|
Putin wants to stop while he's ahead, that’s what his supposed “signaling” is all about. It means he doesn’t anticipate winning, at least not any time soon. No compromise, no returning territories or anything. It's simply calculated to make Ukraine look like the bad guys when we say “go to hell.” Too bad the western media is often playing up to him.
Meanwhile, too many world leaders are cowards driven by self-interest, not even their country’s interests.
Ukraine is not being enabled to finish russia off or chase it away permanently. What’s going to happen going forward is hard to imagine right now, but Putin’s “signaling” suggests that he’s not doing any better and is worried about Ukraine taking more territory back and of course, if Ukraine rejects russia’s proposal, it will be painted as the “bad guy who refuses to sue for peace”...
The Hamas attack on Israel was aided and abetted by Putin, not too surprisingly. It started on his birthday, What a coincidence for a guy whose signature MO for murdering is “special dates.” Not to mention that Hamas leaders visited Moscow several times. The very fact that western media has not pointed out the coincidence of the date means that they are truly incompetent, criminally ignorant, delusional or colluding.
Like Trump saying he’ll be dictator only on Day One. Yeah, he just has to declare himself king or ruler for life on Day 1. What don’t people get about that? There are enough folks in the US who like this idea and they are preparing for his first day. All he needs is a couple of EOs formulated just right and it’s game over. “You’ll never have to vote again.” The resentment-entitlement class, his voter base, doesn’t understand, and the rich/powerful, his donor base, doesn’t care. Both groups figure Trump will be good for them. Neither has ever understood that Trump is only about Trump and nothing else. Period. Except maybe Ivanka. Admittedly rumors have circulated that the billionaires’ plan is to declare him mentally incompetent and replace him with JD Vance, Peter Thiel’s little protegee who pretends to be a hillbilly.
Bannon is a fascist and we all know that. He’s a very sick puppy and Trump’s left hand. Trump is the slick guy who got everything (but kept losing it); Bannon is the loser who never got what he wanted and still can’t get over it.
Humanity has a knack for taking itself to the edge, like it did in the 1930s, and then swinging the other way, as it did when the Iron Curtain came down. I guess it’s our task to work through these crazy swings somehow and figure out which end is up.
The wealthy always have enornous power, but until one of them takes over, they can and will be taken out when necessary by the ones who have “the people” and the policce on their side. That’s how Putin got where he is: took out the richest man in russia, Khodorkovsky, locked him up for 10 years, and divvied up all his corporate assets while making himself one of the richest people on the planet. And he occasionally poisons, shoots or tosses some rich russian out a window just to remind everyone who’s the boss. Trump will do exactly the same, albeit metaphorically at first, unless his base turns on him before Day One. Then he’d better have a serious bunker somewhere.
The thing is, the resentful class tends to be ignored by all kinds of governments because they aren’t poor enough to qualify for public welfare but tend to have steady jobs. Since they get taxed at source, nobody much worries about losing their contributions. Meanwhile, they often make a decent wage in the trades, SMEs, and manufacturing (such as exists) but most have no post-secondary education. Mainly they aren’t good at critical thinking. For example, they never figured out that if you want everything super cheap, of course Walmart is going to start buying everything in a cheap-labor country (China) and you’re going to lose all those decent-paying manufacturing jobs. Thinking a little more deeply, they would understand that when everything starts being made in that same cheaper country, your country is going to have serious economic disparities, theft of copyrights, and myriad domestic and geopolitical problems all around. Too many of these folks also hanker after a strong hand (Big Daddy instead of Big Government), and cling to a past that actually never was, whether it’s about religion, history, patriotism, self-perception as a race, or whatever.
What the short-term solution is is anybody’s guess (certainly not rational persuasion), but the long-term one has to start with basic public education that includes pragmatic and thinking skills, not just the three Rs. People need to understand money and nutrition, bringing up children and conflict resolution, how to instill values, critical thinking... and so on. When our chidren grow up understanding how things work and when enough is really enough, the Trumps and Putins of this world won’t stand a chance.
|
