Entries tagged with world affairs

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world affairs

History, whether it chooses to repeat itself or not

Considering the freakish outcome Yevgeny Prigozhin's armed rebellion has already produced (Prigozhin heading to "exile" in Belarus, Putin actually not killing him and somehow staying in power himself), Vladimir Putin might want to consider a history lesson:

On a previous occasion, there a major defeat of non-Soviet military forces caused massive political upheaval in an autocratic Russian government, and it was the Russo-Japanese War. What ultimately followed it was an abortive revolution in 1905, and although it was an abortive revolution it caused opponents of the Czarist regime (ranging from the Constitutional Democratic [i.e., Cadet] party to the Social Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party) to double down in their efforts to overthrow (or at least limit) the power of Czar Nicholas II.

Another series of catastrophic failures against the German Army during World War I made things even worse, and although other factors were in play (severe social and economic inequity, the autocratic nature of the Czarist regime, you name it) those military defeats showed what a paper tiger the Russian Imperial army was. Could they suppress domestic dissent during peacetime? Of course. But could they do it after they were obliterated in military combat against the Deutsches Heer? Hardly.

For a number of reasons I outlined above, Putin might be able to stay in power, but his seat behind his desk in the Kremlin is a lot less sturdy than it was in February 2022 when all of this started. And the only person he has to blame for that is himself.

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It's been a while...

Hi. This is the first time that I've posted anything on this blog for nearly six months, and the reason for that is simple:

A lot of shit has happened. A lot.

If you look at the current situation in Ukraine or the hearings on the attack on the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021 that are going on right now, news events have effectively been an avalanche over the last few months, and they distracted me to the point where I decided not to write anything here because there was just too damn much of it. I'm finally getting around to it now because a friend pointed out that it had been nearly half a year ago when I last posted. Again, it was due to a shitstorm of news that caused me to even feel buried by it at times. I'm sure any number of people - if not a majority - feel the same way.

All that being said, I'm posting this to say that I'm back. I'll probably be posting shorter entries like I did when I first got an account on LiveJournal years ago, but there will be longer pieces from time to time as well. The simple fact is that a blog is only good when it stays updated, and it's about time that I revived this blog and its mirror site. So I have.

Here's hoping that I can keep doing it for a good, long time.

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Twenty years later

The first inkling that something was wrong that morning was a call I received from my friend Paul Carter where all he said was something like "Hey Chris, turn on the TV - you're not going to believe what's happening".

Then all hell broke loose.

And its effects have lasted for two decades afterwards, either directly or indirectly.

At the time, I was in the throes of an extended period of underemployment after I had been cut loose from my previous full-time job in late September of 1998, so I wasn't one of the thousands of people who evacuated downtown office buildings in Chicago after the planes hit in New York, Arlington and crashed after a passenger rebellion over Pennsylvania. I've worked in the Chicago loop for a total of nearly nine years, and I can only imagine how it was that day for people getting out.

A mutual friend of mine and Paul's was downtown that day, though, and what made it worse for Jeffrey Oelkers was that he had been in New York a few weeks before this happened. He had seen the twin towers of the World Trade Center firsthand just like anyone else in the area could. And he saw the terrifying footage of them getting destroyed weeks later after he stopped off at a place that had a TV on after being evacuated from work.

Like the worldwide pandemic that we've been living through since early 2020, 9/11 was an event that brought out the best in people - and the worst. A gas station attendant was shot to death in suburban Phoenix by a moronic self-described "patriot" just because he was wearing a turban. Unsurprisingly, the "patriot" didn't know the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim and even if he did, it probably wouldn't have stopped him from doing it. Conversely, there are stories of women going grocery shopping with Muslim friends of theirs because the Muslim women were afraid of reprisals. Events like 9/11 serve as a psychological mirror since they strip away the detachment that goes with the ability to think at a remove from trauma, and this is ultimately how you find out what you are, unwillingly. The long-term psychological trauma of that otherwise sunny Thursday morning is another element of this tragedy that will continue to be studied for decades afterwards.

Two decades have passed since that morning, and although people eventually went back to a semblance of their normal lives many people were permanently changed by what happened: the surviving close friends, relatives and loved ones of the people who died in the attacks, either as victims of the hijackings or on the ground. The first responders who risked their lives and either died in the collapse of the twin towers or suffered long-term health effects as a result of exposure to the now-poisonous air at the site. The countless scores of active-duty troops, reservists and eventual enlistees who fought in Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks. And countless others who saw it unfold in real time.

But the saddest truth is that after all of this, none of what happened then or since will give those 2,977 people their lives back.

Nothing will.

And that might be the hardest fact to swallow of all.

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world affairs

Afghanistan Agonistes

The impending collapse of Afghanistan shouldn't come as a surprise. And everyone's to blame. Everybody.

Why? Well, here's a thought - the US has been in Afghanistan for 19-plus years; the Soviets were there for roughly a decade. They - and the British Empire before that - thought that they could somehow take an intensely tribal, regionalized, backward society into the current century of their choice and make it behave as if any of the previous military interventions had actually worked.

They hadn't. And contemporary Afganistan is your proof.

From our point of view, no less than four American Presidents thought they could do what no one since Alexander the Great had done, which is change that region into something that it's not, or at least bring the Taliban to heel by military intervention (George W. Bush, Barack Obama until 2014) or by delusional "deals" he supposedly made with the Taliban (Trump). By withdrawing US forces, Biden is facing reality. The fact that that reality was hideously mangled by over forty years of civil wars, military intervention, constant butchery of civilians by warlords and different political and ethnic factions isn't strictly his fault. Instead, it's everybody's, going all the way back to 1978.

Granted, leaving what passes for Afghanistan's political "leadership" out of the blame game is equally daft. According to Transparency International, Afghanistan ranks 165th out of 180 countries in terms of political corruption. Add to this the fact that local military commanders decided to run for their lives or switch sides as soon as the Taliban rolled into town, and what you get is a collapse that was every bit as predictable as it was inevitable. What happens next is up to the Taliban and whoever chooses to fight them in the future, but what will probably happen is that the regime that holds onto Kabul will constitute the "government" and any number of guerilla bands and local warlords will constitute the real political power in the areas they actually control. And if the Taliban decides to shelter another group of Islamist lunatics who killed a shitload of foreign nationals elsewhere as they did with Al-Qaeda, the county will get bombed and invaded all over again. And the common people get to suffer the worst, just like they did in 1979 or 2001.

If Afghanistan ever manages to change - good luck with that idea ever being made a reality - it will be in spite of intervention by world or regional powers, not because of them. Pakistan, Iran and the like have reasons to keep Afghanistan in the current shape it's in, and Pakistan's military establishment in particular has no problems with the Taliban being in charge just as they were up until September 2001. The reality, however, is that the onus is on the Afghani people to fix things themselves. And when you've bottomed out as much as they have, the only direction out is to start to climb back up. Whether they can or not is anyone's guess.

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Nothing good can come from this

It's not as if Qasem Soleimani wasn't a son of a bitch - he was, but a very high-ranking son of a bitch, to say the least - but his death on the business end of a US airstrike (and on neighboring Iraqi territory, on top of it) will do nothing to stabilize a region already fraught with sectarian violence and wall-to-wall atrocities against civilians.

But it couldn't possibly be a wag the dog hedge against certain domestic political issues, especially when embarrassing new evidence was about to come to light, could it?

Nah. Of course not.

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The content of his "character"

It's been a good long while since I posted here. But then this happened, and as usual the interesting times (in the worst Chinese sense of the word "interesting") we live in forced me to comment.

Donald J. Trump has always been a punchline to me. I considered him a self-absorbed, egotistic boor who I couldn't care less about decades ago when he started gaining attention for himself with his high-profile business dealings (more like business failures, but you know what they say about there being no such thing as bad publicity) and his crass acquisition of mistresses and trophy wives alike. I just couldn't be bothered to care about a man whose main purpose in life seemed to be putting his name on as many prominent buildings as possible because his ego was just that big. He was, on balance, a caricature of the crass, high-living tycoon that shows up in good satire and bad soap operas alike. And I was, at best, indifferent.

And then things changed.

He got into politics. And eventually got elected President.

And then a whole bunch of other things came to light about him, and he went from being merely unsavory to being outright dangerous.

Donald Trump believes in a wide assortment of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific woo and gives them a level of credence that belongs on a fringe web site. He's effectively used the United States government as a personal business marketing tool more than once, showed his contempt for Constitutional principles and nominated a number of sycophants and corporate lobbyists to positions in his cabinet and got rid of them when they weren't sycophantic enough for his liking.

He got in bed with wonderful international examples of authoritarian-to-totalitarian "leadership" such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Eun and did a number of things of things to insult or destabilize NATO, the European Union and individual allied nations. He uses his adult children as his personal public relations arm and is also dumb enough to personally involve them in his international and domestic political blunders.

He makes himself out as a cartoonish ubermensch on Twitter, in reports on his physicals that read suspiciously like he personally wrote them and in assertions that he's a "very stable genius". And his racist, sexist and just plain assholish views and practices in and outside of his Presidency are just as well known.

Quite a few of these things are impeachable offenses while others are not, but regardless of whether he ends up getting impeached because of the Ukraine debacle one question remains, and it's a bad one:

How long will it take to clean up the damage he's caused?

Furthermore, will we be able to clean it up?

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world affairs

Fuxit

Unsurprisingly, the continued effects of Nigel Farage's folly are that Theresa May is probably going to go down as the most ineffective British Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain, at least in terms of coming up with a cunning plan to get Parliament to approve a method of letting go of "a far away country..." sorry, Europe.

Farage and the rest of the Brexit supporters hither and yon probably weren't thinking of letting go of Scotland, either, but that's now a real possibility again. It just doesn't pay to be a supporter of nativist-driven initiatives these days - in the UK or the US. Because even if you "win", the unintended consequences won't have to jump very far to bite you in the ass.

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Idiot, Uninterrupted: The Sequel

And so The Donald walked back his bizarre assertions about Russia's innocence in hacking the DNC in 2016.

Oh, wait. He didn't. Or did he? It's getting harder and harder to tell, since President Unintelligible believes that any answer he gives will always be the right one, no matter how much it contradicts previous ones.

Meanwhile, fear the deadly threat that is...Montenegro. All 600,000+ of 'em. Maybe they'll invade Milwaukee or some other city equivalent to their gigantic population.

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Idiot, uninterrupted

So you were one of the people who thought that the Federal indictment against 12 Russian GRU agents would actually convince one Donald J. Trump that being more assertive in his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin was a good idea, right?

Guess again.

What's actually shocking about all of this (other than Trump's sniveling, conspiracy-mongering performance at that post-meeting press conference) is that Trump is now - and deservedly so - getting dogpiled on by seemingly everyone, including high-ranking members of his own party who weren't joining in on the fun previously. Even more shocking is that commentators on Fox News went after him despite the fact that most of their broadcasts fed the very large rodents running amok in his imagination. As you might guess, it was only the complete lunatics and/or self-serving demagogues who decided not to join in, including repulsive tragedy ghoul and all-around blithering dipshit Alex Jones. Then again, if Jones hadn't responded to a Putin dog whistle about George Soros positively I'd be astounded to the point where I'd be checking my pulse.

Equally astounding was President Unintelligible's complete lack of a handle on outward reality during this burning Hindenburg of a presser. You would think - or at least hope - that he'd lay off the conspiracy theory sauce for half a minute, but of course not. All in the service of improving relations with Russia, of course, although Charles P. Pierce pointed out why that really isn't much of a good thing, if at all:

Compared to the president* on Monday, Neville Chamberlain was Conan the Barbarian. In an unprecedented exercise in national self-abasement, the president* threw the American system of justice, the credibility of the intelligence community, and both Robert Mueller and Hillary Clinton into the woodchipper in order to keep faith with a former KGB thug who leads a failing kleptocracy who, just as an added fillip, and right at the end of their mutually disgraceful fandango, issued a non-denial denial of whether or not his government has compromising material on the president*. He's a laff riot, is our Vlad.

They're both cutups. Top rate comedians, in fact.

Too bad the joke is on everybody else.

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Repulsive

...is exactly what you can call this new Federal policy towards certain classes of Asylum seekers:

The policy (US Attorney General) Jeff Sessions took aim at lies at the heart of an area of immigration law that has been hotly contested over the past two decades. During that time, advocates for victims of domestic violence have succeeded in winning cases that liberalized the law to protect victims of abuse or extortion whose home governments couldn’t or wouldn’t protect them. Many of the immigrants granted asylum as a result were fleeing Central American nations that offer little protection to victims of domestic abuse and gangs.

The government does not appear to keep statistics on exactly how many asylum claims fall into the categories Sessions is now excluding, but advocates estimate that domestic violence victims seeking asylum number in the tens of thousands each year. A large share of those requests have been successful, as a result of several administrative rulings and court cases during the Obama administration.

“There are many, many Central American women and women from other parts of the world who have been able to obtain protection,” said Denise Gilman, director of the immigration clinic at the University of Texas Law School in Austin. “Many women sitting right now in detention under these claims might lose their right to obtain protection and be deported to dangerous situations.”

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees had urged Sessions against changing the asylum rules. It warned that such action would violate international agreements the U.S. has entered into concerned refugees and would subject victims to being returned to situations where their lives are in danger. The American Bar Assn. warned that ending the asylum eligibility for victims of domestic violence “would further victimize those most in need of protection.”

So, yeah, trouble all around: both for former (and, to be perfectly blunt about it, possible future) victims affected by this policy change, but also in terms of our living up to those inconvenient little things called "international agreements" as well. And a humanitarian one that most sane people wouldn't argue with in the first place, to boot.

Then again, international agreements? Even among formerly close allies? Who the hell needs those these days?

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Mother Russia, abusive parent

The correlation you can draw between the attempted assassination of yet another pair of Russian expatriates (in this case, former Russian intelligence agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia) and this ill-disguised threat on Russian state television is quite a simple one: cross Vladimir Putin and you'll end up dead.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world, a certain other demagogic politician possessing a good deal less intelligence than Czar Vladimir apparently continues to believe that his good buddy would never, ever attempt to interfere with American elections. At least that's what this unspent $120 million intended to prevent such interference in the future seems to indicate.

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Oh noes!

I now haz a Dreamwidth account.

As to why, here it is in a nutshell from The Mary Sue:

LiveJournal was bought by the Russian company SUP Media in 2007, but the servers themselves weren’t relocated to Russia until December of 2016. The new Terms of Service (TOS) agreement bans “political solicitation” and requires that any content which is considered “inappropriate for children according to Russian law” be marked as adult/18+ content. Given Russia’s attitudes toward LGBTQIA content, this likely means any queer content must be marked as 18+. Some users have argued that the new terms could even constitute an outright ban on LGBTQIA content.

In addition, any LiveJournal blog which receives more than 3,000 viewers in a 24-hour period must register as a media outlet; this places that blog’s content under even further content restrictions. Critics of the new policy further worry that LiveJournal’s compliance efforts will expose users to the Russian police force’s invasive web monitoring.

Uh, no. Afraid not. Thanks, but I'll pass.

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There are no words...

...to describe the barbarity of this:

Washiqur Rahman’s Facebook banner declares “#IamAvijit”, after the leading secular and humanist blogger, Avijit Roy, who was murdered a month ago in Bangladesh.

This morning Washiqur Rahman himself was killed in similar circumstances: a machete attack by assailants on the streets of Dhaka. The brutal attack took place close to Rahman’s home. Police have reportedly taken two men into custody who were detained at the scene.

This stands as proof that violent religious fundamentalists - regardless of their creed, race or upbringing - are good at three things: finding followers to manipulate, terrifying their opponents into silence and killing the ones who dare to continue to speak out. And it's seemingly getting worse all the time.

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Tragedy and stupidity, all at once

In the wake of the mass murders at Charlie Hebdo, never let it be said that you can't find an American wingnut who remains completely incapable of separating his grimy fantasies from reality.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Bill Donohue.

Now take him away and put him somewhere far from civilized people.

Please.

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world affairs

In Memoriam

The Rwanda genocide of 1994, as told by former Canadian Forces general Romeo Dallaire whose own experience running the UN's undermanned and outgunned Assistance Mission was just another reminder that even the highest-ranking soldiers can see far too much in terms of bloodbaths for their own good.

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Lessons in comparative stupidity on current events

It might come as a rude shock to Weepy and his shrinking circle of acolytes at The Blaze, but Malala Yousafzai actually has accomplished at least one useful thing in her life - which is one more than he ever has.

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In Memoriam: Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

I don't think I can say anything to do him proper justice in a eulogy, so I'll just let the New York Times do it instead:

The question most often asked about Mr. Mandela was how, after whites had systematically humiliated his people, tortured and murdered many of his friends, and cast him into prison for 27 years, he could be so evidently free of spite.

The government he formed when he finally won the chance was an improbable fusion of races and beliefs, including many of his former oppressors. When he became president, he invited one of his white wardens to the inauguration. Mr. Mandela overcame a personal mistrust bordering on loathing to share both power and a Nobel Peace Prize with the white president who preceded him, F. W. de Klerk.

And as president, from 1994 to 1999, he devoted much energy to moderating the bitterness of his black electorate and to reassuring whites against their fears of vengeance.

The explanation for his absence of rancor, at least in part, is that Mr. Mandela was that rarity among revolutionaries and moral dissidents: a capable statesman, comfortable with compromise and impatient with the doctrinaire.

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Vx Dy and his bestest buddies from Afghanistan

Yet more screed that makes me wonder if Th**d*r* B**l* really hates women so much that he's willing to make common cause with religious fanatics capable of this sort of violence in order to keep women permanently barefoot and pregnant.

(NOTE: as usual, that isn't a direct link to the website of the steaming turd in question. I do have standards, you know...)

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And the prize goes to...

I fail to see how these two shouldn't have got the 2013 Nobel Prize in physics, but I'm sure someone will argue that point. I won't.

Nearly 50 years ago, Francois Englert of Belgium and Peter Higgs of the United Kingdom had the foresight to predict that the particle existed.

Now, the octogenarian pair share the Nobel Prize in physics in recognition of a theoretical brilliance that was vindicated by the particle's discovery last year.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to them.

Higgs and Englert's theories behind the elusive Higgs boson explained what gives matter its mass.

The universe is filled with Higgs bosons. As atoms and parts of atoms zoom around, they interact with and attract Higgs bosons, which cluster around them in varying numbers.

Certain particles will attract larger clusters of Higgs bosons, and the more of them a particle attracts, the greater its mass will be.

The explanation helped complete scientists' understanding of the nature of all matter.

"The awarded theory is a central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed," the Royal Swedish Academy said in a post on Twitter.

As is tradition, the academy phoned the scientists during the announcement to inform them of their win. They were unable to reach Higgs, for whom the particle is named.

The conversation with Englert was short and sweet. "I feel very well, of course," he said, when he heard the news. "Now, I'm very happy."

Deservedly so, I might add.

(Also on Lurker)

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world affairs

Unsurprisingly, "nyet".

So, about those markings on Syrian rockets that don't appear to be in Arabic?

A United Nations report finding "clear and convincing evidence" of a deadly chemical attack built new momentum Monday for demands by the United States and allies to impose tough penalties on Syria if it fails to honor promises to surrender its arsenal.

Although the 38-page report from a U.N. scientific team does not assign blame, Western diplomats and independent experts said it offers undeniable evidence that Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces fired sarin-filled rockets with Russian markings (emphasis mine) into Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. The United States says more than 1,400 people were killed.

Western diplomats said the weapons and sarin described by U.N. experts displayed sophisticated manufacturing techniques beyond the capabilities of rebel forces, and that U.N. data about the trajectory of the rockets indicated that they were fired from government-held territory.

"The technical details of the U.N. report make clear that only the regime could have carried out this large-scale chemical weapons attack," said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "It defies logic to think that the opposition would have infiltrated the regime-controlled area to fire on opposition-controlled areas."

On the other hand, take a guess what Russia's reaction to all this was:

Russia sharply criticized the new United Nations report on Syria’s chemical arms use on Wednesday as biased and incomplete, hardening the Kremlin’s defense of the Syrian government even while pressing ahead with a plan to disarm its arsenal of the internationally banned weapons.

The Russians also escalated their critiques of Western governments’ interpretations of the United Nations report, which offered the first independent confirmation of a large chemical weapons assault on Aug. 21 on the outskirts of the Syrian capital, Damascus, that asphyxiated hundreds of civilians.

Although the report did not assign blame for that assault to one side or the other in Syria’s civil war, analyses of some of the evidence it presented point directly at elite military forces loyal to Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad. The United States, Britain, France and human rights and nonproliferation groups also say that the report’s detailed annexes on the types of weapons used, the large volume of poison gas they carried, and their trajectories, all lead to the conclusion that the forces of Mr. Assad were culpable.

I hate to be snarky, here (well, maybe I don't), but if anything this proves that the historians who thought that the Soviet urge to engage in unsavory international acts was a de facto continuation of the Russian push for imperial hegemony were right.

Communism is supposedly as dead as a doorknob in Russia, but their need to play these sort of games hasn't ended. My guess is that the one thing standing in the way of a functioning democracy in Russia (beside Putin's need to be in complete control until he either dies of old age, gets assassinated or ends up in the hands of extraterrestrials, whichever comes first) is that all a leader has to do is play to the chauvinistic Wronged Great Power sensibilities of a certain bloc of voters there and voila! That person gets to be President for life and can play the game all over again.