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Tuesday, March 04, 2014

You Say "Feckless," I Say "Efficacious"

Let's call the war thing off.

2 comments:

Esebian said...

The hawks are cheerfully shrieking indeed, but at least some of them make good points.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/140228/what-putin-really-wants-crimea

Shouldn't the West finally get its act together and nip an emergent Ruso-Eurasian power bloc in the bud before Putin's despotism claims another mountain of skulls or a dozen?

Dale Carrico said...

Depends on what the "nipping" consists of. Too many variations on the "nipping" available amount to comparative skull piles. I think Russia should be marginalized economically and diplomatically for behaving badly -- a move that would be rendered more forceful the less badly we behave ourselves -- and made to see how better behavior is better for everybody. I'm getting nervous about the foregrounding of Putin biography in the building narratives about what is afoot -- I don't doubt that the overabundant majority of political leaders/celebrities are narcissistic to sociopathic (including our own, including our better ones), and hence rather monstrous, but I don't think history is ever properly grasped in terms of a pageant of monsters with superpowers. Russia is a sprawling corrupt scarcely functional power dependent on ties with the notional representative democracies and seething with stakeholders the dynamics among which are the motor of its politics incomparably more that "what Putin wants." Putin seems to me like the KGB thug he was trained as. America has no legitimate interest to enter into anything like another ruinously costly immoral conflict with a dysfunctional nuclear power because our own hawk thugs have comic book narratives to peddle to make us think their dicks are big. The West will finally get its act together when we/they marshal the will to make corporations pay for their climate crimes and then invest in the renewable infrastructure to afford a sustainable Western civilization.