Liberal Zombies Making Excuses For Afghanistan

 

I was on social media recently and a US-American liberal was engaging in some justifiable criticism of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  But I pushed back because that sort of thing tends to include a general amnesia about the utter and complete failure of NATO (the most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world) to contruct a political-economic order in Afghanistan that could meet the very modest hopes of the Afghan people.  In fact, our "government" of a corrupt, powerless puppet in Kabul (who had to be protected by NATO troops from his own people and from the warlord narco-gangsters that took over as provincial governors) was actually so bad, that honest journalists such as Chris Hedges and Tariq Ali (among others) demonstrated that the general population preferred the Taliban to it.

Furthermore, I mentioned the sickening cruelty of Biden petulantly freezing Afghanistan's foreign currency reserves and how, combined with inflation in the price of grain and fertilizer (that inflation itself being a product of Biden provoking a war between Ukraine and Russia) meant that many Afghan women, along with Afghan children and men, would soon starve to death, thus sparing them from the Taliban's misogynist tyranny.

Now, don't get me wrong: I said at the start of this that criticism of the Taliban is justified.  But when Biden carried out Trump's exit from the country, I also pointed out at the time how the media was framing it as the abandonment of the women of Afghanistan, as if we should have stayed there for twenty more years until the violence, corruption, theft, rape, murder eventually won the "hearts and minds" of the people.

The problem remains that the same imperialist voices who initiated this shit-show; who cheered it on for twenty years of stupid lies; are still the voices that are being sought out by the corporate oligarch, pro-imperialist media. Assholes like William Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole stinking lot of them are allowed to give their opinions while the people who have been proven right continue to be marginalized.

The narrative is that this is a disaster for Afghanistan, especially with regards to women's rights. And it's sickeningly true. The Taliban are horrible on women's rights. But if Afghan human rights and happiness (of both men and women) had been at all important to Western leaders, they would have done more to ensure that the government that they subsidized was a good one that did things for the people of Afghanistan. They didn't care so they didn't. Instead they subjected them to thieving rapist gangster warlords and thieving rapist gangster police and burned their cash crops and bombed their houses and invaded their homes in night raids and droned them from the skies for twenty fucking goddamned years.

With the lesson presumably being that illegal, hideous occupations should continue until the oligarchy is 98% agreed that they should be ended and not a second shorter.

Anyway, ... some other liberal was wandering by and accused me of being an extremist who didn't understand how the real world worked.  Saintly Joe Biden shouldn't be condemned for, well, aything I guess, because there are limits to US power, and maybe Biden didn't handle the withdrawl perfectly but he is still our Last, Great, Hope and a fine man and certainly not as corrupt as Trump and his family.

And with that world salad, they could all go on continuing to cling stupidly to the party of Biden, Pelosi, the Clintons, Buttigieg, Clyburn, Rahm Emmanuel and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz.

What Will WE Do About Doug Ford's Corruption???

 

So, [as we all know] Ontario's Auditor General found that political staffers of the Ontario Ministry of Housing, up to and including Ryan Amato, chief of staff to Minister Steve Clark, were selecting portions of the Greenbelt to open up for development, often in violation of land-use regulations, totally in violation of the official process for such decisions, with access to Ministry staff (especially Amato) being vital for developers's success in seeing their dreams come true.  AG Bonnie Lysyk estimates that these developer scum will enjoy a increase in their investments to the tune of $8.3 billion.

At first Ford said that he would accept all of the AG's recommendations except for the one that says to reverse the final decisions to allow the land to be developed.  Steadfastly clinging to his moronic story that he plans to build affordable housing in the Greenbelt he accuses his detractors of contributing to the crisis of homelessness in Ontario.  As well, the fat fuck is yammering that his first swing of the pick-axe to begin chipping away at the Greenbelt is only taking away one little chip:

Ford also expressed frustration Friday in an, at times, testy press conference at the magnitude of media coverage of his decision to remove 7,400 acres in 15 different areas of the Greenbelt, while adding 9,400 acres elsewhere, in order to build 50,000 homes.

"Folks, it's one-third of one per cent," he said, referring to the amount of land being removed from the Greenbelt. "When I talk to people and I say, 'one-third of one per cent, it's like a speck on a map,' they say, 'Really, and they're making that big of a deal?'"

Obviously, people who haven't been criminal sociopaths their entire lives, and who care about such things as democracy, fairness, equal applicability and enforcement of the law, transparency, know that engaging in such blatantly criminal behaviour, the first brazen attempt is the most important.  Ford (and his rich, criminal buddies) know that if they can get away with this, then subsequent theft will be easier.

[I have to wonder who the "people" are that Doug Ford is talking to.  Is it the wealthy vermin who spit on the idea of democratic government? Or is the shit-head chumps who line up for a burnt weiner or processed burger at the annual "Ford-Fests" celebrating their ignorance?]

My question to you, dear readers, is what are WE going to do about this?  The RCMP (hah!) say that they're pondering investigating (ha-ha!).  You remember the RCMP don't you?  They invade the lands of the First Nations and point sniper rifles at them when they protest illegal pipelines going through their sovereign territory; beat people up and occasionally shoot them when they have them in their custody; and charged Mike Duffy with accepting a bribe but cravenly refused to charge oligarch Nigel Wright with bribing him.  So, ... I guess we all know where that RCMP "investigation" is going to go.

The opposition parties are foaming at the mouth.  Including the super-corrupt Ontario Liberals.  But Ford has majority so they have literally no power to do any more.  If the police and the political process can't or won't touch Ford, how possible is it that he thinks he can just ride this out and wait for people's short memories to forget all about it in time for the next election?  And who thinks that given the docility and tactical cluelessness and delusion of the Left grassroots opposition that he's probably right?

Of course, I proposed something long ago to deal with criminal scum like Doug Ford.  But I'm insane.  It's better for the Left to do the same thing it's been doing for decades, over and over again and hope that THIS TIME there'll be a different result.

This is how INSANE Democrats are ...

 

I go to "Daily Kos" for the comics.  Mainly "Tom Tomorrow's 'This Modern World'" and "Reuben Bolling's 'Tom the Dancing Bug'."  But also for Jen Sorenson and Brian McFadden.  "Tom the Dancing Bug" has shown enough smarts, and provided enough laughs over the years so that I do my best to overlook how he has fallen for that whole brain-dead "Russiagate" nonsense.  "Tom Tomorrow" has, himself, started to become much more of a Democratic Party advocate due to his sensititivities having been traumatized by Trump.  Meanwhile, Brian McFadden has occasional left-wing criticisms of the sleazy, lesser-Evil Democrats that cause the Democratic Party Cultists (the majority of the "Kossacks" actually) to condemn him as an evil traitor/purity pony leftard/etc.  There's also three or four other cartoonists who function more like editorial page cartoonists at a newspaper that supports the Democratic Party.  One example of their partisan hackery (I can't remember which one of them did it) has Mitch McConnell sitting at a poker table with Joe Biden.  McConnell has a tiny number of poker chips in front of him while Biden has a mountain of them in front of him.  Words are provided to the effect that this represents Biden's handling of the debt-ceiling bullshit crisis.  McConnell is saying: "Not bad for a dementia patient."

Anonymous US Officals Condemn Ukrainian 'Cowardice'

 

[Note: I put single apostrophes around the word Cowardice because none of the US officials mentioned below used that exact word, and because I didn't want anyone to think that I was actually calling the Ukrainians cowards.]

Caitlin Johnstone wrote a brilliant piece describing the loathsome intellectual and moral failing of the USA's imperialist oligarchy.  "Big Brave Western Proxy Warriors Keep Whining That Ukrainian Troops are Cowards."

Here's the quotes from her essay:

Neo-Cons, Liberal Internationalists, & Isolationists

 

The foreign policy "elite" in Washington are Neo-Con imperialists.  [I wrote "elite" with the quotation marks because, when all is said and done, these people are imbeciles.  Their stupid delusions conform to and sustain the narrative of imperialism and this accounts for their rise within the establishment.  But to believe in the filth that they believe in, they have to be intellectually and morally stunted freaks.]  There is no truly anti-imperialist faction in Washington.  The closest viable ideology to anti-imperialism are the isolationist nationalists.  This is mainly a right-wing, often right-libertarian set of politicians.  Its spokesman today is Senator Rand Paul (son of Ron Paul, who named him after Ayn Rand).  Ron and Rand Paul at least play footsie with racists, but their main hobby horse is libertarianism.  Slightly earlier, the social conservative/quasi-fascist, Nixon advisor, Reagan speech writer Patrick Buchanan was the spokesperson for isolationist nationalism. They often refer to the resistance to "entangling alliances" expressed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.  Wars were expensive in the 18th Century.  And the USA was militarily weak.  There's no doubt that the carnage of the US-American Civil War probably soured USians against getting involved in foreign wars as well.

Oligarchs vs. Monarchs

 picture here

I recently read Michael Hudson's And Forgive Them Their Debts and it was essentially about how oligarchs vied with kings/emperors/whatever for power.  And thinking about the prestige of the British political system among continental thinkers in the 18th Century ... it was nobles jerking off to the control the British aristocracy had over their monarch.  Which they only won in the end by embracing the aims of the Commons TEMPORARILY during their campaigns against royal power.

French aristocrats might have thought they were playing a pretty cunning game.

The British aristocracy did kick ass in the 1700's.  The copper sheathing of the Royal Navy in the Caribbean for instance. Nascent London aristocracy.

Much pearl-clutching against Stalinism is old-fashioned Edmund Burke/Voltaire/I Don't Know.

[Don't forget to add in LYNX later.]

Pro-NATO Liberals Supporting the Proxy War on Russia ...

 ... and all of the suffering and death of Ukrainians, Russians, and everyone else affected by this nightmare:

Been Reading

 

There's been some action at this post about my reading in 2023 if'n yer innerested and haven't checked it out in a while.

Two Problematic Posts

 

I thought that I'd post these two links, explain why I think they're interesting as well as problematic for me.  Perhaps the act of doing this will later inspire me to expand on my unimportant thoughts in later posts at some indeterminate time in the future.

First of all, there's this post: "Why is the West so weak (and Russia so strong)? The role of human capital and Western education)" hosted on a self-described conservative's site. [I've been going to such sites lately for more realistic discussions about the NATO/Ukraine vs. Russia proxy war.  It's sometimes a hard slog, because some of the commentators at these sites deny global warming; denounce the NATO countries for not suppressing homosexuality; deny the reality of global warming; and, some of these idiots simultaneously cheer on Putin's de-nazification goals in Ukraine whilst ranting about the Jewish plot to genocide both Ukrainians and ethnic-Russians in Ukraine so as to provide another homeland for Zionism.  I believe that Putin is genuine in his goal to eliminate the nazi element in Ukraine's institutions because the Ukrainian brand of naziism advocates the physical elimination of Russians.  That Putin actually supports fascists in other parts of Europe is irrelevant to this.  IN FACT: pro-NATO shit-heads who are cheering on this mass-slaughter are the ones who can be accused of "Whataboutism" when they raise the point of Putin's hypocrisy.  THEY are the ones deflecting from THEIR support of fascists in the war that THEY support.  Putin, as a Russian, and as the political leader of Russia, has some self-interest in combatting Ukrainian nazis.  Some US-American ignoramus who fantasizes about the taste of Joe Biden's anus has no justification for supporting the Azov Battalion.]

Holy Fuck! But I DO tend to start babbling when I get typing.  It's just that one thing always leads to another thing.  It's all connected.  ANYWAY ...