘48 and Soviet old-timers hate technology and I don’t know anyone in my family + extended friends who are almost all retired Soviet officers as well who know how to even use the internet, really.

So, yeah, I believe his denial.

There are many groups on Telegram claiming to represent people who don’t have social media either, so this is indeed a real phenomenon. But the court didn’t agree and the fact that he was arrested at the same time as Strelkov is suspicious as all hell.

“This is some kind of garbage dump. I'm actually a candidate of the military academy! This is a malicious falsification,” Kvachkov was indignant.

According to BFM.ru, Kvachkov asked the court to interrogate seven people - the leadership and employees of the All-Russian Officers' Assembly and the Manifesto of the Russian World, as well as to conduct a computer and technical examination to determine the name of the person who registered the group.
In a conversation with Gazeta.Ru, the retired colonel commented on the court decision.

I’ve written about these retired officers before. Apparently, sharing their material online might be problematic and I am literally the only English-language blogger who bothered to do a translation, so again, welp.

I wonder whether or not it was worth it.

But, again, I don’t work for the spooks like the other bloggers do, so how am I supposed to know what the correct corporate Russia LLC policy is? It’s not like I’m on a mailing list getting the talking points memos like my competitors are! This is totally unfair!

“They denied everything and found me guilty. The word “lawlessness” is very soft in relation to what they are doing now,” he said.

Kvachkov believes that he has now been found guilty of discrediting the Russian army, in order to then open a criminal case, since this can be done after two administrative penalties.

“On the 17th they will try to force me under supervision again, but here now they have charged me with administrative charges. They will try to make me feel terrified and give up my political activities,” he said.

Yeah well, no arguments from me there.

This is clearly some sort of terror campaign aimed at the peasants.

The sad thing is that most people probably support the arrests and always will support repression measures simply because they take great pleasure in the suffering of others. You know, in my Russian media work, I actually used to practice the postulates of populism and not just theorize about them like I do here on this blog. Because I was good at appealing to the young masses, my project attracted regular Russians and not the usual super-specialized history fanatics or political junkies that political podcasts tend to attract.

In other words, most of my audience tuning in to listen to me rant and crack jokes wasn’t very smart, but the overall total numbers were good considering how poorly similar projects usually turn out. The secret sauce was me just apeing Alex Jones’ low-IQ shock-jock emotional style and drinking a vodka-soda beforehand until I had lowered my IQ a full standard deviation so that I would start making sense to my audience.

Interacting with 110-100 IQs for the first time in my life proved to be very eye-opening to me about how dumb people think and react to stimuli. Basically, anyone below 115 just generally likes violence and seeing other people hurt because unintelligent people score much lower in traits associated with sympathy or sensitivity to gross things.

This is also why dumb people make for good serfs who are willing to work in shit, slime, sleet, slurry and so on. They just don’t mind it as much, if they’re being honest with us and themselves. Some of them even like it.

They also lack the ability to actually discern truth from lies using logic, although that trait only really starts making itself felt from 130 and up. Below that point, people are just picking and choosing teams and religions and prophets and not actually engaging with the material beyond the most superficial level. In other words, they choose to believe one narrative or the other because they like the aesthetic of the message or the personality promoting it and are unable to engage or assess ideas and information and concepts on their own merits.

Autism acts as a kind of discernment-buff though, because it is associated with enhanced pattern-recognition and diminished emotional-intelligence, which means that autistics are far more likely to engage with the content of a given argument and not rely on secondary social cues to make up their minds instead, even if they have a reduced IQ.

The long and short of it is that most people are vicious and cruel and they like it when they are ruled by people who reflect the traits of the lowest common denominator because that makes them “relatable”. That is what the true values and morals of a Liberal Democracy actually are. Also, dumb, evil, low people only ever assess things through the prism of authority i.e., figuring out who the biggest man with the biggest stick is or alternatively who the fattest sow with the shrillest voice is. Once they figure out who is in charge, this becomes their arbiter of reality and morality. I’m tempted to take another shot at the Old Testament right now to really get my point across, but we really do need to get back on track with this article before I lose the 130s and below with the digression and really incense the 120s and below by attacking their religion.

Anyway, I had a point to all this that I’m getting to right about now.

We started this article talking about the arrest of some normie blogger/journalist who apparently got in trouble for mentioning SOBR or OMON participation in the Special Policing Adventure in Ukraine. We continue:

The court decision also prohibited Afanasyev from engaging in journalistic, editorial or publishing activities for two years and six months. The sentence has not yet entered into legal force, the prosecutor's office noted.

In December, the Abakan court fined him 450 thousand rubles. LLC "Expert-Media" (founder of "New Focus", its head is Afanasyev) under Art. 20.3.1 Code of Administrative Offenses (“Inciting hatred or enmity”). The court found that the publication published a number of articles “aimed at inciting enmity, hatred (discord) towards representatives of law enforcement agencies.”

Ah, so he also got hit with discrediting the spooks as well. Again, I didn’t even know that it was against the law to make fun of the federal police. If you can’t make fun of the Shoigu, or protest COVID jabs, or criticize the spook state, or “provoke” the Islamics, or be against Communism, then what exactly can you do or say anymore?

Related: I think I’ve done all of those things at this point.

I’m flying too close to the sun here, folks.

If they ban making fun of dumb people next, I am really screwed.