h/t WRSA
To those for whom this essay is too much obvious truth and common sense to absorb in one sitting, try it in small bites.
If you can handle it, try it in one sitting.
Either way, RTWT.
For those who need to lose some weight, you'll find your journey through life immeasurably better once the scales fall from your eyes, and you drop about ten pounds of b.s. from inside your head. This essay is liposuction.
If the shoe fits...
12 comments:
This essay is fantastic to anyone with a head for strategy. Tactics are fun and glamorous, but strategy is what wins wars. America retreated from victory in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam for want of strategy.
He is also very good at describing the shortcomings of a merchant-class culture (the USA, Israel, and the Boer republics were the only nations founded by merchants instead of peasants) when dealing with uneconomic factors. Indeed, family life, war, religion, and farming of non-cash crops are all essentials for civilization that are uneconomical.
"The only problem now, as I see it, is that the American point of view is against America. That is what troubles me. On the left, we are ready to destroy our country to save the planet. On the right, Putin is our savior against the New World Order. Is anyone thinking of how to preserve the United States?"
I see it that way too. The dissident right thinks they are against the government; they often sound like they are against the country. Each is certain for himself, however.
So, that's the question, there at the end: Is anyone for America anymore? Maybe the next question is: What's is America?
Nyquist spins a lot of word salad, but evades the actual issues...In 2014, the US, in violation of several treaties, overthrew the elected government of the Ukraine (as it has done dozens of times before) and installed its own puppet, who proceeded to attack and murder many Russian speaking civilians in the Eastern provinces, and causing more than a million to flee to Russia..It then became clear that the puppet, now absolute dictator, would join NATO, and ultimately station nukes on Russia's border, while beginning an ethnic cleansing campaign in the East..Russia was left with no choice but to prevent those things from happening...Inconveniently for both the US and its European stooges, Russia has vast resources, including energy, which are essential to both Europe and the US..The US has continued to avow its goal of regime change and breaking up Russia so that it can be looted again, like the 1990s..What country would stand for that?
excellent read and excellent perspective, thanks for that...
Well I'm not rooting for Russia and I'm not rooting for the Ukraine. America's is culturally rotten in many areas. Not everything is a zero sum game. Cultural survival is. UFOs make me nervous because advanced extra terrestrial technology would do to homo sapiens what Western civilization has done to every indigenous culture it's encountered... At the end of the day civilization is a thin veneer. Survival trumps civilized rules EVERY time. Parity in weapons makes war a horrifying circumstance. Non parity turns war into extermination.
WRSA posted an article today that points at the same thing from a different direction, at least in my opinion.
https://www.thepostil.com/what-ukraine-tells-us-about-the-coming-war/
Both articles point to globalization being the root cause, one from an economic view and the other from a socio-political view.
If I haven't said it before, I want to say that I appreciate your thoughts on Ukraine. I don't necessarily agree with you all the time, but that's precisely why I read here.
-BH
I've just skimmed part of it so far and I'm not ready to say that I agree with it in whole, but his underlying but his underlying thesis that the Homo Economicus is both false and has become the underpinning of both Right and Left ideology in the west is spot on, I think. I noticed that back in college years ago, and it kept me from becoming a full-formed Libertarian, a ideology that I otherwise had (and still have) a lot of sympathy for. I'm seeing the results of seeing people solely in terms of economic activity in microcosm at the improvement chain I work for, in which store policy is that we aren't allowed to even ask a person walking through checkout without paying for their stuff if we can check their receipt. All in the name of safety, of course. Then corporate gets worried about morale at high-shrink stores and asks us to fill out a survey...I responded by quoting Kipling regarding paying danegeld and suggesting that they review the history of Ethelred the Unready and consider carefully exactly how much safety they gain by encouraging people to steal boldly from us. I doubt they will do so.
In any case, thanks for posting that.
Grey Fox
Not only is the sucker the last to know he's been had, but he will also fight hard for his ignorance of being caught in a scam.
@pyrhhus,
That attempt is a facilely futile as abortionists who skip over dealing with the central question of when life begins. Let's try telling it without the Red-colored glasses on.
Ukrainian history doesn't start with the CIA in 2014, it starts with Russia since ever, and underlined in blood by the tender embrace of Stalin and the cheka in the Holodomor.
From 1990-2014, a conga-line of Russian-controlled puppet leaders ruled newly-independent Ukraine. Ukrainians had had enough by 2014, dumping the obvious Russian puppet, and took their country back. Seeing opportunity in the chaos they'd created, and in violation of their own explicit treaty obligations to respect and defend Ukrainian sovereignty, Russia first seized Crimea, and then infiltrated Russian spetsnaz and AB military troops into Donetsk and Luhansk in civvies, trying to pass them off as local insurgents, and incited ethnic Russian Ukrainians in the east into thinking they could simply relocate the borders of Ukraine westward with Russian support, in order to secure a land bridge to the pirated Crimea. Ukrainian forces, not fooled by this tissue-thin Russian maskirovka, started shelling the Russian troops in Donetsk and Luhansk pretending to be local Ukrainians. The few ethnic Russians who still missed the Soviet Union returned to Russia proper.
Same facts, except tied to reality, rather than Russian propaganda, which has fared about as well as everything else Russian has in Ukraine since February.
Boo frickin' hoo.
Putin is simply a murderous KGB thug given the reins of power, longing for his beloved but lost Soviet Empire, and acting exactly as one would expect. The fascination with him by anyone in this country is baffling, unless one admits that his most ardent supporters are either Lenin's exact Useful Idiots, and/or self-loathing nihilists, and that such can be true even while noting that Biden is a babbling idiot selected, not elected, and his sham administration merely a banana-republic grift machine.
"... The fascination with him by anyone in this country is baffling, unless one admits that his most ardent supporters are either Lenin's exact Useful Idiots, and/or self-loathing nihilists, and that such can be true even while noting that Biden is a babbling idiot selected, not elected, and his sham administration merely a banana-republic grift machine."
Patience, this could be long. The Soviet of the 1990's was a shambles. Gorbachev was Russia's Jimmy Carter. So much so that to this day many a Russian spits on the ground on the mere mention of his name. Then someone comes out from left field to eliminate the confusion and install order regardless of the cost -- Putin.
Then the man does something quite un-Russian, he listens to the people in hours long telecasts from man-on-the-street questions. Some get acted upon. For a nation that for 5 centuries endured a top down management it was akin to the Second Coming. My own MIL had tears of joy during the first telecast. The chance to be heard has immense power, more so in a society that has not had it. Regardless of the efficacy of the teleasts Putin gained huge political capital as a result.
This triggered something else that Russians had not had for quite some time -- pride. For good or ill, pride is an infectious human condition. I would not consider it unusual that such admiration crosses oceans. If it had not been for the ongoing war, Putin would still have all his political capital intact. The ole saying -- "He's a bastard, but he's our bastard so we keep him." -- would amply apply here. Still a thug and a scoundrel but so along as Russians want to keep him, well to each their own. Jay Gould was admired in some circle here in the US. Not for what he did, but that he had the chutzpah to pull it off. So too for Putin.
The war with ukraine is his undoing. He miscalculated the depth of the grift in his own military. A KGB agent may have a military background but, in the field, they spend most of their time handling domestic surveillance, not military strategy. Putin has pretty much blown all his political capital domestically. The conscription saw to that. If peace was achieved tomorrow with the current battle lines frozen in place the whole effort is still a failure. He did not achieve his control of the ukrainian shore along the black sea.
Putin is a Stalinist at heart, always will be. But I do tip the hat how he maneuvered to the top. Recognition of that fact does not make one a Useful Idiot. Besides, in a street fight who you going to lay the bet on? Putin or Biden?
Putin's "political capital" in a country that's never had a single honest election in its life is immaterial.
His political capital in a country nominally enamored of liberty and freedom should still, and always, be nil.
That is an excellent, excellent article. I used to read Nyquist a lot between 2000 and 2006, but lost track of him around then. This is some great food for thought.
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