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| Ce n'est pas un falafel |
When you really think about it, Antony Blinken's performance of "Rockin' in the Free World" in Kiev is astonishingly stupid.
Let's step back for a bit.
From time to time I've mentioned those people on the street who get shown a map of the world and can't find their own country on it. I've pointed out that these people's voices sound normal. Their inflections, their accents, the speech patterns in general don't point to any obvious mental problems. They also seem to be decently dressed. Some of them even appear prosperous. When these interviews happen on a Los Angeles sidewalk it's occasionally the case that they're there on vacation. Which means that they're wealthy enough to afford to go on vacation.
In short, they're probably all normal people. A normal person can do okay for themselves without having to know where their country is on a map of the world. And, because that's the case, they never bothered to learn how to find their country on a map of the world.
They're normal people. But they're incurious and ignorant. How pervasive that is, I couldn't say. I'm ignorant of that factoid and I can't be bothered to look it up.
When Bill O'Reillynull <stupidly try to put in a link after all the drama you'll read about below> told his viewers that God makes the tides go in and out he was, obviously, wrong. He was ignorant of the fact that the Ancient Greeks had noticed a correlation between the phases of the moon and the tides and that in 1608 Simon Stevin 1608 Simon Stevin speculated that the moon attracted the tides.
Now sure, perhaps before he told millions of people his theory that God causes the rising and the falling of the tides, O'Reilly should have checked to see if he was right. But you know how it is; He genuinely thought that God did it so why bother to look it up? He was ignorant and wrong but maybe we could cut him some slack.
It was when he responded to the mockery of his critics about his ignorance and error that O'Reilly could be said to have behaved stupidly. He referred to his detractors as "pinheads" and challenged them to explain (among other things) why the Earth has a moon while Mars doesn't.
[I've tried to insert a link twice in that sentence. Once to "Slate" and once to the "Los Angeles Times." Instead of lighting up my selected text as blue, Blogger has put the word "null" at the end of the sentence and made that the link. Here is the latest url: Bill OReilly | Explains Tides | How Moon Got There (mediaite.com) Um, ... that's not the url. Here's the url: Nevermind. I'm too lazy and ignorant to figure it out. Hmmm. Words to link fromWords to link from. That's interesting. It copied the words and then made a link out of the copy. What about now?What about now? I plead ignorance. Let's continue.]
The thing is that if O'Reilly could be excused for being so transported by the idea of an all-powerful God who makes the tides go in and out that he blurted out his erroneous, ignorant belief for the world to hear it, he can't be forgiven for further exposing his ignorance after he got his knuckles rapped. I you're going to repair the damage to your reputation and take the battle to your critics it is essential that you do the research to make sure that the next things you say redeem you rather than further humiliate you.
Bill O'Reilly was evidently too arrogant and lazy to bother with all of that and thereby revealed himself to be stupid and ignorant. For while it's clear that you can be happy and prosperous and of at least normal intelligence despite not being able to find your country on a map, and it's clear that you can become a multi-millionaire media personality while being ignorant and wrong about science, it is just sheer stupidity to not bother doing the 10 minutes of research required about a subject you have chosen to talk about in response to having been exposed as an ignoramus on a related subject.
Which brings me to Antony Blinken. I once referred to him as "meritless" (the way he described charges of an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza).
"Meritless." That's a good word for Antony Blinken. He has no merits. None. He's a goddamned war-criminal with the blood and trauma of millions on his hands and whatever exists of his conscience. He should be arrested for war crimes and if found guilty condemned to a cell for the rest of his life. Together with John Kirby and their demented boss Biden.
And I recently wrote a post about his brain-dead performance of the song "Rockin' in the Free World" in Kiev. I linked to an article from The Hill about it in which most of the criticism came from Ukrainians who thought it insultingly flippant given the devastation caused by the war and the USA's failure to live up to its promises. At the time I could not bring myself to watch a video of the act but I noted that IF Blinken had performed the song with the original lyrics that it would have been incredibly stupid. If they just played the riff and the chorus it would have still been stupid but not agonizingly so.
It turns out that he did include the original lyrics. I have not heard it, because the videos have all tended to be clips from news programs that are less than a minute in their entirety. But I have slogged through enough pro-Democrat and pro-Republican sewage (including a particularly pompous editorial from the racist, shit-for-brains National Review) and now I'm 85% certain that Blinken tried to rouse the fighting spirit of the Ukrainians with these lyrics:
I mean, just think about this people! Try and see it the way that I'm seeing it. Even IF Blinken had chosen a song with more appropriate lyrics his choice to perform at that nightclub was nothing but stupid narcissism. Ukraine has been defeated. It's crumbling. The same way the USA's puppet government in Afghanistan crumbled and then evaporated. Biden and Blinken and the rest of that scum just want to keep the fight going until the election is over in November. Ukraine doesn't have to fight to the last Ukrainian, but the last Ukrainian to die in this war should die on November 6th. (If it isn't too much trouble.)
Do you think that Blinken seriously believed that singing a rousing tune would influence the Ukrainians to fight on? Perhaps he did! That would be par for the course of his stupidity actually. But it's also possible that he is a shameless exhibitionist and just thought that he could show off his "rock and roll" persona. (Apparently he has a band and their tunes are on Spotify!)
So, let's try to break this down: Is Blinken so deluded that he thinks there's a chance Ukraine can still "win"? It's possible. It's possible that Blinken is that big of an idiot. Is it possible that he knows Ukraine is defeated but it has to somehow keep fighting until the November election and that the US American Secretary of State playing a rousing, fighting, rock n' roll song will genuinely inspire them to keep fighting and dying for a lost cause? It's possilbe that he's that big a fucking idiot. Is it possible that he knows Ukraine is defeated, that his performance won't change things one way or the other, but he wants people to see him looking cool on a nightclub stage demonstrating his musical talent? He's certainly capable of being that much of a stupid narcissist.
Think about it! Ukraine has suspended democracy. Opposition parties are banned. Zelensky has put off the elections (that he'd lose). The country is mired in corruption. The government is a nazi-infested, illegitimate regime installed by a US-backed coup. NAZI-INFESTED. Recently, Blinken visited zionist Israel at the start of its genocidal campaign and said "I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.I come before you not only as the United States Secretary of State, but also as a Jew."
[This is the brain-dead world that corporate neo-liberalism and good old-fashioned conservatism has brought us to. The Jewish US secretary of state cheering on a nazi-infested Ukrainian puppet-government, both Canada's Liberal and Conservative parties supporting that government, giving a standing ovation to a former SS soldier, while smearing opponents of Israel's genocide of "antisemitism" as if killing innocent men, women and children in the hopes of exterminating them or driving them into the sea is an essential aspect of being Jewish. People like Blinken, Pelosi, Freeland, Trudeau, Poilievre, harper, can profess to believe in ANYTHING because in truth they believe in NOTHING but their own self-interest.]
All of that would be, is, bad enough. But the goddamned song is a fucking downer! It's a lament, not a hymn! How the fuck does the narcissist Blinken imagine Ukrainians to be stirred to fight for their country by hearing lyrics about an addict dumping her baby in a garbage can before going off to get a hit of her drug? A song about homelessness, inequality, environmental destruction and hypocrisy?
There is ignorance. There is harmless ignorance. There is laziness. There is arrogance. But to be so fucking vapid as to have learned a song, repeated its lyrics over and over, and determined to perform it in public, for stupid reasons, stupid, hypocritical reasons, for stupid vanity, and to stupidly not even realize that the song completely contradicts the stupid message that you're trying to convey.
It's terrifying that a human being can be this stupid and still rise to such a position of power. This example of human garbage is, ... well, of course, as I've long said, ours is a sick system and sick, demented people rise to the top of it. It is still a revelation to me though that our system is so sick that someone as so irredeemably stupid as Antony Blinken can appear and not be filtered out for being too fucking stupid.
If you want to understand why the world is the mess that it is, just look at this exhibit of complete idiocy, hopeless stupidity, utter cluelessness, that is Antony Blinken. How do you arm nazis who hate you, support zionists who act like nazis, criticize Jewish people who protest zionist nazis as "antisemites" and one thousand other evil, nasty, insane things besides? By being as so fucking goddamned stupid and empty-headed as Antony Blinken.
Promising the Impossible: Blinken’s Out of Tune Performance in Kyiv - CounterPunch.org
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