You’re Fired! No, I quit!
You’re Fired! No, I quit!
So, Russia has stopped selling natural gas to Bulgaria and Poland because they refuse to pay for it in rubles, but they both say that they do not want Russian natural gas anyway!
Barkley Rosser
So, Russia has stopped selling natural gas to Bulgaria and Poland because they refuse to pay for it in rubles, but they both say that they do not want Russian natural gas anyway!
Barkley Rosser
Vaguely related?
Interesting comparison of Nazi Germany in 1933 to Putin’s Russia.
Putin’s Russia now looks like 1933 Germany
Boston Globe – Francine Hirsch – April 28
Francine Hirsch, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
(About one-third of this op-ed has been posted. So far, the next portion has not been accepted. No point in continuing. Hopefully, the link posted above will permit access.)
Professor Francine Hirsch Writes About Putin and Ukraine in Lawfare
Putin’s Memory Laws Set the Stage for His War in Ukraine
Revanchism (French: Revanchisme, from revanche, “revenge“) is the political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war or social movement. …
Revanchism draws its strength from patriotic and retributionist thought and is often motivated by economic or geopolitical factors. Extreme revanchist ideologues often represent a hawkish stance, suggesting that their desired objectives can be achieved through the positive outcome of another war. … (Wikipedia)
The South shall rise again boys!
It is worth noting that appeasement of Hitler by the British government, and nazi sympathies from the British upper class in the 1930’s (long before Munich) looks a lot like what is going on in some segments of the American political landscape.
And, more worrying, we should recognize that the ability of the Russian people to be fooled by propaganda of the hate your enemies stripe is not so different from that of about half of the Amreican electorate (note to Dobbs… even if Trump “only” got 74million votes, don’t be sure he won’t find another six million from people who until recently thought of themselves as “progressives.”
I think ultimately we are going to have to risk calling Putin’s bluff. Might be safer sooner than later. [I hear he is siek, but it doesn’t sound like he lacks probable successors who may not be even as sane as he is.]
“even if Trump “only” got 74 million votes, don’t be sure he won’t find another six million from people who until recently thought of themselves as “progressives.”
I foresee Jill Stein making another run in 2024, getting 6 million votes maybe.
Though that’d be about 4 times what she and the Green Party got in 2016.
I was thinking more of former liberals who suddenly discovered Truth on the Right. There is something about the lure of power that sleeps fitfully in the human heart and lurches toward Bethlehem to be born.
[note this is not a reference to Christ, but possibly a reference to fake christians who know power when they see it.]
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Do not go gentle into that good night – Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas…
in a poem about the death of his father, I don’t see the relevance here.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight …
And your Yeats poem is not about Donald Trump.
Dobbs
you could have tried to explain the relevance of your Dylan Thomas quote. But I will try to explain the relevance of
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
and the rest of it.. to Trump, Putin, al Qaida
see, it’s about the mindless growth of violence and mere anarchy. insane lies, passionate haters and the feebleness of “the best.”
or something like that.
Yeats wrote it right after WW1 and it describes that era, but it describes better the coming of Hitler and Stalin…from which we recovered more or less,, and which we are seeing again with Trump and the new Republicans, and Putin, and fanatical “islamists”, and quite possibly America’s reliance on bombing everyone it thinks looks like a potential threat…where it can’t simply torture them by locking them up for as long as it takes.
And here I thought it was all about the Second Coming of tyrant Donald Trump, as foretold by Wm Butler Yeats. However did he know?
Fred
it wouldn’t surprise me if you did. but you denied it. Trump is certainly part of it. but not a big enough part for his re-election or not to weigh that heavily in the scales.
i suspect most people suspect the second coming will be something like Jesus drifting down from the clouds, being given a ticker tape parade down fifth avenue and a reception at the white house. then we will all go to church and be good ever after.
But that’s not what it says in the Book…and I missed this the first time I read the Yeats poem: the second coming will be ushered in by war, famine, pestilence, and death. [though Jesus said these are not the end],,,in any case bad times. and maybe this is why Yeats had to do a double take before he made the connection. I’ve never been a believer in the apocalypse myself. It’s just a poem.
Or maybe we are already in it. There is a lot of evil going around, a great deal of which is perpetrated by people who think they are fighting evil.
And I am thinking that Trump is out to snatch up all those Great Lakes votes that he got in 2016 but not in 2020. Those (and a few million more, like in Texas and Arizona) could do the trick.
Though I am sometime reminded by my offspring
that AOC will be eligible to run for the presidency in 2024.
AOC
Dobbs
it’s good that you see that six million votes is not a safe margin.
that’s what I was trying to say.
especially since the Enemy regards votes as fungible.
as, apparently is truth. i don’t know if people thought Hitler’s, and Stalin’s, lies were ridiculous. but the Trumpists have discovered that it doesn’t matter, as has Putin.