Today on Foxnews a couple of newsbimbos, one blonde, one brunette reflected the level of sophistication with regard to foreign affairs now prevalent in the American people.
1. The brunette referred to Poland as an "east bloc country." Evidently she has not heard that the Warsaw Pact and the USSR no longer exist and that Poland is a NATO country.
2..The newsblonde (dark roots) referred to Russia as one of the remaining Communist countries. It is true that there is a neo-communist political party represented in the Russian parliament but they are a minority party and Putin is not a member, quite the opposite.
In general, Americans are ill equipped to deal with any level of complexity in world affairs above the "Captain America" and "Wonder Woman" level. The Canadians should not feel smug about this. They are basically a protectorate of the "Wonder Woman" crowd and Justin Trudeau is oh, so, precious.
pl
That is extremely well put.
thank you.
Richard Sale
@Colonel – It’s even worse – the news bimbo’s were reading something written for them – by people who should know better but probably don’t. Thanks for watching this crap I can’t stomach it. The people who get their “information” from the teevee are pretty much no use as even their terms of reference are wrong.
Not sure why the swipe at Canada – yes Canada is a satrapy of the empire, despite Canadians’ patriotic need to not admit it to themselves.
Justin is a bit of an intellectual lightweight but the wingers’ disdain for his masculinity, purported lack thereof, is in reality a critique of his metrosexual style – which garnered him many distaff votes and a majority government. He doesn’t need wingers’ votes but he sure needs the women’s vote.
An anecdote which would seem to confirm your position Colonel;
It was a few months ago that someone at a social function of fairly high level business people informed me that Russia had been our enemy since World War Two. I usually bail out on these discussions, but I mentioned that the Cold War had to do with the Soviet Union, which no longer existed. I was then informed that the Soviet Union and Russia are, and always have been, the same thing. As far as I could tell he was not drunk, was not even drinking.
What sha have for breakfast today? Two prime pieces! Thanks Pat.
The really sad thing is that there are many people in the State Department, in the Pentagon and the military itself that think and believe in comic book terms. This begs the questions, “Who is promulgating this type of thinking?” and “Who is funding these policies?”
If people reading this site can deal with complexity, then it follows that many others can as well. So why are they not doing so?
Perhaps it is simply because they are not given that option? Maybe it is soundbites and clickbait, all running in a circular pattern?
“In general, Americans are ill equipped to deal with any level of complexity in world affairs above the “Captain America” and “Wonder Woman” level.”
Col. Lang, why do you think that is the case? It would seem, that considering that our polity has such a comic strip worldview, we should pursue an isolationist foreign policy.
I admit I’m also astonished at the notion Russia is communist or has proclivities in that direction. They don’t and it is because they actually experienced what happens in a purportedly socialist state where those in power do what they can to concentrate their power and lock out any threat.
I recall listening to Radio Moscow shortly before the collapse of the USSR. On their “Mailbag” segment some poor fool from Florida wrote in about how unfair our medical system to “the poor” was when the lovely USSR had free medical care for everyone. The answer was along the lines of “Sure, it’s free here but what you get is exactly what you would expect when something’s “free,” close to zero actual care.” Other examples in different radio segments in the late 80’s similarly deprecated their own system.
I recall telling my dad that the USSR was rotting from the top. That they lost their secular religion! Otherwise the broadcasters would have been replaced and sent to Siberia. But my father was so inculcated in the notion that USSR socialism was some sort of fixed, powerful movement that such indications should be ignored as manipulative. Even after the USSR’s collapse he still didn’t believe it was real but some soft of feint.
It is much easier for bimbettes to argue with strawmen.
As i have said before, these mutual antipathies ought to be taken as irreconcilable religious differences thst can only be managed.
Colonel,
Thanks for this post, wish I’d caught the program in question rather than the boring analysis of Trump’s impact in Poland, followed by the EU anti-Erdogan vote, on public radio. Ironically, they succeeded in recognizing that the venue was not that of the launch of Solidarnosc, but rather that of the rise against Germany in WW2.
From VOA,
Sadly, RT and Al Jazeera have consistently delivered cogent and grammatically correct reports through well-spoken hosts, even if you question their doctrine, to the deprecation of most US media outlets that have established a career path for academically challenged cheerleaders.
Were there any male bimbos (mimbos) on the Fox News panel? What was the color of their hair?
Nurse to my wife (Canadienne) – “Justin Trudeau, the Disney prince?”
I’ve actually met Justin a couple of times. He is not a man I would like to share fox hole with. All the women in the family like him, the men don’t.
Col,
The kanadian situation is actually a bit worse: Trudeau the younger may come on as a lightweight but he is a good political scrapper. We may see a lot of him. The defense minister is a cold war relic & the foreign minister is a wannabe Uke. It’s business as usual for a member of ‘the five eye’s’. Oh, and I hope you didn’t think that subprime mortgages & a real estate bubble were just a USA problem.
swami
I ignore the men altogether. pl
luxetveritas
Yes, but you won’t watch and so I must. pl
Swami
What are you? Anti-male? pl
pl, re: Trudeau
He’s identical to the power-hungry drama teacher, Mr. G, from “Summer Heights High,” a very funny show. Here is Trudeau’s on screen counterpart singing a little ditty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgDwg0opvFo
Oilman2,
The best computer running the best program can only give results as good as the data put into it. Garbage data in, garbage results out.
If many “should know better” people have been marinating in a pressure tank of Fake News and Fake Views for years or decades now, their best thinking can only reflect the Fake News and Views they have been pressure-injected with for all these many years.
All the rest of us can do is keep offering better news and better views in hopes that some personal or intellectual crisis will affect one or another “should know better” people one-at-a-time, and their carefully-molded brain-armor will shatter and they will try dealing with their sudden confusion and disorientation in various ways which might randomly include being led to places like here.
Swami,
I wonder if another word for male bimbos might be . . . bimboys?
It is the same age-old struggle of Latin Christianity to hold sway over the Eastern Rites Churches; at times waged by post-Christian secularists like Napoleon & Hitler and presently – and evidently – by “secularized” Puritans in US & UK against vestiges of the Eastern Roman Empire.
I wonder that the cuurent war in and over Syria not being another religious to destroy – yet again – the Shia political power by Sunni powers.
(And if those Sunni powers succeed, I expect another dark age to engulf Islamdom – just as the demise of Bhuids ushered in an age of virulent rigidity.)
I think the term is “himbo”
Good one. Himbos will also work. But bimboys might conjugate with news better, avoiding the “sh” pronunciation dilemma.
It’s debatable whether it was really about Soviet Communism or a continuation of Britain’s “Great Game” which had been going on since the Crimean War. The stance of the Atlantic powers during the post-Soviet era pushes me towards the latter interpretation.
A good reason not to listen to Faux News.
Most Canadians get their news from American sources so yes I agree to at least a certain extent. But being a smaller country (by population) means we are more outward looking by nature. But you will find a ton of questionable nonsense on the TV here as well.
As for PM Justin Trudeau on foreign policy, compared to his father former PM Pierre Elliot Trudeau, lets just say the apple fell on the other side of the planet.
the exceptional missionaries position.
Colonel,
The smear campaign against Sy Hersh
http://www.alternet.org/world/undermining-sy-hershs-syria-bombshell
Shamelessly pilfered from Peter Hitchens.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/the-perils-of-russophobia.html
But the point about all these back-of-beyond places is that we once believed that they were a battlefield between the British and Russian Empires, and a possible invasion route down which the Tsar’s Cossacks would one day come to steal the Raj from us. Read Peter Hopkirk’s book (the Great Game) yourselves to see what you think, but I am more or less sure that this was a phantom fear. If you read his accounts of the adventures of brave, wild men from both sides who first penetrated this lawless, mapless region, you will see that such an invasion was an almost impossibly hopeless task. Any Russian army that reached the Khyber, or Quetta, would be so exhausted, ill-equipped and half-starved that a well-led defensive force could have blown it to pieces.
Russia certainly wanted to own central Asia and to dominate Persia. It had quietly seized large chunks of China which are going to very troublesome in the years ahead. But what it really wanted (and would certainly have got, under secret agreements duly signed and sealed, had the Tsar survived until 1918) was Constantinople. And it used its theoretical ability to threaten India as a counter-tease to Britain, when Britain got in the way of its plans to take over the mouth of the Black Sea.
Russia wanted Constantinople for its own purposes, to secure its southern flank against attack. An intelligent British government would have recognised this, rather than imagining that St Petersburg, as it then was, had a global plan to chuck Britain out of Egypt and deprive us of India. This phantasmal fear was largely to blame for the futile war in the Crimea, whose only lasting benefit to anyone on either side was to improve the standard of hospital nursing. I have a feeling this could have been achieved without a bloody war.
Prominent among those spreading wild Russophobia was none other than The Times newspaper, which still continues in the same tradition today, though in a less direct and appealing way. It’s interesting how often that great newspaper is wrong.
In 1838, long before Rupert Murdoch got hold of it, that organ was roaring: “From the frontiers of Hungary to the heart of Burmah and Nepaul…the Russian fiend has been haunting and troubling the human race, and diligently perpetrating his malignant frauds…to the vexation of this industrious and essentially pacific empire”.
In 1842, after the self-inflicted catastrophe of the First Afghan War and the destruction of an entire British army, ‘The Times’ sought to blame St Petersburg, ‘whose growing influence amongst these tribes first called for our interference’. The Thunderer stressed that Russian agents were ‘examining with the greatest care’ the passes leading into British India . And it was suspicious that one of the first to be killed was the British political officer Sir Alexander Burnes ‘the keenest antagonist of the Russian agents’.
In retrospect it is fairly easy to see that these suspicions were not really justified. How much is written today about Russia by our media which will look just as thin 100, or even ten years hence?
There’s something about Russia – its different alphabet, its troublesome consonants, its bearded intellectuals, its frozen climate, its ferocious vodka, its onion-domed, oriental architecture and its deep dark forests and Siberian vastness, which makes most Western observers throw up their hands in bafflement and (in some cases) wrongly–assumed superiority.
Most Russians are pretty unhappy about their own country’s politics. But they understand all too well how it is that their choices are so limited. Indefensible frontiers make a country put security first and liberty second, authority first and law second, and it would be interesting to see how much English liberty there would be if our small culture had sought to survive on the banks of the Volga or the Don (or come to that the banks of the Loire or the Danube or the Rhine).
Of course, if people would stop attacking Russia, it might develop more towards the liberty and law model (see below). But it gets few chances to do so.
All,
It may be relevant to look back at what were clearly intended as statements of the fundamentals of their political thinking, made by two figures who were to be influential in early twenty-first century politics, just prior to the millennium.
The first contained a discussion of lessons to be learnt, ‘from our past and present’. Drawing these, its author said, was ‘work for society as a whole and more than one year,’ but some of them ‘were already clear.’ The first two:
‘1. For almost three-fourths of the outgoing century Russia lived under the sign of the implementation of the communist doctrine. It would be a mistake not to see and, even more so, to deny the unquestionable achievements of those times. But it would be an even bigger mistake not to realize the outrageous price our country and its people had to pay for that Bolshevist experiment. What is more, [it would be a mistake] not to understand its historic futility. Communism and the power of Soviets did not make Russia a prosperous country with a dynamically developing society and free people. Communism vividly demonstrated its inaptitude for sound self-development, dooming our country to a steady lag behind economically advanced countries. It was a road to a blind alley, which is far away from the mainstream of civilization.
‘2. Russia has used up its limit for political and socio-economic upheavals, cataclysms and radical reforms. Only fanatics or political forces which are absolutely apathetic and indifferent to Russia and its people can make calls to a new revolution. Be it under communist, national-patriotic or radical-liberal slogans, our country, our people will not withstand a new radical break-up. The nation’s tolerance and ability both to survive and to continue creative endeavor has reached the limit: society will simply collapse economically, politically, psychologically and morally.’
(See http://pages.uoregon.edu/kimball/Putin.htm .)
The second opens:
‘Today at the frontier of the new Millennium I set out for you how, as a nation, we renew British strength and confidence for the 21st century; and how, as a Party reborn, we make it a century of progressive politics after one dominated by Conservatives.
‘A New Britain where the extraordinary talent of the British people is liberated from the forces of conservatism that so long have held them back, to create a model 21st century nation, based not on privilege, class or background, but on the equal worth of all.
‘And New Labour, confident at having modernised itself, now the new progressive force in British politics which can modernise the nation, sweep away those forces of conservatism to set the people free.’
(See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1999/sep/28/labourconference.labour14 .)
So tell me: From where should an alert observer have expected the neo-Bolshevik onslaught?
Along those lines of the media’s lack of complexity and its nonstop demonisation of Trump–
One cable pundit yesterday proclaimed that Trump was greeted by violent demonstrators in Hamburg. Well, yes and no. There were protests, but the target of those protestors was not Trump but globalization and capitalism, etc.
The protests were aimed at the G20 world order and as much at Merkel and Macron as at Trump. It would have made no difference if Hillary were president.
But the media never misses an opportunity to bash Trump.
Indeed, David. I worry far more about leftist impulses here at home and in other Western countries than the vestigial ones remaining in Russia. Revolutions driven by the most noble of intentions seem to produce the greatest excesses. The Russian one didn’t produce such excess largely because it wasn’t driven by unhinged thinking (unlike the French which quickly devolved into the Reign of Terror) but by widespread recognition that the great socialist experiment failed.
Interesting. So the Canadians say “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” instead of “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the tree”? I never knew that.