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The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craz

The myth is about Soros, but it was a network of largely U.S. investment banks that co-ordinated and piled on to raid the BoE. Consider that the GameStonks craze where people just really, really liked the stock got threatened with charges of market manipulation, almost took out Robinhood, with contagion exposure to Citadel with system wide risk, and caused back door intervention by Fed authorities and even the Whitehouse - Soros' payday is evidence for Balzac's adage that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. I have no doubt what he did would be absolutely criminal today. He went on to create the Open Society Foundations, which supported and co-ordinated aspects of the (then) progressive anti-globalization movement of the 90s I was involved in. At the time the movement was mostly anti-capitalist, uniting labor and civil society against (neo-liberal) trade agreements designed to exploit the poverty and authoritarianism of other countries and to hollow out western economies by exporting manufacturing jobs, and against exploitative policies by the IMF, who used loans to indebt and subordinate elected governments and force privatization and sale of their infrastructure to transnational corps and roll back environmental protection. (see, confessions of an economic hitman, nologo, etc.) Ostensibly noble causes. It almost seemed like a billionaire's noblesse oblige. Soros was the "good capitalist." The movements themselves failed after 9/11, and Occupy was a whimper in comparison to the battles of Seattle, Quebec City, Turin, and others. The US rust belt was exported destroyed in the 90's and 2000s, laying the ground for the populist revolt that created 2015 election result. However, his OSF foundations and network of NGOs flourished, installing progressive activists from the era in colleges and political parties, and other key institutions. Trouble is, these weren't working class labor organizers and anarcho-anti-capitalists, they were technocrats, equipped with an ideology whose specific endgame is central economic co-ordination, and it was nominally anti-capitalist in the sense that it is against the individualistic cultural aspects of smallholders and the autonomy and values small business provides, and that it uses critical theory as a tool to dissolve the bonds of societies. This is the kernel of truth beneath the layers of hallucinatory conspiracy theory. To me, Soros is just a visionary criminal who learned about totalitarianism from the inside during his youth, and has funded his own vision of that technocratic system. That's not a conspiracy theory, that's just what any billionaire criminal with a will to power seeking to build a empire would do, and imo, he has.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
Didn’t Soros study under Karl Popper? I wouldn’t say he learned totalitarianism from the inside, rather he was influenced by a very astute advisor on the nature of societal openness and the associated dynamics. As far as being supposedly ‘evil’, I don’t see how anyone in his position could not be. Look at the world around us. We are ruled by psychopaths, shysters and ghouls at multiple levels; middle management to heads of state. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about decency, humility and fairness, but the older I get and more money/power I accumulate, I’m starting to see that the monsters of the world will only be beaten by a bigger monster. So if I set out to right the wrongs I see, I too would necessarily need to become monstrous.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  To be monsterous and justified, what a triumph of moral expedience. Soros experienced WWII as a teenager in Hungary(?) where growing up he saw the rise of the movements that would become NSDAP and Stalinsim, respectively. My view is that the most powerful thing he has ever experienced was that evil, but in seeing the power of them, he understood what was possible, and his intent is to use them for "good." Trouble is, you need the power to do good, but once you have the power, why do you need to be good? I think what we now recite as Popper's paraphrase is just a cheap slogan for organizing banal minds, and not a model for reflection. My objection isn't to Popper and so-called open socieites, it's to the belief that the "problem," is the lack of a sophisticated plan with a system guided by ideology to run them in the first place. It's a technocratic presumption, that if we just come up with a system, we can impose it on reality and human desire, and we will "fix the problem." What Popper has been used for (regardless of what he may have written), and the viral idea that critical theorists today have made that people fundamentally want was this very justification for their own monsterousness. This is the liberation they're offering. When you revisit the idea of being a victim or being oppressed as just an infinite will to power, moralized by an ideology designed to dissolve truth and inconvenient perceptions of reality, it's pretty obvious that the OSF and its appendant bodies in the WEF and other networks are just recycled totalitarian junk from a new generation of demagogues. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a bunch of billionaires and bureaucrats have had Damascene conversions and are really just self sacrificing martyrs and saints.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

Didn’t Soros study under Karl Popper? I wouldn’t say he learned totalitarianism from the inside, rather he was influenced by a very astute advisor on the nature of societal openness and the associated dynamics. As far as being supposedly ‘evil’, I don’t see how anyone in his position could not be. Look at the world around us. We are ruled by psychopaths, shysters and ghouls at multiple levels; middle management to heads of state. I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder about decency, humility and fairness, but the older I get and more money/power I accumulate, I’m starting to see that the monsters of the world will only be beaten by a bigger monster. So if I set out to right the wrongs I see, I too would necessarily need to become monstrous.

motohagiography 5y ago
To be monsterous and justified, what a triumph of moral expedience. Soros experienced WWII as a teenager in Hungary(?) where growing up he saw the rise of the movements that would become NSDAP and Stalinsim, respectively. My view is that the most powerful thing he has ever experienced was that evil, but in seeing the power of them, he understood what was possible, and his intent is to use them for "good." Trouble is, you need the power to do good, but once you have the power, why do you need to be good? I think what we now recite as Popper's paraphrase is just a cheap slogan for organizing banal minds, and not a model for reflection. My objection isn't to Popper and so-called open socieites, it's to the belief that the "problem," is the lack of a sophisticated plan with a system guided by ideology to run them in the first place. It's a technocratic presumption, that if we just come up with a system, we can impose it on reality and human desire, and we will "fix the problem." What Popper has been used for (regardless of what he may have written), and the viral idea that critical theorists today have made that people fundamentally want was this very justification for their own monsterousness. This is the liberation they're offering. When you revisit the idea of being a victim or being oppressed as just an infinite will to power, moralized by an ideology designed to dissolve truth and inconvenient perceptions of reality, it's pretty obvious that the OSF and its appendant bodies in the WEF and other networks are just recycled totalitarian junk from a new generation of demagogues. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a bunch of billionaires and bureaucrats have had Damascene conversions and are really just self sacrificing martyrs and saints.