Ukraine Endgame in Sight?, "The World at War" at 50, The 'Once-Utopian' San Fernando Valley, Ethno-State vs. Liberal Democracy, David Lynch's "Blue Velvet"
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"Corruption in Ukraine is at Nigeria-levels, with billions being squirreled out of the country, into offshore accounts and invested in fancy real estate purchases."
Ukraine has always had corruption to rival Sub-Saharan Africa.
Just that the war brought in a flood of free American and European money, and the oligarchs and bureaucrats need only send others to die so that those oligarchs can collect their choice cuts.
n.b. when I lived in Ukraine, it was often referred to as "White Africa" as it featured comparable levels of corruption, poverty and income inequality, but the inhabitants were as Aryan-looking as it gets.
It boggles my mind that the Biden family's connection to Ukraine corruption has been basically ignored. Nevermind that the previous pesident suffered impeachment for raising the issue.
The significance of corruption in Ukraine is not its scale but the role it played in integrating the country with the EU and NATO at all levels. Convergence via corruption is integral to the way the American system works. People who deplore Ukrainian corruption as a legacy of the Soviet era or as something intrinsic to Slavs have missed this essential issue.
I have long maintained that the United States is equally corrupt, and I have bribed everyone in Ukraine from Cabinet ministers to the local fire department, while I have never so much as offered an American cop a free donut.
Just that in America, corruption is legalized and channeled to the sorts of people who can afford pricey lawyers.
Taking into account how wildly unpopular most western politicians and their policies are with their respective publics (compare with the genuinely popular Putin or Xi), "democracy" as it is practiced is basically a cover for rulers to do what they want. The technical term for this is a "beard".
After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for the *other* carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet next time around. So until then, shut up and fall in line!
My favorite example of democracy and diversity is comparing the early 1990s elections of monoethnic Slovenia and multiethnic Bosnia, both then republics in Yugoslavia.
Slovenia's election looks like a standard Western European parliamentary election. The "Democratic reformist," Socialist, Social Democrat, Christian Democrat, Liberal Democrat parties and a few others all got between 7 and 18 percent of the vote. Slovenia went on to quickly win independence and fairly quickly join the EU, Eurozone, and Schengen.
In Bosnia 70% of Muslims, 85% of Serbs, and 95% of Croats voted for their own ethnicity's parties. Massive war broke out, country is still a political charlie foxtrot.
As someone once said, elections in multiethnic societies are just periodic censuses. And to use your example, in America(and to be fair the rest of the Western world as well), non-whites all vote like they live in Bosnia but whites vote like they live in Slovenia.
That census comment was actually made in a New Yorker article about that 1990 Bosnian election. In one rare moment of insight Bill Kristol said it about the US
The counterexample is the Netherlands. For a long time it had a political system that we called "verzuiling" (pillarisation). You had separate "pillars" for Protestants, Catholics and those who didn't want to identify by religion. Some pillars were sometimes further divided but that is not of interest here. Each pillar had its own schools, trade unions, newspapers, TV programs, political parties, etc. The system was the result of decades of political horse trading. It worked very well as it was based on mutual respect. Nowadays the system has become defunct as a result of the decline of the churches.
In Bosnia things went wrong when - on advise of a US ambassador - the Muslims declared Bosnia to be their state. This is the opposite of mutual respect and as a consequence it evoked a reaction. Unfortunately this was not the first country that the US has destroyed with its divide-and-conquer machinations.
Slovenia was not monoethnic. The way it treated its Kosovo Albanian and Roma citizens was brutal (google for "the erased"). This is the same sort of xenophobic "democracy" as you see in Israel.
There are less and less places in the world that are monoethnic. That doesn't have to be a problem. The great empires of the past like the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were multiethnic too. The solution is to find common ground.
Well pillarization amongst the Christians have been replaced by that of Muslims. They have their own party with 3 seats in the Dutch parliament. I have seen a lot of Dutch people do mental gymnastics to justify its presence, but the fact is, a party like this would not be possible before mass Muslim immigration. And whats going to happen, when Muslim birthrates keep being higher than Dutch ones and Muslims keep on migrating to the Netherlands? Me thinks, there will be even more explicitly Muslim parties that will win even more seats.
Also I am not really sure Habsburg and Ottoman empires are polities to look up to. They collapsed once the ethnicities of those empire formed a national consciousness. Even today, other than the Austrian Germans and Turks, none of the other successor nations think of those empires even remotely positively. Those empires only worked, when 99% of the population were illiterate peasants whose worldview did not extend outside their own village. The incredibly mutliethnic, British and French empires also collapsed due to the same reasons, just a generation later.
I won't speculate about the future of immigration and asylum.
Most people don't care under what kind of government they live as long as it treats them decently. In such situations the main motor behind separatism is usually the belief that life will be better when they separate. There are statistics that show Quebecois and Catalan separatism growing and shrinking depending on how their economy is doing compared to the motherland.
The main reason the Habsburg empire fell apart was Allied propaganda and manipulation during World War I: divide-and-conquer. The Ottoman empire mainly had problems in the Balkans and there the competition with other great powers (Habsburg, Russia and England) played a major role in polarizing the situation. The fact that it didn't treat all its citizens equally didn't help either.
In modern society language is very important for your career perspective. That has as a result that once a multi-lingual empire falls apart it is soon impossible to recompose it as the people don't speak the languages any more and the mechanisms to deal with multi-linguism have disappeared. But note that many countries still have linguistic minorities.
Propaganda, manipulation, and divide and conquer tactics by your enemies will always exist. What matters is your ability to resist against it. If 95% of the population of the Habsburg Empire was German Catholics, it would still be around.
If language and religion are the same you have eliminated the two most obvious division points that can be exploited. However, that still leaves history. The fact that a region used to be independent or part of another state can sometimes be used too.
The Hapsburgs tried and collapsed looking for that common ground.
The Ottomans common ground was a mass grave, however if you survived that the millet system.
That frayed with 19th century Nationalism, so the young Turks genocided the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks- and only lost because they went against England, picking Germany.
The post-Napoleonic Hapsburgs were cynics whose leading statesmen played off ethnic groups and sects against each other. The rivalry, demagoguery and erosion of trust and respect laid the foundations for the murderous mass politics of the 20th c. The sly encouragement of ethnic feuding by the Austro-Hungarian regime was noted at the time by an eminent academic sociologist in Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv called Ludwig Gumplowicz.
San Fernando Valley: For a deep dive into California during the 60s and 70s - and in magical prose - you just cannot do better than Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the collection of essays that launched Joan Didion as one of America's great late-20th c. writers. It also happens to be the title I chose for my own Substack....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress..... partly because of Joan Didion but also because of these awesome opening lines of WB Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming' with which she introduced her essay collection:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You just could not get a pithier and more prescient description of 'Woke' 21st c. Western liberalism
Didion on California: “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of ‘Double Indemnity.’”
She landed on my radar when she wrote about hearing the news of the Manson Murders for the first time. "No one was surprised"...that line still sticks in my head to this day.
Y'all: Should there be a ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel war? What conditions would you place on either party? How, and who, would they be enforced? (Note the UN's record on Israel.........)
I don't see it happening for several more weeks. Israel might be able to take advantage of our era of short attention spans and produce war fatigue in Gaza as well as in political discourse
In a situation like this, one side must achieve a lasting and overwhelming victory to put an end to things. Israel is closer to this than their enemies over the past several decades. But liberalism makes people feel icky at the prospect of one side winning outright rather than both sides coming to a compromise. The status quo will have to change enough to make libs feel as though something has changed so it may be that a third party country or two is entrusted with "peacekeeping" in the region
I was reading that using hospitals and schools and ambulances, etc as military command centers/transporting soldiers are all war crimes. And for Hamas, those things are routine.
One interesting thing about all the endless protests: It's as if Hamas didn't exist.
There was a ceasefire but Hamas broke it. There is no real case for a ceasefire until Hamas releases all hostages. Until then a state of open war is inevitable. The current calls for a ceasefire being made internationally are designed to let Hamas retain the hostages so that they can drag out the crisis indefinitely.
The UN has no credibility and has dealt itself out of the game. Ditto the EU. Russia and China could play a role, perhaps even one or two of the Gulf states. It is early days yet. The war has a way to go.
Someone needs to explain to me why being an "ethnonationalist state" has become some sort of moral atrocity, synonymous with Nazi fascism. Aren't at least half the countries in the world run by a dominant (socially and numerically) ethnicity? Are we all supposed to make believe that humans aren't tribal apes who prefer their own (as opposed to WEIRDos and their religious devotion to abstractions like universal human equality)? (And I won't even ask why Freddie the famous Marxist is now humping "liberal democracy", which I thought all Marxists consider a bourgeois mask for exploitation. Has he gone full Fukuyama? Never go full Fukuyama!)
The WEIRD religion, which can be more or less summed up by its holy hymn, John Lennon's "Imagine", has the same blind missionary zeal as the Christianity it's supplanted—these people seem to really believe that inside the heart of every human there's the desire to become a consumerist monad who exchanges his tribe and tradition for bespoke pronouns and a Starbucks gift card.
Modern liberals, which I guess include everyone from Freddie de Boer to Hillary Clinton, are besotted by all their various sacred OUGHTs (we ought to be a single undifferentiated lump of humanity!), and completely blind to all the basic ISes of the human condition.
Freddie has an absolutely hilarious relationship with his leftist audience. He talks to them like children because they basically are and that's what I assume he's doing here too
"I noticed that you're for prison abolition but you cheer whenever someone like Derek Chauvin goes to jail. So, uh, what's your plan for Derek Chauvin?"
Then his comment section is people coming up with utopian societies almost literally full of rainbows and unicorns, or people threatening him with violence for posing such a question
Poor Freddie was born too late, he wants to conduct (mostly) rational and empirical coalition-building politics a la the 1930s, which are all but dead in 21st-century America. He believes "elites hijacked the Social Justice movement" when it was always an elite operation from top to bottom (at least post-60s), and has now devolved into a cross between primitive tribalism and internet fashions (My lapel pin is more righteous than yours!).
But being a "Marxist" means first and foremost that you have a tenuous connection to reality, or at least are wearing idealism-colored glasses.
Freddie's politics is a larp...the Greenwich Village Old Left are as relevant as the characters of P.G. Wodehouse. The world has moved on and 'Leftists' like him are just an Ivy League parody of the Thatcher era conservatives in the UK, the so-called Young Fogey's. He is acting a part in a world that exists only in his head...though I am sure that plenty of American conservatives might find Freddie's 'radicalism' proof that the Marxist bogey is about to pounce and carry them off to Gulag#2.
Besides, there are few things as politically pointless as grad-school standard theorising. Pontificating about what is OK and not OK from an abstract perspective while a war is going on simply reveals the irrelevance of it all. Either the Israelis have the resolve and capacity to successfully assert themselves or they don't. Legitimacy is downstream from capacity. It is not developed or awarded in seminars.
The Marxist q. is important. Marx saw the skilled workers and economically active entrepreneurs as the essential agents of history. Today's Left is largely advocacy for the non-productive, marginal or surplus population of all classes. This derangement is integral to the way the Left now functions. IMO it explains the foggy thinking and perverse choices of the self-identified Left.
Capacity being downstream of legitimacy is the very thinking that got us into this mess. Either we believe that justice is real, or that it's all coercion all the way down.
I'd say the problem was assuming that legitimacy could ever be conferred by elite level consensus in the first place. This has been aggravated by the fact that elites have developed ideas about politics that bear little relationship to history or human nature. Otherworldly idealism blended with smugness and the imperatives of reputation management at the top cost ordinary people their lives.
No, legitimacy comes from force and dominance. Justice a tactic, a method.
In war - and ALL was gained by war , including your genes 🧬 like mine , wherever we are standing- all from violence- in war mercy like terror a tactic.
Justice is a method, not some invisible force.
And yes it’s based on coercion as well, how to do justice without coercion?
I watched The World at War with my Dad. He was just barely too young for World War II, and got drafted during Korea but was not sent into combat. Hence I exist. I can still hear the opening music, and hear Lawrence Olivier's voice, and see the faces, one after another, disappearing into the flames. An absolute masterpiece. Thank you for bringing back those memories.
If the US abandons Ukraine, East Europe will not forget it, cause it knows that being in NATO is not enough of a guarantee. Ukraine was in NATO in all but name. US seems incapable of having proper alliances and too weak to impose a war economy when it is needed.
US comes out as a big loser, not winner out of this. Everyone will smell its weakness and incapacity. Afghanistan, now this, and everyone sees what US is doing with Israel too "unconditional support".
Where's the unconditional support for Ukraine? How is Israel special?
NATO is on its last breaths of air if it can't figure out a way to help Ukraine. They literally expected it to gain the Donbas with 300 tanks? Without air support? Without enough artillery?
Yes, I have to agree with you on that, and disagree with Soldo's precipitate conclusion that the US is a big winner in this. NATO has been shown to be all huff and puff, without any backing that would make any country want to rely on them.
About time too, thank heavens.
It does make me wonder what will happen when the neighbours of occupied Palestine and Taiwan start realising they maybe put their money on a regime that was more hot air than anything real.
China can't buy it...but the Gulf Arabs and Iranians will rent it! Instead of chocolates and nylons the sophistocastrati of the Old World will settle for kebabs and hijabs.
Analysis is not advocacy but sometimes it looks like black humour.
"Moral lecturing and grandstanding is all that we can expect to receive these days." or as Wolf Blitzer once emoted, "so poor, so black"
As far as Polansky, he needs to work on his obfuscation methods. His ability to telegraph its ok when one person does it because I don't have to explain myself to ppl beneath me approach is a bit lacking of the proper sophistry the moment demands
I think survival is the victory for Russia. That and some new territory they didn’t quite want.
Russia’s win is NATO looks like childish fools, because they are... and other than we’ve 🇺🇸 secured our Oceanic flanks and gotten industry back... we are...
US thought Russia "surely couldn't survive this one." But not only did it survive, Russia now has a military that can fight. The US must rely on proxies.
Yeah, we've thrown our ammo away in Ukraine, while Russia has an industrial base and can manufacture all it needs. Oh well, we have the Kardashians and all they add to GDP. Take that, Putin!!
Debt is indeed an asset if you can enforce repayment or if you can sell the debt to a third party. Trying this without full-spectrum military dominance gets tricky.
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Irony!
The US is fighting Putin's land grab with little to no collateral damage.
While the US is funding Bibi's land grab with huge proficiency for murdering children in their 75 year old open air concentration camp.
Maybe Biden's handlers will wake up and see the optics are no good.
And send more money to the Kiev laundry!
"Corruption in Ukraine is at Nigeria-levels, with billions being squirreled out of the country, into offshore accounts and invested in fancy real estate purchases."
Ukraine has always had corruption to rival Sub-Saharan Africa.
Just that the war brought in a flood of free American and European money, and the oligarchs and bureaucrats need only send others to die so that those oligarchs can collect their choice cuts.
n.b. when I lived in Ukraine, it was often referred to as "White Africa" as it featured comparable levels of corruption, poverty and income inequality, but the inhabitants were as Aryan-looking as it gets.
It boggles my mind that the Biden family's connection to Ukraine corruption has been basically ignored. Nevermind that the previous pesident suffered impeachment for raising the issue.
Pretend that one of Trump’s useless spawn had a $600,000 a year no show job with some Ukrainian oligarch company.
The MSM would be up on that tip like the stink on shit.
Probably half of D voters are happy that white guys are killing each other over there.
The significance of corruption in Ukraine is not its scale but the role it played in integrating the country with the EU and NATO at all levels. Convergence via corruption is integral to the way the American system works. People who deplore Ukrainian corruption as a legacy of the Soviet era or as something intrinsic to Slavs have missed this essential issue.
I have long maintained that the United States is equally corrupt, and I have bribed everyone in Ukraine from Cabinet ministers to the local fire department, while I have never so much as offered an American cop a free donut.
Just that in America, corruption is legalized and channeled to the sorts of people who can afford pricey lawyers.
https://indica.medium.com/america-is-just-corrupt-e3cabe19e80c
https://indica.medium.com/how-the-us-legalized-corruption-c478b5ad0655
Thank you Philip.
Coming up next... who from overseas does attend American Prestige Schools ?
STAY TUNED
I got standing room tickets to the Vienna Opera House and wound up next to two Ukrainian cuties 👍
The Austrian usher girl kept telling them to stop talking
Taking into account how wildly unpopular most western politicians and their policies are with their respective publics (compare with the genuinely popular Putin or Xi), "democracy" as it is practiced is basically a cover for rulers to do what they want. The technical term for this is a "beard".
After all, your elected representatives approved this. If you don't like it, you can vote for the *other* carefully vetted corporate imperialist muppet next time around. So until then, shut up and fall in line!
I thought I was the most pissed off person on the Internet today, thanks for lifting the burden off me Feral Finster.
You can tell by the way they spit out the word 'populism'. Policies that people actually like? Dangerous rabble !
I have to be honest, I was only here for Blue Velvet
My favorite example of democracy and diversity is comparing the early 1990s elections of monoethnic Slovenia and multiethnic Bosnia, both then republics in Yugoslavia.
Slovenia's election looks like a standard Western European parliamentary election. The "Democratic reformist," Socialist, Social Democrat, Christian Democrat, Liberal Democrat parties and a few others all got between 7 and 18 percent of the vote. Slovenia went on to quickly win independence and fairly quickly join the EU, Eurozone, and Schengen.
In Bosnia 70% of Muslims, 85% of Serbs, and 95% of Croats voted for their own ethnicity's parties. Massive war broke out, country is still a political charlie foxtrot.
As someone once said, elections in multiethnic societies are just periodic censuses. And to use your example, in America(and to be fair the rest of the Western world as well), non-whites all vote like they live in Bosnia but whites vote like they live in Slovenia.
That census comment was actually made in a New Yorker article about that 1990 Bosnian election. In one rare moment of insight Bill Kristol said it about the US
The counterexample is the Netherlands. For a long time it had a political system that we called "verzuiling" (pillarisation). You had separate "pillars" for Protestants, Catholics and those who didn't want to identify by religion. Some pillars were sometimes further divided but that is not of interest here. Each pillar had its own schools, trade unions, newspapers, TV programs, political parties, etc. The system was the result of decades of political horse trading. It worked very well as it was based on mutual respect. Nowadays the system has become defunct as a result of the decline of the churches.
In Bosnia things went wrong when - on advise of a US ambassador - the Muslims declared Bosnia to be their state. This is the opposite of mutual respect and as a consequence it evoked a reaction. Unfortunately this was not the first country that the US has destroyed with its divide-and-conquer machinations.
Slovenia was not monoethnic. The way it treated its Kosovo Albanian and Roma citizens was brutal (google for "the erased"). This is the same sort of xenophobic "democracy" as you see in Israel.
There are less and less places in the world that are monoethnic. That doesn't have to be a problem. The great empires of the past like the Habsburg and Ottoman empires were multiethnic too. The solution is to find common ground.
Well pillarization amongst the Christians have been replaced by that of Muslims. They have their own party with 3 seats in the Dutch parliament. I have seen a lot of Dutch people do mental gymnastics to justify its presence, but the fact is, a party like this would not be possible before mass Muslim immigration. And whats going to happen, when Muslim birthrates keep being higher than Dutch ones and Muslims keep on migrating to the Netherlands? Me thinks, there will be even more explicitly Muslim parties that will win even more seats.
Also I am not really sure Habsburg and Ottoman empires are polities to look up to. They collapsed once the ethnicities of those empire formed a national consciousness. Even today, other than the Austrian Germans and Turks, none of the other successor nations think of those empires even remotely positively. Those empires only worked, when 99% of the population were illiterate peasants whose worldview did not extend outside their own village. The incredibly mutliethnic, British and French empires also collapsed due to the same reasons, just a generation later.
I won't speculate about the future of immigration and asylum.
Most people don't care under what kind of government they live as long as it treats them decently. In such situations the main motor behind separatism is usually the belief that life will be better when they separate. There are statistics that show Quebecois and Catalan separatism growing and shrinking depending on how their economy is doing compared to the motherland.
The main reason the Habsburg empire fell apart was Allied propaganda and manipulation during World War I: divide-and-conquer. The Ottoman empire mainly had problems in the Balkans and there the competition with other great powers (Habsburg, Russia and England) played a major role in polarizing the situation. The fact that it didn't treat all its citizens equally didn't help either.
In modern society language is very important for your career perspective. That has as a result that once a multi-lingual empire falls apart it is soon impossible to recompose it as the people don't speak the languages any more and the mechanisms to deal with multi-linguism have disappeared. But note that many countries still have linguistic minorities.
Propaganda, manipulation, and divide and conquer tactics by your enemies will always exist. What matters is your ability to resist against it. If 95% of the population of the Habsburg Empire was German Catholics, it would still be around.
If language and religion are the same you have eliminated the two most obvious division points that can be exploited. However, that still leaves history. The fact that a region used to be independent or part of another state can sometimes be used too.
The Hapsburgs were war-lords who kept losing wars. They sacrificed the lives of their subjects. No propaganda was needed to bring them down.
The Hapsburgs tried and collapsed looking for that common ground.
The Ottomans common ground was a mass grave, however if you survived that the millet system.
That frayed with 19th century Nationalism, so the young Turks genocided the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks- and only lost because they went against England, picking Germany.
The post-Napoleonic Hapsburgs were cynics whose leading statesmen played off ethnic groups and sects against each other. The rivalry, demagoguery and erosion of trust and respect laid the foundations for the murderous mass politics of the 20th c. The sly encouragement of ethnic feuding by the Austro-Hungarian regime was noted at the time by an eminent academic sociologist in Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv called Ludwig Gumplowicz.
San Fernando Valley: For a deep dive into California during the 60s and 70s - and in magical prose - you just cannot do better than Slouching Towards Bethlehem, the collection of essays that launched Joan Didion as one of America's great late-20th c. writers. It also happens to be the title I chose for my own Substack....https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress..... partly because of Joan Didion but also because of these awesome opening lines of WB Yeats' poem 'The Second Coming' with which she introduced her essay collection:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
You just could not get a pithier and more prescient description of 'Woke' 21st c. Western liberalism
Slouching Toward Bethlehem and The White Album, her next collection of essays, are genuine classics.
Totally agree. Along with my Substack of course!
Definitely. Didion is much appreciated by myself.
Didion on California: “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of ‘Double Indemnity.’”
She landed on my radar when she wrote about hearing the news of the Manson Murders for the first time. "No one was surprised"...that line still sticks in my head to this day.
Y'all: Should there be a ceasefire in the Hamas-Israel war? What conditions would you place on either party? How, and who, would they be enforced? (Note the UN's record on Israel.........)
Gaza eats lead until all the hostages are released—no ceasefire till that basic demand is met.
I don't see it happening for several more weeks. Israel might be able to take advantage of our era of short attention spans and produce war fatigue in Gaza as well as in political discourse
In a situation like this, one side must achieve a lasting and overwhelming victory to put an end to things. Israel is closer to this than their enemies over the past several decades. But liberalism makes people feel icky at the prospect of one side winning outright rather than both sides coming to a compromise. The status quo will have to change enough to make libs feel as though something has changed so it may be that a third party country or two is entrusted with "peacekeeping" in the region
I was reading that using hospitals and schools and ambulances, etc as military command centers/transporting soldiers are all war crimes. And for Hamas, those things are routine.
One interesting thing about all the endless protests: It's as if Hamas didn't exist.
There was a ceasefire but Hamas broke it. There is no real case for a ceasefire until Hamas releases all hostages. Until then a state of open war is inevitable. The current calls for a ceasefire being made internationally are designed to let Hamas retain the hostages so that they can drag out the crisis indefinitely.
The UN has no credibility and has dealt itself out of the game. Ditto the EU. Russia and China could play a role, perhaps even one or two of the Gulf states. It is early days yet. The war has a way to go.
Someone needs to explain to me why being an "ethnonationalist state" has become some sort of moral atrocity, synonymous with Nazi fascism. Aren't at least half the countries in the world run by a dominant (socially and numerically) ethnicity? Are we all supposed to make believe that humans aren't tribal apes who prefer their own (as opposed to WEIRDos and their religious devotion to abstractions like universal human equality)? (And I won't even ask why Freddie the famous Marxist is now humping "liberal democracy", which I thought all Marxists consider a bourgeois mask for exploitation. Has he gone full Fukuyama? Never go full Fukuyama!)
The WEIRD religion, which can be more or less summed up by its holy hymn, John Lennon's "Imagine", has the same blind missionary zeal as the Christianity it's supplanted—these people seem to really believe that inside the heart of every human there's the desire to become a consumerist monad who exchanges his tribe and tradition for bespoke pronouns and a Starbucks gift card.
Modern liberals, which I guess include everyone from Freddie de Boer to Hillary Clinton, are besotted by all their various sacred OUGHTs (we ought to be a single undifferentiated lump of humanity!), and completely blind to all the basic ISes of the human condition.
Freddie has an absolutely hilarious relationship with his leftist audience. He talks to them like children because they basically are and that's what I assume he's doing here too
"I noticed that you're for prison abolition but you cheer whenever someone like Derek Chauvin goes to jail. So, uh, what's your plan for Derek Chauvin?"
Then his comment section is people coming up with utopian societies almost literally full of rainbows and unicorns, or people threatening him with violence for posing such a question
Poor Freddie was born too late, he wants to conduct (mostly) rational and empirical coalition-building politics a la the 1930s, which are all but dead in 21st-century America. He believes "elites hijacked the Social Justice movement" when it was always an elite operation from top to bottom (at least post-60s), and has now devolved into a cross between primitive tribalism and internet fashions (My lapel pin is more righteous than yours!).
But being a "Marxist" means first and foremost that you have a tenuous connection to reality, or at least are wearing idealism-colored glasses.
Freddie's politics is a larp...the Greenwich Village Old Left are as relevant as the characters of P.G. Wodehouse. The world has moved on and 'Leftists' like him are just an Ivy League parody of the Thatcher era conservatives in the UK, the so-called Young Fogey's. He is acting a part in a world that exists only in his head...though I am sure that plenty of American conservatives might find Freddie's 'radicalism' proof that the Marxist bogey is about to pounce and carry them off to Gulag#2.
Besides, there are few things as politically pointless as grad-school standard theorising. Pontificating about what is OK and not OK from an abstract perspective while a war is going on simply reveals the irrelevance of it all. Either the Israelis have the resolve and capacity to successfully assert themselves or they don't. Legitimacy is downstream from capacity. It is not developed or awarded in seminars.
The Marxist q. is important. Marx saw the skilled workers and economically active entrepreneurs as the essential agents of history. Today's Left is largely advocacy for the non-productive, marginal or surplus population of all classes. This derangement is integral to the way the Left now functions. IMO it explains the foggy thinking and perverse choices of the self-identified Left.
Capacity being downstream of legitimacy is the very thinking that got us into this mess. Either we believe that justice is real, or that it's all coercion all the way down.
I'd say the problem was assuming that legitimacy could ever be conferred by elite level consensus in the first place. This has been aggravated by the fact that elites have developed ideas about politics that bear little relationship to history or human nature. Otherworldly idealism blended with smugness and the imperatives of reputation management at the top cost ordinary people their lives.
Yes but these ordinary people... where did they go to school?
No, legitimacy comes from force and dominance. Justice a tactic, a method.
In war - and ALL was gained by war , including your genes 🧬 like mine , wherever we are standing- all from violence- in war mercy like terror a tactic.
Justice is a method, not some invisible force.
And yes it’s based on coercion as well, how to do justice without coercion?
lol...good stuff
This seems to be the best critique of FdB's confused position on Israel that I've seen.
I guess the murdering and driving off of a population currently living on the land you want for your ethnic-state is bad
Well wherever you are, that’s your inheritance.
I watched The World at War with my Dad. He was just barely too young for World War II, and got drafted during Korea but was not sent into combat. Hence I exist. I can still hear the opening music, and hear Lawrence Olivier's voice, and see the faces, one after another, disappearing into the flames. An absolute masterpiece. Thank you for bringing back those memories.
If the US abandons Ukraine, East Europe will not forget it, cause it knows that being in NATO is not enough of a guarantee. Ukraine was in NATO in all but name. US seems incapable of having proper alliances and too weak to impose a war economy when it is needed.
US comes out as a big loser, not winner out of this. Everyone will smell its weakness and incapacity. Afghanistan, now this, and everyone sees what US is doing with Israel too "unconditional support".
Where's the unconditional support for Ukraine? How is Israel special?
NATO is on its last breaths of air if it can't figure out a way to help Ukraine. They literally expected it to gain the Donbas with 300 tanks? Without air support? Without enough artillery?
Oh, how we will remember the US here.
Yes, I have to agree with you on that, and disagree with Soldo's precipitate conclusion that the US is a big winner in this. NATO has been shown to be all huff and puff, without any backing that would make any country want to rely on them.
About time too, thank heavens.
It does make me wonder what will happen when the neighbours of occupied Palestine and Taiwan start realising they maybe put their money on a regime that was more hot air than anything real.
Interesting times.
Europe. We're after Europe.
Now Europe is broken off from Russia and China can't buy it.
We're getting Europe's manufacturing as reshoring manufacturing is a major priority in America that's actually happening.
We'll do the same if China takes the bait with Taiwan, and we'll get Taiwan's chip factories and more importantly her human capital in the Bargain.
Basically America just consolidated it's WW2 and Cold War gains, rather bluntly.
Ukraine is a throwaway.
Anyone who didn't know we're worse than the British in Perfidy terms has been asleep for 60 years.
Analysis is not advocacy.
China can't buy it...but the Gulf Arabs and Iranians will rent it! Instead of chocolates and nylons the sophistocastrati of the Old World will settle for kebabs and hijabs.
Analysis is not advocacy but sometimes it looks like black humour.
You should see my poetry.
My poetry makes Vogons cry.
Correct re: Europe as main goal.
Even if this is true, America tightened its grip on western Europe for another generation. That may be of more importance to them in the end
"Ukraine was in NATO in all but name"??? Ukraine was not even an official ally. Israel is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_non-NATO_ally
The US is the big winner?
Sure if you are a defense contractor...
Not really, the money isn’t there beyond stock bounces.
Popular Trope, but Daddy Warbucks is no more real than “Annie”.
"Moral lecturing and grandstanding is all that we can expect to receive these days." or as Wolf Blitzer once emoted, "so poor, so black"
As far as Polansky, he needs to work on his obfuscation methods. His ability to telegraph its ok when one person does it because I don't have to explain myself to ppl beneath me approach is a bit lacking of the proper sophistry the moment demands
If this is a Russian victory, then may God preserve Russia from any more such victories. It surely can't survive another one.
I think survival is the victory for Russia. That and some new territory they didn’t quite want.
Russia’s win is NATO looks like childish fools, because they are... and other than we’ve 🇺🇸 secured our Oceanic flanks and gotten industry back... we are...
US thought Russia "surely couldn't survive this one." But not only did it survive, Russia now has a military that can fight. The US must rely on proxies.
We can fight, no reason we should...
.... oh and we’ll need ammo, it’s gone... I mean artillery, rifles 5% of casualties. Artillery 85%
Yeah, we've thrown our ammo away in Ukraine, while Russia has an industrial base and can manufacture all it needs. Oh well, we have the Kardashians and all they add to GDP. Take that, Putin!!
Yes...
They honestly thought that fiat GDP translates to economic power- it doesn’t.
In the same sense bankers think debts are assets... not in reality.
Debt is indeed an asset if you can enforce repayment or if you can sell the debt to a third party. Trying this without full-spectrum military dominance gets tricky.
There's no such thing as a Jewish state. There is a Zionist project, which has as much to do with Judaism as a SoCal valley girl.