Liberal Insanity: If You Want to Stay Alive --- Smarten the Fuck Up!!!!

 It's really getting hard to take.  The hysteria, the hypocrisy, the ridiculous chest-thumping war-mongering.  Now, don't get me wrong; I've always said that I find liberals to be intelligent people who I can tend to get along with up to a point.  But right now we're past one of those points.  And these people are losing their fucking minds.

Rule number one for a sane person with integrity: If you do not hate all the US presidents back to Reagan (at least) as much as you hate Vladimir Putin, then you are a brainwashed fuck-faced hypocrite.  If Putin has blood on his hands then those presidents have blood up to their elbows, if not their shoulders.

This is just a fact.  

God damn it.

One sign of liberal derangement is the continued admiration of the moron, racist, elitist, imperialist, untalented hack Thomas Friedman. Here's the idiot spewing drivel about Putin's invasion of the Ukraine:

Our world is not going to be the same again because this war has no historical parallel. It is a raw, 18th-century-style land grab by a superpower — but in a 21st-century globalized world. ... Yes, the Russian attempt to seize Ukraine is a throwback to earlier centuries — before the democracy revolutions in America and France — when a European monarch or Russian czar could simply decide that he wanted more territory, that the time was ripe to grab it, and so he did. And everyone in the region knew he would devour as much as he could and there was no global community to stop him.

[ Now (because there are so many goddamned brainwashed fools out there) let me preface the rest of this post (and, what the hell, ANY OTHER POST that I write wherein I shall speak about Vladimir Putin using facts and arguments based on evidence and not delusion and bloodlust) by saying that I do not want to loving lick Vladimir Putin from his anus, up his taint, over his balls, and then begin lovingly sucking on his shaft and the head of his cock before going back down again and repeating this over and over with greater intensity until he ejaculates and then we lovingly cuddle and smoke cigarettes.  He is an authoritarian social arch-conservative/reactionary, who does not run his own country very well, and who has abused and killed people.  That having been said, in a choice between Putin, and any US government that has existed during his many years in power, ... or with the Israelis, or the Colombians, or the Egyptians, or any other dictatorship or semi-dictatorship, ... there is literally NOTHING to choose from. Certainly nothing to risk nuclear war over. ] 

Back to Friedman ...

Jesus-fucking-Christ! There's so much stupid shit in those few sentences.  After the "democracy revolutions in America and France" the French went on to invade and annex several countries and establish puppet states in others.  And the United States of America conquered and subjugated the peoples living in what is now their own western states.  Then they took over Hawaii and the Philippines.

And the only big difference between US imperialism and old-style European imperialism is that the US-Americans have learned that it's far more efficient to allow a place to retain nominal independence and rule them through a comprador class who turn over their countries' resources in return for a cut of the swag that is far less costly than an actual military occupation.

But all of that is beside the point that Vladimir Putin does not want to annex the Ukraine.  I say that with confidence for the same reason I always say that Putin's foreign policy is far more modest than his hysterical detractors present it as; this being that Putin knows he cannot afford extended military campaigns and occupations.

So let's dispense with the groundless assertion that Putin seriously wants to CONQUER the Ukraine and forcibly make it a part of Russia again.  Friedman continues ...

In acting this way today, though, Putin is not only aiming to unilaterally rewrite the rules of the international system that have been in place since World War II — that no nation can just devour the nation next door — he is also out to alter that balance of power that he feels was imposed on Russia after the Cold War.

Friedman then begins babbling about "World War Wired."  This apparently means that war info and coverage is now taking place in a world connected by high-speed internet where anyone with a cellphone can upload video footage of what's happening to everyone else with an internet connection.  Big fucking deal.  I pretty much stopped reading at Friedman's hypocritical nonsense of Putin "unilaterally rewrit[ing] the rules of the international system."  Doesn't Friedman remember George Bush Sr.'s description of the "New World Order" with the fall of the Soviet Union and the US-led coalition against Iraq (for its invasion of Kuwait)?  That new order was "What we say goes!"

The United States routinely violates international law. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal. Bush Sr.'s invasion of Panama was illegal.  It's sanctions against Venezuela are illegal.  And I'm pretty sure that arming and training Jihaadist mercenaries to topple the government of a sovereign state (such as Syria) is illegal. [I can't remember where, during the past couple of weeks, that I read someone who pointed out that the USA no longer says "international law" but instead substitutes that with saying "rules-based international order" because the USA has so frequently violated international law that even they're embarrassed by the term.]

As usual, with an arrogant buffoon like Thomas Friedman, it's difficult to know if he's deliberately, cynically lying, or if he stupidly believes the tripe that he's writing.  It's possible that it's a combination.  Friedman knows that the "Big Lie" is a useful tool of propaganda.  But he lives in a bubble of elitist psychopaths who lie all the fucking time and in such an environment one could see how an individual's grasp on reality could become weak.

Next up on our cavalcade of braying jackasses calling for a nuclear holocaust is Canadian columnist Glen Pearson.  Pearson argues that the constant news and images of dying Ukrainian children from Putin's criminal invasion will so pierce the hearts of the peoples of the Western democracies that eventually we will have to consider risking nuclear war to make it stop.

Women and children are increasingly falling victim to this conflict.  Ukrainian men and even boys use whatever weapons they can find, and their casualty rate will grow as the weeks, months, and years ensue.  In a war of attrition like this, a decision will have to be made: allow Putin to continue the civilian carnage or risk the nuclear option by protecting civilians caught in the mayhem.

...

Many kids will lose their fathers, grandfathers, and sometimes their mothers forever.  Whenever this kind of conflict rears its ugly head, parents seek to get their children to someplace safe, just as the English did in World War Two.  We aren’t even two weeks into the conflict, and Ukrainian children are now traumatized, surrounded by mortality, and increasingly facing a future without a father, a mother, or both.

As this conflict wears on and Russia inevitably gains the upper hand, images of the carnage will play much more on the western mind than they do at present.  When enough children perish, pressure will mount for someone to do something, likely starting with creating open skies.  Critics will continually point out that doing so risks the use of nuclear weapons, and they won’t be wrong.

I rather think that the Biden administration's preference is to continue to allow those children to die because their goal is to weaken and debilitate Putin's Russia in a long, drawn-out guerrilla conflict, and if the Ukraine is devastated the way Afghanistan was, ... well, so what.  Of course, as I said last post, Biden and his SoS Blinken are both idiots, and things could spin out of control.  But if it does, and we do have a nuclear war, it won't have much to do with the concerns of ordinary people, however conveniently brainwashed they are.

If you don't want ordinary people stirred-up by images of dying civilians, a time-tested way to avoid that problem is to not report on it.  Suppress the traumatic news about people suffering and dying the same way the corporate press suppresses the suffering and dying in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Colombia, Honduras, etc., etc., ... and problem solved! (Yes I'm being cynical and sarcastic.)  And, anyway, as I said, ordinary people's feelings don't matter.  Unless their agreement with the official narrative serves some purpose for the ruling class, their emotions matter as little as their practical demands.  

It certainly isn't the case that Biden (or anybody else at the top of the USA's political culture) gives a fuck about human suffering.  Right now Biden is imposing collective punishment on the people of Afghanistan by starving them all to death.  He cynically lied about ending support for Saudi Arabia's genocidal campaign against Yemen where millions have been suffering for years as food imports to the poorest nation in the Middle East have been reduced to a trickle by the bombing of ports and infrastructure.  The USA has been preventing Syrian reconstruction after the defeat of their Jihaadist mercenary insurrection.  It has done nothing to repair the devastation that NATO's air campaign did to Libya, or to restore order to the country which has fallen into chaos as the various Jihaadist nutbar factions that the US employed to bring down Qaddafi turned against each other.  No. Biden doesn't care about the suffering in the Ukraine.  The Ukraine is a pawn on a chessboard and the human beings within it count for nothing except as propaganda tools. 

Next up, sadly, is a bizarre editorial from the usually sensible Michael Harris. 

Ukraine’s pop-star president, the guy in the T-shirt, says if Ukraine goes down, it’s not just the end of one country. It is the end of the world. In other words, if Ukraine dies, ask not for whom the bell tolls. You know the rest.

It is true that war leaders deal in hyperbole, but Volodymyr Zelensky has a point. As he said, Ukraine is the border between the civilized world, and what used to be known as the evil empire; between democracy and brutal dictatorship.

Vladimir Putin, the villain of this piece and more than a few others, is proving to be a one-man geopolitical pandemic. Despite all the death and destruction Putin has already caused, French President Emmanuel Macron warns that the “worst” is yet to come in this unprovoked and savage war against a sovereign, democratic state.

Ah yes! The Ukraine sits on the border between civilization and savagery.  How romantic! How historical! How convenient.  How stupid.  I remember being just as contemptuous of Jon Stewart talking about the difference between the USA and its allies and Muslim fundamentalist extremists as "Team Civilization" vs the savage "Other":

Did you hear that?

"Stark reminder, that for the most part, the legislators and journalists and institutions that we jab and ridicule are not, in any way, the enemy. For however frustrated or outraged the back and forth can become, it's still back and forth, a conversation  between those on, let's call it 'Team Civilization.'"

I'm sorry, but "for the most part" you mock people like george w. bush, dick cheney, donald rumsfeld, condoleeza rice, barack obama (sort of), john mccain, mitch mcconnell.

THAT is your "Team Civilization"? Thieving, torturing, mass-murdering scum-bags???

It's true, that "Team Civilization" doesn't go into newsrooms in Paris, London, New York City, and shoot people in cold blood. But let's be fair here. What makes it more tragic for 12 Western cartoonists to have been killed for their views, than for 12 Pashtun-speaking citizens of Pakistan to be killed by a predator drone while attending a funeral of another innocent person who was killed by another predator drone? Or 12 Afghan villagers, blasted to bits by a NATO air-strike against insurgents taking shelter among them? Or 12 Iraqis, shot by US marines on a rampage because one of their own was killed by an IED? Or 12 Syrians killed by being in the crossfire of the civil war between the Baathist dictatorship and the fundamentalist, fanatic rebels? Or 12 Palestinians, blasted to pieces from a bomb dropped by an Israeli war plane?

What reasons did those other people die for? Is it better to die for US imperialism? Or Israeli expansionism? Are those deaths less tragic, and more "civilized" because the final source of them was in Washington D.C. or Tel Aviv?

"Team Civilization" has a lot of blood on its hands, doesn't it?

It's the same with Harris's nitwit depiction of the West being the defender of righteousness and decency and democracy.  This is beyond ridiculous.  The USA subjects all of Latin America to corrupt, mafioso-type governments and funds and trains the DEATH SQUADS that are needed to keep the populations of these countries down whenever the poverty and misery of neo-liberal imperialism becomes too much to take.  And any countries that manage to defeat these DEATH SQUAD governments, whether it's Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Venezuela, or Chile, or Bolivia, or Ecuador, gets subjected to terrorist insurgencies.  And if these independent, leftist governments respond to these terrorists the way the US government would when faced with the same thing, the USA employs bullshit concerns for "human rights" to impose brutal, murderous sanctions on them.  (They employ these bullshit concerns for "human rights" and "free elections" regardless.)

It's difficult to really appreciate the enormity of the stupidity in describing the US-led "international community" as the defenders of justice when the US continues to rampage across the Middle East, invading countries, employing torture, arming and funding terrorist insurgencies, and leaving entire nations in ruins.

And who gives a shit what Emmanual Macron says? The man is a servant of the banksters with a deplorable human rights record himself.  He's just a servile poodle to the US-dominated Borg.  Anyway, Harris continues:

So far, there is no sign that severe sanctions have done anything but make Putin double down on his outrageous invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces continue to inexorably close in on the country’s key cities, including Kyiv, in what has been called by U.S. intelligent analysts, the “slow annihilation” of Ukraine’s military assets. Despite Putin’s denials, civilian targets are also being ravaged by intense shelling. 

So if the goal of the sanctions, the shaming, and the isolation of Putin and his band of thugs and oligarchs was to stop the invasion, it hasn’t worked, at least not yet. 

So what do you suggest Michael?  What, beyond sanctions, should "The West" do to defeat Evil and restore Justice?

And even if, over time, the sanctions work, what if the net result is an isolated Putin driven into the arms of China? What if China becomes the buyer of last resort for Russian wheat and energy? What if the two countries conspire to set up a course of their own, buying and selling securities and commodities in a non-dollar currency? If your neighbourhood is Asia, how tempting would it be to work with Peking rather than New York, even if the deals weren’t denominated in U.S. dollars?

Here, Harris is actually on to something.  The USA's ruling class's delusional attempt to hold onto sole superpower status despite their own determination to disembowel themselves.  THEY are the ones who shifted manufacturing to China.  THEY are the ones impoverishing the majority of their fellow citizens by taking away their jobs, their social programs, their public infrastructure.  THEY are the ones short-sightedly pursuing the financialization of the economy and engaging in reckless, illegal fraud requiring one public bail-out after another.  Other countries, wealthy people from other countries, are coming to the conclusion that not only is the US dollar artificially propped-up, but that the US and the UK are thieves.  Saudi Arabia prices its oil in US dollars and this is vital to the ability of the dollar to remain the world's reserve currency.  But Saudi Arabia's Clown Prince Bone-Saw is now talking about accepting the Chinese Yuan.  (He is petulant because of Biden's [insincere] criticisms of his genocide in Yemen as well as Biden's carrying out the Trump-initiated withdrawl from Afghanistan.)  Again, it's entirely possible, given their limited mental abilities, their delusion and hubris, that Biden, Blinken, et.al., really haven't thought this through. Despite what you would read in the corporate press, it is not only Russia that is going to be hurt by these sanctions.  And, despite what you read in that corporate press, it's entirely possible that Russia and China (with all their resources) could successfully build a Eurasian (mostly Asian) separate trading bloc against the US-led trading bloc.  It is possible (but given Russia's corruption and lack of democracy it is a slim possibility) that Russia (after a period of intense pain) could emerge from this stronger, rather than weaker.

But with all that having been said, ... I just gotta say that I never would have believed it if I hadn't experienced it all in recent weeks, ... how so many people, ... even those who follow the news and the analyses and therefore consider themselves informed, ... have bought the US-Amerian propaganda narrative hook, line and sinker.  How even after the abominations of the invasion of Afghanistan and its failed occupation, and the illegal invasion of Iraq and its destruction into a balkanized, sectarian nightmare, and the cynical "humanitarian" intervention by NATO that destroyed Libya, and the support for friendly dictators to the extent of slaughtering their own people in the "Arab Spring," and the proxy-war against Syria's Assad [dictatorship] by US and Saudi financed JIHAADIST maniacs; that these people, these "liberals" would so line-up behind the Biden administration's narrative with such stupid enthusiasm.

Once again, the offical enemy is a "MAD-MAN" with whom negotiation is pointless.  Negotiation is, once again, "Appeasement" and "Munich 1938."  War is the only possible response to the crimes of the "MAD-MAN," the new Hitler, the reincarnation of Stalin.  And, once again, the USA is the "indispensiable nation" in the fight against "EVIL" and in defense of the "rules-based international order."

Case-in-point is Owen Gray at "Northern Reflections."  All of those idiotic quotes from those idiotic writers I've been talking about I only know about from reading Owen Gray's blog. I don't read garbage from Thomas Friedman.  I'd never even heard of the mediocrity Glen Pearson.  Owen does.  For some reason Thomas Friedman's decades-spanning career of imperialist lies and failed predictions hasn't discredited him in Owen's eyes.  Probably because he writes for the establishment New York Times.  And the NYT's consistent support for every imperialist venture, it's brazen willingness to debase its credibility again and again, doesn't detract from it's authority.  Because some people are like children who need authority figures to believe in.  They have to believe in the system.

So, with such a childish mindset, immersed in such dreck, one inevitably comes to believe that Putin is a "mad-man," just like Saddam Hussein was a "mad-man" and Osama bin Laden was a "mad-man," and Qaddafi was a "mad-man," and Hugo Chavez was a "mad-man."  All of these men did what they did not for any identifiable reasons but because they're the new Stalin/Tsar out to recreate the Soviet/Russian Empire, or the new Hitler seeking to conquer the entire Middle East, or (most stupidly) because they "Hate FREEDOM":

Just because Putin said, year after year, to stop pushing the anti-Russian military alliance of NATO towards his borders, and then insisted that Ukraine was the red line they could not cross; just because non-Russian scholars on foreign affairs said that no Russian government would consent to NATO bases in the Ukraine; just because the USA put a Missile defense system in Eastern Europe on the ridiculous premise that it was to defend against an Iranian missile attack; ... none of these are any reason to take Putin seriously.  No, no, no.  What you have to do is listen to shameless liars and hopeless idiots like Thomas Friedman and Antony Blinken or whatever fuckhead you choose, and believe them when they babble about Putin being a "mad-man" who wants to take over Europe.

"Putin doesn't negotiate."

Right.  And the United States under Trump violates its agreement with Iran while demanding continued compliance from Iran.  And then Trump's successor Biden, instead of condemning Trump's dishonesty, validates it by continuing to demand further concessions from Iran instead of returning to the treaty.

And the USA arrogantly ignored Putin's attempt to negotiate a neutral Ukraine.

And the USA invaded Iraq on the basis of non-existent "Weapons of Mass Destruction" rather than allow UN inspectors to continue their work of PROVING Iraq's adherence to its obligations.

And rather than allow Afghanistan's Taliban government's offer to hand Osama bin Laden over to a third-party country upon receipt of evidence of his guilt in the 9-11 attacks, the USA decided to instead attack, overthrow that theocratic, misogynist government and spend twenty years propping-up a government so corrupt and brutal that the Taliban were able to defeat it and return to power.

I cannot find the words to adequately express the contempt that I feel for shit-libs who continue to spout off about how the latest official enemy of the USA is the anti-Christ and that the USA continues to be the Shining City on a Hill.  The childishness.  The hypocrisy.  The moral blindness.  

Even after I point out to Owen Gray the FACT that the USA's GBWT has killed about SIX MILLION PEOPLE and has created 38 MILLION REFUGEES he refuses to admit the titanic stupidity of his beliefs.  Of COURSE we have to pour small-arms weapons in to the Ukraine to defend "freedom"!  And all the while, maniacs are shouting about starting World War Three!!!

Here's Caitlin Johnstone vainly crying out for sanity in a world of insane shit-heads with no idea about the meanings of the words they use:

But I think another major part of it is the much more basic fact that if people truly understood how dangerous nuclear war is for everyone on this planet, nobody would consent to the kinds of cold war games that the drivers of empire have been intending to play with these weapons.

If people truly understood that their life and the lives of everyone they love are being gambled like poker chips in nuclear brinkmanship maneuvers geared toward securing unipolar planetary hegemony for an undeclared empire loosely centralized around the United States, those few empire architects would soon find themselves on the losing end of a tooth-and-claw fight against the entire human species. The ability to win cold war power struggles is dependent on the mainstream public not thinking too hard about what nuclear war is and why it is being risked.

...

So I think we’re seeing a broad lack of awareness among the general public of just how close to the precipice we are for the same reason nuclear winter theory has been suppressed: because if everyone deeply understood how dangerous these unipolarist grand chessboard power plays are, and how they deliver no real benefit to ordinary people, they wouldn’t permit them to happen.

A responsible news media would be educating the public about things like nuclear winter, and how easy it would be for a nuclear war to be triggered by a malfunction, miscommunication, misunderstanding, or miscalculation in the chaos and confusion of soaring cold war escalations as nearly happened many times during the last cold war. A “news” media whose job is not to report the news but to manufacture consent for imperial agendas will do everything it can to prevent people from paying attention to those things.

This is why, if you really understand nuclear war and what it means and how close we are to its emergence, it feels so surreal and dissonant looking around at the things people are talking about today. How ungrounded in reality it all is, how unseriously people are taking this thing, how willing they are to consent to things like no-fly zones and other direct military action against Russia. It’s because people are prevented from seeing and understanding this reality. You can’t have the riff raff interfering in the mechanics of the imperial machine. Unipolar hegemony is too important to be left to democratic processes. Keep the local fauna confused and distracted while you roll the dice on nuclear armageddon with the hope of ruling the world.

These people are like mobsters, knowing they’ll probably die a violent death but willing to risk it all for a chance at living the high life. There’s not the slightest iota of wisdom guiding their actions. Just the primitive impulse to dominate and control. They’re living their lives and making their decisions essentially on autopilot, guided by unconscious impulses they themselves don’t understand.

Indeed.  You have to pull your heads out of your asses.  You have to get over your infantile need for a good God or a benevolent United States.  You have to admit that US presidents are mostly monsters.  They are monsters with more blood on their hands than Putin has.  You are a stupid hypocrite if you hate Putin more than any recent US president.  They are not good people.  They are bad people.  They are insane people.  And they are playing a very dangerous game for no good purpose and they are setting off chains of events that could get you and everyone you love killed.

I will no longer be commenting at Owen Gray's site.  His moral imbecility is contemptible and there's no reason to communicate with such a stooge.  I find most liberals as contemptible, believing in shit equally as stupid as that of any right-wing anti-vaxxer.  Fuck those deluded simpletons.

Do an image search for "starvation yemen."

Even after they hear the FACTS about the number of people Biden and his ilk have tortured and murdered they cling to their stupid childish beliefs.  Disgusting.  Absolutely disgusting.

UN: Crisis in Yemen

UNICEF: Appeal for Afghanistan