The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The Current World Peace Paradox

(MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST MANDOS POST)

In a weird twist of fate, American liberals and (some) leftists are finding themselves in the non-traditional position of standing in the “hawk” corner, while (some) American conservatives under Trump are in the position of wanting to cut deals with so-called traditional enemies of the US. Whether those deals will actually lead to world peace is another question, but I know it seems a little odd for this constellation of allies and enemies to have occurred — in particular, for American liberals to side so openly with what was traditionally considered a very reactionary part of the US security and foreign policy state.

I would suggest that this is not so odd or illogical or morally convenient. American liberals and (some) leftists/progressives/whatever see this form of peacemaking as being between ideological brethren — opening the door to a form of intolerant, relativist nationalism that pushes back on notions of universal rights and freedoms. If world peace is to be made by people seated at the table who are happy to sacrifice openly international struggles for equality of race, religion, culture, and gender, what value is this world peace other than mere survival?

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99 Comments

  1. Willy

    It’d be so much simpler if conservatives did ‘peace through small government doves’ and liberals did ‘peace through big government hawks’. But modern ideologies are so messed up it seems that anything is possible. Maybe Trumps not-so-grand military parade, without the familiar tanks and missile carriers, will be a nice compromise?

    It’d also be simpler if we just knew who the real bad guys were. They’re getting pretty good at hiding their real intentions.

  2. My increasing impression is that the “real bad guys” have a lot of tactics but little strategy, so finding their “real intentions” might be futile.

  3. Willy

    The ones I knew personally (in my humble little life) always had tactics. Their strategy may have been to live and die by the seat of their tactics. IOW, who needs to think things through when the thrill of risk and chaos is so much more fun? Regular guys have a hard time relating because they need to be able to sleep well at night, something the bad guys seem to have no problem with.

    Maybe Clinton and Obama were a step to the left of their kind. (no pun intended) Same personal needs but more in the way of cause-effect reasoning?

    Anyways, the real intention is power. Just power. Talk of race, religion, culture, gender, survival… are tools for them, things for the rest of us humble folks to worry about.

  4. Hugh

    Republicans can’t govern and Democrats govern badly. Republicans have the courage of their lack of conviction. They were hardline deficit hawks until it became a question of a trillion dollar tax cut for their rich benefactors. They were the party of bare-knuckle law and order until they enabled this incredibly crooked and twisted President and his cohorts. And they were Russia-phobes until Trump started sucking up to Putin. None of this springs from any set of principles. Republicans curry to the rich or Trump’s base, and they will go to any length to do so. That’s it. Nothing more.

    The Democrats also serve the rich but have a fuck you TINA attitude toward their base. Some of them no doubt are using Russia-gate to try to explain away the loss of their painfully awful candidate Clinton in 2016. But the thing is that the Russians were trying to influence the election. And Clinton was so bad that their activities could have, could have changed the outcome. And it is also true that if you threw a brick in the general direction of the Trump campaign, you would probably hit six Russians. And no, that is not normal. It is beyond bizarre, and much of it is probably criminal.

    But beyond all this, it is important that the US has a military, intelligence services, and even interests because the world is destabilizing. Sure, the US has not been doing what it could to slow this process and Trump is greatly accelerating the destabilization with his inside out foreign “policies”, but that destabilization driven by overpopulation and climate change would be occurring anyway. And even with the catastrophe of Trump, it remains, at least for now, in the best position to do something about it and survive it.

  5. Dan

    Liberals and some Leftists are dupes willing to believe they can stand for universal rights and freedoms by supporting corrupt and collapsing liberal states whose core illiberalism is no longer deniable and so deep it suggests liberalism as an emancipatory project was a lie all along.

    White supremacist, ethno-nationalist, and antisemitic populists manipulated by kleptocratic elites decided to sacrifice “world peace” for their survival decades ago. It’s just now they do it openly enough that many people have a harder time engaging in denial.

    A US-Israeli cooperation with Russia to put the squeeze on central Asia against China while holding down the middle east in its death throes is a long-term survival strategy Europeans will come around to or find ways to accept while pretending to object. NATO has no value, certainly not to the US which does not benefit from protecting largely pro-Russian central and east European nationalists from Russia. A US strategic pivot is long overdue, where China’s critical access points to markets and resources can be squeezed from all points of the compass.

  6. Synoia

    because the world is destabilizing…

    Really? How do you measure that this time is worse than the 40s, 50s, 60s, or 70s?

  7. GlassHammer

    “In a weird twist of fate”

    The left fanatically favors out-groups, so watching them push for a conflict that would most certainly get U.S. citizens killed (including themselves) isn’t weird. What is weird is mindset required to embrace out-groups at the expense of your own in-group. Its looks like empathy combined with defective prioritization.

    At least I understand conservative in-group preference (us vs them is easy to grasp and in some ways sensible) but the mental gymnastics of the left baffle me.

  8. Tom

    https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/

    Well Americans can now challenge being placed on a kill list, till an appeals court says otherwise.

    However, if you aren’t a US Citizen, you can be killed at will under the filmiest of pretexts due to metadata analysis.

    Let’s face it, the US is now an elected dictatorship, has been for years and unless we break the 2-party system and scrap our outdated constitution and replace it with proportional vote of parties and have a unicameral congress, there is no chance of the dysfunction being fixed.

  9. Heliopause

    “American liberals … see this form of peacemaking as … opening the door to a form of intolerant, relativist nationalism that pushes back on notions of universal rights and freedoms.”

    If American liberals had even the most microscopic intention of applying these principles generally and consistently then we might have something to talk about. Since there is no evidence of this in either history or current events we can dismiss it.

  10. GlassHammer

    Apologies I wanted to add one more thing to my post.

    You can’t say that your perfectly willing to risk the lives of you fellow citizens solely to virtue signal and in the same breath claim to care about their well being.

    Of all the lefts faults this one irks me the most as of late.

  11. DMC

    “Liberals?” What are those? All I see is Democrats and if thats all it takes to qualify for the term, they I submit it is both redundant and deceptive. When discussing the political spectrum in the U.S., one must keep in mind that it covers the center-right to the fairly far right. There is no left beyond token, storefront operations like the Green Party.

    A Joke: Russian in NYC runs into a cousin from the Old Country.
    Cousin: How is the political system in this country working?
    Russian: In this country they are having two parties. One party represents interests of oligarchs, plutocrats, and such like capitalists. Republicans are same but have also preachers.

  12. Hugh

    Synoia, as I have written here many times, we have until 2030 to have our responses to overpopulation and climate change up and running. We need to be well on our way to sustainability and non-carbon energy. Many parts of the world are already gone, most notably Africa. They just don’t know it yet. World population will hit 9 billion around 2040, and will collapse to 1 billion or less before 2100. So yes, things are different this time around. Putin’s neo-USSR imperialist fantasies and Xi-di’s dreams of a Chinese hegemony are framed within a world that soon will not exist. Meanwhile the US is wasting irreplaceable time with Trump’s criminal/treasonous idiocy and Europe continues its slow motion break-up. I still give the US and Europe even odds of pulling through in some form. I give slightly lower odds to Northeast Asia mostly because of the destabilizing effects stemming from the failure to deal with a nuclear North Korea. For the rest of the world, we are talking about scattered pockets. I should add that these odds are lower than even a year or so ago reflecting the fact that time is running out and we are seeing, as with Trump, the embrace of chaos and insane contrarian policies.

  13. Hugh

    Liberal as it is used today is a vague, amorphous term, little more than pooh flung at a wall. It is often and incorrectly associated with New Dealism. Modern liberalism/neoliberalism instead marks a return to Wilsonian liberalism of the early twentieth century. Wilsonian liberalism was elitist, paternalistic, rabidly anti-populist, pro-corporatist, and interventionist. It was marked by the Red Scare raids, attempts largely successful to crush social movements, the creation of the Fed, and the entrance into World War I. FDR was a quintessential liberal but he was flexible enough to introduce some socialist programs to ensure the survival of capitalism. Once that was accomplished he did not hesitate to embrace financial policies which thrust the economy back into Depression in 1936 at the point when the country had just come out of Depression and to keep it there until World War II definitively took the country out of Depression and into the World War.

    The important thing to remember nowadays is that both what we now call liberals and conservatives are really slightly different faces of Wilsonian liberalism. Traditional conservatism: small government, isolationism, and states rights is dead and gone despite the occasional lip service to pieces and parts of it.

  14. Bill Hicks

    The liberals are openly siding with the FBI and the CIA. That’s not just being “reactionary,” it’s a sell out of everything they are supposed to stand for. The CIA has repeatedly proven itself to be the single greatest threat to democracy in the post-WW2 era, while the FBI has always been more concerned with commies than real threat to America. The liberals, particularly the Hillary dead enders, also seem to prefer being incinerated in a nuclear Holocaust to having Trump be president. If that’s what it means to be a “liberal” these days, I’ll be happy to forget I ever was one.

  15. NR

    Bill Hicks:

    “The liberals, particularly the Hillary dead enders, also seem to prefer being incinerated in a nuclear Holocaust to having Trump be president.”

    It’s you guys’ lack of hyperbole that impresses me the most.

  16. BlizzardOfOzzz

    The libs are throwing a massive tantrum. Mandos’ post is basically, “gay communism NOW or we burn this bitch to the ground”.

  17. Willy

    This thread has gone bonkers. When the President chosen by God turns out to be a controlled spy for a psychopathic ex-KGB agent as part of some kind of global power prank (and half the NRA has had sex with his spies in exchange for god knows what), what else can you do but invent nutball hyperbole about “liberals”?

  18. The libs are throwing a massive tantrum. Mandos’ post is basically, “gay communism NOW or we burn this bitch to the ground”.

    The world is pretty evil — if the only way it can be saved is by accepting an absolute, non-instrumental increase in evil (I consider a world secured by intolerant nationalisms to be absolutely more evil), it should not be saved. I hope I have never given the impression that I ever believed otherwise.

  19. What is weird is mindset required to embrace out-groups at the expense of your own in-group. Its looks like empathy combined with defective prioritization.

    Why is this weird? If your “in-group,” as a whole, has accumulated collectively a certain amount of disproportionate power in some domain of life, it is matter of simple justice to work towards redistributing this power towards “out-groups”.

  20. You can’t say that your perfectly willing to risk the lives of you fellow citizens solely to virtue signal and in the same breath claim to care about their well being.

    Sure you can. All liberatory movements, “virtue-signalling” or not, entail risks for the objects of said liberation. Failed rebellions have always involved serious consequences for often materially uninvolved members of the would-be liberated populations. You can definitely care about the well-being of the people whose lives you risk.

  21. This thread has gone bonkers.

    Yeah, I know, I conceived of this post in a few moments of inspiration and once I had asked Ian to post it, I just knew I had landed a live one. It’s the central issue of moral priority.

  22. If American liberals had even the most microscopic intention of applying these principles generally and consistently then we might have something to talk about. Since there is no evidence of this in either history or current events we can dismiss it.

    “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”

    There’s lots and lots to dislike about American liberals, and some of their failings are why we got here (and some of their opponents on the left have failings responsible for why we got here, too, ad infinitum). No one, least of all myself, is saying otherwise.

    But at least American liberals want to be seen to stand up for equality somewhere. That’s significantly better than not wanting to be seen to stand up for equality anywhere. And like I always say, saying is doing.

  23. Fluesterwitz

    @Mandos

    Without any irony, thank you for making your positions unambiguously knowable.

  24. Greg T

    So liberals would rather risk war with a nuclear superpower out of fear of revanchist nationalism? There’s a good point there Mandos, but the internationalist struggle involves a lot more than racial, gender rights. If this is how liberals perceive things, the focus is entirely too constricted. A hot war between the US and Russia serves no one. Reducing tensions between these two heavily armed nations benefits everyone. Moreover, the struggle is economic. Maybe the lurch to nationalism could have been curtailed if most Americans were benefiting from the international order. They are not. Seems that the cost of preserving or forwarding the rights of identity groups is economic deprivation and escalating tensions with Russia.

  25. Hugh

    So it is Putin who seizes Crimea, invades Eastern Ukraine and Northern Georgia via proxies, attacks the US election process and it is the US or liberals or whatever who is risking nuclear war? More examples how progressives don’t understand foreign affairs and should not be trusted on them.

  26. Jay

    “Mere survival” isn’t nothing. If your morals require war then you’re probably doing morality very, very wrong.

  27. GlassHammer

    “Sure you can. All liberatory movements, “virtue-signalling” or not, entail risks for the objects of said liberation. Failed rebellions have always involved serious consequences for often materially uninvolved members of the would-be liberated populations. You can definitely care about the well-being of the people whose lives you risk.”-Mandos

    If it is a liberatory movement, what is the “freedom from” or “freedom to” being proposed by the left in our recent interactions with Russia?

    The bar for determining whether or not someone “cares about the lives they risk” should be set high and measured by the amount of risk they themselves are willing to take.

  28. S Brennan

    To Hugh’s elitist’s pout:

    “Putin seizes Crimea, invades Eastern Ukraine and Northern Georgia via proxies, attacks the US election process and it is the US or liberals or whatever who is risking nuclear war….progressives don’t understand foreign affairs and should not be trusted on them.”

    I ask; where/when did you serve the Armed Forces of America?

    No service Hugh?

    Fine, then don’t lecture those who did with your warmongering nationalist drivel. If you thought the threat was genuine you would have served, you didn’t and won’t now; because wrapping yourself in the US flag is a canard, an argumentative form for/to low brows.

  29. Hugh

    Wow, S., check your meds. They say that wrapping yourself in the flag is the last resort of scoundrels, also the reality challenged apparently. Everything I wrote was factually correct. The line being peddled by some here is don’t look at what Russia does, just criticize the US and condemn the US if it reacts. And of course, invoke nuclear war as the result of any reaction. This is both stupid and incredibly unrealistic, but again illustrates the essential bankruptcy and dishonesty of so much progressive foreign policy thinking.

  30. Peter

    @ S Brennan

    ‘Elitist’s Pout’ is the best description yet of the liberal warmongers reactionary response to their loss of power to send other peoples sons and daughters to die in their wars.

    Liberals exposing their true colors to the public may help to keep them out of power, permanently.

  31. Ché Pasa

    On the continuing confusion and political chaos…

    The point has been made but needs constant repetition: there is no Left in the US political firmament. US politics and government is conducted entirely by rightist factions. Democrats are not leftists and never have been.

    Hugh brought up Wilsonian Liberalism, but that didn’t spring fully-formed from Zeus’s brow so to speak. No, it was an (inevitable?) evolution from TR’s progressivism which itself was an evolution from the Republican reaction to the largely Democratic Populist Movement of the latter 19th Century — which itself was a reaction to… so on and so forth.

    Throughout all of these political evolutions, the Left (expressed variously through anarchism, socialism, communism, and what I call communitarianism) was subverted and suppressed, sometimes quite violently, such that even labor organizations (so long as they survived at all) were expected/required to toe the anti-Leftist line.

    Today there is no real Left in US politics or government. Any sign that one might arise or emerge is met with fierce resistance from the Rs and the Ds alike.

    But there are contending rightist factions, one of which is slightly less bloody-fanged than the other. Neither has the best interests of the Lower Orders in mind, and neither is particularly concerned about the Fate of the Earth except to the extent that they protect and defend their own prerogatives and power.

    The current state of affairs with Ds loudly defending the security state establishment and the Rs appearing to trash it, violate its “norms” and so forth, appears to be anomalous, but I submit it’s not. It’s purely a factional struggle over who controls the security apparat, not — at all — a question of whether there should be one. Nor is it a contest over war or not-war. Imperialism or not-Imperialism. Oligarchy or not. Etc.

    That was all decided long ago, and none of that has particularly changed with the advent of the current chaotic rulership. What is in dispute is who shall be master and for whose benefit, that’s all.

  32. BlizzardOfOzzz

    Hugh has gone full neocon; sad to see, but you could see it coming.

    Putin seized Crimea; are we going to just ignore what precipitated that, the US engineering a coup against the Russia-friendly elected government of Ukraine? Russia was also following the precedent established by the US in Serbia (which they were explicit about) of splitting a country against the will of its government, by plebiscite.

    As for “Russia invaded Georgia”, this is a flat neocon lie; in fact Georgia invaded Russia. John McCain will repeat the lie with his last breath, but Hugh might still have time to fact-check himself, if his Trump Derangement should ever go into remission for a moment’s clear thought.

  33. Anon

    Forgot how many suck-ass Libertarians there are on this site. The Koch Brothers are in control of the US and anyone with half a brain knows their plans. And anyone who agrees with them is a scumbag. I hope the US goes full commie just to make your heads explode.

  34. Ruth

    I’d like to correct some revisionist propaganda:

    Russia did not seize or invade Crimea.

    The Crimeans held a referendum and voted overwhelmingly to be part of Russia (95% of the vote, 85% of registered voters). This should come as no surprise as they are ethnically Russian because Crimea was only symbolically given to Ukraine during the days of the Soviet Union when it didn’t really matter. Crimeans are Russians and they wanted to return to being treated as such.

    It has been suggested that this must have been rigged on the basis that previous referenda showed percentages in the 20s and 30s. However, Ukraine’s persecution of Russian-speakers and the move towards the far right may also have had something to do with it, too.

  35. Greg T

    Hugh-

    Even if Russia seized Crimea- a debatable contention in itself- explain to me where vital US interest is served in risking war with Russia?
    As far as Ukraine is concerned, the US has its fingerprints all over that mess.

  36. Willy

    Didn’t Reagan once tell Gorby that he loved that wall, then Gorby fell for the reverse psychology and the wall came down? Is my history hazy?

    What is freaking out old school, true patriotic, last remaining… conservatives is all the inconsistency and authoritarian worship of modern conservatives. Trump is playing the opposite of Reagan against adversaries, and against “friends” as well.

  37. Always a pleasure to see again again, Man!

    YO! Blizzard of Ozzzzz … you still haven’t answered the question: do you think those dead kids and teachers and grieving parents, first responders and members of the Sandy Hook community are crisis actors, that Sandy Hook is a false flag, and those dead kids are not dead?

  38. The bar for determining whether or not someone “cares about the lives they risk” should be set high and measured by the amount of risk they themselves are willing to take.

    In the case of nuclear war (which is what we’re talking about when discussing USA/Russia/China), nearly everyone (of note or otherwise) suffers the risk of fiery death with their loved ones, or worse.

  39. Peter

    @ Ozz

    Don’t conflate liberal R2P interventionsists with neocon nation builders, they come from opposite ideology even though they both monger for conflict and war.

    It’s important to make this distinction because liberals are showing their true colors as liberals not neocons.

  40. Willy

    NATO: Europe was once the toughest hood on the planet, with all the worst wars. It can be argued that it’s been relatively peaceful since NATO. But practically anything can get to be too big, to be too much, to be taken over and used by the wrong elements. As with political correctness, it doesn’t mean the original intentions or outcomes were bad and the entire concept a fail. It means that with initial benefit and success some people wanted more, and then came the harm from excess and corruption.

    (The author of this comment believes that every unchecked concentration of power will eventually be corrupted.)

    I always hated that phrase “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. Maybe it should be more like: “The road to hell was originally paved with good intentions, and headed in the right direction, until the bricks became made of lies.”

  41. Heliopause

    @Mandos
    “But at least American liberals want to be seen to stand up for equality somewhere.”

    Everybody does. Conservatives are currently standing up (in their minds) for lofty Enlightenment principles in Iran. Liberals, on the other hand, want detente with Iran because it’s one of their own Dear Leader’s signature accomplishments. It’s all a silly joke, of course, most people take their principled stands where tribal leadership tells them to.

  42. Heliopause: yes, bad people make equality arguments for bad reasons. Worse people make principled arguments for sustaining unequal treatment.

  43. Willy

    It’s tribalism when there isn’t any honest discussion of cost-benefits which might question Dear Leaders views, because honestly discussing such things could get oneself ostracized from the tribe.

    If I remember correctly, it wasn’t liberals who started the anti-Iraq war movement but libertarians from the Lew Rockwell / Justin Raimondo camp, who to their credit, did a cost-benefit analysis which went against Fox Newsie tribalism. Anybody anti who guested on that show were usually barked at as traitors.

    What is Trump going to replace the Iran deal with?

  44. nihil obstet

    I think I understood the Cold War — the U.S. wanted private market capitalist economies everywhere and the Soviet Union wanted state capitalist managed economies everywhere. And given the way third world areas had been plundered under European capitalist colonies, the third world was now heavily attracted to the Soviet model (which, whatever its long-term outcomes, usually immediately improves the lives of the previously exploited). Capitalist elites were frightened that the commies would come take all their money.

    I don’t understand this new hysteria. What do people think Russia’s interests are? In what way will anything Russia appears to be trying to do damage the U.S.? In the dysfunctional American election system, there was a candidate from each party. If true, why would it be a disaster if a foreign country supported one of the two candidates? I’d like an open, honest electoral system, but that applies to the Koch brothers as well as any foreign rich men. What am I missing other than “Them’s furriners” xenophobia?

  45. Hugh

    Not a neocon, but the amount of Russian trollery and useful fools in this thread is more than I expected. How many referendums have been held in Chechnya or a hundred other places in Russia? Oh right, referenda are only for ethnic Russians living in some one else’s country. My central thesis here is that progressives are never going to be taken seriously on foreign policy if they persist in goofery where they excuse dictators like Putin. The same values and critical thinking must be applied to all comers. The failure to do so will simply keep progressives deservedly marginalized.

  46. Willy

    Maybe it’s the longer term picture. Think of the potential for long term damage to liberal democracy caused by an elite powerful few.

    What keeps the Russians or any other nefarious organization from using increasingly effective social-manipulation technologies for the benefit of some highest bidder, to the detriment of humanity?

  47. NR

    Hugh:

    Most of the Russia apologists around here aren’t progressives, they’re Trump-supporting right-wingers.

  48. BlizzardOfOzzz

    Gotta repeat the same lies as what they do on the teevee, otherwise you’re a kook.

  49. Willy

    I make up my own lies.

    In today’s fake news, Trump tweeted that NFL players should be thrown out of the game if they kneel once during the anthem, and be out for the season if they do it twice.

    How libertarian of him.

    Of course, if Putin tries to ruin the American Way again this fall it looks like it’ll be Trump doing the kneeling. As an old-timer cubicle mate used to say to me every day about our messed up corporate workplace: “Have you ever seen such confusion?”

  50. someofparts

    The level of hysteria is startling, isn’t it? If it seems confusing just remember, we have always been at war with Eurasia.

  51. tony

    Take up the Liberal’s burden—

    Send forth the best ye breed—

    Go send your sons to exile

    To serve your captives’ need

  52. jrkrideau

    @
    How many referendums have been held in Chechnya or a hundred other places in Russia?
    Uh, the same number as was held in Puerto Rico?

  53. someofparts

    I’ve been remembering a storyline from the last season of Homeland. A television provocateur with a wide audience also had a cyber shop. He had a large staff of cheerful youngsters who trolled full time. That’s something to think about.

    So I wonder, is it possible to tell the difference between those folks and legitimate comment? I think I can, but it’s hard to be sure – which is the point I guess. So if anyone else has tips on how to spot this kind of thing I would love to hear them. Can’t hurt to improve my game.

    While we’re wondering what we do/don’t have to fear from Russian bots I would enjoy using my idle time to get better at spotting trolls in my own neighborhood.

  54. peon

    If you disagree with me you are a troll/Putin apologist/Russian bot/neo-con/useful fool/suck-ass libertarian/elitist/reactionary/dupe/and my dad can beat up your dad.

  55. Ché Pasa

    To the topic Mandos explores:

    In my day it was often called “whirled peas”. Snark, of course, but based in part on the realities of World Peace as then conceived. A supposedly peaceful division of the globe betwixt Them and Us, with Them holding the bulk of Asia and whatever parts of Eastern Europe and European Russia they could keep from splitting off, and Us having sway over the rest of creation. What could go wrong, right?

    What was wrong with that visualization, anyway?

    Apart from all the many police actions and little wars of course. These were supposed to go away somehow, whether through meditation, visualization or some such, I never knew.

    And yet Our Rulers claimed we were At Peace right on through the Bush the Lesser era. Except when we weren’t, but why quibble? The peace was a phony peace that was filled with ongoing death and destruction on the periphery, and it still is.

    The whole notion that the US and the Russian Federation are implacable enemies (much like the US and Soviet Union) is phony as hell. As is the notion that Only Trump can keep us from the ultimate nuclear holocaust. After all, everyone knows Hillary would have started WWIII by now. Right?

    But that’s not what’s going on, and it never was. Hillary was no more likely to start WWIII than Trump is, and you can come to your own assessment of that likelihood. Mine is slim to none with the proviso that Trump is so chaotic that an accidental trigger is more likely with him (though still slight.)

    The Russian Federation is not an enemy in a rational sense (nor was the Soviet Union, but that’s another issue). Even the most warmongering neocons (and who does John Bolton serve today?) don’t believe Russia is an enemy. Russia is instead a target. Big ol’ target. Resources, money, hostile takeover. That hasn’t really changed since Himself took the White House. He’s just going about acquiring the target in a different way. And is being outmatched…

    And it has nothing to do with “peace in our time” or any time.

    There is no peace under Trump, and there would have been no war with Russia under Hillary. The slaughter continues, the exploitation, plunder and dispossession continue, the rivalry continues, the peace is ever-elusive. No matter what else is going on, that is consistent.

  56. StewartM

    My take:

    1) The Democratic leadership is not “liberal”, “left”, or “progressive” and hasn’t been in some decades.

    2) The “RUSSIA!!” (TM) hysteria is embarrassing. Russian interference, as puny as it was (“maybe tens of thousands of dollars” in an election costing 6.5 billion), wouldn’t have mattered a whit if Clinton had been not so damned and determined to run as the self-styled “smart Republican” in the race, and treat the Sanders supporters at the Democratic convention with open hostility and contempt, all which drove down Democratic turnout. Gotta hand it to her; unlike Obama, at least she was honest about remaining the Goldwater Girl she really is.

    3) Nor was “Russian interference” the worst thing that a candidate has done. What Nixon did in 1968 sabotaging the peace talks) was worse. What Reagan did in 1980 (getting Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for future arms) was worse.

    4) Despite what Teevee “libruls” say, Trump’s interactions with Putin in 2016 and sense might well be illegal but certainly it’s not treasonous. When I last checked we weren’t at war with Russia in any conceivable fashion and to a large extent, Putin’s interests only conflict with ours because of US foreign policy overreach (like, why are we concerned about the Crimea, an ethnically Russian territory that voted to become part of Russia again largely due to fears what the Ukrainian nationalists might do to them, the same Ukrainian nationalists we spent $5 billion to overthrow a democratically-elected government to install into the Ukraine?). Oh, and we did this not to promote “democracy” but to put a government in that would let Western banksters loot the Ukraine. Here’s a look at the people we have enabled:

    https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ukrainian-far-right-and-the-danger-it-poses/

    5) Now our Teevee “libruls” are saying there’s no such thing as a ‘deep state’ (or even, “God bless the Deep State”–Eugene Robinson), which is news to anyone who was left-sympathetic throughout the past half-century. Case in point–almost lost in all the hoopla over the 2016 election and “Russians!!” is the fact that the Trump team was also approached by representatives of Saudi Arabia and Israel, who also offered Team Trump help on a social media offensive against HRC:

    https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Israeli-run-social-media-firm-may-have-worked-to-help-Trump-get-elected-558033

    What I fully expect is that Mueller’s team (who has sent investigators to Israel to look into this) will just meekly accept any denials of “we didn’t do it, of course!” by anyone they ask, and this line of investigation will be closed, so that TV attention can focus solely on that damn Putin and those dastardly Russians. Because, ya know, Israel is our “friend”. Even though it looks like if Israel did help, Netanyahu sure got some things he wanted (Iran deal torn up, US moves embassy to Jerusalem).

    Of course, the same people who will meekly accept Israel’s denials of “an attack on our elections” will decry Trump meekly accepting Putin’s denials of showing Trump to be a fool at best and complicit at worst.

    6) As for those dastardly Russians hacking the ballot machines–hell, there have been allegations of tampering since those things were put in. But, as we all know, using exit poll data is only a completely reliable way of detecting election fraud when it comes to elections in other countries (say, the Ukraine, 2004) but it’s completely unreliable when it comes to detecting ballot machine bias or fraud when it comes to US elections. Despite studies like this of the 2004 election, where the discrepancy between the exit polls data and the results in some key battleground states using electronic machines exceed the 95 % probability that it’s random chance.

    https://www.issuelab.org/resources/1297/1297.pdf

    Got to go back to worrying about the Russkies hacking out machines instead of just our usual domestic 1 %.

  57. someofparts

    https://blackagendareport.com/russiagate-ruling-class-diversion

    “Thus, corporate America, wedded as it is to a “diversity” doctrine that means little to the masses of Black people but is a red flag to the White Man’s Party “deplorables,” will be forced to identify more publicly with the Democrats, or pretend to be apolitical.

    The Trump phenomena — and the resultant ruling class hysteria — has stolen the corporations’ option to pose as “non-partisan” actors in U.S. politics. They are forced deeper into the Democratic camp, creating further contradictions for the “inclusive” party, which must ultimately answer to a more clearly defined — and also more self-aware – constituency of the “left,” most broadly speaking, if it is to preserve the duopoly. This other half of the country, slightly bigger than Trump’s white majority base, is composed of a minority of whites, virtually all Blacks, and large majorities of Latinos and other minorities. It is way to the left of the Democratic Party and roiling with economic demands that the Lords of Capital will not, and cannot, fulfill”

  58. Willy

    I used to love online consumer product reviews (I’m not very materialistic but must buy them for my customers). But then I started noticing that some reviews seemed phony. Then a friend told me the only job their daughter could get was writing fake reviews as a “Corporate PR Consultant”.

    So now my current strategy is to look for patterns between the reviews which make consistent rational sense. IOW, I have to stay ahead of the intelligence of the fake reviewers.

    But what about all the readers who lack that ability? We see their kind here all the time (but don’t tell them that).

    It used to be one could trust government sources for these sorts of things but those days may be gone. I’d think that Trump constantly attacking non-government systems reliant on integrity (academia, science, media…) would be of grave concern to our visiting libertarians.

    What happens when Zuckerberg and the Twitter boys move on, to be replaced by who knows what? Who’ll maintains the social integrity of those places then? The only solution is to make big money illegal in politics, and the review sites as well.

  59. Heliopause

    An argument for risking millions of lives for the sake of an abstraction that its proponents never consistently apply is just about the most morally dubious one I can think of.

  60. An argument for risking millions of lives for the sake of an abstraction that its proponents never consistently apply is just about the most morally dubious one I can think of.

    An inconsistently applied good principle is worlds better than a consistently applied evil principle. However, no side here is perfectly consistent — even Russia, a giant multiracial/multicultural/multireligious empire, can at best be accused of conveniently instrumentalizing nationalism in a divide and conquer strategy to protect its “near abroad” and has no intention of sticking to the rhetoric of the politicians in countries who cozy up to it. Repeat for all would-be Great Powers.

    Nevertheless, American liberals, despite their parochialism (and indeed, they can be very parochial!), are not wrong to see an existential threat to their ideals (however inconsistently applied) in the kinds of alliances being formed on the right of the post-liberal world order. I agree that there are lots of reasons to criticize American liberals, but I also agree that the kind of threat to those stated ideals is one that has the potential turn the world into the sort of hellhole that attempts to implement nationalist idylls necessarily become.

  61. NR

    I love how, whenever Trump steps in it in the foreign policy sphere, the Trumpers always show up and push the lie that the only two options are either a) whatever it is Trump is doing, or b) an actual shooting war with Russia/China/North Korea/whoever.

  62. I did not entirely intend this to be a “RUSSIA!” thread, although I knew it was inevitable that it would become that. This post was the intellectual sister of a post I wrote a while back attempting to reflect American liberal reactions to Julian Assange’s apparent attempts to involve himself in attacking Hillary Clinton.

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/mandos-on-trumps-victory/

    7. The whistleblower movement, if it can be called that, de facto figureheaded by Julian Assange, is now completely and possibly perpetually discredited with left liberals everywhere, aside from the extremely narcissistic kind. It will never be forgiven for letting a rapist into the White House because of email. On the contrary, they provided the perfect conditions for left liberals to justify to themselves state secrecy among government leaders — because the breaking of state secrecy was used to hinder a feminist advance and empower white nationalism. As I said, I don’t personally believe the emails had much to do with anything, and their contents and the inner meaning of the episode is going to be forgotten just like the Enron emails were — a social science curio. But the public interpretation of this is clear: WikiLeaks tried to stab American blacks, Hispanics, women, and gays in the back, and succeeded. A perfect alibi.

    The American liberal/mainstream Democrat critique of the movements behind Bernie Sanders, etc., is essentially the same: that it’s clear that many people — some of them who consider themselves to be on the left in some sense — would prefer to stab American liberal causes in the eye and allow wide-ranging, global-scale illiberal victories, rather than accept that there is currently a choice between a more liberal-minded capitalist oligarchy and a violent nationalist crony capitalism.

    And the question is, does the triumph of a nationalist crony capitalism herald conditions for a return to a more sustainable left-wing direction, without having to pass through collaboration with an also-violent liberal-signalling oligarchy?

    When I say I would rather a mass nuclear inferno than a world peace of fascist autocracies, I am responding to a hypothetical. It is possible that the world peace of fascist autocracies is a stage required to move, dialectically and pendulum-wise, back towards a deeper left-minded internationalism, that the promise of a just world unity can only be fulfilled through the fire of fascism somehow. I don’t see how that could be, but it could be, and I suppose I would prefer that to the nuclear inferno.

  63. bruce wilder

    Oligarchy or death!?

    Wouldn’t that be Oligarchy AND death?

    Wow. You really have lost your mind.

  64. Ché Pasa

    Um. Mandos. No.

  65. StewartM

    Mandos:

    there is currently a choice between a more liberal-minded capitalist oligarchy and a violent nationalist crony capitalism.

    What, there was no crony capitalism under Obama and Clinton? Heck, the bankster bailouts were nothing but crony capitalism. To a large extent the ACA was crony capitalism. Clinton-Obama “liberalism” means at most the poors can get a few crumbs only if some rich guys get to rake in more loot.

    Thomas Frank on Clinton-Obama “liberalism”

    https://www.salon.com/2016/03/14/bill_clintons_odious_presidency_thomas_frank_on_the_real_history_of_the_90s/

    AND…it was Clinton-Obama DNC “brilliance” that resulted in Democrats from being the majority party having the allegiance of upwards of ̀̀̀̀50 % of the electoral to a minority party of about half of that. It was “voting for the lesser evil” that tarnished the Democratic brand and brought about Trump. We’re actually lucky that Trump is stupid and lazy and corrupt; if he were none of these things things would be worse.

    So the truth is, it’s not a case of “vote for Clinton-Obama crony capitalism or get fascism”. No, you’ve gotten it backwards, Clinton-Obama crony capitalism and its symbolic (but not real) advocacy of identity politics won’t forestall fascism, it will *bring fascists to power*, sooner or later. Guaranteed. We are relatively lucky with Trump; the next guy/gal may be more evil and far smarter.

    If you really want to forestall fascism, you start voting for the people who will do things to prevent fascism. You take away the bogus economic arguments of fascists (which allow them to blame ‘the others’ for economic distress) by promoting full employment and pursue policies that promote income and wealth equality which actually benefit the bottom 90 %. You end the wars which promotes a military solution mindset. And you dismantle the tools that any would-be fascist could use (like mass surveillance).

    This all means you vote for people like Sanders; or even better, Corbyn. The New Deal helped forestall fascism in the US, and that was no accident.

  66. someofparts

    Wow Mandos. I just saw the vindication of your item #7 in sickening detail.

    Kos has a thread up on the recommended list about the imminent capture, I guess you could call it, of Julian Assange. The comments on the thread were sickening and vicious. It is an absolutely horrifying mob.

    I’m done with Kos. Not going to link to it either. Check it for yourselves if you want, but have a stiff drink first.

  67. NR

    I don’t have any sympathy for Assange; he acted as a cutout for Russian intelligence operations which are directed by a murderous dictator.

    The hypocrisy is that if he’d done exactly the same thing for the CIA, you guys would despise him.

  68. BlizzardOfOzzz

    Mandos may have started something here, maybe the Dems will add universal heat death to their party platform. If we’re serious about equality, why settle for half measures?

  69. BlizzardOfOzzz

    Broke: turning lead into gold
    Woke: turning D’Quintavi’us into Einstein through dialectical materialism
    Bespoke: Einsteinium into Negronium through nuclear fission

  70. Willy

    Mandos, I just reread the post again (I’ll try harder next time). Let me see if I got this straight.

    Sixteen years ago in the run-up to Iraq, Republicans called “liberal” attitudes against “a very reactionary part of the US security and foreign policy state” treasonous. But today, liberals/democrats/whatever are calling Republican attitudes towards the same “reactionary part of the US security and foreign policy state” treasonous. Liberals didn’t think there was much of a threat from Iraq but do see a major threat from Russia (which seems better at knowing where to hit back).

    Let’s set aside Arabs and Russians pissed off at the USA for its meddling habits and wanting it stopped (or payback), which liberals/democrats seem to understand better than most rank and file Republicans.

    My question, is the rank and file Republican support this way and that, really about white power?

  71. someofparts

    “There seems to be a complete psychotic break with reality in the U.S. as a result of the Trump-Putin summit. Liberals are hysterically calling for impeachment and even so-called radicals are quoting ex-CIA criminal John Brennan and branding Trump a traitor. The good thing about all of this is that the liberals posing as radicals have been exposed and their sentimental pro-empire, pro-American proclivities revealed. Unfortunately, though, the reactions to the summit has also revealed a secret that many of us knew, spoke about but did not dare focus too much attention on it, and that was the reality of how right-wing Black America had become.”

    https://blackagendareport.com/musings-marginsthe-nato-and-putin-summits-plus-high-crimes-misdemeanors-and-liberal-madness

  72. tony

    “When I say I would rather a mass nuclear inferno than a world peace of fascist autocracies, I am responding to a hypothetical. ”

    This is the first time I have momentarily hoped American democracy is destroyed and the Democrats face death squads.

  73. someofparts

    Democrats? Republicans? What next, the Tooth Fairy?

  74. bruce wilder

    only a hypothetical, tony

  75. bruce wilder

    wouldn’t Hillary be fully justified in forming death squads to hunt down the remaining Bernie Bros — after all, they stabbed in the eye (not the back?) that last best hope of earth, a “liberal-minded” oligarchy.

  76. StewartM

    NR

    The hypocrisy is that if he’d done exactly the same thing for the CIA, you guys would despise him.

    What, for publishing information that everyone agrees is absolutely true and which exposed corruption inside one of the major US political parties? No, we wouldn’t.

    Some of us think that *all* of it should have come out before the 2016 election–the news about FBI re-opening the Clinton email server probe, news about the Trump Russian collusion probe, everything. Just like in a functioning democracy we’d have also found out the shenanigans that Nixon and Reagan did in 1968 and 1980. In a democracy where the press does its job (Wikileaks had to do it because the press refused), voters should be told as much as can be disclosed about the candidates running for office, before the elections, at least things which are pertinent to governance, so that they can make the best choice then and not have to deal with the fallout of having a post-election problem that needs fixing.

    Why wouldn’t anyone be for that?

  77. NR

    “This is the first time I have momentarily hoped American democracy is destroyed and the Democrats face death squads.”

    And this is the first time I’ve seen a Republican reveal his true nature like this. So thanks for that.

  78. NR

    StewartM:

    I agree, everything should have been released to the public. If Assange had just dumped all the info he’d had and kept his mouth shut after that, I wouldn’t have any problem with him. However, he didn’t do that, and to call him a journalist is laughable. He went full 100% Trump fanboy during the election and everything he did was aimed at hurting the Democrats and helping Trump. He said himself that he had information about Trump, but he refused to release it. He timed his releases in stages to cause maximum political damage to the Democrats. He sold official merchandise shitting on the Democrats. And he tweeted vague things implying that Hillary Clinton was responsible for Seth Rich’s death which ultimately turned out to be just empty bullshit.

    Those are not the actions of a legitimate journalist.

  79. NR

    I should add that I don’t like Hillary Clinton and I think there are many reasons why she lost (including multiple ones that were entirely her fault), but given Wikileaks’ conduct during the campaign, I think I’m on pretty solid ground in doubting their smug and self-satisfied claims of impartiality and journalistic standards.

  80. someofparts

    TB – thanks

  81. bruce wilder

    NR, your Troll is showing.

    but, who knows, maybe Mueller will get custody of Assange and he can be prosecuted for publishing something that wasn’t a press release or a carefully calculated “leak” to a well-groomed pet. you can hope.

    of course, if only Assange had behaved better by your lights, lights carefully calibrated after the fact so that you can justify condemning the man for revealing the truth, you could support him — you being so high-minded and all. but, damn, he did not clean under his fingernails in the approved manner, he could not possibly be a journalist performing a public service.

  82. someofparts

    I am a bit jealous that Eraserhead is getting paid to be the lowest common denominator.

  83. NR

    Bruce Wilder, I see you have no answer to the facts I posted, so you simply call me a troll.

    Ironically, that itself is the act of a troll.

  84. someofparts

    If you feed them it just gives them more poo to fling at the bars between their tiny little minds and humans.

  85. someofparts

    See how quickly it flung that doody! Rock on Zippy!

  86. someofparts

    What are doing home on the weekend at your age NR? Sitting at a troll farm with the other goobers, or in your Spiderman jammies in mom’s basement?

  87. StewartM

    NR

    He said himself that he had information about Trump, but he refused to release it. He timed his releases in stages to cause maximum political damage to the Democrats. He sold official merchandise shitting on the Democrats. And he tweeted vague things implying that Hillary Clinton was responsible for Seth Rich’s death which ultimately turned out to be just empty bullshit.

    Not true according to the Wikipedia article on Assange, Assange never said that:

    “We publish material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere. When we have material that fulfills this criteria, we publish.” He explains that the website received pertinent information related to the DNC leaks and Clinton political campaign, but never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson’s campaign, and therefore could not publish what they did not have.[241] Assange has consistently denied any connection to or cooperation with Russia in relation to the leaks damaging to Clinton and the Democratic Party.”

    As for Seth Rich, Assange aceted dicey. Here’s a link that I think it fairly balanced:

    https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/guccifer-wikileaks-seth-rich/

    So I have to question your sources. Where are you getting your facts?

  88. NR

    StewartM:

    We do have some information about the Republican campaign,’ Assange said on ‘Fox & Friends.’

    But ‘from the point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is that it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day. That’s a very strange reality for most of the media to be in,’ he said.

    That’s a direct quote from Assange himself. Here’s the source:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3760002/WikiLeaks-founder-says-problem-leaking-material-Trump-compare-comes-Donald-Trump-s-mouth.html

  89. Willy

    If Assange is a libertarian, people need to be cautious. Not all libertarians are bad, being reasonable government overreach watchdogs. But if a somewhat popular messenger suddenly proclaims dogmatic libertarianism, the odds are pretty good they’re trying to enrich themselves via kleptocratic funding.

  90. bruce wilder

    Assange: “from the point of view of an investigative journalist organization like WikiLeaks, the problem with the Trump campaign is that it’s actually hard for us to publish much more controversial material than what comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth every second day.”

    NR: “He went full 100% Trump fanboy”

    I am not going to be disputing “facts” with you, NR. You do not seem to have grasped the basic concept.

  91. NR

    bruce wilder:

    I\’m talking about Assange\’s ACTIONS, which were calculated to help Trump every step of the way. Assange even corresponded with Trump\’s son, offering him information to damage the Clinton campaign:

    https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-secret-correspondence-between-donald-trump-jr-and-wikileaks/545738/

    The difference between a pattern of actions taken and a single comment is pretty obvious, but apparently it\’s too difficult for you to grasp. So yes, you\’re right, you definitely aren\’t going to be disputing facts with me.

  92. NR

    bruce wilder:

    I’m talking about Assange’s ACTIONS, which were calculated to help Trump every step of the way. Assange even corresponded with Trump’s son, offering him information to damage the Clinton campaign (just google “assange correspondence trump jr” since I’m apparently not allowed to post the link here).

    The difference between a pattern of actions taken and a single comment is pretty obvious, but apparently it’s too difficult for you to grasp. So yes, you’re right, you definitely aren’t going to be disputing facts with me.

  93. Heliopause

    “An inconsistently applied good principle is worlds better than a consistently applied evil principle.”

    I guess I’ll just call this discussion off because it’s like we’re speaking different languages. Everybody’s got bedrock good principles, at least in their own minds. Conservatives say they’re for “liberty.” Well, who the hell isn’t for “liberty?” I sure am. Write it down, I’m for “liberty” in the abstract. And (most of) the stuff American liberals say they’re for as well, I’m for it in the abstract. Glad we straightened that out.

    So, what are Russians for? I can’t speak for them, but one thing I feel somewhat confident in stating is that they are AGAINST fascism (of the type we saw in WWII, anyway). Their history of being invaded, with tens of millions of deaths, at the hands of the Western European powers that invented these lofty abstractions we speak of, colors much of their thinking about the world. Maybe a lofty principle that could be added to the liberal canon is trying to understand the world from the perspective of others. In a real-world, not too abstract way. Just throwing that out there.

    But I’ve already said too much. Since both of us are wholeheartedly for good stuff in the abstract we’re really just arguing about nothing at all. So, bye.

  94. highrpm

    Their [russia] history of being invaded, with tens of millions of deaths, at the hands of the Western European powers…and those same WE powers so readily & seamlessly handed over their reigns to the bolsheviks. just so simple. ain’t it?

  95. Heliopause

    @highrpm
    Sorry, no idea what you’re getting at here.

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