Read this NYT editorial. In particular note the following sentence:
"Just a few hours after President Trump doused expectations of extracting any confession from President Vladimir V. Putin on Russia’s election meddling when they meet on Monday"
I imagine a meeting of the "Hard Ones Club": Stalin, DeGaulle, Churchill, Golda Meir and so on. The NYT Editor in chief is there and he says the above. They start snickering, then giggling, then guffawing, they bend over, put their hands on their knees trying to catch their breath, the tears streaming down their face. Harold MacMillan catches his momentarily and says "but my dear boy, stealing each others secrets and meddling in their affairs is what nations do".
Then the sweet 27 year old naif who 'literally knows nothing' continues:
"his own Justice Department issued a sweeping indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents for hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton presidential campaign." to renewed peals of laughter and "please, please stop, you're killing us boy!".
Stalin wipes the drool from his mouth and says "Imagine that! Indicting your enemies, Rooshvelt!: you should have sued Tojo for all he's worth! FDR shoots back "Yeah and old Adolph would have been a nightmare of a deposition, har, har!".
It is really hard to take seriously anyone who thinks like this. In the real world one expects one's adversaries to do what they can to discover your secrets and discomfit you short of a shooting war. It is the responsibility of the 'adults' to take precautions to ensure that that result is minimized. Something that the DNC, John Podesta, Hillary Clinton and BHO did not do. Adults when confronted with the Russian actions would have never admitted them....running around squealing 'we got an owie from that mean man!". They would have worked on countermeasures and payback.
But there's more to this than simply a childish response to serious nation state contention. The whole "Trump colluded" imbroglio is fundamentally a post modern event. Think about what's going on in our Universities: it has been a long time since there has been any meaningful amount of traditional racism, misogyny or homophobia yet the obsession over such has never been more hysterical. Of course there's lots of racism and female and gay hatred on these campuses but it's done by people who are considered victims so it can't be anything evil. Which is so very post modern. Recall that Foucault and the other postmodern literary theorists asserted (and have been swallowed hook, line and sinker by Academe) that the meaning of texts (words to you and me) is defined by the audience, not the writer/speaker. I used to get so upset about this because it was used to pervert the messages that great authors had sent us but I wasn't thinking nearly big enough.
You see the Foucaultian revolution in language and thought means that crimes are only crimes if I - meaning the established power base - conclude they are. It's the foundation of the Critical Legal Theory school of law so heralded by Harvard. Harvard said: isn't it outrageous that the powerful define what is evil and illegal and with crocodile tears their administration and the minions of the State said "oh yes, so sad".
Which is how you can get Halloween costumes mocking hillbillies while banning sombreros. You see one is a funny critique and the other a moral crime.
And I think it is this Foucaultian revolution or more accurately inversion that has bubbled up into the ranks of the Times and the elite of your Party. The inversion of words and deeds. In a world where there is little or no physical conflict among the privileged, words become more real than deeds. The fact that BHO and the Dems negligently allowed the hacking is less significant than the words that Trump uses to denounce what after all is the nation state norm.
I'm sure you've seen the black clad Antifa protesters doing their thing. What strikes me about them is how many women are in their ranks. Because in any real violent confrontation blows that would level a man will maim or even kill a woman. Yet they pretend that there is no difference. I was at a French Caribbean bar called "Under the Volcano" for Bastille day. I was with - among others - a young Nigerian Data Scientist from Church, she was describing to me how she was taking Karate and how her Sensei was emphasizing that violence was to be used as a 'last resort'.
I'm afraid I'd had a couple drinks so I was a little blunt. I said: "But you're a woman, your upbringing and biology lead you to always treat violence as a last resort, indeed your normal response to violence should be to flee it. Your challenge isn't restraining your violent impulses or some lack of technique, it's the difficulty (absent having a child to protect) you have in generating a violent response when that's what's needed. You have no experience with violent confrontation. By contrast I grew up in a world where violent confrontation between boys was common: I haven't fought since I hit my mid teens but I know what I would do and know that I can do it if I were put in a situation needing it. Frankly no matter how much training you have in Karate, my real experience, social and biological predisposition and superior muscle mass and density would almost guarantee me a first punch victory."
Yet she is constantly told that she doesn't need to even consider men as she goes about her life, that she can go where she likes, dressed as she likes and if any man takes advantage of that it's wholly his fault. There is a great old Bachrach piece called 'Wives and Lovers" it's a man giving advice to a young wife that she needs to try to keep the attentions of her Husband because 'men will be men'. We used to have an entire infrastructure to restrain 'men being men' it was imperfect and in some ways oppressive to women but it recognized the fundamental biological reality. Today we've swept all of that away and in it's place we have college seminars to fight "Toxic Masculinity" as if biology can be rectified by lecture.
But that's what so much of what passes for social discourse has become. It's cultural Marxism. Recall traditional Marxism: it attempted to reorder economic relations to fix socialist theory resulting in immense chaos, waste and poverty, not to mention mass murder. So we've jettisoned it. In its place we have cultural Marxism which has its own religious set of beliefs such as Men and Women are equal unless in our Postmodernism it benefits women to be different.
I interpret this Cultural Marxist academic world to be a place where the real risks and contention in biological and geopolitical world are superseded by the local battle for political power. And as I've feared, the triviality of academic political discourse has seeped into our 'End of History' geopolitics. The piece you sent me was a Cultural Marxist masterpiece: the enemy in the Editors of the NYT's mind is not and never has been Putin or Russia - for if it was they would have vigorously criticized BHO's supine response (indeed his open mic grovelling to Putin's lackey) to Russian aggression. But they did not - they've spent 18 months screaming "we've got an owie! and it's that bad man Trump's fault".
Nor did they hold BHO and co accountable for allowing the 'hacking'****. Their goal isn't protecting the nation from Putin, it's deposing the current occupant of the Eagle throne. This assumption that there is no world out there worth worrying about and that all the real action is in Washington is very late Roman Empire. Because of course it was all of the chaos and damage from battle after battle for control of the center that progressively destroyed the Empire's ability to fight off mass incursions into its domains. Eventually the incursions became migrations and were so great that the migrant groups became active participants in the dynastic contention. At that point, stripped of it's economic and military dominance and having no cultural coherence, the Western Empire fell.
History doesn't repeat itself but today's news sounds a whole lot like that Roman Funeral Orchestra tuning up.
May God have mercy on the United States of America.
And that's what I think about that.
****And How in Hell can the FBI know there was Russian hacking of
mail servers that it never examined? Because the Dems never let the Feds have them to examine in first place. The Feds never charged anyone with obstructing justice for destroying Hillary's campaign or the DNC's servers. Destroyed them while loudly claiming that partisan crimes had been committed on them.
The Federal state's lifeblood is credibility. It is bleeding out rapidly. Perhaps this is Jeff Sessions and Robert Mueller's goal: pretend to be saving the beast while surreptitiously opening more veins.
