It really is weird to have the “superpower” of being able to see the obvious.
Obviously, Iraq did not have WMD. Obviously, neither the Iraq nor Afghan occupations would succeed.
Obviously, letting Covid rip will cause a mass disabling event which will severely damage our societies.
Obviously China does not regard the US, in specific as a friend, as for 12 years the US has publicly stated, over and over again, that China is Enemy #1.
Obviously, Russia would not let Sevastapol be taken away from them.
Obviously, Russia would not let Ukraine join NATO.
Obviously, offshoring our industrial base to China would make them stronger and us weaker.
Obviously, immiserating our working class would make them hate the liberal order and vote against it when possible (Brexit/Trump, etc.).
Obviously, China has food and energy problems, and obviously, having Russia as a friend helps China fix those problems.
Obviously, China cannot trust the West for supplies, as the West has sanctioned China.
Obviously, the West hates China’s government and wants it replaced, and obviously, the Chinese government doesn’t like this and prefers Russia, which does not want to overthrow their government.
Obviously, Putin must win his war, or he will lose power and be killed.
Obviously, bailing out the rich in 2008 led to a sclerotic economy which cannot fix problems because central banks made a rule that incompetent rich people will be allowed to stay incompetent.
Obviously, not charging rich people with the crimes they committed which caused the financial crisis, but hitting them with fines which cost less than what they made would make them commit more and more crimes.
Obviously, if the rich control government (as per the Princeton Oligarchy study and common sense), and if Covid makes them much richer faster, the government will not seriously try to control Covid.
Obviously, if logistics and supply chain issues make the people who run the logistics and supply chain richer, they will not, themselves, try to solve the supply chain problems.
Obviously, the Ukrainian government’s statements about the war can be trusted just as much, or rather, just as little, as the Russian government’s statements.
Obviously, Democrats are going to lose the mid-terms, and Joe Biden will be (even more of) a lame duck.
Obviously, Biden doesn’t really mind Manchin spiking his program, or he would have gone after Manchin’s coal business or his daughter’s Epi-pen crimes.
Obviously, it will be to China’s huge, long-term advantage that they didn’t let Long Covid disable a huge percentage of their population.
Obviously, in ten years or so, almost everyone will admit that letting Covid rip was a mistake, just like most Iraq war boosters now admit they were wrong about Iraq.
Obviously, Israel is an apartheid state.
Obviously, most American, British, and Canadian politicians are terrified of the Israeli lobby and unwilling to cross it.
Obviously, the US is one of the most corrupt societies in the world, it’s just that US corruption is either legal — or if illegal, not prosecuted.
Obviously, Canada’s rich benefit from sanctions against Russia, because they sell the same things.
Obviously, having oligopolies control most of the US economy has led to inflation being much more than it would have been otherwise.
Obviously, Western central banks have spent 40 years crushing ordinary people’s wages relative to inflation.
Obviously, ex-Federal reserve governors, treasury secretaries, and most Presidents are rewarded for their services after they leave office with huge post-facto bribes, and obviously, they know they will be.
Obviously, Sinema & Manchin are being paid well to spike progressive policies.
Obviously, most European nations are American vassal states.
Obviously, giving in to American demands to reject Huawei 5G networks convinced China that European states are not trustworthy trade partners.
Obviously, Biden, who was a key driver of the bankruptcy bill which made it nearly impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, was not going to cancel student loan debt.
Obviously, China does not want to accept world rules made when it was its weakest.
Obviously, India is trending dangerously authoritarian, and is in danger of eventually engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Obviously, climate change is now past the point of no return, because we clearly won’t do anything to stop it until it is too late. (Sorry, just obvious.)
Obviously, most Western elites don’t care if people they don’t know in their own societies die or are impoverished.
Obviously, our massive “shock therapy” looting of Russia in the 90s was going to lead to a strong man taking over. (I expected military, turned out to be secret police.)
Obviously, drowning the government in a bathtub would create vast corruption among private contractors and lead to an inability to handle crises like Covid which require state capacity (if we wanted to, which mostly we don’t — see above).
Obviously, Bangladesh will be one of the first non-island states to be destroyed by climate change.
Obviously, making the rich even richer will never lead to improvements for the middle and working classes, as opposed to controlling the wealth and power of the rich.
Obviously, massively inequal societies turn into oligarchies of some sort, even if they are nominally democratic.
Obviously, repeatedly invading other countries in violation of international law would make international law weaker, and make countries not inside the blessed Western circle cynical about Western law and leadership.
Obviously, sanctions never cause regime change and only hurt ordinary people (this is the record for sections, 100 percent of the time).
Obviously, Venezuela and Iran will never trust the US or the West.
Obviously, China doing most of the world’s development would make developing countries prefer them to the US.
Obviously, the Chinese would be mistrustful of Western nations and Japan for humiliating them for a century.
Obviously, many Indians prefer Russia to the US and Europe, because Russia has been a reliable ally to them since their independence, when no Western nation has.
Obviously, the invasion of Ukraine is not a worse war crime than the invasion of Iraq.
Obviously, if Putin should be tried for war crimes so should George W. Bush (and many others who never will be).
Obviously, getting the Saudis to spread their noxious form of Islam and to arm guerillas against the Soviets has blown back horribly and has caused mass devastation far beyond Afghanistan.
Obviously, centrists agree with right-wingers on most issues, because they never roll back what right-wingers do while in power.
Obviously, centrists hate left-wingers much more than they hate fascists.
JMM
Some formatting needed — and I see some duplication. But excellent list.
Willy
I agree with the excellent list. With only a couple quibbles.
They say that the two most powerful emotions are hope and fear. An intelligent psychopath can quickly spot the degree to which a another can be manipulated by observing their levels of reliance on hope and fear. I’d add in greed and corruption, for manipulating the less agreeable.
Which brings us to centrists. Ideally, the good ones want to bring all sides to the debate table to try and come up with the most ‘scientific’ best-fit solutions to complex problems. But I think the good centrists are easily manipulated with hope and fear, while for the bad ones (who were using “centrism“ as camouflage) greed and corruption will do.
And so we have Biden appearing unusually labile and Manchin being open to per$ua$ion. It helps that neither are all too bright.
I’d disagree that Iraq and Ukraine are equivalent. The American policemen at least had the philosophy of trying to pick off the suspected criminals in the crowd, while the Russians prefer to mow down anybody in the general vicinity including any protesters.
CoCoNuts
Obviously the Ukrainian government’s statements about the war can be trusted just as much, or rather, little, as the Russian government’s statements.
Obviously, you haven’t been watching the news.
Ven
Obviously the mainstream media is so corrupt and incompetent, that they are unable to state the obvious.
edwin
I want to nit-pick:
“Obviously the US is one of the most corrupt societies in the world, it’s just that corruption is either legal or if illegal, not prosecuted. ”
The US has institutionalized corruption.
Tim
The list is outstanding and we could discuss each and every point that will never be challenged by our Oligarchs (includes most CEO’s of major corporations, “Billionaires” and a great chunk of multi-millionaires and those bought and paid for politicians at almost every level above high school council). Most of these cause doom and hardship for all but those directly responsible. While the Ukraine crisis is first and foremost, one of the biggest risks for Canada is the imploding democracy south of the border, once that takes a foothold, all bets are off what the behemoth decides to do with Canada and Mexico. The events in Ottawa are a prelude to what the movement has in store for us and has people like PP frothing at the mouth to take the reins in parliament.
Astrid
The super power is being okay with throwing away your career, your social network, and getting attacked as a Russian troll, a Chinese shrill, an antisemite, and an eco-Fascist. These topics are taboo and people who openly speak them in this society become un-persons.
Every society has such topics. The USian version is just extra destructive and toxic.
Anne Twitty
Everybody knows..
Lex
Ian, you probably don’t remember me from The Agonist days or the old terralist group. But I’ve been privy to your thoughts for that long. This must have been an excruciating list to compile because I can confirm that you considered them obvious at the time. It’s been a frustrating 20+ years for anyone paying attention, and worse for anyone with a heart or conscience. Still, many thanks for the times you’ve provoked my thoughts or uttered them for me. If it wasn’t all so obvious it would be less horrifying.
bruce wilder
I was thinking the other day about the response of many mainstream economists to the general failure of the economics profession to “predict” or anticipate the economic and financial crisis of 2007-8. Many of us who were paying attention — practically any one who followed the Calculated Risk blog from late 2005 was aware of what was coming. The smart money in politics was moving to make Ben Bernanke Greenspan’s successor in 2005, which I think is a clear indication that key parts of the ruling class knew what was up.
It was all “obvious” if you were paying attention to the moral truths, because the financial crisis of 2008 was the product of years of regulatory and financial folly and deceit. You did not have to be clairvoyant to “predict” it, because it was a necessary consequence of folly and deceit run rampant. You only had to have sufficient moral acuity to expect those consequences.
It is also not hard to understand how to be oblivious, as most professional and academic economists seemed to be and continued to be afterwards, having refused to learn anything. Economics may be a particularly stark case, because economics functions like a civic religion, much as the ancient Roman state religion did — a lot of mumbo jumbo, including ritual predictions and post facto explanations to legitimize the political order. Economists peddle a Big Lie as an article of religious faith in a “just world” (neoliberal edition). Models, my ass.
I was just reading a few minutes ago an interview by David Remnick in the New Yorker with Stephen Kotkin, a prominent scholar of Soviet history long at Princeton. Kotkin’s thesis is remarkably insipid:
Remnick leads the interview with a reference to the realism of Mearsheimer and Kennan. Kotkin’s response is this:
Russia as a bad seed against a West of the Immaculate Conception. This is a demonstration of how to be oblivious.
GlassHammer
Obviously letting civil society (advocacy groups, professional associations, churches, and cultural institutions) fall apart was a mistake.
Seattle Resident
“Obviously Biden doesn’t really mind Manchin spiking his program, or he would have gone after Manchin’s coal business or his daughter’s Epi-pen crimes.”
I suspect that if Biden went after Manchin’s coal business or the daughter’s corruption, he’d jump ship and become an independent ( he would not go republican for he would lose to the raw dog variety), thereby giving the Senate to McConnell. I think that the Biden administration considers the business and the family for Manchin to be red lines that are potentially too risky to go after in a 50/50 Senate
Granted it’s not much but, at the very least, with 50 votes plus Harris, Biden has been able to make a ton of district court appointments to counter the reactionary crazies that Trump put on the bench.
NL
“Obviously bailing out the rich in 2008 led to a sclerotic economy which cannot fix problems because central banks made a rule that incompetent rich people will be allowed to stay incompetent.”
No, no…
“Obviously bailing out the rich in 2008 led to a sclerotic economy which cannot fix problems because central banks made a rule that incompetent rich people will be allowed to stay –> rich<—".
NL
“Obviously most American and British and Canadian politicians are terrified of the Israeli lobby and unwilling to cross it.”
Blaming “Israeli lobby” only exonerates our ‘own’ ethnic ‘brethren’ of responsibility and disguises where the true fault lines lie, and these lines do not lie between ethnicities.
“Obviously our massive “shock therapy” looting of Russia in the 90s would lead to a strong man taking over. (I expected military, turned out to be secret police.)”
— The Russian Communist leadership did it to their own country. We participated and ‘promised’ them not to expand NATO to facilitate their own momentum to dissolve their own country, but we did not do anything to them, and the wealth that their own oligarchs stole exceeds anything we had taken out of the country. If anything, the present conflict stems from the unwillingness of the Russian oligarchs to share with us their ‘profits’. And really we did not make them take their wealth out Russian and get enamored with London. But it is so Russian to worship all European. Russian Czar’s aristocracy adored Paris and everything French…
“Obviously India is trending dangerously authoritarian and is in danger of eventually engaging in ethnic cleansing.” — Seems that some elites there concluded that the Western societies are no different from India, i.e., race = caste, class = caste, and that they can easily ascend the ladders of wealth and power in the West — just look at the CEOs of Alphabet, Microsoft, Twitter, etc, etc and look at the leadership in the UK. They think there is no ‘glass sealing’ for them. Their children are busy in the West rising the ranks. This then feeds into self-confidence and their ‘aggressive’ posture vis-à-vis the poor back home and their membership in the so-called Quad internationally.
someofparts
This is what keeps the obvious from being universally obvious –
“It was not easy … It needed … a sort of athleticism of mind, an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.”
— Orwell, 1984
That is the quote that is the preface in a book I just got, “Disciplined Minds” by Jeff Schmidt, about how the minds of salaried professionals are shaped in our culture.
Mark Pontin
“Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—America looked like this: it had psychopathic capitalists running the country. It had slavery. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the non-white. This is the United States that we know, and it’s not a United States that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the Russians. There are internal processes in the U.S. that account for where we are today.”
While we’re visiting the department of The Past Isn’t Dead, It Isn’t Even Past.
Ché Pasa
As others have been at pains to point out, there are no Good Guys in the mess of Ukraine. Everyone has oligarchically stained fingers, lots of blood on their hands, and some of those doing battle on the ground and in the c-suites and airy palaces are blood relations. This is much closer to the Guns of August scenario than most of us want to acknowledge.
They wouldn’t, would they? Yes they would. Because they’re vile and stupid and have yearned to just try it for generations. It’s been said that the Russian Federation and before them the Soviet Union would never do a First Strike because of what they suffered in WWII — incomparable death and destruction at the hands and guns of the Nazis — and they wouldn’t risk it again in a contest with America. Because America would not be as gentle as the Nazis were.
They’d rather collapse and slouch quietly away than risk the finality of nuclear holocaust.
That seems to be what the shit-stirrers are counting on with this war-not-war. Rattle the nuclear sabers loud and long enough and the Russian bear will go back to its den.
Maybe.
What’s obvious is that the shit-stirrers have believed their own hype for so long that what’s actually happening is beyond their comprehension. This isn’t what they anticipated and planned for.
But then, nothing is any more, is it?
Ian Welsh
What you do with someone like Manchin is get the file together, have an “investigation” announced, then you have a personal conversation with him somewhere that isn’t recorded. If he resists, you do the destruction in stages, so that you always have something in reserve. “It can always be worse.” (Remember Dennis Kucinich’s trip with Obama on AirForce 1 and how he suddenly changed his mind on Obamacare? If he wasn’t squeezed hard during that trip I’d be very surprised.)
This is fairly fundamental. Think LBJ.
Among other things, use FICO provisions: say that raising epipen prices or vast violations of coal laws are conspiracies (which they are) and that the money earned are the result of a criminal conspiracy: seize and freeze it all.
Win or lose, it takes years to clear this stuff.
I doubt Manchin has the balls to resist when squeezed hard by someone with the full power of the Federal executive branch, but if he does, so be it. Still destroy him and his family.
This isn’t a game. On a personal level, he and Sinema have insured Dems will lose the midterms catastrophically, and that Biden will be a lame duck president and probably lose in 2004. In societal terms, millions of people who would have been helped to avoid poverty, illness and even death have been hurt by their games.
If they resist being squeezed, make an example of them.
Does no one know how politics works any more?
Feral Finster
Most, if not all of these things are abundantly obvious to anyone with as much brains as God gave a feral cat.
In addition, all of these things are truths which you cannot say in polite company.
Mark Pontin
Not incidentally, how’s your blood pressure, Ian?
Willy
Here’s an obvious response to obvious disinformation. Hint: the news is full of video evidence which I highly doubt was CGI.
Putin invades a nation so viciously that civilian lives are irrelevant, in order to goad NATO into demonstrating its milquetoast response, thereby proving how evil NATO is.
Yeah, real convincing. A bit like a brother bloodying his sister to get the popular kids to quit calling him a bully, and to keep her on his side.
Seriously, if you’re gonna fight the power, it’s probably best not to ally with another, more evil power. Seems counterproductive to me.
StewartM
Obviously Biden doesn’t really mind Manchin spiking his program, or he would have gone after Manchin’s coal business or his daughter’s Epi-pen crimes.
Hmm, I read your comment above, Ian, but the short-term consequences also have to be considered. Manchin has openly offered to stop caucusing with the Democrats and go over to the Republicans, which would hand the keys to the Senate to the Rs. You may not think it this is important, but that would mean no Biden-appointed judges. Judges are important as recent court rulings mean that the conservative majority is ready to enable our next Victor Orban and toss any notion of precedent or consistent logic out the window to transparently advance their political agenda; they’re scarcely bothering to hide it now.
Also, I doubt you realistically expect to use the FICO law against Mahchin (that’s only for the little people) and moreover even if you did, his donors would pay for his defense. Yes, it may take years for him to clear himself, but–judging from the snail’s pace against Trump, where we have the damning evidence on tape–when you’re moving against someone supported by America’s elite, such proceedings slow to a crawl. Probably they’d drag on until we’d have a R back in the White House and the charges would then be dropped, curtailed, or a pardon would be granted.
(By contrast, it’s been noted that if Trump had been an ordinary city council man, state senator, or governor (Rod Blagojevich?) had been caught on tape essentially confessing to crimes like Trump, they’d already be jailed by now, not running around the country giving rallies. One could only imagine the lighting speed which the just-us system would work if whistleblowers were involved.)
I agree that making threats to someone is critical to success, but don’t make threats if you can’t follow through hurt them. I’m not sure that we can hurt either of these bad actors; they’re not concerned about losing re-election as they’ve been bought. I fear your ‘going after them’ would be the political equivalent of committing suicide due to fear of death. You just give up what little Congressional power you do have a year earlier.
different clue
Obviously the partisans and supporters and committed ideologists of one or another of these things will deny their obviosity and will offer to debate and debate and debate.
I could think of one or two that I would be happy to debate and debate and debate myself. But at some other time on some other thread.
Astrid
Here’s an example of a MSM distributed atrocity – https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/03/disarming-ukraine-day-15-a-curious-hospital-bombing-and-no-fly-zone-pressure.html
The woman was widely reported as having died, except when I googled her name and found other reports stated that she was injured. Yet other pictures show her unhurt with her newborn in a hospital bed. The nondescript injuries that she purported suffered is inconsistent with the bombed out building. I’ve seen pictures of Palestinians after an Israeli attack, there’s a lot of dust and caked blood on everyone, not a couple clean looking people with artistically applied blood.
And here’s more discussion – https://gilbertdoctorow.com/2022/03/15/parallel-worlds-or-parabolic-mirror-images-media-coverage-of-the-russia-ukraine-war/
Russia is winning this war easily, without needing to resort to atrocities. I’m sure they’re ruthless against Banderites and I’m sure that civilian casualties and individual incidences of violence happen, but it makes zero sense to harm civilians.
If they wanted to do so, they could have done American shock and awe from the start to minimize troop casualties. The reports of atrocities makes just as little sense now as reports of Syrians gassing civilians when they were winning against ISIS.
There’s a reasonable debate about whether the Russian invasion is justified or not, moral or not, good decision or bad decision. But projecting all the excesses of your side into other peoples without knowing anything about them and saying they’re definitely the “baddie”. As I’ve said before, Ukrainian propaganda has a 419 feel to it. You either buy into it and continue to dig into it or…me, obvious Putin Xitler fangirl.
Astrid
American exceptionalism at work.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AlanRMacLeod/status/1501981269701373952
Willy
I don’t have cable news but do have internet. I watch news sources ranging from MSNBC to Newsmax, BBC to Sky News, opinion/interview sources ranging from Majority Report to Chris Hedges to Rogan.
Also, as much as I’d love to unplug into an isolation of my own making, I have to get out there and know many people including slavs from every Slavic nation, as well as many eastern Europeans. My Ukrainian and Belorussian acquaintances told me that well before any Putin actions against their nations, that their nations were confused disasters compared to western nations, with the consolation being that Russia was just as bad or even worse.
That noted, not a single one, source or individual, is calling Putin and his invasion anything but a war crime catastrophe being perpetrated on innocent civilians. That’s the overwhelming opinion.
My “side” is whoever’s for a mixed economy with strong reality and science-based checks on any and all concentrations of power, which would include Putin, Trump and Xi for what should be obvious reasons.
If progressives choose to side with Putin, such unpopular opinions will be used against progressives. I didn’t write the rules. Whether you’re into Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Balthasar Gracian or Robert Green, all of them, sage or pop influencer, proclaimed that maintaining wildly unpopular opinions will ruin the prospects for you and your cause.
This is why I think that anybody who sides with Putin, or tries to obfuscate his invasion, is either a paid disinformant or a fool. And that goes double for every time they try to frame me as something I’ve never been.
davidly
Obviously most of this is by design.
different clue
One way of knowing which political analyst-thinkers might be worth one’s time to follow is buy seeing whether their predictions about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine deal turn out to be right or wrong.
Two prediction-offering analysts I somewhat follow are . . . Beau of the Fifth Column and Colonel Lang at Turcopolier Blog. They are both predicting a partial Russian loss in this war for their own different and unrelated sets of reasons. If both of them turn out to be right after everything is over and done with, then either both of them got lucky, or at least one of them is right, or both of them are right. If they both get it right, I am not smart enough to know whether they are lucky or good, so I will keep following both for more than just entertainment value.
Ian Welsh
Whether Russia loses depends on one’s definition of a win.
Alzo
Obviously, controlling a coronavirus that is already ubiquitous is impossible. Obviously it was never a significant threat to humanity in any case. But most crucially obvious; it was only given a brand for its political and its incredible profit potential.
In 10 years it will be an historic example of mass formation psychosis!
different clue
If the RussiaGov decides to settle for Eternal Neutrality and Zero NATO for Ukraine for ever and ever, that could be defined as a win for Russia. ( It would be better for Ukraine as well, whether they ever see it that way or not). If Russia ends up keeping the historically Russian penninsula of Crimea, that would be a bigger win.
If the RussiaGov succeeds to keep Donetsk-Lugansk, and especially succeeds in conquering and keeping all of Greater Donbassia, that would be a total loss for Ukraine, which would certainly be a spite-based psychic victory for Russia. And if the RussiaGov expelled or exterminated every Donbassian of dubious enthusiasm for Russian rule, that would turn the depopulated land of Donbassia into a material gain for Russia even if it became a reputational loss for Russia over the short term ( the next hundred years or so).
If Ukraine ends up keeping a National Existence on most of its territory ( mid Ukraine and West Ukraine) that would be the best Ukraine can hope for, unless the RussiaGov suddenly disintegrates or self-performs a strongman-transplant in the short-term meantime before Ukraine stops resisting. If Ukraine got to keep just enough Black Sea coast to be able to import and export that would be gravy. The RussiaGov may wish to deny them that as punishment for having dared to fight so strong for so long.
In which case, Ukraine would have to export its grain by rail to the ports of Western Europe. Or Southern Europe and then to the Suez Canal. Which I suppose is how grain from the Black Sea ports gets out anyway.
different clue
@Alzo,
I continue to regard the coronavid virus as significantly harmful to people and to the societies ruled by ” make it spread to everyone” governments. I will continue to live my life on that basis.
In the long run, if the ChinaGov can succeed in keeping coronavid to near-zero in the Chinese population, the Chinese population will be the control population in this big experiment of spreading coronavid to every person on purpose, over and over and over again.
If you personally consider coronavid to be personally harmless, as some people do, perhaps you and like-minded people could/should hold “corona parties” whereby you get the virus on purpose from known carriers, so as to become immune to it and demonstrate its non-seriousness to skeptical onlookers.
willy robinson
‘Obviously, having oligopolies control most of the US economy has led to inflation being much more than it would have been otherwise.’
This is the only one I have any quibble with. Low inflation seems to suit the very richest, and they appear to have worked hard at keeping it low
(i’m no expert, I’m just saying this one is not obvious to me. The rest of them are pretty straightforward. Good list)