All comments should now show on one page. Not entirely happy with this theme, and may change it again in a bit if I find a better one.
The old one was from 2009 and unsupported, and it finally broke and had to be changed. I’m told that this one works much better on mobile. I would prefer a comments count, and I have mixed feelings of the big picture at the top, even if it’s pretty. Most blog themes now want a picture with each post, which while it is best practice I don’t want to do (and since I have literally thousands of posts without, they make old posts look bad.)
I too prefer the raven picture, but the header here needs about a 3/1 ratio and a picture around 1280 × 444 and I haven’t found a good one of ravens meeting those requirements.
The theme does present well on my iPhone (yes they can know where I am — i am not sure anyone knows who i am, not even me)
On more topical fronts: the contrast of Putin and Biden at the summit meeting. NC ran a compare/contrast essay by John Helmer. (I have never understood why NC features Helmer, who presents as a conman — is he even in Russia?) But his essay in this case was pretty good — and devastating to the pretense that Biden is not senile. Lots of Twitter attention to Biden’s statement about the U.S. not interfering in foreign elections, but no mainstream notice of the delusional nature of that view. File it with Tonkin Gulf incident, WMD, and Russiagate?
Rolling Stone had a deeply disturbing expose of homicides and drug use among elite soldiers at Fort Bragg (weren’t we suppose to rename that base for someone not a traitor?)
The legitimacy crisis enveloping the U.S. is growing broader and deeper when the President cannot even lie effectively and the most deeply committed soldiers act like sons of anarchy on a bender.
Meanwhile what passes for the left-liberal center is sure the country was born in irredeemable original sin. Hmmm.
Imagining an “Original Sin” for liberal-leftist Americans to parade their superior sensititivity by affecting to ” believe in” is part of the negative fallout from the Puritan and other Dissenting Christianisms so prevalent in parts of early Colonial America.
We had at least 2 generations of effective left here, and both were carefully destroyed by official governmental action. The first left was destroyed by Twentieth Century America’s most evil president, President Wilson. The second left was destroyed by long term action taken by the counter-New Deal Truman-McCarthy-etc. establishment.
So the only left “left”, as it were, is a subhuman pacifist left deeply contaminated and polluted by Quakeristic and other masochistic pacifist brain-pus. The antifas are trying to remedy that in their own anarchic unfocused childish way.
You don’t hear China or Japan blathering about something so utterly stupid as their ” national Original Sin”.
This comment is based on comments in the Preparing for Bad Times thread, said posts are posted on the same day as this one.
Krystyn, I’ve vacillated between buying a home (on hold for now) and buying a van and becoming a van dweller. The home is really for my son, something for him to inherit. One of the main issues for me is requiring high speed internet. But I lean toward it being safer to be mobile over the long term given all the uncertainties, especially climate change. Finding a place to grow food or storing valuables is the issue there. But I love the idea of being able to avoid bad weather, all the time. I realize I do have the choice and not everyone does, but I’m glad to hear you are making it work.
“I admit that I really prefer the old format over this, inclusive of the Raven.”
Astrid, I agree. I love the starry night/Milky Way pic but it’s a lot of scrolling just to get to the article title. I loved the old format, so clean and crisp and so different (in a good way) from the rest of the internet, laden with junk as it is.
And I partially agree with this: “the possibility that a government might understand that its power and legitimacy coming from social cohesion and welfare of all its people.“
As we have seen, acquiring power (legitimate or not) doesn’t require the consent of the people (manufactured or not), just a lot of money to get the ball rolling, and then keeping the money coming. But the long-term viability of government power is something else entirely. China appears to be doing what will keep them going over the long term, while just about everything in the West is focused only on the short term. This manifests literally as sole concern over the current and next quarter’s profits.
If nothing else, China seems to focus on continual learning, unlike the West which focuses on the past and things said by dead people (we think) only when it provides support for decisions made in the present. Quoting from the Bible is only one example of many. I’ll take oral traditions handed down for generations (easily verified between generations) over questionable translations any day.
And pretty much every response to problems we’ve seen in the last 40-50 years, such as COVID, has realized as short term bandaids that ultimately solve nothing, create more problems, and of course enrich a few. And when those responses become inconvenient to the powerful, they are easily removed or altered.
There is no long term thinking in the West anymore, compared to indigenous peoples’ methods for resource management that considered the needs of the next seven generations (at least). And the last long term thinkers (the “founding fathers”) were really only concerned with ensuring that ordinary people could not affect decisions. For this and other reasons, the US has always been a house of cards (in constant danger of collapse).
The manner (frame, structure) in which a society is organized is irrelevant without ongoing short term and long term planning to ensure long-term viability. And this is why I keep saying that the downfall of the oligarchs is baked into the cake. The only long term they consider is the size of their bank accounts and who in their family will continue the sociopath tradition. This was evident in McDonalds’ family history as told by his niece in her tell-all.
Meanwhile, the right continues to work at maintaining remnants of our original sin, covertly or not. So we just give them a pass?
But I’ll admit, getting lefties to march in lockstep can be as hard as herding cats, with all that diversity of perceived most-pressing problems going on. Not to mention all that right wing machinating taking full advantage.
Still, it’s useful to contemplate that the USA is founded by a bunch of tax cheats who were afraid that the mother country might get in the way of their stealing of Indian lands too quickly. At the least, such thoughts might deflate the purported high mindedness of the American project and puts the supposedly sacred constitutional document, with its three-fifth compromise, in the proper context. I don’t believe in residual guilt for the people living today, but we damn well shouldn’t be proud of US’s repressive and blood soaked history.
Japan has been avoiding apology for its sins against East Asia and Pacific Islands during WWII for 76 years. They managed to spin Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing into a victimhood shield in their relations with the West. After all, their sins were against slinty eyed orientals and people with too melanin, none of whom were trying to settler colonize an oil rich corner of the world. So unlike the Germans, who settled on a strategy of performative Holocaust apologia (while keeping on many of the Nazi personnel), the Japanese are happy to play it off as just as another war. With everyone directly involved already dead from old age, I guess most are willing to let sleeping dogs lie. But you only need to show an image of the imperial Japanese flag anywhere in East Asia, to get people’s heckles way up.
the liberal middle classes in Western Europe as well as the U.S. have always had an ambivalent relationship with what we used to call the working classes. if by left we mean political movements and coalitions that seek to both include the participation of and champion the interests of the working classes, then those movements and coalitions have encountered even the idealistic middle classes as frenemies in their midst, more apt to support the state and the capitalist elite in oppressing the working classes than to make common cause against the forces of authoritarian reaction assembled and coordinated by the obscenely wealthy.
i think the present state of soi disant left idpol politics has little enough to do with the Quaker or Puritan heritage, but a great deal to do with the radical dimunition in social and economic mobility over the last three generations, which has hardened class consciousness. To attend an elite private university in the U.S. requires inheriting that privilege from parents and grants near-exclusive entre to what little remains of elite national journalism.
I think Michael Lind is right: the woke value a vocabulary that distinguishes them from lesser folks while celebrating their own virtue and rationalizing their contempt for much of the society they have no serious interest in governing. Resemblance to Puritans or Quakers is coincidental. (Genuine Quaker idealism is, in my experience, a possession of very nice people.)
Every nation tells stories about themselves — always politically contested stories to some extent, but also stories that unite a broad spectrum of the population behind certain institutions, ideals or settlements. And, yes, mostly every nation in its stories makes itself exceptional in some important respects. I would be more cautious about discarding stories that support ideals than Astrid. Are these stories told by hypocrites and fools? Yes. The fools and hypocrites will still be telling stories after these stories are gone; what monstosities will they then support?
I feel like that argument, that without foundational stories, we would just be sliding towards nihlism, is proven to be false in practice. This was the argument for religion and against atheism. Yet, in practice we don’t that atheists and agnostics are often better rounded and more humane people.
National mythologies do have a rally around the flag effect, but we’ve seen how “freedom” in this country has decayed into license to do whatever you want without consideration to health and safety of others. In Germany, this performative apologia means that Germans now deny the evils of Zionism and cannot properly face the real pressures that mass emigrations has brought into its borders. In Japan, this means forgetting what it did to all its neighbors and rearming.
If the US was a small country like Sweden or Portugal, perhaps the false mythologies wouldn’t matter much. But we see how the America myths about its Innocence, good intentions, and exceptionalism leaves a long trail of wrecked countries, dead mostly brown people, and soon a fully devasted ecosystem. If tugging this thread brings it down, doesn’t it deserve to be brought down?
Of course, Astrid, I agree that the U.S. is in some kind of degenerative spiral with regard to its national storytelling. But, our storytelling is not driving America’s destructive and foolish foreign policy. I think the general population’s “good intentions” are mostly genuine. The thing is, in “our” democracy the 80%, even the 99% most of the time do not get what they want in any domain of national governance. The interests and preferences of the great majority and the general welfare and the public interest receive no consideration. You can object that there is also not much effective resistance to that state of affairs and you would be right; I am not arguing against the guilt of the American people for their negligence and short memory and general gullibility. (The commenters on this blog who argued strenuously for Biden over Trump rarely apologize for keeping the ball rolling undisturbed.)
I see Biden and Putin side-by-side and I can well imagine that Putin leads his government in trying to think thru what is in Russia’s collective, national interest and ways and means to achieve rationally chosen goals. He speaks like a man engaged in governing on this and other occasions.
I do not think Biden or anyone in the higher levels of his Administration thinks seriously about America’s national interest or governing accordingly. To some extent, the Blob has taken over — a mindless autopilot — on the second level down from Cabinet Secretaries and the West Wing: “the interagency” and the “process”. But what drives the Blob are business interests manipulating career paths in a complex snakepit — corruption in a word, but not the self-aware corruption that might still sight a national interest or sense how to achieve a rationally-chosen goal thru the ideological fog thrown up to hide from repeated failure and wasteful foolishness.
You can sense the absence of sense and sensibility in Biden’s senile outbursts — sound-bites planted by aides in his pickling brain. And also in the disinterest of American journalists in much of anything said, including especially the ludicrous lie about the U.S. not interfering in foreign elections. (The fake outrage across NATO about Belarus forcing a commercial jet to land so they could arrest a critic of the regime went uncommented upon not just in the U.S.)
The apathy and the absence of effective institutional support for organizing people to oppose this bipartisan nightmare of a politics are not anywhere near the national stories that once organized some great achievements. Those stories grow stale from overuse by cynical manipulators and from the clear absence of any effect on policy or behavior. It is all lies, liars, fools and failures thinking it can go on like this profitably forever.
Certainly no disagreement with your analysis. Thinking of just one corner. The barely remarked upon erosion of civil liberties and due process in the last 20 years is shocking. The political class (and this includes their voters) uniformly can’t be bothered to uphold even the appearance of integrity of the system in which they rest their legitimacy. They can’t even make a pretense of upholding truth as they flit between comforting lies and obfscations. Truly we’re sunk.
The question is probably no longer whether this system is salvageable, but whether the psychos at the top and their unhinged supporters will burn everything down on their way out.
bruce wilder
‘… the U.S. is in some kind of degenerative spiral with regard to its national storytelling. But, our storytelling is not driving America’s destructive and foolish foreign policy.”
What is driving the US foreign policy then?
‘…in “our” democracy the 80%, even the 99% most of the time do not get what they want in any domain of national governance.’
Why is this possible? Who gets what they want?
‘I see Biden and Putin side-by-side and I can well imagine that Putin leads his government in trying to think thru what is in Russia’s collective, national interest and ways and means to achieve rationally chosen goals.’
We will have to see how rational Russian governing classes are. Paint me skeptical. If they ever dig themselves out this pit (remains to be seen), this period in their history will be known as a period of national humiliation and stupidity. They keep on losing time after time. Russians are racists just like us (not every one of course, but in a majority). That’s why they are infatuated with Europe — i.e., people who look like them — and are reluctant to embrace cooperation with Asia, i.e., slanted eye-ds who do not look like them. When racism in America is pointed to Russians, they don’t care, they accept that the minorities are incapable and brought this onto themselves. Russia did not have slavery, but they did steal land from native people in Siberia — mostly with slanted eyes. ‘Biden’ is correct to play to their racism, they may still hand over themselves fully for a chance to be included in the ‘superior race’. China also seems to think that Russia is rational, this may cost them.
‘America’s national interest or governing accordingly.’
What is a nation? Why does it have to have an interest?
‘drives the Blob are business interests manipulating career paths in a complex snakepit ‘
What is the ‘Blob’? Is this like that lovable green creature from the movie?
“The apathy and the absence of effective institutional support for organizing people to oppose this bipartisan nightmare of a politics are not anywhere near the national stories that once organized some great achievements.”
What national stories and what are achievements are discussed here? And which political center should organize people?
‘It is all lies, liars, fools and failures thinking it can go on like this profitably forever.’
US is the greatest and richest country in the world that has overcome many challenges. Why can’t this continue?
I am playing a fool here who can ask more questions in a min than a wise person can answer in a lifetime. But still, some questions are in order.
Seventeen months too late the USA is finally going to fund billions for the development of treatments for COVID. Despite from the beginning; ignoring, censoring, and ridiculing physicians who have already found and instituted treatments rather than telling their patients to stay home until they can’t breathe any longer.
Western identity politics (divide and rule) has crashed into the reality. The corporate state (the Western Empire) is falling. Today feels like Tom Brokaw reporting from Berlin except instead Rachael Maddow today reads the news from the new Stasi.
Money for nothing does not serve or protect the people. Profit over lives insures chaos.
Old, remembering the Eisenhower years, I can only hope for a restoration of the US Constitution and government by and for the people. Tragically, more likely, next winter, after the latest coronavirus variant lockdowns, the unrest already simmering in the USA will explode much like 1789 and 1917.
On the new look: Disorienting at first, but it’s grown on me. The picture enhances the theme, so I like it for that (also, on clear nights, I can look out my front door and gawp in wonder at the Milky Way arcing overhead and be reminded that even our imaginings are not as amazing.)
Back when he was working in Moscow, I thought Taibbi could be amusing and entertaining, a dynamite story-teller and narrative-spinner, and an often insightful observer of the passing scene. (Of course, he did not lack for controversy, either.) Since those days, he seems to have almost fossilized, and while he can still tell a story like almost nobody else in the trade, his sprightliness is gone, and his determination to push rightist narratives — in support of some higher objective of course! — diminishes his work. Dude’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, tho.
Finally, I’ve been pondering the “resignation” of Portland Police Bureau’s entire Rapid Reaction Force, always on call to put down leftist and anarchist agitators and non-violent demonstrators at a moment’s notice. Their brutality and arbitrary use of force, tear gas, and sub-lethal weapons on all and sundry was notorious and widely admired depending on your point of view. The one of them who was indicted for pushing, striking and injuring a demonstrator was by no means even close to the worst of the lot. Far from it. If they wanted to indict a member for outrageous behavior, Portlanders could name half a dozen or more well-deserving officers. But then the whole team, tearing around town on their Riot Vans, was little more than a goon squad directed solely at the “left.” When fascist mobs ran wild in the streets, they would look on approvingly. Their “resignations” while remaining police officers matters little.
Nothing will change. Somehow, in Portland and many other places, it never does.
The future is going to be a dystopian nightmare beyond anything we can imagine. Nothing any of us do is even going to slow it down, much less stop it. The narrative that defines our future is that picture of Bezos using chopsticks to pop a big tasty roach into his mouth.
@NL “What is the ‘Blob’? Is this like that lovable green creature from the movie?”
“the Blob” is a reference to the reflexively hawkish U.S. foreign policy establishment, coined by Obama advisor Ben Rhodes who saw them as an obstacle to Obama implementing a better policy, particularly with reference to Iran.
You can do an internet search and quickly access a number of brief, incisive analyses of the problem of the Blob. Among the more sophisticated and well-researched you may find reference to the work of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.
The existence of an institutional complex that we can call the foreign policy establishment seems inexplicably hard to accept for some people, let alone that it produces a voluminous discourse immune to reason or evidence and capable of drowning out all sense of a genuine public purpose or national interest.
The foreign policy establishment is just one component of the military-industrial complex, which in turn is one part of a globalized and financialized commercial, industrial and financial business establishment dominated by a several dozen business corporations and several hundred mega-wealthy families.
The bureaucratic apparatus of various business, financial, academic, governmental initiatives have grown, evolved and aged even while the shared understanding of their design, potential, function and purpose available to democratic discourse has withered and faded. To me, this fading away of interest in how the political economy has been organized by the capitalism of the industrial revolutions is the essence of the political disease of neoliberalism. Those looking on with horror, from left or right, are left with “there is no alternative” where paths to reform or revolution should be. The right instinctively wants to blow things up, wreck the place, while the left fantasizes a Monty Python politics of “now for something completely different”. But, I digress.
The sclerosis of American politics is attributable, in my view, to the operation of Michel’s Iron Law of Institutions on many now long-lived bureaucracies combined with the evolution of a high-centralized political ecology in which those bureaucracies function and survive. The majority of humans in these structures have their thinking circumscribed by roles and career paths while embedded in systems controlled at the top in many cases by sociopathic parasites. Running a business to create value still happens, but running a business into the ground to extract cash for private equity is now a pattern. A member of Congress is constrained to raise campaign cash from lobbyists to finance manipulative propaganda campaigns thru corporate mass media until she can retire into a job as a corporate lobbyist. An Army General looks forward to retirement into a position as a company director or consultant in the military-industrial complex with which he daily interacts as vendors of products and services.
“rational” seems to be an ideologically loaded trigger word for a lot of people, which is unfortunate.
I do not imagine I can rescue the term, but I wish I could, because it would be useful to be able to point to examples of political opinion where all sense of mechanism or matching means to ends in pursuing a carefully considered, achievable objective is thrown aside, in favor of an empty narrative trope of good and pure moral intentions or a ritual recitation of a magical incantation and apply a label that clearly indicates departure from reality basis.
Probably nothing is going to keep generals who cannot win a war with overwhelmingly superior resources and 20 years to do it from complaining that a failure of political will to stay the course is destroying all the good they have accomplished for women’s rights.
Intervening in a multi-sided conflict and supporting various of those sides hostile to your own country’s interests in their fights with each other — what do you call that policy? (U.S. policy in Syria but also generally in the Mideast, where we ally with Saudi Arabia hostile to the U.S. on many levels.)
Or economic policy discussions dominated by worrying about the deficit and business confidence and arguing for the magic of austerity.
Glad you brought up your disappointment with the loss of noting how many comments have been made, for me it was the first thing noticeable, and a disappointment. Do you feel free to discuss further, regarding changes re Word Press, as it seems (from recollect), that they’ve increasingly become heavy handed (including shutting down some sites), and less affordable (if I recollect correctly) for those running the paid version.
No, it’s nothing political that I’m aware of. Modern themes aren’t optimized for classic blog aesthetics is all, at least as far as I know. That’s one of the reasons I kept the old Theme for so long. Around 2016 I played around with a bunch of new ones, but none of them quite “worked” the way I wanted.
If I were going to make a more radical change it would be a style where multiple posts are visible, with small slugs so that people can see, say, the most recent 4 to 6 posts without scrolling much.
Thanks for the response, Ian. Perhaps others reading here, with WordPress blogs, can chime in. I wish I could remember, fairly recently (last half year, or less?) what I had read about WordPress doing something very disappointing, regarding those with small blogs. It may have had something to do with mobile (Apple connected?) access, I just can’t recall, way too much horrid shit going on.
Also, I’m not terribly skilled at front end work, but I know there’s a display: none css class: value that should be able to hide the starry graphic, for the larger footprint of a laptop. If you don’t like the graphic on small footprints, either, it’ll be that much easier to turn off, since you won’t need a cs query for the footprint. (there’s also visibility: hidden, though I’m not familiar with that)
The monthly archive links aren’t listing your old postings like they used to either though they do bring you back to the postings pages for that month.
Ray McGovern pens “Please! Someone Set Biden Straight on China ‘Squeezing’ Russia”, now at antiwar.com.
“Recall that during the 70s, as Biden entered politics, the Russians and Chinese had been shooting at each other across that “multi-thousand-mile border,” China was claiming 1.5 million square kilometers of Siberia that had been seized and “occupied” by a handful of Cossacks and certified by centuries-old “unequal treaties” (that were, indeed, unequal). During the 70s and early 80s, it did seem as though the mutual hostility would last forever. (Full disclosure: I was CIA’s principal analyst on Sino-Soviet relations during the 60s and early 70s, and I shared that view. For commentary on how and why this all changed, please see “US-Russia Ties, from Heyday to MayDay” and “Russia-China Tandem Shifts Global Power.”
…
What does matter is the impression President Putin got of a president highly experienced in foreign affairs, but bereft of accurate knowledge on some fundamental current realities (and the China issue is only one such questionable tack). ”
McGovern doesn’t speculate on whether Biden is incapable of being up to date, because of dementia. However, Biden’s lucidity seems to vary quite a bit; and when he’s on his game, one would hope that he can ingest enough of the truth to know better.
We are left with a bizarre uncertainty, not totally unlike mysteries surrounding Trump’s failures, especially in the last few months of his Administration, where he even threw his own supporters under the bus. While I was concerned about Trump having dementia early in his Presidency, that seemed to be a less plausible alternative, later on.
Dementia or no dementia, a President should be touch with reality, and able and willing to plausibly explain his actions and statements.
Biden’s lucidity doesn’t matter. Biden is his administration. McDonald Trump was not. He was and is a megalomaniac. McDonald Trump, that is.
Putin’s intelligent. He knows this, even though his cyber warriors imply he doesn’t with their contradictory illogic knowing full well the rubes who are their targets won’t see the contradictions.
Meanwhile, Snowden’s doing a hell of lot better than Assange, sin’t he? Married with a newborn. Life is good for Arch Enemy Numero Uno, right? Weird, all of that. It doesn’t quite add up. Especially Snowden’s popularity. He even has a Twitter check. If there was Twitter in 30s and 40s, I’m certain Hitler would have had a Twitter check seal of approval as an official somebody so long as his fingers didn’t spit too much when he was typing one of his vitriolic diatribes.
When Snowden fled the US, he probably wanted to go somewhere warmer and more tropical than Russia. The DC FedGov Regime decided to revoke Snowden’s passport while Snowden was physically in Russian airspace, getting ready to land in Moscow, as I remember.
If my memory is correct, it is therefor the DC FedGov Regime which froze Snowden in place in Russia and Putin found Snowden on Russia’s hands with no action or expectation of his own. He even said ( as I remember) in an interview, that this showed very poor craft on “America’s” part. So Putin eventually gave Snowden asylum.
Snowden survives because the Western Intelligence Community cannot figure out how to kidnap him from Russia back to the West, or how to assassinate him within Russia.
Snowden’s bad luck was to be in a Western country and subject to the long arm of Western Intelligence and the Western Intelligence Community’s legal system.
That doesn’t cut it for me, dc. If they wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Instead, he’s not only not dead, but he’s actually quite vocal and has quite a following. I’m certain he will reach Greenwald’s level of subscriptions, $500,000 per year, on Substack in no time. It’s amazing how much money activists have to pay for all these subscriptions, isn’t it? How do they do it on an “activist’s” salary? Trust funds, maybe? Or maybe they aren’t what they pretend to be on the internet.
NaCap itself featured a little more commentary, namely this . . .
Exactly like the railways in the pre-Confederate South:
One Ball One Chain. Still, if the New Chinese CommuNazi Colonialism treats Africa better than the Old EuroWestern Colonialism did, then Africa will still be net-net better off in the longest run.
And many people in that NC thread and in the tweet thread, including me, commented on how the map is inaccurate and dubious. The map is of new investments, so it’s not meaningful unless you overlay it with preexisting rail infrastructure. Furthermore, Belt and Road projects require initiative of the local governments, so it’s directed in a different manner than colonial governments. Incidentally the guy offering that analysis tweet is also anti-leftist all-over and appears to be your bog standard reflective liberal.
You have so much time for evil China narrative, which, even if true doesn’t affect you anything like how your own government is negatively affecting you. Yet you don’t bother responding to the comments I specifically posted trying to address your points. I am not saying that I’m right and I certainly don’t think China is a definite good or even that a past track record of doing good extends to the future. But you seem to prefer wallowing in the China evil narrative. So I give up wasting my time with you.
Ian Welsh
All comments should now show on one page. Not entirely happy with this theme, and may change it again in a bit if I find a better one.
The old one was from 2009 and unsupported, and it finally broke and had to be changed. I’m told that this one works much better on mobile. I would prefer a comments count, and I have mixed feelings of the big picture at the top, even if it’s pretty. Most blog themes now want a picture with each post, which while it is best practice I don’t want to do (and since I have literally thousands of posts without, they make old posts look bad.)
I too prefer the raven picture, but the header here needs about a 3/1 ratio and a picture around 1280 × 444 and I haven’t found a good one of ravens meeting those requirements.
bruce wilder
The theme does present well on my iPhone (yes they can know where I am — i am not sure anyone knows who i am, not even me)
On more topical fronts: the contrast of Putin and Biden at the summit meeting. NC ran a compare/contrast essay by John Helmer. (I have never understood why NC features Helmer, who presents as a conman — is he even in Russia?) But his essay in this case was pretty good — and devastating to the pretense that Biden is not senile. Lots of Twitter attention to Biden’s statement about the U.S. not interfering in foreign elections, but no mainstream notice of the delusional nature of that view. File it with Tonkin Gulf incident, WMD, and Russiagate?
Rolling Stone had a deeply disturbing expose of homicides and drug use among elite soldiers at Fort Bragg (weren’t we suppose to rename that base for someone not a traitor?)
The legitimacy crisis enveloping the U.S. is growing broader and deeper when the President cannot even lie effectively and the most deeply committed soldiers act like sons of anarchy on a bender.
Meanwhile what passes for the left-liberal center is sure the country was born in irredeemable original sin. Hmmm.
different clue
Imagining an “Original Sin” for liberal-leftist Americans to parade their superior sensititivity by affecting to ” believe in” is part of the negative fallout from the Puritan and other Dissenting Christianisms so prevalent in parts of early Colonial America.
We had at least 2 generations of effective left here, and both were carefully destroyed by official governmental action. The first left was destroyed by Twentieth Century America’s most evil president, President Wilson. The second left was destroyed by long term action taken by the counter-New Deal Truman-McCarthy-etc. establishment.
So the only left “left”, as it were, is a subhuman pacifist left deeply contaminated and polluted by Quakeristic and other masochistic pacifist brain-pus. The antifas are trying to remedy that in their own anarchic unfocused childish way.
You don’t hear China or Japan blathering about something so utterly stupid as their ” national Original Sin”.
Trinity
This comment is based on comments in the Preparing for Bad Times thread, said posts are posted on the same day as this one.
Krystyn, I’ve vacillated between buying a home (on hold for now) and buying a van and becoming a van dweller. The home is really for my son, something for him to inherit. One of the main issues for me is requiring high speed internet. But I lean toward it being safer to be mobile over the long term given all the uncertainties, especially climate change. Finding a place to grow food or storing valuables is the issue there. But I love the idea of being able to avoid bad weather, all the time. I realize I do have the choice and not everyone does, but I’m glad to hear you are making it work.
“I admit that I really prefer the old format over this, inclusive of the Raven.”
Astrid, I agree. I love the starry night/Milky Way pic but it’s a lot of scrolling just to get to the article title. I loved the old format, so clean and crisp and so different (in a good way) from the rest of the internet, laden with junk as it is.
And I partially agree with this: “the possibility that a government might understand that its power and legitimacy coming from social cohesion and welfare of all its people.“
As we have seen, acquiring power (legitimate or not) doesn’t require the consent of the people (manufactured or not), just a lot of money to get the ball rolling, and then keeping the money coming. But the long-term viability of government power is something else entirely. China appears to be doing what will keep them going over the long term, while just about everything in the West is focused only on the short term. This manifests literally as sole concern over the current and next quarter’s profits.
If nothing else, China seems to focus on continual learning, unlike the West which focuses on the past and things said by dead people (we think) only when it provides support for decisions made in the present. Quoting from the Bible is only one example of many. I’ll take oral traditions handed down for generations (easily verified between generations) over questionable translations any day.
And pretty much every response to problems we’ve seen in the last 40-50 years, such as COVID, has realized as short term bandaids that ultimately solve nothing, create more problems, and of course enrich a few. And when those responses become inconvenient to the powerful, they are easily removed or altered.
There is no long term thinking in the West anymore, compared to indigenous peoples’ methods for resource management that considered the needs of the next seven generations (at least). And the last long term thinkers (the “founding fathers”) were really only concerned with ensuring that ordinary people could not affect decisions. For this and other reasons, the US has always been a house of cards (in constant danger of collapse).
The manner (frame, structure) in which a society is organized is irrelevant without ongoing short term and long term planning to ensure long-term viability. And this is why I keep saying that the downfall of the oligarchs is baked into the cake. The only long term they consider is the size of their bank accounts and who in their family will continue the sociopath tradition. This was evident in McDonalds’ family history as told by his niece in her tell-all.
Willy
Meanwhile, the right continues to work at maintaining remnants of our original sin, covertly or not. So we just give them a pass?
But I’ll admit, getting lefties to march in lockstep can be as hard as herding cats, with all that diversity of perceived most-pressing problems going on. Not to mention all that right wing machinating taking full advantage.
Astrid
John Michael Greer’s essay on rescue game is instructive on what’s happening in the “woke” left and the bipartisan love to”humanely intervene” in parts of the world that they can’t find in a map. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/
Still, it’s useful to contemplate that the USA is founded by a bunch of tax cheats who were afraid that the mother country might get in the way of their stealing of Indian lands too quickly. At the least, such thoughts might deflate the purported high mindedness of the American project and puts the supposedly sacred constitutional document, with its three-fifth compromise, in the proper context. I don’t believe in residual guilt for the people living today, but we damn well shouldn’t be proud of US’s repressive and blood soaked history.
Japan has been avoiding apology for its sins against East Asia and Pacific Islands during WWII for 76 years. They managed to spin Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing into a victimhood shield in their relations with the West. After all, their sins were against slinty eyed orientals and people with too melanin, none of whom were trying to settler colonize an oil rich corner of the world. So unlike the Germans, who settled on a strategy of performative Holocaust apologia (while keeping on many of the Nazi personnel), the Japanese are happy to play it off as just as another war. With everyone directly involved already dead from old age, I guess most are willing to let sleeping dogs lie. But you only need to show an image of the imperial Japanese flag anywhere in East Asia, to get people’s heckles way up.
bruce wilder
@dc
the liberal middle classes in Western Europe as well as the U.S. have always had an ambivalent relationship with what we used to call the working classes. if by left we mean political movements and coalitions that seek to both include the participation of and champion the interests of the working classes, then those movements and coalitions have encountered even the idealistic middle classes as frenemies in their midst, more apt to support the state and the capitalist elite in oppressing the working classes than to make common cause against the forces of authoritarian reaction assembled and coordinated by the obscenely wealthy.
i think the present state of soi disant left idpol politics has little enough to do with the Quaker or Puritan heritage, but a great deal to do with the radical dimunition in social and economic mobility over the last three generations, which has hardened class consciousness. To attend an elite private university in the U.S. requires inheriting that privilege from parents and grants near-exclusive entre to what little remains of elite national journalism.
I think Michael Lind is right: the woke value a vocabulary that distinguishes them from lesser folks while celebrating their own virtue and rationalizing their contempt for much of the society they have no serious interest in governing. Resemblance to Puritans or Quakers is coincidental. (Genuine Quaker idealism is, in my experience, a possession of very nice people.)
someofparts
Well, open thread day so here is some news of interest to me.
https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/lifting-the-mask
Ed Snowden is on Substack now.
bruce wilder
Every nation tells stories about themselves — always politically contested stories to some extent, but also stories that unite a broad spectrum of the population behind certain institutions, ideals or settlements. And, yes, mostly every nation in its stories makes itself exceptional in some important respects. I would be more cautious about discarding stories that support ideals than Astrid. Are these stories told by hypocrites and fools? Yes. The fools and hypocrites will still be telling stories after these stories are gone; what monstosities will they then support?
Astrid
Bruce,
I feel like that argument, that without foundational stories, we would just be sliding towards nihlism, is proven to be false in practice. This was the argument for religion and against atheism. Yet, in practice we don’t that atheists and agnostics are often better rounded and more humane people.
National mythologies do have a rally around the flag effect, but we’ve seen how “freedom” in this country has decayed into license to do whatever you want without consideration to health and safety of others. In Germany, this performative apologia means that Germans now deny the evils of Zionism and cannot properly face the real pressures that mass emigrations has brought into its borders. In Japan, this means forgetting what it did to all its neighbors and rearming.
If the US was a small country like Sweden or Portugal, perhaps the false mythologies wouldn’t matter much. But we see how the America myths about its Innocence, good intentions, and exceptionalism leaves a long trail of wrecked countries, dead mostly brown people, and soon a fully devasted ecosystem. If tugging this thread brings it down, doesn’t it deserve to be brought down?
bruce wilder
Of course, Astrid, I agree that the U.S. is in some kind of degenerative spiral with regard to its national storytelling. But, our storytelling is not driving America’s destructive and foolish foreign policy. I think the general population’s “good intentions” are mostly genuine. The thing is, in “our” democracy the 80%, even the 99% most of the time do not get what they want in any domain of national governance. The interests and preferences of the great majority and the general welfare and the public interest receive no consideration. You can object that there is also not much effective resistance to that state of affairs and you would be right; I am not arguing against the guilt of the American people for their negligence and short memory and general gullibility. (The commenters on this blog who argued strenuously for Biden over Trump rarely apologize for keeping the ball rolling undisturbed.)
I see Biden and Putin side-by-side and I can well imagine that Putin leads his government in trying to think thru what is in Russia’s collective, national interest and ways and means to achieve rationally chosen goals. He speaks like a man engaged in governing on this and other occasions.
I do not think Biden or anyone in the higher levels of his Administration thinks seriously about America’s national interest or governing accordingly. To some extent, the Blob has taken over — a mindless autopilot — on the second level down from Cabinet Secretaries and the West Wing: “the interagency” and the “process”. But what drives the Blob are business interests manipulating career paths in a complex snakepit — corruption in a word, but not the self-aware corruption that might still sight a national interest or sense how to achieve a rationally-chosen goal thru the ideological fog thrown up to hide from repeated failure and wasteful foolishness.
You can sense the absence of sense and sensibility in Biden’s senile outbursts — sound-bites planted by aides in his pickling brain. And also in the disinterest of American journalists in much of anything said, including especially the ludicrous lie about the U.S. not interfering in foreign elections. (The fake outrage across NATO about Belarus forcing a commercial jet to land so they could arrest a critic of the regime went uncommented upon not just in the U.S.)
The apathy and the absence of effective institutional support for organizing people to oppose this bipartisan nightmare of a politics are not anywhere near the national stories that once organized some great achievements. Those stories grow stale from overuse by cynical manipulators and from the clear absence of any effect on policy or behavior. It is all lies, liars, fools and failures thinking it can go on like this profitably forever.
Astrid
Bruce,
Certainly no disagreement with your analysis. Thinking of just one corner. The barely remarked upon erosion of civil liberties and due process in the last 20 years is shocking. The political class (and this includes their voters) uniformly can’t be bothered to uphold even the appearance of integrity of the system in which they rest their legitimacy. They can’t even make a pretense of upholding truth as they flit between comforting lies and obfscations. Truly we’re sunk.
The question is probably no longer whether this system is salvageable, but whether the psychos at the top and their unhinged supporters will burn everything down on their way out.
NL
bruce wilder
‘… the U.S. is in some kind of degenerative spiral with regard to its national storytelling. But, our storytelling is not driving America’s destructive and foolish foreign policy.”
What is driving the US foreign policy then?
‘…in “our” democracy the 80%, even the 99% most of the time do not get what they want in any domain of national governance.’
Why is this possible? Who gets what they want?
‘I see Biden and Putin side-by-side and I can well imagine that Putin leads his government in trying to think thru what is in Russia’s collective, national interest and ways and means to achieve rationally chosen goals.’
We will have to see how rational Russian governing classes are. Paint me skeptical. If they ever dig themselves out this pit (remains to be seen), this period in their history will be known as a period of national humiliation and stupidity. They keep on losing time after time. Russians are racists just like us (not every one of course, but in a majority). That’s why they are infatuated with Europe — i.e., people who look like them — and are reluctant to embrace cooperation with Asia, i.e., slanted eye-ds who do not look like them. When racism in America is pointed to Russians, they don’t care, they accept that the minorities are incapable and brought this onto themselves. Russia did not have slavery, but they did steal land from native people in Siberia — mostly with slanted eyes. ‘Biden’ is correct to play to their racism, they may still hand over themselves fully for a chance to be included in the ‘superior race’. China also seems to think that Russia is rational, this may cost them.
‘America’s national interest or governing accordingly.’
What is a nation? Why does it have to have an interest?
‘drives the Blob are business interests manipulating career paths in a complex snakepit ‘
What is the ‘Blob’? Is this like that lovable green creature from the movie?
“The apathy and the absence of effective institutional support for organizing people to oppose this bipartisan nightmare of a politics are not anywhere near the national stories that once organized some great achievements.”
What national stories and what are achievements are discussed here? And which political center should organize people?
‘It is all lies, liars, fools and failures thinking it can go on like this profitably forever.’
US is the greatest and richest country in the world that has overcome many challenges. Why can’t this continue?
I am playing a fool here who can ask more questions in a min than a wise person can answer in a lifetime. But still, some questions are in order.
VietnamVet
The intertubes I read, changed this week. There has been a paradigm shift:
Meet the Censored: Bret Weinstein by Matt Taibbi
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-bret-weinstein?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoyNzY1ODUwLCJwb3N0X2lkIjozNzc4MzU4NCwiXyI6IjJDVW1RIiwiaWF0IjoxNjI0MTIyODIxLCJleHAiOjE2MjQxMjY0MjEsImlzcyI6InB1Yi0xMDQyIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.v7ymeXABm8eUcTxt1Gtrkkb6iUWPzKKrLUn8M_3twTQ
Seventeen months too late the USA is finally going to fund billions for the development of treatments for COVID. Despite from the beginning; ignoring, censoring, and ridiculing physicians who have already found and instituted treatments rather than telling their patients to stay home until they can’t breathe any longer.
Western identity politics (divide and rule) has crashed into the reality. The corporate state (the Western Empire) is falling. Today feels like Tom Brokaw reporting from Berlin except instead Rachael Maddow today reads the news from the new Stasi.
Money for nothing does not serve or protect the people. Profit over lives insures chaos.
Old, remembering the Eisenhower years, I can only hope for a restoration of the US Constitution and government by and for the people. Tragically, more likely, next winter, after the latest coronavirus variant lockdowns, the unrest already simmering in the USA will explode much like 1789 and 1917.
Ché Pasa
On the new look: Disorienting at first, but it’s grown on me. The picture enhances the theme, so I like it for that (also, on clear nights, I can look out my front door and gawp in wonder at the Milky Way arcing overhead and be reminded that even our imaginings are not as amazing.)
Back when he was working in Moscow, I thought Taibbi could be amusing and entertaining, a dynamite story-teller and narrative-spinner, and an often insightful observer of the passing scene. (Of course, he did not lack for controversy, either.) Since those days, he seems to have almost fossilized, and while he can still tell a story like almost nobody else in the trade, his sprightliness is gone, and his determination to push rightist narratives — in support of some higher objective of course! — diminishes his work. Dude’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, tho.
Finally, I’ve been pondering the “resignation” of Portland Police Bureau’s entire Rapid Reaction Force, always on call to put down leftist and anarchist agitators and non-violent demonstrators at a moment’s notice. Their brutality and arbitrary use of force, tear gas, and sub-lethal weapons on all and sundry was notorious and widely admired depending on your point of view. The one of them who was indicted for pushing, striking and injuring a demonstrator was by no means even close to the worst of the lot. Far from it. If they wanted to indict a member for outrageous behavior, Portlanders could name half a dozen or more well-deserving officers. But then the whole team, tearing around town on their Riot Vans, was little more than a goon squad directed solely at the “left.” When fascist mobs ran wild in the streets, they would look on approvingly. Their “resignations” while remaining police officers matters little.
Nothing will change. Somehow, in Portland and many other places, it never does.
someofparts
The future is going to be a dystopian nightmare beyond anything we can imagine. Nothing any of us do is even going to slow it down, much less stop it. The narrative that defines our future is that picture of Bezos using chopsticks to pop a big tasty roach into his mouth.
Plague Species
Happy belated Juneteenth to any and all. What a way to celebrate your freedom.
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootings-violence-police-weekend/10809907/
bruce wilder
@NL “What is the ‘Blob’? Is this like that lovable green creature from the movie?”
“the Blob” is a reference to the reflexively hawkish U.S. foreign policy establishment, coined by Obama advisor Ben Rhodes who saw them as an obstacle to Obama implementing a better policy, particularly with reference to Iran.
You can do an internet search and quickly access a number of brief, incisive analyses of the problem of the Blob. Among the more sophisticated and well-researched you may find reference to the work of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt.
The existence of an institutional complex that we can call the foreign policy establishment seems inexplicably hard to accept for some people, let alone that it produces a voluminous discourse immune to reason or evidence and capable of drowning out all sense of a genuine public purpose or national interest.
The foreign policy establishment is just one component of the military-industrial complex, which in turn is one part of a globalized and financialized commercial, industrial and financial business establishment dominated by a several dozen business corporations and several hundred mega-wealthy families.
The bureaucratic apparatus of various business, financial, academic, governmental initiatives have grown, evolved and aged even while the shared understanding of their design, potential, function and purpose available to democratic discourse has withered and faded. To me, this fading away of interest in how the political economy has been organized by the capitalism of the industrial revolutions is the essence of the political disease of neoliberalism. Those looking on with horror, from left or right, are left with “there is no alternative” where paths to reform or revolution should be. The right instinctively wants to blow things up, wreck the place, while the left fantasizes a Monty Python politics of “now for something completely different”. But, I digress.
The sclerosis of American politics is attributable, in my view, to the operation of Michel’s Iron Law of Institutions on many now long-lived bureaucracies combined with the evolution of a high-centralized political ecology in which those bureaucracies function and survive. The majority of humans in these structures have their thinking circumscribed by roles and career paths while embedded in systems controlled at the top in many cases by sociopathic parasites. Running a business to create value still happens, but running a business into the ground to extract cash for private equity is now a pattern. A member of Congress is constrained to raise campaign cash from lobbyists to finance manipulative propaganda campaigns thru corporate mass media until she can retire into a job as a corporate lobbyist. An Army General looks forward to retirement into a position as a company director or consultant in the military-industrial complex with which he daily interacts as vendors of products and services.
bruce wilder
“rational” seems to be an ideologically loaded trigger word for a lot of people, which is unfortunate.
I do not imagine I can rescue the term, but I wish I could, because it would be useful to be able to point to examples of political opinion where all sense of mechanism or matching means to ends in pursuing a carefully considered, achievable objective is thrown aside, in favor of an empty narrative trope of good and pure moral intentions or a ritual recitation of a magical incantation and apply a label that clearly indicates departure from reality basis.
Probably nothing is going to keep generals who cannot win a war with overwhelmingly superior resources and 20 years to do it from complaining that a failure of political will to stay the course is destroying all the good they have accomplished for women’s rights.
Intervening in a multi-sided conflict and supporting various of those sides hostile to your own country’s interests in their fights with each other — what do you call that policy? (U.S. policy in Syria but also generally in the Mideast, where we ally with Saudi Arabia hostile to the U.S. on many levels.)
Or economic policy discussions dominated by worrying about the deficit and business confidence and arguing for the magic of austerity.
Delicate question
Ian
Glad you brought up your disappointment with the loss of noting how many comments have been made, for me it was the first thing noticeable, and a disappointment. Do you feel free to discuss further, regarding changes re Word Press, as it seems (from recollect), that they’ve increasingly become heavy handed (including shutting down some sites), and less affordable (if I recollect correctly) for those running the paid version.
I can’t help but wonder if those changes don’t have something to do with the White House having adopted Word Press since 2018: https://wordpress.org/showcase/the-white-house/ .
Ian Welsh
No, it’s nothing political that I’m aware of. Modern themes aren’t optimized for classic blog aesthetics is all, at least as far as I know. That’s one of the reasons I kept the old Theme for so long. Around 2016 I played around with a bunch of new ones, but none of them quite “worked” the way I wanted.
If I were going to make a more radical change it would be a style where multiple posts are visible, with small slugs so that people can see, say, the most recent 4 to 6 posts without scrolling much.
Delicate question
Thanks for the response, Ian. Perhaps others reading here, with WordPress blogs, can chime in. I wish I could remember, fairly recently (last half year, or less?) what I had read about WordPress doing something very disappointing, regarding those with small blogs. It may have had something to do with mobile (Apple connected?) access, I just can’t recall, way too much horrid shit going on.
metamars
https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/wp_count_comments/ shows a simple function:
wp_count_comments( int $post_id )
Retrieves the total comment counts for the whole site or a single post.
You could probably find a coder amongst progressive coders with the right skillset, who will tweak your site for free.
See https://www.progcode.org
Also, I’m not terribly skilled at front end work, but I know there’s a display: none css class: value that should be able to hide the starry graphic, for the larger footprint of a laptop. If you don’t like the graphic on small footprints, either, it’ll be that much easier to turn off, since you won’t need a cs query for the footprint. (there’s also visibility: hidden, though I’m not familiar with that)
Z
Ian,
The monthly archive links aren’t listing your old postings like they used to either though they do bring you back to the postings pages for that month.
Z
metamars
Ray McGovern pens “Please! Someone Set Biden Straight on China ‘Squeezing’ Russia”, now at antiwar.com.
“Recall that during the 70s, as Biden entered politics, the Russians and Chinese had been shooting at each other across that “multi-thousand-mile border,” China was claiming 1.5 million square kilometers of Siberia that had been seized and “occupied” by a handful of Cossacks and certified by centuries-old “unequal treaties” (that were, indeed, unequal). During the 70s and early 80s, it did seem as though the mutual hostility would last forever. (Full disclosure: I was CIA’s principal analyst on Sino-Soviet relations during the 60s and early 70s, and I shared that view. For commentary on how and why this all changed, please see “US-Russia Ties, from Heyday to MayDay” and “Russia-China Tandem Shifts Global Power.”
…
What does matter is the impression President Putin got of a president highly experienced in foreign affairs, but bereft of accurate knowledge on some fundamental current realities (and the China issue is only one such questionable tack). ”
McGovern doesn’t speculate on whether Biden is incapable of being up to date, because of dementia. However, Biden’s lucidity seems to vary quite a bit; and when he’s on his game, one would hope that he can ingest enough of the truth to know better.
We are left with a bizarre uncertainty, not totally unlike mysteries surrounding Trump’s failures, especially in the last few months of his Administration, where he even threw his own supporters under the bus. While I was concerned about Trump having dementia early in his Presidency, that seemed to be a less plausible alternative, later on.
Dementia or no dementia, a President should be touch with reality, and able and willing to plausibly explain his actions and statements.
Plague Species
Biden’s lucidity doesn’t matter. Biden is his administration. McDonald Trump was not. He was and is a megalomaniac. McDonald Trump, that is.
Putin’s intelligent. He knows this, even though his cyber warriors imply he doesn’t with their contradictory illogic knowing full well the rubes who are their targets won’t see the contradictions.
Meanwhile, Snowden’s doing a hell of lot better than Assange, sin’t he? Married with a newborn. Life is good for Arch Enemy Numero Uno, right? Weird, all of that. It doesn’t quite add up. Especially Snowden’s popularity. He even has a Twitter check. If there was Twitter in 30s and 40s, I’m certain Hitler would have had a Twitter check seal of approval as an official somebody so long as his fingers didn’t spit too much when he was typing one of his vitriolic diatribes.
different clue
When Snowden fled the US, he probably wanted to go somewhere warmer and more tropical than Russia. The DC FedGov Regime decided to revoke Snowden’s passport while Snowden was physically in Russian airspace, getting ready to land in Moscow, as I remember.
If my memory is correct, it is therefor the DC FedGov Regime which froze Snowden in place in Russia and Putin found Snowden on Russia’s hands with no action or expectation of his own. He even said ( as I remember) in an interview, that this showed very poor craft on “America’s” part. So Putin eventually gave Snowden asylum.
Snowden survives because the Western Intelligence Community cannot figure out how to kidnap him from Russia back to the West, or how to assassinate him within Russia.
Snowden’s bad luck was to be in a Western country and subject to the long arm of Western Intelligence and the Western Intelligence Community’s legal system.
different clue
In my last sentence above, I of course meant ” Assange’s bad luck” etc.
Plague Species
That doesn’t cut it for me, dc. If they wanted him dead, he’d be dead. Instead, he’s not only not dead, but he’s actually quite vocal and has quite a following. I’m certain he will reach Greenwald’s level of subscriptions, $500,000 per year, on Substack in no time. It’s amazing how much money activists have to pay for all these subscriptions, isn’t it? How do they do it on an “activist’s” salary? Trust funds, maybe? Or maybe they aren’t what they pretend to be on the internet.
different clue
Here is a map of Chinese railroads in Africa with some commentary, from Twitter.
https://twitter.com/PeterZeihan/status/1406995616324935683?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1406995616324935683%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nakedcapitalism.com%2F2021%2F06%2Flinks-6-23-2021.html
NaCap itself featured a little more commentary, namely this . . .
Exactly like the railways in the pre-Confederate South:
One Ball One Chain. Still, if the New Chinese CommuNazi Colonialism treats Africa better than the Old EuroWestern Colonialism did, then Africa will still be net-net better off in the longest run.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
Astrid
And many people in that NC thread and in the tweet thread, including me, commented on how the map is inaccurate and dubious. The map is of new investments, so it’s not meaningful unless you overlay it with preexisting rail infrastructure. Furthermore, Belt and Road projects require initiative of the local governments, so it’s directed in a different manner than colonial governments. Incidentally the guy offering that analysis tweet is also anti-leftist all-over and appears to be your bog standard reflective liberal.
You have so much time for evil China narrative, which, even if true doesn’t affect you anything like how your own government is negatively affecting you. Yet you don’t bother responding to the comments I specifically posted trying to address your points. I am not saying that I’m right and I certainly don’t think China is a definite good or even that a past track record of doing good extends to the future. But you seem to prefer wallowing in the China evil narrative. So I give up wasting my time with you.