This piece is just a collection of thoughts from the random sampling that I've been doing this past month and a half here in Dalmatia.
Leave a comment if the mood strikes you, and let's please avoid shitting on any nation/ethnic group, please and thank you.
I have been in transit since last week and will be all over the map for the next little bit, but will squeeze in posting when I get the chance to do so.
«…For the moment, they want to enjoy their first real summer vacation in three years, knowing full well that their leaders have fucked them again.…»
Given that Niccolo Soldo has aptly deployed the notorious f-word, and being a Vietnam veteran myself (US Army) I’d like to embellish that word choice with a verbal relic of the Vietnam era:
“clusterfuck (plural clusterfucks)
“(slang, vulgar) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.”
The so-called (and mostly hyperreal) leadership of the Global Village, western and eastern branches, is indeed a fornicating and formicating cluster of diverse lost causes: the Chinese Emperor, in his Forbidden City; the Soviet Union; Lech Wałęsa; Budapest 1956; Leo Strauss and his Neocon progeny; and maybe even Donald Trump (if his #MAGA cause is indeed lost.)
Macron, heir to the Bourbon kings and Robespierre, urging a peace deal with the Ayatollah Khamenei? More accurately, heir to a Moliere farce!
I used the unusual word “formicating,” so I’d best add the definition from Wiktionary:
formicate (third-person singular simple present formicates, present participle formicating, simple past and past participle formicated)
Jul 13, 2022·edited Jul 13, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
"Them!" was one of my childhood movie memories (unlike "Jeb!", today). 11C30, '71-'76. But tell me: Doesn't "clusterfuck" also contain an element of wistful remembrance? a familiarity-with and fondness-of those involved in it? After all, they were OUR "clusterfucks", no? Or, perhaps it's just the benevolence of Time, rounding the corners, softening the sharp edges, and letting us live with what was.
Excellent point. Back then we (or at least I) expected things to get better. And, for the most part, they did. Now, although the woke takeover of the USA defies all logic and most experience, we can HOPE that the insanity will pass, but we can’t be sure. After all, the Dark Ages lasted a millennium.
Dalmatia, as the part of a collective Mediterranean cultural landscape has a very brusque, unforgiving way of dealing with people who do something dumb: “Sir, what did you expect (is going to happen after you did that dumb thing)?” I think it summarizes quite aptly our current moment in time.
One of my uncles is fond of saying "dobili sto su trazili" (they got what they were looking for), as a response to when someone or some group predictably fucks up.
I think I will write up a movie review this week. I have only posted two so far:
The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) - Italian movie about a small Tuscan town in the dying days of WW2, stuck between retreating Germans and Italian Fascists and the approaching Americans. Ebert called the cinematography "too beautiful", therefore distracting - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/film-review-la-notte-di-san-lorenzo
Jul 12, 2022·edited Jul 12, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
Agreed about movies. Older is usually better. The scripts in a movie from the 30s-60s are so tight and compact and coherent compared to today. They told a story and did not waste time. Every scene and every line moved things along. Actors knew how to act, using their faces and bodies, knowing the camera would enlarge and amplify the subtlest movements. The wordless scene in The Wild Bunch, where Pike (the great William Holden) wakes up, and sees the mostly empty whiskey bottle, and the young Mexican prostitute, in the cold light of day, and straps on his guns, and he knows, and we know, it is the last drink and the last woman he will ever have, is like something from a lost world. Movies today are like art from late antiquity, in the shadow of unattainable greatness, but the artists are blind to how far they have fallen. Speaking of sixties action romps with beautiful actresses, see Deadlier Than The Male (1967), with the ravishing Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina. And as to grim war films, see the brilliant Army of Shadows (1969), about the French Resistance.
I blame nautilus, the exercise equipment. From the 80s onward actors and actresses were expected to look like athletes. There is much less emphasis on acting ability.
Scriptwriting is also becoming very academic. Film schools and related faculties are homogenizing the medium. The youngsters writing scripts read way too few books to have picked up any sense of how style can be applied to the written word.
It was becoming apparent as early as the 1980s that the influence of television, and particularly TV commercials, were having a negative impact on feature films. Directors did not know what to do with the large canvas, they wasted time, they were used to the rapid impact of TV programs and commercials, snd they did not know how to tell a story. Also, people became increasingly less literate, as you say. They no longer read books, so they did not know how to develop characters over time. Films became episodic, a series of images meant to stir thoughtless emotions, in some kind of sequence, but not adding up to anything. As early as Star Wars, this was beginning to happen. Fortunately, the old movies are very accessible now, and we can spend our time with people who were competent at their craft, if we want to.
The 80s was certainly the great inflection point. Several factors (economic, cultural, political) combined to make it very difficult for the studios to produce films fit for adults, films with a degree of complexity and psychological plausibility. Attention spans and literacy have declined and a vast range of human behaviour is now off-limits artistically because it cannot be reconciled with the norms assumed by the arts.
The main argument is that the experimentation of the 70s came out due to 60s Hollywood becoming too formulaic and out of touch with the youth, thus losing audiences to TV and especially rock'n'roll, but that "Jaws" created the blockbuster that drove a stake through its heart, with Cimino's high-budget bomb "Heaven's Gate" driving the final nail in the coffin.
Have not read it, but hear its ideas a fair bit. Hollywood incorporated techniques from the European New Wave to stay relevant. "Heaven's Gate" was very left-wing in its politics. Ironically, today's commercial stuff is way more ideological in the worst way, but they are prepared to swallow the losses. Ultimately, it is a business. Few commercial films make much of a profit. Theoretically the money is made on the blockbusters, but who knows? My pet theory is that Hollywood's true function is tax evasion and money laundering. The complexity of calculating profits on a film and taxing the returns as they come in over the years make film finance a great medium for dodgy practices.
Cinematically the American cultural shift most happened in 1972. Look at the best picture nominees that year: immigrant experience (The Godfather, The Emigrants--the latter is a Swedish film), Holocaust (Cabaret), Southern black sharecroppers (Sounder). Only identifiable WASPs featured are the hillbilly inbred rapists in Deliverance, and they're quickly defeated by suburban weekend warriors.
Here in the States most everyone who was caught up in "the current thing" months ago, have moved on from Ukraine. Some blue checks still have Ukro flags, but far fewer than before. People are much more concerned with gas prices, inflation, and yes, summer vacation. There's some talk of Biden being too old, which one hears in random locations, and probably explains his low poll numbers. Still, as in Europe, it doesn't matter what people think -- the mass mobilization of public opinion that lasted 4-6 weeks accomplished its goal, which is that the foreign policy establishment can pretty much spend as much $ as it wants fighting the proxy war. The press, supine as usual in front of a Democrat POTUS, doesn't ask questions and the defense contractors rake in the $. This won't change at all until the November elections, but even then, it's likely nothing will change. Republicans love defense contractors too. The only thing I can see impacting that is if inflation continues or something important breaks in the financial markets. But there's a great deal of ruin left in the US, far more padding than exists in Europe, and no reason for the administration not to fight to the last Ukrainian conscript and the last EU pensioner.
Solid post, Tim. I agree 100% and have said many of those same things myself. Your post speaks to the articles in mainstream media about the "public losing faith in democracy" (rightly so).
Even that framing is a misdirection play: we don't have a democracy in USA; never did; our founders never intended us to; and we are certainly not "spreading" nor "saving" "democracy". Is all part of the propaganda.
Trump was against American intervention overseas but I bet you don't think much of him.
Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.”
Schedule F employees could be fired. With this order, he would have be able to fire people in the federal bureaucracy.
The Washington Post in an editorial expressed absolute shock and alarm at the implications and wrote: "...Mr. Trump will try to realize his sad vision in his second term, unless voters are wise enough to stop him.”
On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.”
He was about to drain the swamp but Biden was declared the winner due mostly to mail-in ballots.
Too bad he was so weak, vain and incompetent not to do those things right away. Brought mostly the wrong people too. But I don't have the energy to full revisit the Trump presidency right now!
If "I bet you don't think much of him," was aimed at me, I'd just say don't be too hasty making snap judgments. While Trump's attempts at reigning in COCOM adventurism more or less failed (for multiple reasons, including lack of commitment to push withdrawal choices though), I give him full credit for trying. When you're on the outside it's difficult to fully understand how difficult it is for even POTUS to force change on a recalcitrant Executive Branch (such as the extremely powerful DoD) when Congress and the Press is also against you.
Trump’s failure was rooted in his seeming inability to understand the actual government or gather and keep allies within it - many in government would have Constitutional government restored.
He did not follow through on his Inauguration speech which frankly given the time and its tone he should immediately made examples of the very many elite criminals of Davos, or been conciliatory in word.
Trump was menacing in words but meek in deeds.
Trump acted as a CEO.
The POTUS lost his Executive Branch powers with Humphreys Executors (1937) and APA (1946).
His inability to gather allies ..
...when he gave up Flynn instantly he lost what can only be called the Intelligence war.
His staffing picks above all Jared were horrific at times, he allowed Jared his pettiness towards Christie for jailing his criminal father (a totally out of control criminal at that).
When the IC via Brennan and Comey tried to blackmail him with the Russian pee hoax he should have had those 2 arrested on Jan 21st, even if they escaped jail they openly blackmailed the President.
Trump’s idea of fighting from start to finish was to call his lawyers; President’s don’t get the option. You are the law over government or there is none - the status quo being laws do not apply to the government officials.
This is a really interesting piece. Not a report from the home front, but the holiday front, as it were. Both the subject and the piece itself bring Joan Didion to mind. Maybe its the lack of strong emotion, the juxtaposition of calm and distant chaos.
What I'd be interested to know is what the tourists make of Russia or the Ukrainians (as people, not the polities). Westerners expect each other to gush with concern over distant, exotic, victims of war and other misfortune. Judging by the media, Europeans do not appear to have any appreciable degree of empathy for the Russians. For me, this exposes the shallowness of Europe's so-called values.
In this corner of Europe, Russians are seen as a serious force and the only Russians one encounters are those who are well-off. There is a grudging (and sometimes non-grudging) respect for the Russians. Ukes are considered bros.
If you don't think PUTIN CRAZY or buy into the projected eventual motives for the invasion (conquest of Europe, restoration of USSR), then one might be a neutral observer who hopes Russia wins quickly so we get about to putting the pieces back together again.
Excellent article, so enlightening to get the various "man on the street" perspectives — Oops, I meant "person on the street!" At the beginning of the Russia/Ukraine Brouhaha this winter I suspected it wasn't a simple bad guy vs. good guy conflict. Your writing provided needed viewpoints, along with Matt Taibbi who spent many years in Moscow as a journalist. As the Ukraine flags either replaced BLM signs or popped up alongside them, I just sighed... the major news media here in the U.S. is so blatantly propagandized. My favorite meme was a photo montage of several well known celebrities and the headline: The only way to stop Russia now is if enough celebrities record themselves from their mansions singing "Imagine." Thank you Substack and all you varied writers! Have a lovely summer.
Interesting that a pan-European, and even global, quantitative survey can be done from Croatia due to holiday travelers passing through. The attitudes sound about as expected. The enthusiasm for the Ukraine war has diminished in the USA as it has settled into a grinding war of attrition, which plays to Russian strength and staying power, and permits none of the dashing feats of arms that the Ukrainians pulled off when the Russians tried to win a quick, Blitzkrieg-like victory. The muscular reflex sanction regime, poorly thought out, with little focus on long term effects, seems to be penalizing the sanctioning countries more than the Russians. Yet another display of the incompetence and callousness of the Western ruling elite, a gang of smug, vicious idiots, who despise their own populations and see immiserating them as a positive feature of their destructive self-congratulatory gestures. Hopefully they will not get us into World War III, with nuclear weapons being used on a large scale. Have a nice Summer, and I hope we are all alive next year at this time.
In the USA we are facing higher prices for everything, especially gasoline. Our government is sanctioning its own people by destroying our energy industry in the service of their deranged climate fears. The US government is inflicting more pain on its own people than it is inflicting on the Russian people.
There's just a feeling of powerlessness that can be easily detected. COVID beat people down, and the sentiment is that the politicians are far too distant from the people.
If Canadians feel powerless, it is due to Covid and domestic issues. The war in Ukraine is just too remote for us to worry about it. Fuel prices are up, and it is the usual suspects who are using the opportunity to rake in big profits.
The incompetent and callous “Western ruling elite, a gang of smug, vicious idiots, who despise their own populations and see immiserating them as a positive feature of their destructive self-congratulatory gestures,” are intentionally trying to trigger a nuclear escalation. They plan to live underground and run their millennial global police state from there. Stupid rats!
It is their end-game, as the imperial power otherwise will continue to wane which, to them, is a fate worse than annihilation of all local humanity.
The first three paragraphs of this piece provide the foundational theory for a lot of Michael Moore's work, and pretty much all of Sascha Baron Cohen's work.
Dobbs and the other rulings from SCOTUS changed the board here, never mind morality politics is Power.
The Power of Progressive government of the last 89 years has been the courts and SCOTUS rulings. What people never understood was Roe was a litmus test not a standalone issue.
The Entire New Deal Administrative State’s immunity from elected government rests on the courts. The entire machine and all the machines since 1965 rest on the courts doing what the Progressive Bureaucracy and Theocracy told them, the Power itself never mind all the rights and interests that sprang up like Kudzu (hi gays) are at mortal peril.
Its as if in 1859 SCOTUS (Supreme Court US 🇺🇸) had reverted Dred Scott and allowed the states and legislatures to settle the issue.
The sleepy State Capitols already aroused from a century of irrelevant sleep by COVID have just burst into life with abortion legislation. The Catholic Legal Laity * changed the board and the Evangelical State movements just sprang into life - and RTL built not just a National legal machine in DC but state organizations in anticipation of this moment- when Roe fell.
Roe was always the litmus **test for the entire Progressive power structure, if SCOTUS did not uphold the sacrament of abortion they would never hold the line on the rest of the imaginary conjuring, worst case scenario question Humphreys Executors =POTUS can’t fire bureaucrats, Federal Bureaucracies can administratively tax without Congress- directly against Articles 2 and 1.
The entire edifice indeed the entirety of Moldbug’s Cathedral can collapse if SCOTUS doesn’t hold the line. And SCOTUS is (shh Catholic) I mean Constitutional Originalists.
And the 💩 and 🔥 is flying on Yarvins stack because he posted “you can’t win the Culture War”
Which started a fire still burning on his comments, generally against the 5D chess surrender to win convoluted course he recommends... and we have of course a new metaphor, the peasants are now hobbits who can’t beat the Elves aka elites but the hobbits could quit just as worm turns to get the Dark Elves to defect and and and ...
Frankly Yarvin is starting to sound like PG Wodehouse in Nazi Captivity ...or he is just scared.
He’s closer to Alex J than people realize, both have been Fr Gapron’s from some point but as usual the Joke is backfiring.
If the facts change Sir consider changing your evaluation.
The facts are changing.
This is what was lacking...
...with Trump or any potential Tribune of the plebes there was no movement it was all him and he built nothing but rallies. He gathered no allies , although he did keep his word on the Justice’s he appointed.
Trump or not there’s a movement now with country wide depth.
More importantly; your grasp of the elites theory is respectfully very incomplete if the Supreme Court isn’t the very foundation and Apex; The Supreme Court is the Supreme Laws of the Elites that descend on us all...you can’t get more Elite. This IS their POWER and Legitimacy.
You can’t hold to Elite Rule and disregard the Supreme Court, that is their rule.
Gods Teeth Man that is The Elite speaking- and the Progs have lost control of them.
Its as if the Jesuits had seized control of America itself...
(Shh 🤫 don’t frighten the Protestants they’re very happy now but very skittish you know...they really think Latin is magic and for the first time they really like us...🤫)
You can’t agree with Elites theory but ignore the Supreme Court throwing down Roe, in particular on Originalist grounds. You see If taking the Constitutional text as written and as understood when written is legitimate for Roe then many decisions including directly powers of the Bureaucracy could be thrown down.
The entire legal edifice and Constitutional legitimacy of Progressive and Elite rule is based on Supreme Court rulings, if the Court doesn’t obey the Elites they just lost their real power.
SCOTUS most assuredly just disobeyed the Elites.
So these Elites 🇺🇸 are in deeper trouble than they ever were with Trump.
An alternative way to put it: the elites have split. SCOTUS defected from the Progressive camp. SCOTUS is indeed elitist, it is a college of politicians in legal drag, but by resorting to a more straightforward interpretation of the constitution they have undermined the entire legal edifice of public administration in America for roughly a century. The states are now in a position to function as autonomous bodies. The left must fight across 52 fronts or resign themselves to governing portions of the US only.
This is very much consistent with a perspective derived from Mosca or Pareto. It is truly a coup d'etat, the result of at least a generation of hard, patient work in law schools. Very Gramscian too.
Trump was only able to pick reliably conservative judges because Catholic law schools had done so much to retain or nurse those who preserved the jurisprudence needed to restore the Constitution. I think this is the Long Warred's point and it is a good one.
I've had this growing sense of foreboding. The normalcy of the world around feels bizarre by contrast. God willing nothing will come of it but it feels like the wheels are coming off in a thousand different ways, many of them intentional.
This piece is just a collection of thoughts from the random sampling that I've been doing this past month and a half here in Dalmatia.
Leave a comment if the mood strikes you, and let's please avoid shitting on any nation/ethnic group, please and thank you.
I have been in transit since last week and will be all over the map for the next little bit, but will squeeze in posting when I get the chance to do so.
«…For the moment, they want to enjoy their first real summer vacation in three years, knowing full well that their leaders have fucked them again.…»
Given that Niccolo Soldo has aptly deployed the notorious f-word, and being a Vietnam veteran myself (US Army) I’d like to embellish that word choice with a verbal relic of the Vietnam era:
“clusterfuck (plural clusterfucks)
“(slang, vulgar) A chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong. It is often caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.”
The so-called (and mostly hyperreal) leadership of the Global Village, western and eastern branches, is indeed a fornicating and formicating cluster of diverse lost causes: the Chinese Emperor, in his Forbidden City; the Soviet Union; Lech Wałęsa; Budapest 1956; Leo Strauss and his Neocon progeny; and maybe even Donald Trump (if his #MAGA cause is indeed lost.)
Macron, heir to the Bourbon kings and Robespierre, urging a peace deal with the Ayatollah Khamenei? More accurately, heir to a Moliere farce!
I used the unusual word “formicating,” so I’d best add the definition from Wiktionary:
formicate (third-person singular simple present formicates, present participle formicating, simple past and past participle formicated)
To move like ants.
To have a sensation like the movement of ants.
Nuclear-armed ants, of course, but that’s been a science fiction trope since 1954 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Them!).
"Them!" was one of my childhood movie memories (unlike "Jeb!", today). 11C30, '71-'76. But tell me: Doesn't "clusterfuck" also contain an element of wistful remembrance? a familiarity-with and fondness-of those involved in it? After all, they were OUR "clusterfucks", no? Or, perhaps it's just the benevolence of Time, rounding the corners, softening the sharp edges, and letting us live with what was.
Excellent point. Back then we (or at least I) expected things to get better. And, for the most part, they did. Now, although the woke takeover of the USA defies all logic and most experience, we can HOPE that the insanity will pass, but we can’t be sure. After all, the Dark Ages lasted a millennium.
Dalmatia, as the part of a collective Mediterranean cultural landscape has a very brusque, unforgiving way of dealing with people who do something dumb: “Sir, what did you expect (is going to happen after you did that dumb thing)?” I think it summarizes quite aptly our current moment in time.
Indeed, what did we expect?
One of my uncles is fond of saying "dobili sto su trazili" (they got what they were looking for), as a response to when someone or some group predictably fucks up.
😂
🇺🇸 want to enjoy their first real summer vacation in three years, knowing full well that their leaders have fucked them again.😂
Insert many places lol
have always found remaining silent a useful practice
Understatement, from you.
I think I will write up a movie review this week. I have only posted two so far:
The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) - Italian movie about a small Tuscan town in the dying days of WW2, stuck between retreating Germans and Italian Fascists and the approaching Americans. Ebert called the cinematography "too beautiful", therefore distracting - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/film-review-la-notte-di-san-lorenzo
Fathom (1967) - A British spy caper/comedy romp starring Raquel Welch in several different bikinis filmed in various, beautiful locations in Franco's Spain - https://niccolo.substack.com/p/film-review-fathom-1967-uk
I like old movies. I don't watch new ones at all.
Agreed about movies. Older is usually better. The scripts in a movie from the 30s-60s are so tight and compact and coherent compared to today. They told a story and did not waste time. Every scene and every line moved things along. Actors knew how to act, using their faces and bodies, knowing the camera would enlarge and amplify the subtlest movements. The wordless scene in The Wild Bunch, where Pike (the great William Holden) wakes up, and sees the mostly empty whiskey bottle, and the young Mexican prostitute, in the cold light of day, and straps on his guns, and he knows, and we know, it is the last drink and the last woman he will ever have, is like something from a lost world. Movies today are like art from late antiquity, in the shadow of unattainable greatness, but the artists are blind to how far they have fallen. Speaking of sixties action romps with beautiful actresses, see Deadlier Than The Male (1967), with the ravishing Elke Sommer and Sylva Koscina. And as to grim war films, see the brilliant Army of Shadows (1969), about the French Resistance.
Grazie for the recommendations as I haven't seen either of those. When it comes to American Film, Noir is best (followed by Westerns).
Loved High Plains Drifter; saw it with friends when very young on the VCR in the early 1980s and it was an eye-opener for me at the time.
What do you think of Once Upon a Time in the West (which is Noir Western and Hell Opera)...
classic
I blame nautilus, the exercise equipment. From the 80s onward actors and actresses were expected to look like athletes. There is much less emphasis on acting ability.
Scriptwriting is also becoming very academic. Film schools and related faculties are homogenizing the medium. The youngsters writing scripts read way too few books to have picked up any sense of how style can be applied to the written word.
For me, watching Fellini's 8 1/2 when I was 14 showed me that movies could be art, and dialogue could be beautiful.
Ah, Fellini...from Rimini on the other side of the Adriatic! Is cinema in Croatia heavily Italian?
It was becoming apparent as early as the 1980s that the influence of television, and particularly TV commercials, were having a negative impact on feature films. Directors did not know what to do with the large canvas, they wasted time, they were used to the rapid impact of TV programs and commercials, snd they did not know how to tell a story. Also, people became increasingly less literate, as you say. They no longer read books, so they did not know how to develop characters over time. Films became episodic, a series of images meant to stir thoughtless emotions, in some kind of sequence, but not adding up to anything. As early as Star Wars, this was beginning to happen. Fortunately, the old movies are very accessible now, and we can spend our time with people who were competent at their craft, if we want to.
The 80s was certainly the great inflection point. Several factors (economic, cultural, political) combined to make it very difficult for the studios to produce films fit for adults, films with a degree of complexity and psychological plausibility. Attention spans and literacy have declined and a vast range of human behaviour is now off-limits artistically because it cannot be reconciled with the norms assumed by the arts.
This is a very, very good book on the subject - https://www.amazon.com/Riders-Raging-Bulls-Sex-Drugs-Rock/dp/0684857081
The main argument is that the experimentation of the 70s came out due to 60s Hollywood becoming too formulaic and out of touch with the youth, thus losing audiences to TV and especially rock'n'roll, but that "Jaws" created the blockbuster that drove a stake through its heart, with Cimino's high-budget bomb "Heaven's Gate" driving the final nail in the coffin.
Have not read it, but hear its ideas a fair bit. Hollywood incorporated techniques from the European New Wave to stay relevant. "Heaven's Gate" was very left-wing in its politics. Ironically, today's commercial stuff is way more ideological in the worst way, but they are prepared to swallow the losses. Ultimately, it is a business. Few commercial films make much of a profit. Theoretically the money is made on the blockbusters, but who knows? My pet theory is that Hollywood's true function is tax evasion and money laundering. The complexity of calculating profits on a film and taxing the returns as they come in over the years make film finance a great medium for dodgy practices.
Cinematically the American cultural shift most happened in 1972. Look at the best picture nominees that year: immigrant experience (The Godfather, The Emigrants--the latter is a Swedish film), Holocaust (Cabaret), Southern black sharecroppers (Sounder). Only identifiable WASPs featured are the hillbilly inbred rapists in Deliverance, and they're quickly defeated by suburban weekend warriors.
That’s all education
The Wild Bunch is a classic.
I confess
I wanna go out that way
🤷♂️
Ditto re films. Who can even come close to The Third Man (1949) ?
A personal fave.
Third man music in my head in 94 as we 2 soldiers drove into Prague at night down rainy streets...
...I started in Cold war
It was weird 😆
The Thin Man! (of course)
Speaking of old movies and Politics how about The Marx Brothers “Duck Soup”?
Because we’re freaking in it 😂
Here in the States most everyone who was caught up in "the current thing" months ago, have moved on from Ukraine. Some blue checks still have Ukro flags, but far fewer than before. People are much more concerned with gas prices, inflation, and yes, summer vacation. There's some talk of Biden being too old, which one hears in random locations, and probably explains his low poll numbers. Still, as in Europe, it doesn't matter what people think -- the mass mobilization of public opinion that lasted 4-6 weeks accomplished its goal, which is that the foreign policy establishment can pretty much spend as much $ as it wants fighting the proxy war. The press, supine as usual in front of a Democrat POTUS, doesn't ask questions and the defense contractors rake in the $. This won't change at all until the November elections, but even then, it's likely nothing will change. Republicans love defense contractors too. The only thing I can see impacting that is if inflation continues or something important breaks in the financial markets. But there's a great deal of ruin left in the US, far more padding than exists in Europe, and no reason for the administration not to fight to the last Ukrainian conscript and the last EU pensioner.
Solid post, Tim. I agree 100% and have said many of those same things myself. Your post speaks to the articles in mainstream media about the "public losing faith in democracy" (rightly so).
Even that framing is a misdirection play: we don't have a democracy in USA; never did; our founders never intended us to; and we are certainly not "spreading" nor "saving" "democracy". Is all part of the propaganda.
Well said!
Trump was against American intervention overseas but I bet you don't think much of him.
Two weeks before the 2020 general election, on October 21, 2020, Trump issued an executive order (E.O. 13957) on “Creating Schedule F in the Excepted Service.”
Schedule F employees could be fired. With this order, he would have be able to fire people in the federal bureaucracy.
The Washington Post in an editorial expressed absolute shock and alarm at the implications and wrote: "...Mr. Trump will try to realize his sad vision in his second term, unless voters are wise enough to stop him.”
On January 21, 2021, the day after inauguration, Biden reversed the order. It was one of his first actions as president. No wonder, because, as The Hill reported, this executive order would have been “the biggest change to federal workforce protections in a century, converting many federal workers to ‘at will’ employment.”
He was about to drain the swamp but Biden was declared the winner due mostly to mail-in ballots.
Too bad he was so weak, vain and incompetent not to do those things right away. Brought mostly the wrong people too. But I don't have the energy to full revisit the Trump presidency right now!
He should have done that Jan 21st 2019, he had no idea of the actual government.
If "I bet you don't think much of him," was aimed at me, I'd just say don't be too hasty making snap judgments. While Trump's attempts at reigning in COCOM adventurism more or less failed (for multiple reasons, including lack of commitment to push withdrawal choices though), I give him full credit for trying. When you're on the outside it's difficult to fully understand how difficult it is for even POTUS to force change on a recalcitrant Executive Branch (such as the extremely powerful DoD) when Congress and the Press is also against you.
Trump’s failure was rooted in his seeming inability to understand the actual government or gather and keep allies within it - many in government would have Constitutional government restored.
He did not follow through on his Inauguration speech which frankly given the time and its tone he should immediately made examples of the very many elite criminals of Davos, or been conciliatory in word.
Trump was menacing in words but meek in deeds.
Trump acted as a CEO.
The POTUS lost his Executive Branch powers with Humphreys Executors (1937) and APA (1946).
His inability to gather allies ..
...when he gave up Flynn instantly he lost what can only be called the Intelligence war.
His staffing picks above all Jared were horrific at times, he allowed Jared his pettiness towards Christie for jailing his criminal father (a totally out of control criminal at that).
When the IC via Brennan and Comey tried to blackmail him with the Russian pee hoax he should have had those 2 arrested on Jan 21st, even if they escaped jail they openly blackmailed the President.
Trump’s idea of fighting from start to finish was to call his lawyers; President’s don’t get the option. You are the law over government or there is none - the status quo being laws do not apply to the government officials.
Twitter and lawyers do not success make.
Yes indeed. Well said.
Sadly, your analysis is spot on.
This is a really interesting piece. Not a report from the home front, but the holiday front, as it were. Both the subject and the piece itself bring Joan Didion to mind. Maybe its the lack of strong emotion, the juxtaposition of calm and distant chaos.
What I'd be interested to know is what the tourists make of Russia or the Ukrainians (as people, not the polities). Westerners expect each other to gush with concern over distant, exotic, victims of war and other misfortune. Judging by the media, Europeans do not appear to have any appreciable degree of empathy for the Russians. For me, this exposes the shallowness of Europe's so-called values.
In this corner of Europe, Russians are seen as a serious force and the only Russians one encounters are those who are well-off. There is a grudging (and sometimes non-grudging) respect for the Russians. Ukes are considered bros.
Appreciate the nuanced, first-hand perspective. Good read!
Sure enough jealous of location, appreciative of insight(s).
Would be a joy to roam along whand at I consider Nostro Mare as did once when a "profugho ungherese."
Ciao!
Profugho Ungherese haha
If you don't think PUTIN CRAZY or buy into the projected eventual motives for the invasion (conquest of Europe, restoration of USSR), then one might be a neutral observer who hopes Russia wins quickly so we get about to putting the pieces back together again.
Here in Canada, summer is short, and Canadians do not spend it asking and answering questions about politics. We have three other seasons for that.
That being said, I'm expecting my summer of contentment to be transformed by autumn, by the meddlesome chattering classes.
Sirloin on the bbq, Moosehead in one hand, sun beaming down on Muskoka.
Drat you just made me hungry for Sirloin
Excellent article, so enlightening to get the various "man on the street" perspectives — Oops, I meant "person on the street!" At the beginning of the Russia/Ukraine Brouhaha this winter I suspected it wasn't a simple bad guy vs. good guy conflict. Your writing provided needed viewpoints, along with Matt Taibbi who spent many years in Moscow as a journalist. As the Ukraine flags either replaced BLM signs or popped up alongside them, I just sighed... the major news media here in the U.S. is so blatantly propagandized. My favorite meme was a photo montage of several well known celebrities and the headline: The only way to stop Russia now is if enough celebrities record themselves from their mansions singing "Imagine." Thank you Substack and all you varied writers! Have a lovely summer.
Interesting that a pan-European, and even global, quantitative survey can be done from Croatia due to holiday travelers passing through. The attitudes sound about as expected. The enthusiasm for the Ukraine war has diminished in the USA as it has settled into a grinding war of attrition, which plays to Russian strength and staying power, and permits none of the dashing feats of arms that the Ukrainians pulled off when the Russians tried to win a quick, Blitzkrieg-like victory. The muscular reflex sanction regime, poorly thought out, with little focus on long term effects, seems to be penalizing the sanctioning countries more than the Russians. Yet another display of the incompetence and callousness of the Western ruling elite, a gang of smug, vicious idiots, who despise their own populations and see immiserating them as a positive feature of their destructive self-congratulatory gestures. Hopefully they will not get us into World War III, with nuclear weapons being used on a large scale. Have a nice Summer, and I hope we are all alive next year at this time.
Not surprising.
In the USA we are facing higher prices for everything, especially gasoline. Our government is sanctioning its own people by destroying our energy industry in the service of their deranged climate fears. The US government is inflicting more pain on its own people than it is inflicting on the Russian people.
The USA is suffering more than Russia.
That's the POINT.
The Russians didn't march into the Capitol Jan 6.
American's suffering especially say hated Truckers short of DEF etc is Feature not a Bug.
There's just a feeling of powerlessness that can be easily detected. COVID beat people down, and the sentiment is that the politicians are far too distant from the people.
Canaduh and western Europe seem to share a similar kind of political paralysis at the moment
If Canadians feel powerless, it is due to Covid and domestic issues. The war in Ukraine is just too remote for us to worry about it. Fuel prices are up, and it is the usual suspects who are using the opportunity to rake in big profits.
The incompetent and callous “Western ruling elite, a gang of smug, vicious idiots, who despise their own populations and see immiserating them as a positive feature of their destructive self-congratulatory gestures,” are intentionally trying to trigger a nuclear escalation. They plan to live underground and run their millennial global police state from there. Stupid rats!
It is their end-game, as the imperial power otherwise will continue to wane which, to them, is a fate worse than annihilation of all local humanity.
Maybe. But it’s a rule of thumb that stupidity and ineptitude explain a lot more than conspiracies and intentional malice.
Yes, it’s fantastically stupid. District of Columbia.
The first three paragraphs of this piece provide the foundational theory for a lot of Michael Moore's work, and pretty much all of Sascha Baron Cohen's work.
Man continues to be a social animal.
Dobbs and the other rulings from SCOTUS changed the board here, never mind morality politics is Power.
The Power of Progressive government of the last 89 years has been the courts and SCOTUS rulings. What people never understood was Roe was a litmus test not a standalone issue.
The Entire New Deal Administrative State’s immunity from elected government rests on the courts. The entire machine and all the machines since 1965 rest on the courts doing what the Progressive Bureaucracy and Theocracy told them, the Power itself never mind all the rights and interests that sprang up like Kudzu (hi gays) are at mortal peril.
Its as if in 1859 SCOTUS (Supreme Court US 🇺🇸) had reverted Dred Scott and allowed the states and legislatures to settle the issue.
The sleepy State Capitols already aroused from a century of irrelevant sleep by COVID have just burst into life with abortion legislation. The Catholic Legal Laity * changed the board and the Evangelical State movements just sprang into life - and RTL built not just a National legal machine in DC but state organizations in anticipation of this moment- when Roe fell.
Roe was always the litmus **test for the entire Progressive power structure, if SCOTUS did not uphold the sacrament of abortion they would never hold the line on the rest of the imaginary conjuring, worst case scenario question Humphreys Executors =POTUS can’t fire bureaucrats, Federal Bureaucracies can administratively tax without Congress- directly against Articles 2 and 1.
The entire edifice indeed the entirety of Moldbug’s Cathedral can collapse if SCOTUS doesn’t hold the line. And SCOTUS is (shh Catholic) I mean Constitutional Originalists.
And the 💩 and 🔥 is flying on Yarvins stack because he posted “you can’t win the Culture War”
Which started a fire still burning on his comments, generally against the 5D chess surrender to win convoluted course he recommends... and we have of course a new metaphor, the peasants are now hobbits who can’t beat the Elves aka elites but the hobbits could quit just as worm turns to get the Dark Elves to defect and and and ...
Frankly Yarvin is starting to sound like PG Wodehouse in Nazi Captivity ...or he is just scared.
He’s closer to Alex J than people realize, both have been Fr Gapron’s from some point but as usual the Joke is backfiring.
I’m going to have to look that CB admin state unraveling up, thanks!
So...while you were F---in off...
The Papist Apostolic Laity fulfilled its Vatican II mission...
😆
Catholic Action at last-
Yarvin's piece is about Elite Theory (which I certainly cling to myself).
If the facts change Sir consider changing your evaluation.
The facts are changing.
This is what was lacking...
...with Trump or any potential Tribune of the plebes there was no movement it was all him and he built nothing but rallies. He gathered no allies , although he did keep his word on the Justice’s he appointed.
Trump or not there’s a movement now with country wide depth.
More importantly; your grasp of the elites theory is respectfully very incomplete if the Supreme Court isn’t the very foundation and Apex; The Supreme Court is the Supreme Laws of the Elites that descend on us all...you can’t get more Elite. This IS their POWER and Legitimacy.
You can’t hold to Elite Rule and disregard the Supreme Court, that is their rule.
Gods Teeth Man that is The Elite speaking- and the Progs have lost control of them.
Its as if the Jesuits had seized control of America itself...
(Shh 🤫 don’t frighten the Protestants they’re very happy now but very skittish you know...they really think Latin is magic and for the first time they really like us...🤫)
SCOTUS is made up of elites. No idea what you're trying to say.
Yeah I am unwittingly unclear at times-
SCOTUS most assuredly just disobeyed the Elites.
You can’t agree with Elites theory but ignore the Supreme Court throwing down Roe, in particular on Originalist grounds. You see If taking the Constitutional text as written and as understood when written is legitimate for Roe then many decisions including directly powers of the Bureaucracy could be thrown down.
The entire legal edifice and Constitutional legitimacy of Progressive and Elite rule is based on Supreme Court rulings, if the Court doesn’t obey the Elites they just lost their real power.
SCOTUS most assuredly just disobeyed the Elites.
So these Elites 🇺🇸 are in deeper trouble than they ever were with Trump.
This is a Dictatorship losing their Army.
SCOTUS is part of the elite, though.
An alternative way to put it: the elites have split. SCOTUS defected from the Progressive camp. SCOTUS is indeed elitist, it is a college of politicians in legal drag, but by resorting to a more straightforward interpretation of the constitution they have undermined the entire legal edifice of public administration in America for roughly a century. The states are now in a position to function as autonomous bodies. The left must fight across 52 fronts or resign themselves to governing portions of the US only.
This is very much consistent with a perspective derived from Mosca or Pareto. It is truly a coup d'etat, the result of at least a generation of hard, patient work in law schools. Very Gramscian too.
Trump was only able to pick reliably conservative judges because Catholic law schools had done so much to retain or nurse those who preserved the jurisprudence needed to restore the Constitution. I think this is the Long Warred's point and it is a good one.
Yes and The SCOTUS part of Elite [actually the Elite Elite Elite Court] just defected ....
....Some because they were Catholics who spent decades getting into position to do this, Roberts because he wants to Live :D
Abortion law will be determined by the states. Decentralization is good, no?
There’s no National Abortion Law. Now - no Federal one.
Roe was a court decision that said there was a Constitutional Right to Abortion.
It did not specify limits.
That was more or less at the states, but all the way to term in some cases.
Roe just overturned by Dobbs decision June 25.
It will now vary state to state.
Texas had just passed a heartbeat law saying that at heartbeat of fetus it became illegal.
The matter is returned by the Federal government to the States and will vary.
I’m not a lawyer so;
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
Very Very Very Good
I've had this growing sense of foreboding. The normalcy of the world around feels bizarre by contrast. God willing nothing will come of it but it feels like the wheels are coming off in a thousand different ways, many of them intentional.
VIBE SHIFT
Well Damn I’m only just beginning to enjoy myself...
cheer up!
https://youtu.be/q8Zh9FXrcmA
The bizarre result would be no cataclysm.