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

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 24, 2024

14 Comments

  1. Z

    Nothing gets our rulers’ statestream media hosts hotter than a foreign leader who is willing to send hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to death on our rulers’ orders.

    What a man! What bravery! And he even has a human side to him! He listens to AC/DC!

    https://twitter.com/elliott_rocks/status/1755352595143557488

    Z

  2. Z

    Really brave too, I’ll mention, for Genocide Joe, the Lead Stiff of Weekend at Biden’s, to stake the remaining five years of blurry-eyed life he might have left on this planet on “not backing down” to Putin … and, hence, being fully revealed as the corrupt, joke of a president that he is … while also, of course, casually tossing all life on this planet into the poker pot in his ego-based and face-saving gambit.

    A reason why proxy wars can be more dangerous than direct wars: the U.S. military, which has some responsibility to the soldiers they are sending in danger’s way and hence might have a bit more humanistic … and reality-based … take on war, don’t have as much influence on calling for a direct halt on the madness of these escalations.

    There’s no alliance amongst the sane of the U.S. military leaders that can stop Ukraine from their escalations because the State Department and the CIA deal directly with the War Pimp Zelensky and his Kiev-caine Cowboys. There’s the ones who hand them the money. And the State Department and the CIA aren’t accountable to anyone but our rulers, who have never paid for the consequences of their greed … and therefore are basically fearless … and don’t have the military expertise to properly access the risks of escalation.

    Z

  3. Siskëwahane

    Pa. billionaire Jeffrey Yass’ firm has a large holding in company that merged with Trump’s Truth Social

    Trump, who is facing mountainous legal fees and fines stemming from legal cases against him, stands to net more than $3 billion from the sale.

    “Truth Social, owned by Trump Media, merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp., which has received investments from several other institutions and banks.

    Yass’ Susquehanna had double the next highest shareholder’s investment in DWAC, as of the latest December filing, but the firm holds shares across thousands of companies at any given time. Susquehanna has held the stock since the merger between DWAC and Trump Media was first announced in October 2021…

    Truth Social is at least the second social media company that Susquehanna has invested in. It was an early investor in ByteDance in 2012.”

    https://archive.ph/iZ3PM#selection-1247.0-1251.190

    https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-tiktok-forced-sale/#comment-150538

  4. Curt Kastens

    I read the first paragraph of the RUSI link and i decided that it was uneccessary to read any further. That attritional war supirior to manouver warfare is total balony. When anf army occupies the territory of an enemy far behind its front lines it not only limits the enemies abilities to send supplies to the fron lines it limits the ability of an enemy ot even produce the supplies that are needed for the front lines. Any 5 year old can understand that.
    The only time that an attritional warfare might be supirior is if a nation expects that if it quickly deafeats an enemy on the battlefiled it will still have to face the same soldiers not on the front lines but in an insurgency. But the insurgency problem can be dealt with by either forcing out the population that had lived in the area or through a combination of poliitcal strategies designed to win the native population over to the side of the winners and military tactics designed to destroy the insurgency’s capacity to carry out attacks.
    My guess is that the RUSI peice is all about generating more profits for the MIC.

    In the case of the attempted Russian liberation of the Ukraine it might have been necessary for the Russians to wage war of attrition up to this point because its army was to small to face an insugency or to physically remove those Ukrainians who were ungratefull for being liberated. They may also have not been trying very hard to make major territorial gains out of caution that NAT0 forces will enter the war. But it is also possible that the Russians simply have been unable up to this point of making large terrritorial gains even if they had wanted to do to some kind of weakness in the sacred Russian Army and Air Force. The members of the Russian Army and Air Force really are sacred because they are fighting for a just cause against a set of evil infidel armies.
    But sadly sacred is not the same thing as competent. I am by no means accusing the leadership or the Russian Military of incompetence. I am just saying it can not be ruled out and even if that is the problem we, people of at least some integrity, have to stoically endure the incompetence until the end.

    Ok, so that sounded a bit like WW2 propoganda. But it is far better to write propoganda for Russia, (and Cuba, and China, and Venezuela) that for the collective west.

  5. The “New York Times” deems this load as ‘fit to print’:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/24/us/politics/pandemic-politics-malaise.html
    I must confess to skimming the article. Of course, there is the obligatory claim that COVID is over. Despite the joyous conclusion of the pandemic (inconveniently forestalled by people getting sick), the Gray Lady laments the distrust of authority prevalent in the population. What a wonder!
    I must learn to resist the temptation to express certainty that the “NYT” will not survive the shame of printing rank propaganda, but no, for them, it is what it always was.

  6. Curt Kastens

    There have been 3 really big events that have happened in Russia in the past year that I think have something in common. They are the Progozin Plane crash, the death of Navalny, and the Moscow terrorist attack that occured this past Friday.
    The thing which all three of these events seem to me to have in common is that all three make the FSB look like amatures. Of course the standard wisdom is that Putin killed Progozin and Navalny and some people think that the terrorist attack was a false flag Russian operation. Therefore from that shallow view point there is nothing odd about what has happened in these cases.
    But if the shallow view point is wrong, there is a serious implication. The implication is that the collective western intellegence agencies have the capability to bring down a highly protected plane in Russia, they have (it has) the ability to carry out assasinations in Russian prisons and that it knows more about what is going on in Russia than the Russian Intellegence agencies do.
    I think an impiication of that is either the Russian Intell. agencies are being totally outclassed. Or the Russian Intell agencies had to let these events occur so that they could protect their own intellegence sources in western countries. This is not a pleasent thought as both of these choices suck. We have not seen the shoe on the other foot. Therefore I think the Russians are getting badly beaten in the intellegence wars. Or, maybe I am jist to much of a short term thinker.
    What do you think?

  7. Willy

    We need better organizational monikers.

    For example, women into neo-Nazism (and sexual perversions even) call themselves Moms for Liberty. People who believe that zygotes deserve government intervention care while born children do not, call themselves The Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. And of course, we have MAGA for those who want to turn America into a dystopian third-world clusterfuck.

    It seems that “The Left” and “Progressive” have become uncool monikers. They imply folks wanting to drag others down from our God-given bigoted, perverted, hypocritical and racist freedoms. Suggestions?

  8. bruce wilder

    Cheerleading in the information vacuum makes considered assessment of Russia’s capabilities almost impossible. I won’t link but Timothy Snyder’s recent 7 minute hate on NPR is an example — here’s a guy, a tenured historian at Yale, who spews a series of assertions based on a chosen propaganda narrative, without even acknowledging a need for qualification.

    Putin’s February 2022 “SMO” was conducted with a hodgepodge force, because Russia, by historical standards demilitarized, did not have much else. The Narrative from the Western media had to find a way to make Russia into both a rogue state long bent on military aggression and somehow of limited military capacity: incompetence and corruption were useful explanatory dodges to cover the narrative contradiction.

    The Russian strategy in Ukraine requires a policy of restraint with regard to civilian casualties and destruction of infrastructure, but Ukrainian and western propaganda require a different story, one where the Russians target civilians ruthlessly and relentlessly. Massive attacks on military facilities are acknowledged only tangentially as “3 civilians killed” headlines.

    I see the attritional warfare labeling as driven by the same distorted story-telling, but do not know how to come to an accurate understanding on my own. The battlefields seem to remind many visually of WWI, where enormous destructive munitions rained down repeatedly in the same narrow range of real estate. Paradoxically, the enormous technical advances in weaponry that multiplied the offensive firepower of armies paralyzed those armies in WWI. The tactical organization of armies lagged far as did the technical means of command-and-control. Also, The generals were mostly very bad at their jobs, in large part due to the social and cultural antiquities that elevated them. The analogies to WWI explain some but not much of what is seen in Ukraine. The Russians came into the war without much in the way of drones, but Ukraine managed some impressive innovation. Both sides deployed vast quantities of obsolete Soviet equipment, which is often treated as direct-to-scrap. Improved surveillance of the battlefield and rear areas surely inhibits both sides and both sides have partisans “behind the lines” and in positions of importance in their respective bureaucracies in no doubt impressive numbers. What neither side has an abundance of is young soldiers. The demographic deficit in 18-25 male population in Ukraine is nothing short of extreme.

    Why doesn’t Russia simply cutoff the supply lines of advanced “fortress” placements of their enemies? I don’t know. Is it a grand strategic choice not to define a frontier on the Dneiper and to exhaust Ukrainian forces without a map-coloring conquest? I have no real idea.

  9. different clue

    @Willy,

    How about ” Liberals for Gun Rights” . . . ? Of course they would have to actually BE ” liberals for gun rights”, or they would be found out and exposed as pretenders.

    Or how about Friends of the New Four Freedoms . . . ?
    #1: Freedom of hate speech.
    #2: Freedom of personal guns.
    #3: Freedom of recreational drugs.
    #4: Freedom of driving while black.

    And perhaps such Left and Liberals as exist today in America really do have nothing left to offer. And perhaps no name change will cover that fact.

    Perhaps New Deal Revivalists should call themselves New Deal Revivalists. Or New Deal Reactionaries. Or some such thing.

    We should also remember that there is a huge brainwar industrial complex devoted to making uncool any name that any liberal or liberadical group might create for itself.
    So any such name should inspire the inspirable and not worry about being ” uncooled” to anyone else.

    @Curt Kastens,

    I don’t believe the RussiaGov wants to conquer or liberate all of Ukraine. I think it wants to conquer or liberate or whatever-you-call-it the Russophone regions often called NovoRussia or Donbassia. And it certainly wanted to reconquer its own prior province of Crimea, in part to prevent EUroNATO UFUKUS from ever gaining a base there.

    As to the rest of Ukraine and also EUroNATO UFUKUS itself? They don’t want to conquer or liberate the rest of Ukraine. They just want to destroy it down to the point where it will never ever be a useful forward platform for NATO or a viably revanchist state. They also want to keep draining NATO inventories down to zero and keep the EUro governments impoverishing and de-stabilizing and reverse-developing the EUropean countries. Interrupting the EUroNATO supply lines to the Ukraine front would prevent the Ukraine front from staying active as a sucking black hole for Ukrainian soldiers and EUroNATO military inventories.

    So I expect the RussiaGov to stick to attritionism till Ukraine and NATO have nothing left to be attrited of. A co-worker of mine is married to a Ukrainian. She tells me that he says the unanimous feeling among Ukrainians in Ukraine is that they would rather all die to the last Ukrainian than to resume their subordinate status as part of the Russian Empire. So they will keep feeding themselves into the wood chipper till they change their minds and exterminate their own Ukranazi rulers in order to be able to surrender or until they are indeed mostly or completely all dead. Either choice and either outcome is equally fine with the RussiaGov.

    If that ended up in 30 million dead Ukrainians, would that be a genocide? And if so, who would have committed it? The RussiaGov for happily letting Ukraine feed itself into the wood chipper as long as Ukraine wants to do so? Or the Ukranazis and NATO-UFUKUS for orchestrating and inevitableizing this war to begin with?

  10. Willy

    @dc,
    Yeah, I was being facetious. I was trying to distract from the “it’s okay if you’re an asshole” mentality. Putin and Trump are expected to do whatever it is they want, including being either bullies or crybabies after being wronged, actual or just made up, even in the same situation, just because they’re assholes. But “the left” always has to behave within the rules of integrity because they’re expected to.

  11. Curt Kastens

    This is really funny. Do not believe it at your own pearl. Last might befpre i went to bed I sat in front of the computer for 30 minutes trying to decide whether or not to send out a warning about the collapse of a major bridge in the United States. I decided not to because of the early morming hour that the event would occur would result in few deaths. It was a painful decision because the death of one or two people is a tragedy.
    But giving a warning might prevent the neccessary event from happening.
    Well in the end it did not matter. Because based upon the clues that I had to figure out that were provided to me by ______________ I had deduced that a bridge in San Diego would collapse. Well who knows maybe time will prove that I was right about that too I just got the time wrong.
    I still think that the Russians should take down Somme if not all of the bridges over the Rhein as well.
    Oh oh wait a mucn better idea. though it would not be easy. The bridge between Sweden and Denmark would be a very deserving target as the governments of both nations deserve a really realyl rude shock to wake them up from their Satanic (figuratively speaking) policies.

  12. Curt Kastens

    In my honored opinion (IMHO) the link below is a really well written opinion piece.
    It really squeezes my balls though. The reason why is the author implies that the Russians are not going to go for the throat of NATO. He is explicitly expecting that the Russians will not conquor KIev. And that the west will be able to claim that Russia was defeated which even if the Russians got everything they wanted the claim that they were defeated will be widely believed.
    This troubles me a lot. Becuase it could plausibly be true. And if it is true it means that the area where I live will not be liberated by the Russians.
    Ok for the sake of arguement lets just say that if the Russians arrived and they were the new bosses and they turn out not to be a bit different than the old bosses will I be disappointed? No, because at a minimum the people who have been lying to me for the past 60 years will be out of a job and new fresh liars will take their place. That is important progress in my book. On a dying planet it would be foolish to expect any better than that. 2.11° soon. And it is only going to keep on getting hotter.
    Here is the link:
    https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/france-saves-europe?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=841976&post_id=142984087&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ey6a2&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

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