That’s what George Galloway asked CN Editor Joe Lauria on the Mother of All Talk Shows. His response examines the need for a change in imperial thinking.
That’s what George Galloway asked CN Editor Joe Lauria on the Mother of All Talk Shows. His response examines the need for a change in imperial thinking.
Offcourse.!
It is a complex issue, but I support Lester’ “Yes”. Provoking and stoking the war does not offer many tangible benefits, we are not talking about Falklands or Grenada that boosted popularity of the respective leaders at a very reasonable cost. The alternative answer would posit corruption and similar malign goals that are successfully advanced. And one can build a solid case there too.
To me, lesser issues with malign decisions and no benefits whatsoever provide a better clue. When Biden, perhaps “best prepared president elect in history”, and with experienced, came to office, he could make two quick executive decisions that could boost his popularity and spare him of respective future headaches: undoing decisions of his predecessor concerning the agreement with Iran and prosecution of Assange. No ifs and buts, just quick cancellation of the executive orders and in the case of Iran, a swift time-table of normalization steps.
But packaging that would take some intelligence AND some deviation from the inertia of the think-tanky morass. Still, Democratically inclined think-tanks etc. could be neutralized by the slogan of restoring the best of Obama’s legacy.
I see no benefits in the course Biden and his crew had taken on that, so I see stupidity. In the case of Assange, astounding stupidity. In the case of Iran, there would be some political battle that would require a bit of vision, plus it would have to be a sequence of steps, but what was difficult with Assange? Any idiot, with the exception of complete idiots, could do it.
The power structure on this planet has been forming for millenia and it is a structure that favours psychopaths. So we are not ruled by idiots, no, we’re ruled by psychopaths who make the decisions. Those decisions are then presented to us by idiots who fill the most modern governments, mere spokespeople. They must be idiots because who better to keep the benevolent clever people from the levers of power than the malicious egotistical idiots? Just look who blocked Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders in UK and USA.
And here we are now. Progressive, well-meaning politicians isolated and removed from the decision-making process thus leaving most of the human race without political representation. I haven’t a single illusion any more, this world is ruled by opposed criminal gangs lead by psychos so apt at the art of deception that an amazing amount of people still thing one of those gangs is the police. They are all liars, thieves and murderers and that includes Putin who, just like his western counterparts, solves his problems by starting wars Admittedly, he might have some more existential reasons for his bloodsheds than those who provoke him into it but in my view he was far from exhausting all the peaceful solutions at his disposal so screw him too.
I’m 60 years old now and I can’t wait to get out of this unimprovable hellhole of a planet. Whatever we are comes from the blueprint of this place so screw it as well.
Your comment is spot on, could not be more right. Only thing I am not sure about is why is it that our structure favours psychopaths. There could be a basic psychological reason; good people are not concerned with ruling and imposing their ‘vision’ of how things should be on others.
It is only psychos that have the will and energy to spend that much time to crawl their way to the top. I like to spend time patting my cat, tending my veggie patch and having a swim in the ocean, every day, when not working.
It is the old saying, one I have read many times in many different publications; “People who want to rule are not fit to rule.” True benevolent rulers are the ones who are dragged kicking and screaming from their normal lives and are made to rule. Not many of those through history.
Almost makes me think we are doomed as a species….
Not stupidity, but a far far older national dysfunction that can be terminal as in nation ending. Multinational Kleptocrats rule over US elected officials by bribery. Thus elected officials scramble to serve up to their sponsors’ short-term windfalls, no matter how catastrophic the long-term damage to our nation and its citizens. We need public funding of campaigns abundant enough to completely nullify private funding. Salaries for President and Congress must reflect the amounts of money and the importance of the issues they’re responsible for. I.e. President and Congress must be paid at least 10x what they are currently, and probably more. We need a police that has the teeth to dig out all lobbying type bribery. Public funding or risk a government malfeasance malfunction that ends US.
Yes.
Four words: “Listen to Joe Lauria.”
This explanation by Mr. Lauria tells the story. I doubt things can be made any clearer.
As I have stated here at CN previously, “the imperial mind defies reason.” Point of fact, the desire to gain more power and wealth over whelming the fear of burning the earth to a crisp is very indicative of the mad man and mad women. These issues we face because of US intervention in Ukraine are a direct result of these “idiots”.
I warn never underestimate the power of small groups of greedy people with billions of dollars. These are the enemy we face. These most wealthy of idiots such as 45, and others who are not the idiot but the mentally deranged who have had their total control and power rot their brains. They are totally unhinged.
I earlier made a a comment at “The US Left & War In Ukraine” by Lawrence Davidson. There I pointed out the existence of the “Slow-con” being applied to the masses by “useful idiots”. All of whom are used as a tool of oppression to sooth the elites as they overwhelm and subjugate.
Such are the boot licking sycophants.
Thanks CN
I agree with several of these comments, and would add the following.
Our apparently idiotic rulers are not actually idiots, but corrupt. Our actual rulers are a war profiteering banking mafia who have bought our mainstream media, and bought our political system, with the added levers of blackmail and occasional murders. The most deadly potential of the Ukraine situation (currently a giant embezzlement operation) is that historically these people benefit from war.
Some historical background is at War Profiteer Story.
hXXps://war**profiteer**story.blogspot.com
[Note: To use the above link please remove all asterisks, as well as replacing XX with tt.]
“Are we ruled by idiots?” is a satisfying way to express frustration but obviously these idiots are psychopaths who, yes, think they’re superior and deserve to bend the globe to what satisfies their egos and bank accounts. The question really is how to “dislodge” these idiots from the same path as centuries of the deluded before them. The problem is unfortunately not simply political. It’s the weary apolitical (or enthusiastically apolitical for that matter) of a no-think self-indulgent western laziness. Probably a calamity only will shake things up enough for a way to change.
Some are idiots.
Some are far more cynical and selfish than that.
Who benefits? The ones who are not idiots are cackling all the way to the bank.
Yes, all are idiots. NATO is an alliance of idiots, starting with the senile US president and incompetent administration. Why Sweden and Finland want to join the club beats me. NATO members may get lucky and all will end before Europe is scorched earth. In the end, NATO and the EU will be no more, a real blessing that would be. That is if the Europeans are lucky and Biden is not allowed to throw Europe under the bus, fighting Russia to the last European standing.
I am convinced, in the end, there will be no NATO, no EU left standing, regardless of how it ends.
The real statesmen/women are all on the Russian side. NATO is isolated, it needs coercion, and extortion to be held together.
Two things: 1) Probably in February, before the 24th , I sent an e-mail to some friends reaffirming my belief that there would be no invasion based on the completion of NS2 and Germany’s need for the gas saying “the needs of German industrialists will trump the nihilistic hate of a bunch of Nazis.” So I don’t get it. The Russian operation seems to be going as planned except for a longer than expected operation in Mariupol where I believed the Azov crowd would have surrendered once they were surrounded. I assumed, since we refer to them as neo-Nazis, that they would have responded like the chicken shxx crowd we have in the U.S as opposed to 1944 SS battalions and that as the cauldron encircles the Ukrainian Army in the Donbas we would be seeing more units throw in the towel. So the level of fanaticism is beyond not only my expectation but comprehension. 2) And please correct me. Since this operation is proceeding substantially as expected I have no doubt that the collective military minds of the West are not particularly surprised by events. We have appropriated $53 plus billion in military aid and given the logistics of delivery very little is in Ukraine and I doubt if it will get there. I highly suspect that most of the already manufactured arms will not be shipped and the “new” equipment will be produced in coming years and will also be warehoused or used in some other operation. This isn’t stupidity but piracy.
Short answer — yes.
In America, neither political ‘team’ believes in ‘meritocracy’. One team is a personality cult that favors loyalty to the individual or at least to the ‘team’. This matters much more than any real ability to do the job they are to be given. The other political ‘team’ also hates meritocracy in that they believe that the persons ‘Identity’ decides who gets what job, and again, any real talent to do the job simply does not enter into the calculations.
This is not only at the top, but it runs down through the system. It has to do so. After all, if the person at the top got the job by either personal loyalty or political Identity, they are likely to do the same for their picks beneath them. Add to this a very natural human tendency to get rid of potential competitors for advancement. Thus, that talented person who might someday rise to challenge the person who got the job by other means is pushed to the side. And this continues down through the chain of command. The most dangerous people to the untalented who have power are those who have actual talent. They must be gotten rid of.
So, the short answer … yes, we are ruled by idiots. It is by design. This is what happens when a society becomes so arrogant that it believes it no longer needs to put talented people into key jobs, but can instead make the key jobs a plaything of the imperial court and its courtiers.
And if you think things will get better, remember what we’ve learned in recent years that spots in good schools are not going to the best and the brightest, but to the children of the wealthy and movie stars who can bribe their way into those positions.
Are we ruled by idiots? Only notices this now? Have been for quite some time already.
Fascinating, Mr Lauria.
“Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT”
“Common Sense
by Thomas Paine” by
Idiots works too.
Joe – I guess this could fall under ‘idiots’ – or Knaves. Priti Patel apparently spelled her own name correctly.
hxxps://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/06/17/julian-assange-extradition-home-office/
The ECHR order to ground her Rwanda deportation flight seems to take on extra importance now. “Before his extradition, Assange could ask Britain’s highest court to hear more arguments, or he could pursue an appeal in the European Court of Human Rights. Each court would have to agree to hear Assange’s appeal, which is not guaranteed.”
“Are they (Western leaders) idiots to trigger a war for imposing sanctions on Russia that will hurt the West more than Russia?”
They have locked into a Neocon policy defined more than 20 years ago to pursue US global hegemony. Once they start wars, it’s hard for them to walk back because it would mean admitting that all the killing and destruction was for nothing. It would expose them as the war criminals they really are. So, they have to double down to save their own skin.
US efforts to subvert modern Ukraine started almost 30 years ago. Having spent 5 billion dollars (according to V. Nuland), these efforts finally bore fruit with the US-led coup in 2014. After Nuland and her boss VP Biden let the Nazi genie out of the bottle during the Maidan uprising, it naturally didn’t just creep back into the bottle. No, the Nazi monster took on a life on its own and went on terrorizing the Russian-speaking part of the population with massacres in Odessa, Mariupol, Kherson, the Donbas, etc., in addition to the daily terror spread by the right-wing groups against anybody voicing dissent. This could not fail to provoke a Russian reaction.
In Washington, the power of the war hawks can be measured by their success in making Trump supply weapons to Ukraine even though he hated Ukraine and Nato and wanted closer ties with Russia.
The conglomerate of US/UK war hawks, Ukrainian ultra-nationalists together with Russia-haters in Poland and the Baltic countries embarked on a common policy towards Russia. If each one of them is toxic on its own, in combination, they are a recipe for disaster.
In the last 20 years, China has risen as an economic superpower and the BRICS have become stronger, while the relative economic power of the US has declined. Despite an enormous effort, the US has also suffered catastrophic defeats in the greater Middle East, which has strengthened its adversaries.
Thus, the writing was on the wall, yet they were unable to readjust their course of action, not as a group anyways. The current war hysteria turns this group pressure into a lynch mob. Any Western politician questioning the wisdom of supporting Ukraine’s war effort is committing political suicide.
I guess they were hoping against hope that their desperate action would somehow succeed or that Putin would falter with some sort of half-arsed response. I guess the US can always walk away like it did in Afghanistan, but for Europe it looks very bleak. At least the US won’t have to worry about any rapprochement between Russia and Europe.