Shit-Libs Proudly Admit Their Stupidity & Insanity

 

First of all, most of the writers (I believe there's more than one) at "Lawyers, Guns, & Money" are not full-time stupid people.  There's a series: "So-and-so visits an American grave" where the writer talks about the remarkable life of the person who used to inhabit the body buried under a tombstone.  Eloquent summaries of often forgotten US-Americans who made a positive contribution to their country and helped make their country however good it eventually became.  In the same way, I don't really believe that Christian Parenti or Max Blumenthal are genuinely stupid even though they've both swallowed/concocted some shit-for-brains COVID-denialism conspiracy theory.  I don't really think that Owen Gray at "Northern Reflections" is indifferent to the sufferings of starving Yemeni children just because he never mentions them even when it's pointed out that the USA is being titanically hypocritical condemning Russia's attack on Ukraine whilst aiding and abetting Saudi Arabia's genocide in Yemen.

It's just that like Parenti and Blumenthal allowed their minds to turn to garbage on the subject of COVID, and Gray is doomed to forever believe that centrist maniacs like Thomas Friedman are sources of wisdom because they speak in "liberal" journals like the New York Times, and whoever it is at "Lawyers, Guns, & Money" worships at the altar of the Democratic National Committee, ... on some occasions they espouse clearly stupid beliefs.

Case in point for shit-libs is the mental contortions they engage in to embrace their moronic narrative that the war in the Ukraine wasn't deliberately orchestrated to weaken Russia.  That the Biden cabal didn't willfully provoke Putin by installing a hostile, anti-Russian government on his border and flood it with weapons and expanded and trained its army and threatened to make it part of the anti-Russian NATO alliance.  This means that all of those deaths are 98% the fault of the corrupt, senile, racist rapist Joe Biden and his racist, psychopath Secretary of State Blinken.

I was going to provide a link to the recent posting at "Moon of Alabama" blog about the referendums in Luhansk and Donetsk to provide an alternative viewpoint to the ridiculous propaganda that shit-libs have happily swallowed.  But just like so many other contrapoint sources, when they're not smothered by imperialist algorithms, they're outright suppressed and censored.  (It's almost as if the creators of the US-imperialist narrative don't trust the resiliance of their arguments against competitors or something!)  I cannot access the site this morning.  In its stead I'll provide this link to that "Rise Like Lions" post from a month or so ago.  Read it.  And ponder whether the narrative that Putin repeatedly tried to get the Russian ethnic majority Donbas provinces to remain inside the Ukraine via Minsk 1 and 2, and pleaded with the USA not to continue to arm this hostile, anti-Russian Ukrainian regime, promising to respect its sovereignty if they refrained from joining NATO, and only moved to incorporate Luhansk and Donetsk after the rogue Ukrainian government rapidly stepped-up its shelling of those provinces in preparation for an invasion, makes more sense than the USA's imperialist narrative that Putin is a "madman" who tried to recreate the Russian Empire with 130,000 troops.  He has chosen this moment to begin his megalomaniacal agenda simply at random, and nothing that happened in the years since 2014, and nothing he said about NATO expansion, and guarantees of Ukraine's sovereignty and Minsk's I and II have any relevance whatsoever.  (As well, convince yourself that Biden hasn't said that the goal is to weaken Russia and overthrow Putin.  Pretend that Condoleezza Rice wasn't saying in 2014 that Europe should stop buying oil and natural gas from Russia but should instead buy it from the USA.)

["Moon of Alabama" became accessible last evening.  Here is the post.  I'll quote some of it.]

The 2014 color revolution was exceptionally brutal. The U.S. had organized extreme right wing groups to take the lead in violent protests. (The same groups were in the early 1940s allied with German Nazis  and, between 1948 and 1952, were waging a CIA led guerrilla war against the Soviet Union.) The street fighting ended with an unconstitutional change of the government of Ukraine.

The first law that the new coup government implemented was a rejection of Russian as one of Ukraine's state languages. For some 50% of Ukrainians Russian is their daily language. Ukrainian itself is a Russian dialect. Nearly 100% of Ukrainians understand Russian.

The ethnic Russian people in Ukraine feared being canceled. Crimea, which in 1991 had voted for and declared its independence before the Ukraine did so, voted, under Russian protection, to join Russia. Moscow accepted the move.

People in other former Russian parts of Ukraine protested and a some in the east took up arms. They twice defeated the Ukrainian army and volunteer formations sent against them. The Minsk I and II agreements that followed required Ukraine to give those Donbas oblasts significant autonomy. The United Nations Security Council acknowledged and supported the agreements. But any attempts to implement them were sabotaged by the U.S. via the armed right wing movements that had control over the government in Kiev.

For eight long years the people in the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics defended their borders against constant  Ukrainian attempts to solve the conflict by violence. While the people in those republics had voted for the independence of their republics, and to become a part of Russia, the Kremlin did not want to accept that. It wanted that those republics stay within Ukraine and insisted on the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

In 2015 the U.S. and NATO started to build a new Ukrainian army. They succeeded. By 2021 it was larger than most armies of NATO countries. Plans were made to invade the Donbas republics. In 2021 Russia became aware that a first attempt was soon to be made. It launched large maneuvers of its own military near its western border to deter such attempts. The situation settled down.

...

When the Kremlin learned of new plans to attack the Donbas republics in 2022 it took a stand. It send quasi ultimatums to the U.S. and NATO and requested security agreements that would deny NATO membership to Ukraine. The ultimatums were rejected. The U.S. wanted war in Ukraine to a. 'weaken' Russia and to b. get stronger control over its European 'allies' and economic competitors.

On February 17 the Ukrainian army launched artillery preparations for an all out attack on the Donbas republics. Over the next days the shelling increased from some 40 artillery explosions per day to over 2,000 per day. Russia had to act. On February 22 it recognized the independence of the Donbas republics and signed defense agreements with them. On February 24 it send its troops to defeat the Ukrainian army and to make any future attacks on the Donbas impossible.

Compare that to the official USA/NATO narrative: "In 2022, Vladimir Putin asked us to refrain from adding the Ukraine to NATO before launching his insane plan to rebuild the old Czarist Empire by conquering the Ukraine."

Which brings me to the attack, the deliberate sabotage of Russia's Gazprom Nordstream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany. (And, more precisely, the terrifying enthusiasm with which shit-libs show themselves ready to swallow and the regurgitate ANY lies, no matter how insanely stupid.)

If you believe the USA/NATO narrative, the Russia-to-Germany Gazprom undersea pipeline was sabotaged by Putin.  He blew up his own pipeline to stop the flow of Russian natural gas to Germany even though all the stuff he needed to continue to send the gas westwards were on the control panels back in Russia.  If you believe the "Let's Stop Provoking Russia [and China] and Risking Nuclear War" crowd, you believe that the primary beneficiary of the destruction of the undersea pipelines is the USA and therefore it was probably the USA (or one of its lapdog countries) that sabotaged them.

But here's "Lawyers, Guns & Money" yammering like complete shit-heads that Putin destroyed his own pipelines to show that he's SERIOUS about cutting off ties with the West.  It has to be seen to be believed:

There’s been some chatter on “security studies Twitter” about why Russia might have sabotaged Nord Stream 1 and 2. Nord Stream 1 is an important source of hard currency, which the Kremlin needs to cushion the damage done by western economic sanctions and to finance its war effort in Ukraine. Given that Gazprom (the state-controlled energy company responsible for exporting natural gas) can turn off the flow of gas whenever it wants to, why use explosives to damage the pipeline?

...

Some very smart people have argue that Putin (may have) sabotaged Nord Stream in order to demonstrate resolve.

...

Branislav Slantchev offers two reasons why the sabotage “makes sense strategically.” He points out that Putin “could have concluded that Europe is well on its way to weaning itself of Russian energy.”

If that’s the thinking, then the expected value of keeping the line will have decreased substantially. (There are also some arguments about Gazprom payments, but these are too small to be worth mentioning.) The expected benefit of interrupting the supply now, however, is fairly large if it wreaks havoc on the European economies just as the cold season is starting. It will almost certainly push the European economy into a recession, the governments will scramble to cope with the fallout, and social discontent will increase quite a bit. Even if it is proven that the Kremlin was behind this, it will not matter — people might blame Russia but they will still demand measures from their own governments. This means that Ukraine might be pushed a lot further down the list of priorities in Europe, and so aid to Kyiv could be in jeopardy. The US will doubtless have to spend resources to help our friends in Europe, and that’s another strain on our budget. Overall, if your goal is to win some time for the mobilization to become effective, and if you believe that Europe is lost as a client anyway, blowing up Nord Stream would be a way to go.

But, as Slantchev notes, this still doesn’t explain why Putin didn’t just halt the flow of gas.

Utterly ridiculous.  Embarrassing.  I stopped reading not long afterwards. (While looking through that blog's archives for that story I saw plenty of vile shit.  Reminded me why I almost never read it.  The Democratic Party cult is a brain-destroyer.]

These imbeciles are talking about Europe having pretty much already weaned itself off its dependence on Russian fuel.  As if the energy crisis that is forcing industries to shut down isn't happening as we speak.  Apparently both Germany and Russia built an expensive undersea pipeline that everyone could see would be useless within two years.  And that's why Putin blew it up!

It's actually terrifying to see how otherwise intelligent people are reduced to babbling idiots from partisan tribalism and brainwashing.  No you fucking morons!  Putin didn't want to cut ties with the West.  Putin said again and again and again that installing an anti-Russian regime in Ukraine and flooding it with weapons and making it a part of NATO was a red-line for Russia.  US diplomatic scholars said it would be seen as an existential threat by ANY Russian government.  The USA provoked this war.  The USA has admitted its goal is to weaken Russia and to overthrow Putin.  The Ukrainians are being used as pawns.  Ordinary Ukrainians are suffering for the witless delusions of a fascist minority.

But now the Biden administration is saying that blaming the USA for the pipeline sabotage is a "conspiracy theory."  

The western political/media class has been dismissing as “conspiracy theories” all claims that the US is likely responsible for last month’s sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, even while leveling the exact same accusations against Russia without ever using that term. Which probably says a lot about the way that label has been used over the years, if you think about it.

At a UN Security Council meeting on Friday, US envoy Richard Mills repeatedly accused Russia of promoting “conspiracy theories” in its Nord Stream accusations against the United States, saying that “our Russian colleagues have decided to instrumentalize the Security Council meeting to spread conspiracy theories and disinformation.”

“It’s important that we use this meeting not to foster conspiracy theories, but to focus our attention on Russia’s blatant violation of the Charter and its crimes in Ukraine,” Mills argues, after saying that “the United States categorically denies any involvement in this incident” and that there is no justification for “the Russian delegation raising conspiracy theories and mass disinformation in this Council.”

Mills then hilariously spends the remainder of his remarks insinuating that it is actually Russia who perpetrated the attacks, mentioning the word “infrastructure” no less than nine times in his arguments to establish that in Ukraine, Russia has a history of attacking critical civilian infrastructure similar to the pipelines.

“Sabotage of critical infrastructure should be of concern to us all,” Mills says. “In the context of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, we have seen numerous Russian attacks damaging civilian infrastructure. We witnessed Russia recklessly seize control of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, risking a nuclear disaster in Europe. We saw countless attacks destroying civilian electricity infrastructure.”

“Despite efforts that we heard today to distract us from the truth, to distribute more disinformation and slightly wacky theories, the facts on the ground in Ukraine speak for themselves,” Mills concludes.

This is Goebbels' level "Big Lie" stuff.  This is shameless.  But the Democratic Party has been shameless for a long time.  "Russiagate" was a crazy conspiracy theory.  Saying Hunter Biden's laptop story was "Russian disinformation" was brazen lying.

Poor Caitlin Johnstone clearly understands the stakes for humanity here.  We are risking nuclear war.  And for WHAT???  So that the USA oligarchy can cling to soul superpower status for a few more years?  So that it can beat down any and all rivals including China and Russia?  Is THAT worth your life to you???

But when she points this out to the shit-libs they [sadly, not surprisingly] accuse her of being a Putin puppet.

Everyone has lost their fucking mind. Propaganda has made madness look like sanity and sanity look like madness, has normalized cheerleading for nuclear world war and abnormalized calls for de-escalation and detente. It’s truly as bat shit insane as anything could possibly be.

Over and over again we’re being fed the message from the US and its proxies that this game of nuclear chicken can only escalate and never de-escalate. They are lying. They are playing games with all our lives in service of a dark god named unipolarism, and we gain nothing from it.

The only positive I can see in this mess is that any further movement toward madness will have to be a move into sanity, because we’ve taken madness as far as we can possibly take it and we’ll necessarily have to circle back round again. You can only turn 180 degrees away from the light before you’re turning back toward it again. You can only run halfway into the woods before you’re running out of it.

❖

“Kids there’ve been some nuclear explosions and everyone on earth is certain to die horribly, but we need to understand that it was very important for our government to help Ukraine recapture the annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia territories from the Russians.”

“What are those places, Daddy?”

“I don’t really know. Let’s go check the globe!”

“Yay! I love learning geography!”

...

Mainstream liberals are so fucking stupid that they think the only possible choices with regard to Russia are either (A) handing Putin the entire world on a silver platter or (B) just continually charging toward direct confrontation as though Russia doesn’t have nukes. They don’t know what detente is. At all. They don’t even know it’s a thing, let alone an option here. Like if you ask them they don’t know about the existence of the word or the concept. I’ve been complaining about this since long before the invasion.

Detente used to be a household word. Mainstream politicians campaigned on and debated about it. Now hardly anyone knows it’s even a thing, let alone a real option in dealing with the horrifying escalations between NATO and Russia. This is because the political/media class never tells them.

It’s supposed to be the news media’s job to create an informed populace, but because their real job is propaganda they actually do the opposite. News media never mentioning detente is like a preschool teacher never mentioning sharing or cooperation and just telling kids to fight.

This is the only reason anyone who advocates de-escalation and detente gets met with “SO YOU’RE SAYING WE SHOULD JUST GIVE PUTIN WHATEVER HE WANTS???” instead of a sane adult response. It’s because people haven’t been told that de-escalation and detente are historically viable and successful.

It's terrifying that people can be so fucking goddamned stupid.