Published at 20:42 on 25 July 2023
First, the assigned reading:
The extra content is a little discussion.
First, will this foot dragging result in any action being too little, too late? It might. Had the lawbreaking by the most powerful been treated more seriously sooner, Trump might already be seriously damaged to the point that the GOP would finally throw him under a bus. (His base of cult followers would never do so, but the party leadership might, if they realize that the sooner they do so, the sooner they can move on from a candidate who is doomed to lose. They don’t care about democracy, but they do care about remaining politically viable.)
Second, it really all goes to show what a bunch of pure unadulterated bullshit the “they are picking on Trump” line of the Right continues to be. Trump has gotten nothing but free rides and special treatment from the entire system, basically since the very first day of his life as the heir of a multimillionaire. If Trump wasn’t getting special treatment, he would already be in prison.
Published at 06:56 on 12 July 2023
Too bad. As mentioned earlier, Ukraine does not belong in NATO. Not yet at least. Moreover, the process of getting to where Ukraine’s membership in NATO makes sense is likely to be long and complex enough that any sort of strict timeline is foolish to promise.
Biden was wrong to give Ukraine cluster bombs but he is dead right when it comes to NATO membership for Ukraine.
Ukraine is not getting an express ticket to NATO membership and Zelensky can like it or lump it. (Who else is he going to get to shovel mass quantities of military aid at his country in its time of need? Beggars can’t be choosers.)
Published at 21:05 on 11 July 2023
Now it has come out that Putin has actually met personally with Prigozhin in the wake of the Wagner mutiny. This just screams weakness. A strong authoritarian would have had the leader of a mutiny against him disappeared within a matter of days.
To reiterate: I can’t see Putin lasting much longer than a year.
Published at 19:07 on 6 July 2023
Cluster bombs? NATO membership (not eventually, right away)? It seems like no bad idea is bad enough not to get serious consideration these days.
Cluster bombs first: the problem with cluster bombs is that the bomblets in them don’t all explode. Most of them do, but not all of them. The remaining unexploded ones lie in wait for some unfortunate individual, often a civilian, sometimes a child. Then, tragedy. They are as bad as land mines (which are banned by international treaty for a reason).
Fast-tracked NATO membership: no, no, no.
First and most important, Ukraine is actively fighting Russia. Membership while that state of affairs exists violates the unwritten rule that two superpowers don’t directly fight each other. (The NATO treaty requires an attack against one nation to be interpreted as an attack against all. This means that the next bullet fired by a Russian soldier brings the USA into a direct war against Russia.) The argument being proffered for this is that since there hasn’t been a nuclear exchange with Russia yet, what the hey, it’s worth a roll of the dice, let’s push our luck and go for broke. This is so reckless that it frankly boggles the imagination.
Second, Ukraine is not a functioning, first-world democracy. Yes, Ukraine is definitely better at the whole democracy and civil rights thing than Russia has been in recent decades, no disagreement there. But it’s still best understood as a democratizing country, not a democratized one. Ukraine still has huge problems with corruption. There are right now headaches at times caused by the likes of Turkey, Poland, and Hungary voting contrary to Western norms. Why compound them by giving another less-than-fully-compatible nation an express ticket to full membership?
Look, I get it. Putin is a piece of fascist, imperialist shit who started this war. Nothing wrong with helping Ukraine defend itself against Putin’s aggression. But please, be prudent about it. The above two ideas are disasters.
Published at 18:07 on 26 June 2023
Putin made an unscheduled speech today in which yet again he thanked Wagner for standing down and not going into Moscow. Total weak guy stuff (a strong leader would have promised punishment and retribution).
That one year time frame I gave a few posts ago was my upper bound for how much longer Putin can last in office. His actual remaining time in office might be quite a bit less.
Remember, revolutions in Russia seldom happen in one fell swoop. In 1917, the February Revolution preceded the October Revolution. The attempted coup against Gorbachev in 1991 was followed some months later by the breakup of the USSR, and that was followed in 1993 by Yeltsin’s coup against parliament. The Wagner mutiny is probably just the beginning.
Published at 16:23 on 25 June 2023
The putsch helps Ukraine. A lot.
Russian soldiers occupying Ukraine now know that their leader is weak and vulnerable. They know that prominent, influential people on the Russian side are saying that the whole pretext for the war was a pack of lies: Ukraine was of no threat to Russia and did not need to be de-Nazified.
Ask yourself: Would you feel motivated to fight for a weak and vulnerable leader in a war based on a pack of lies?
As such, expect low morale, desertions, surrenders, mutinies, etc. to really ramp up on the Russian side.
Moreover, Putin now is fighting two wars. One in Ukraine where he had already bitten off way, way more than he could chew. And now another one at home, trying to cling to power. He is now vastly more overextended than he was before.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure any of this out. You can be sure the Ukrainians already have. They were already beginning an offensive to retake territory. Expect the offensive to get ramped up: when the enemy is weak, you hit him harder.
Published at 20:11 on 24 June 2023
It looks like Putin has survived it… for now.
And that latter phrase is crucial. Before yesterday, Putin’s power was unquestioned. Nobody dared cross him. Not if they wanted to keep on living, that is.
Now, somebody has crossed him… and Putin was compelled to cut a deal to resolve the situation. Putin is no longer the undisputed master of events in Russia. He has been shown to be weak, shown to be vulnerable.
As such, I would be surprised if Putin lasts much longer than another year.
Published at 07:21 on 20 June 2023
That is my question: Was the current right-wing Hindu nationalist (read Hindu supremacist) government in India in any way involved in this and other similar crimes in Canada? I am not saying they definitively were, mind you, just that they might have been (such things are entirely in character for such a regime), and the possibility needs to be seriously investigated.
Published at 22:52 on 15 June 2023
I worried earlier about the threat of petulant centrists helping elect Trump in 2024. Now, this is still a worry (No Labels is still around, after all), but it seems that many other centrists are being realistic about things and appreciate how truly dangerous No Labels really is. Take the canonical centrist Democrat group Third Way, for example. Fully three of the four articles currently featured above the fold on their main page are about the dangers of No Labels.
Which, to reiterate, is definitely good news, but then again No Labels is still around, which is not-so-good news.
Published at 20:17 on 8 June 2023
Time to reiterate a few points I made earlier in the wake of the New York indictment:
- This is still not one of the two most serious things Trump did, crimes that strike at the heart of political democracy, and which therefore are the most critical things to indict Trump over. Yes, mishandling so many classified documents (willingly and deliberately, and then trying to cover it up) is more serious than trying to cover up some hush money payments to a porn star. But it is still not as serious as attempting to tamper with vote counting in Georgia or inciting a fascist putsch at the Capitol, not by a long shot.
- The pending indictment breaks another precedent. An ex-president will soon be indicted over Federal charges. This proves that the Department of Justice is not pulling levers behind the scenes to protect Trump. Well, not quite: I am sure they are still pulling levers behind the scenes, but not enough to completely protect Trump.
- They would, in other words, have indicted anyone other than an ex-president far sooner, over far less convincing evidence.
- Moreover, the broken precedents makes it more likely that another indictment over what happened on 6 January 2021 will come eventually.
What this all means is that when it comes to a trial, they are highly likely to convict, because they have already done Trump the favor of being double super sure that the case against him is ironclad.
And then what? Most likely, house arrest. Sorry, Nice Liberals: the system is not very likely to lock up someone that powerful in a normal prison. Plus, house arrest neatly solves the problem of Secret Service protection, to which all ex-presidents are entitled under the law. It will probably become part of their mission to supervise the conditions of his house arrest, perhaps in conjunction with Federal marshals.
