All posts by Joseph

Political Rants

It’s the assholes vs. the fuckers

NOTE: The Russian invasion of Ukraine began a day after I finished this post. The points are still relevant, in my humble opinion.. jp

In light of some of the Twitter arguments I’ve been getting into, I thought it might be a good idea to return, once again, to the Russia/Ukraine issue. It’s not hard to find people who are more well-informed on this score than I am. I am not an expert. That said, many of the commentators I see on cable television are not experts, either. I see that as a license to bloviate in these dark and disturbing times.

As many of you know, Twitter is no place for a nuanced foreign policy debate, and I’m not certain that blogging is any better suited to the task. I’ll let you be the judge of that. I have blogged on this issue before, most recently just a couple of weeks ago. And so here I go, as the shadow of war falls over all of us once again. Let’s make a few things clear, shall we?

Point one: Putin is not a nice man

When I criticize the United States’ role in bringing about the Ukraine crisis, people on Twitter accuse me of being an apologist for Putin, even a fan of the Russian president. Oldest trick in the book. For the record, Putin is an autocratic creep-ass, willing to put thousands of people at risk or engage in mass murder just to make a point. I’ve never liked him, but neither do I ever conflate him with the country he leads. His somewhat unscrewed speech from a few nights ago just confirms what I’ve always assumed – he’s a craven neo-czarist thug, and he has a constituency that wants just that.

Point two: We wanted an autocratic Russia

Today’s Russia is partly the product of decades of bad policy. Few seem to remember that in 1993, when then-president Boris Yeltsin shelled the Russian parliament because they weren’t doing his will, the nascent Clinton administration was very supportive. This is simply the most gross example of how we favored a dominant executive in Russia from the very start of the post-Soviet era.

It totally makes sense, when you look back on the history of U.S. foreign policy. We like having one dude or a small gaggle of dudes (but really just one) to deal with in a foreign country, rather than some random elected body of representatives. Yeltsin was dictatorial but compliant with U.S. direction, which is why when Russians reflect on the demographic and economic catastrophe that rolled over them in the 1990s, they reserve much of the blame for us.

Point three: Don’t blame socialism

Okay, let’s put this to bed once and for all. Russia was an expansionist imperial power during the Czarist period. To a limited extent, this was true during the communist period as well. Now, in post-communist Russia, they’re trying to build a cordon sanitaire to their west once again. This is a Russia thing, not a commie thing – Russia will always throw its weight around to some extent, because – like us – it thinks highly of itself. Nothing to do with socialism .

Point four: Whose mutual defense obligation?

Those who insist that Ukraine should be invited to join NATO should consider what they’re suggesting. How many nation states should our young people be asked to defend with their lives? Our military men and women are already on the hook for defending Poland, the Baltic States, Montenegro, Romania, Slovenia, for crying out loud. Are we also going to ask them to stand between Ukraine and Russia? What’s next – Quemoy and Matsu? Just because so many of our young people are willing to wear the uniform doesn’t mean we should be eagerly pitchforking them into one hopeless fight after another.

Point five: There is a NATO already

Another common rejoinder from my Twitter friends is that if we appease Putin now, he will roll into Poland, occupy Eastern Europe, and drive to Germany and France. Now, I know it’s cold comfort, but Twitter friends, for god’s sake, Russia is faced with a solid wall of NATO allies to its west, each on a hair-trigger to call in the American military if it even smells like Russian tanks are on their way. Any attempt by Vlad to channel Peter the Great would result in World War III and probably the end of effing everything. So … uh … no worries?

I could go on, but for right now, let’s at least agree to pray for peace and encourage our leaders to find that off-ramp I was talking about a couple of weeks ago. There’s plenty of blame to go around for this debacle, but my hope is that cooler heads will prevail.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Everything but the bathroom sink

2000 Years to Christmas

Damn it, what’s the temperature out there again? Fifty-seven and windy? Mother of pearl. This is an effing roller coaster, man. Tubey was frozen to the ground last night, now he’s sprouting corn flowers. It’s insane!

Oh … hi, friends. I know you probably don’t think of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) as ground zero in the climate crisis that’s underway. In fact, you probably don’t think of the Cheney Hammer Mill at all, right? That’s a shame, because like Xanadu, the mill doesn’t exist unless you believe in it. (Is that how Xanadu works, or am I thinking of Brigadoon? I can’t keep these mythical paradise worlds straight.)

Weather or not

Got a news flash for you: this place ain’t insulated. The fact is, it barely even has window glass. That’s not our fault, people. Those nasty kids from up the street keep chucking rocks through our windows. Purely coincidentally, it tends to happen when we’re rehearsing. Whatever the cause may be, the weather blows into this place like a landlord on the first of the month.

Of course, it’s even worse than it sounds. The ne’er do wells in our neighborhood have been climbing in through those broken windows and walking out with our stuff. That’s right – shoplifters! Morning Joe warned me about this, and I didn’t listen because, well, I never listen to that ass clown. Of course, last month they took everything but the kitchen sink. This month, it was everything but the bathroom sink. Rapscallions!

Doing something about this shit

Well, we decided we needed more security around this dump, so we deputized Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and commanded him to patrol the area during the wee hours of the morning. That worked great, until it didn’t, and a few mornings ago I woke up to a blank, discolored wall where the bathroom sink used to hang. THEY FINALLY DID IT.

I was ready to read Marvin the riot act, but it seemed strange that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, had been unusually quiet on his invention’s failure to prevent burglary. When I dropped by his quarters earlier this week, I discovered why – our missing stuff was stacked in pile in Mitch’s laboratory. Apparently HE had been the rapscallion, the ne’er do well. But why?

Making it (not) rain

Well, it turns out that Mitch has been working on some kind of weather control machine, and he needed all that junk to produce fuel for his smoke-belching behemoth. There he was, shoveling plumbing fixtures, old electronics, and broken furniture into the hatch. Kind of hard to criticize a man when he’s working that hard, right? Who needs a bathroom sink, after all.

Incidentally … Mitch is also causing a lot of the bad weather. That and shoplifting. So I apologize in advance. The weather sucks and it’s all his effing fault.

Political Rants

With friends like us, who needs enemies?

Anyone who thinks what we’re doing to Afghanistan is uniquely cruel has not been paying attention over the last few decades. We did something very similar to Vietnam after that endless war ended. We sanctioned the government, denied them aid, blocked others from trading with them, and so on. That lasted decades, and I have no doubt that, given the prevailing political mood, the Afghan strangulation might last years, at least.

What the hell is the point of this policy? We bled rural Afghanistan for twenty years. Every family lost someone to our bombing runs, drone strikes, or night raids. Sniveling hacks like Lindsey Graham seem satisfied that all this killing has accomplished something, but he’s wrong, as usual, unless the point was to make some people a lot of money. As we sit around grousing incoherently about retail terrorism, a million people are on the brink of starvation, and we won’t even let them have their own damn money.

Keeping the creep-asses happy

I don’t imagine that our leaders actually care that much about people in other countries. They often pretend to care one way or the other to please some domestic constituency. For instance, it’s hard to find a politician willing to say something good about Cuba, or Venezuela, or some other official enemy. It’s not because they’re official enemies – on the contrary, they’re official enemies because our politicians don’t want to say anything good about them.

If I were to assume the best about Biden, I would guess that he won’t agree to free up Afghan reserves held in this country because he doesn’t want to be criticized for appearing to support the Taliban. I’m sure he can hear the attack ads in the back of his mind – Biden gave money to the Taliban! He supports terrorists! Not unlikely, though the right wing is going to say that anyway, regardless of what he does. So maybe a million kids need to die so that he can avoid some amount of criticism. That’s the best case.

For reasons of state

What’s the worst case? That they’re cravenly putting people’s lives at risk for some perceived gain. It’s kind of the same thing, except maybe more actively evil. Our leaders are well-practiced at standing by and folding their arms while thousands die. Look at the global COVID pandemic – we could have taken steps to tamp down the virus all around the world, thereby saving maybe hundreds of thousands of lives. But we didn’t because, well, we value free markets and private property over all other things. Even people.

The Lindsey Grahams of the world affect to be afraid that, if we don’t kill them over there, they’ll find some way to kill us over here. From what I’ve heard of the rural experience in Afghanistan over the last twenty years, I would guess that we are now in more danger from angry Afghans than we ever would have been had we decided not to invade. So, either the Senator is an imbecile or maybe he just doesn’t care that we’re making people bitter enough that they’ll want to get back at us one day. (My guess is that, by then, Graham will be long gone.)

Self-licking ice cream bomb

There is, of course, a financial incentive. The Pentagon budget is a tremendous bonanza for defense contractors. Untold fortunes have been made off of these massive, multi trillion-dollar budgets. Because institutions have a tendency to perpetuate themselves, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that our global war on terror is likely to keep rolling and rolling, regardless of success or failure.

The machine is doing exactly what it’s built to do. No, it’s not keeping us safe – that’s not what it’s built for. It is making people rich, though, and so by that standard, our foreign policy is a screaming success.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.