Tag: Putin

Iran: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Time to pity Donald Trump

Looming over the verbal skirmishes  concerning Iran’s recent attack on the Saudi oil facilities and Mike Pompeo’s calling the attack “an act of war” is the fundamental problem that Donald Trump has created: putting himself between a rock and a hard place. There’s no wriggling out of it without either losing face or getting into a hot war with Iran, which would incur the involvement of Russia and the Chinese—too hot for Donald Trump to handle.

At this point, the end result appears to have been a loss of face—not that Donald Trump would ever admit it. The Treasury Department is to clamp down further on Iran’s financial system—somewhat short of Trump’s bellicose rhetoric. This will wreak further havoc on Iran’s economy, but if the Iranian government asks its people to make big sacrifices to oppose the U.S., they will be ready to starve rather than knuckle under.

We saw a similar Trumpian backpedaling from explosive rhetoric back in July of 2018 as Trump, personally aggrieved by standard Iranian bluster,  thundered back at Hassan Rouhani with threats of annihilation.

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Climate of Fear: Short Term Effectiveness, Long Term Error

[Preface: since I wrote the comments below, Trump has, by executive order, changed the zero-tolerance anti-immigration policy to end—supposedly—the separation of parents from children.  Done not on humanitarian grounds, but because of bad optics.  But the optics won’t improve much any time soon, since the administration has no answer to the question of how to reunite the families already separated—records of who belongs with whom, and where they are, have evidently not been systematically kept.  The prospect exists of some children never being reunited with their parents. There is also no answer as to how they are going to house the thousands of families who are not being separated. Callousness and inattention to human rights have become hallmarks of the Trump government, and now we can add incompetence to that list.]

Fear here, there, and everywhere

Donald Trump has fear working for him on both sides of the Mexican border: he galvanizes his base with fear of immigrant hoodlums, and scares refugees with the prospect of separating children from parents, and sending  asylum-seekers back to the horrors from which they fled

The U.S. “will not be a migrant camp,” asserted the President in defense of the zero-tolerance policy that has resulted in more than 2,400 children, many of them toddlers and some infants, being separated from their parents, beginning in April.  He added he would not let migrants “infest” America.

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Vladimir Putin Sitting Pretty

The gift that keeps on giving: Trump presidency

Vladimir Putin must be rubbing his hands with glee* over any and all of the events precipitated by, or connected with, the United States, since January 2017.

For starters, his man in the White House continues to keep the U.S. domestic political scene in turmoil, with each day’s opening tweets sowing discord and confusion among lawmakers, media, foreign governments, entertainers, and the public.  Trump has done much to thwart the effort by intelligence services and the Department of Justice to investigate and counter Russian influence on our elections, by portraying it as a Deep State plot to undermine his presidency.

For seconds, Trump has refused to implement the strict sanctions on Russia passed by Congress in summer 2017. (Regardless, he continues to claim that “no one has been tougher on Russia than I have.”)

For thirds, Trump continues to dismay foreign allies on four fronts:
(1) pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords;
(2) pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal;
(3) imposing trade sanctions such as tariffs on aluminum and steel imported from Canada, Mexico, and Europe as well as such traditional trade foes as China.
(4) leaving it to other nations to deal with massive refugee crises in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, while the Trump administration strengthens barriers against refugees from anywhere trying to find asylum in the U.S.

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How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy

Breathing an Atmosphere of Lies

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two years, you can probably guess why lying and other forms of spreading untruths fester with new virulence in the minds of the public (that is, that portion of the public who is paying attention to public life).

Communicating untruths, whether deliberate lies or “alternative facts” mistaken for truths through ignorance, is a very broad topic.  There are polite lies, “white lies,” or lying to protect a loved one, all of which are in a different moral universe from evil lies. The latter are the kind that constitute Fake News as well as other kinds of dishonest villainy.

If a lie inflicts harm on somebody’s Bad Guys, then justifying it may depend on whose side you’re on.

Subverting the system with lies is OK if you win.  That’s where we stand in the days of rank partisanship.

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Coping in the Data Ocean

Our Oceanic Data Environment and the Paradox of Choice

What is it like to be a bat? is the  title of a paper by Thomas Nagel in the Philosophical Review in October 1974 that is widely quoted and discussed among philosophers.  But you don’t have to be a philosopher to see that the question goes straight to the mystery of consciousness. Is the consciousness of a bat anything like ours? What about a wolverine, a gecko, a sea urchin?

How does an  animal’s environment shape its consciousness? You’d expect that the consciousness of a wandering albatross, who spends months at a time on the wing without ever touching land, has to be wildly different from that of a mole who spends most of its time underground in the space of half an acre.

For more on wandering albatross flight, see this will blow your mind

It’s all very well to imagine yourself a wandering albatross. It sounds like a glorious life, untethered by our bonds to mere stationary places and to people who do not soar thousands of miles at a stretch.

But, what is it like to be a fish?

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Donald Dishes Out Nuclear Trash Talk

Yes, you’ve all heard it,  thanks to Joe Scarborough, that not only will we have an arms race, but WE the USA will crush the opposition! Hooray! The fun begins January 21st. Courtesy of Donald Trump.

Esquire on 2017 Detonation Device

So, that’s not news.  What’s most newsworthy about this, for those seeking to “read between the lines,” is the spin (not so much spin as cartwheel) from Trump spokesman Sean Spicer:

“He’s going to ensure that other countries get the message that he’s not going to sit back and allow” them to engage in nuclear proliferation, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told NBC. “And what’s going to happen is they will come to their senses, and we will all be just fine.”

Fortune cites “loose cannon.”

We will all be just fine.

Per Sean Spicer, who, if you have actually seen him speak, exudes all the charm of a badger in a leg-hold trap, assures us that his boss is just sending a message. As in, trash talk, “Listen up, MoFos, we gonna whup yo’ MoFo-ing nuclear ass,” which everyone understands is just showmanship to boost ratings, no one to take it that seriously, once “they have come to their senses.”  (Doesn’t this sound like something like Don Corleone might have said?)

For his part, Russian leader Vladimir Putin kept his pragmatic head, pointing out that a nuclear arms race was unaffordable.  Vlad, bless his cold cold heart, was not about to take the bait—and I, for maybe the first time, was grateful for the wisdom of a tyrant with a long memory and a long projection into the future.

 

 

 

37%!?! The Trumputin Effect, Tribalism, and Strongmen

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov found that 37% of Republicans  have a “favorable view” of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (It’s 10% of Democrats also!; I don’t know who these Democrats are and I don’t want to know.)

That’s a “favorable view” of someone who is responsible for the deaths of Syrian civilians in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands. That’s in addition to  thousands of casualties resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, plus the bloody invasion of Georgia in 2008, not to mention cyberwarfare against Baltic states, and, within Russia itself, continuing violent repression of critical investigative media and opposition voices in general.  In other words, a “favorable view” of someone for whom there’s a compelling case to charge as a war criminal several times over.

Oh, and we might mention that he lies about absolutely everything that sheds a bad light on Russia (last I heard he was still denying that Russian troops had entered eastern Ukraine, except to protect Ukrainian rebels. Why does this sound like Saturday Night Live?). 

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