Mungable Politics
It’s amusing to me how mungable the political spectrum is in the United States.
On one hand, you’ve got Republicans passionate about Trump appointing Elon and Vivek to remove government regulations with the DOGE. Because government regulations are bad, mmkay?
Meanwhile, they are also excited about RFK jr’s plans as the incoming Health Secretary “for greater regulation of food additives and ultraprocessed foods”.
Regulation over here = bad. Regulation over there = good.
It just goes to show you that Trump doesn’t really have a position on regulation. It’s a tool that should be used or prevented on a basis to be determined by “what sells”.
And just to show it isn’t only the Republicans who have mungable positions – the Democrats in the U.S.A. have been wanting more regulations on food additives for years but doing little about it when they had the chance. Now they are up in arms over the appointment of RFK jr. And while I agree that many of his positions are bonkers, and even a broken clock is right twice a day, you should at least be able to agree with people from the other side when they say something that makes sense.
Like, for example, Trump saying the U.S.A. should stop supporting Ukraine. I’ve talked about this for years on the Bullshit Filter, but you should also listen to these recent interviews with Scott Horton on Greenwald and Jeffrey Sachs on Useful Idiots who explain the background in lots of detail.
People keep asking me whether or not I think Trump is really anti-war. I don’t think he has a firm position on that, either. I think he’ll do whatever suits his private interests or the interests of his biggest supporters. He’ll probably lower U.S. support for their sneaky takeover of Ukraine but increase support for Israel’s genocide, and at some point attack Iran again.
Like his position on TikTok (wanting to ban it during his first term, then wanted to support it when one of their biggest investors became one of his biggest supporters), everything is mungable. Trump‘s strategy seems to be “let’s go find out what people are angry about or passionate about and then just say we’re going to fix that”, and in doing so, he’s managed to take over the Republican Party and turn it into a new party which has managed to grab the working class vote as well as various progressive positions like bigger regulations on health and food and ending the war in Ukraine. It’s really incredible to watch play out.
Elon and his Messiah Complex
My boys and I were talking this morning over chess about Elon and his messiah complex. We’re convinced that he thinks it is justified to do whatever he has to do (including help get Trump elected) in order to move fast enough with his plans to save the human race from extinction. In philosophy it’s called “consequentialism”. I talked about the idea of ‘consequentialism’ in The Psychopath Epidemic:
Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s “Great Purge” and his collectivization of the Soviet agricultural sector might be examples of consequentialism. His desire to force the Soviet Union into a more productive economy and to rid her of internal counter-revolutionaries (real or imagined) may have, in his mind, justified breaking a few—or a million—eggs. He might have concluded that it was better that a million people should go to the gulags than have two hundred million people starve or murdered during the next invasion. As it turned out, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union a few years later, only twenty-seven million Soviet people died, thanks partly to Stalin’s push for rapid industrialization in the previous few years.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, is often rationalized by people in the United States as being necessary to prevent a land invasion of Japan, which would have potentially led to even more deaths. Earlier in WWII, the RAF and USAF dropped hundreds of thousands of phosphorus bombs on civilian centers in Germany —650,000 on Dresden alone. Tens of thousands of innocent people died, mostly women and children noncombatants, “simply for the sake of increasing the terror,” according to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Of course, this was justified as a means of helping the Allies win the war.
From 1990 until 2003, the United Nations imposed debilitating economic sanctions on Iraq, resulting in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people (depending on which source you believe)—half of them children. Denis Halliday, the appointed United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned in 1998 after a thirty-four-year career with the UN, saying, “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s successor also resigned in protest, calling the effects of the sanctions a “true human tragedy.” The stated aim of the sanctions was to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. When asked by Lesley Stahl of CBS News if the price of 500,000 dead children was worth it, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who at the time was Bill Clinton’s UN Ambassador, replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.” Although the total number of dead children is now debated, Albright’s response, to a number she apparently accepted at the time, is the point.
For Elon it might just be The Trolley Problem on a global scale. He might think it’s worth whatever it takes to save humanity and that he can only do that under a Trump administration that he can manipulate. Of course, I think he probably also thinks of Trump as a mental (and financial) dwarf. Musk is definitely the smarter, as well as the richer, of the two. And, arguably, the more powerful.
NATO v Russia
The Biden administration’s recent decision to allow Ukraine / NATO to fire missiles deep into Russian territory demonstrates the lies that the West have been claiming about NATO’s bases that surround Russia for the last couple of years. “Oh they are just defensive” they say. Until they aren’t, of course. So now we see Ukraine firing ATACMS into Russia, which can only be done with the direct involvement of NATO / USA.
According to the NYT:
The long-range missile — known as ATACMS and pronounced like “attack ’ems” — can strike targets 190 miles away with a warhead containing about 375 pounds of explosives. It can be fired from the HIMARS mobile launchers that the United States has provided Ukraine, as well as from older M270 launchers sent from Britain and Germany.
Apparently Biden is no longer trying to prevent World War III. I’ve heard it explain, by people like Jeffrey Sachs, that the Biden administration figure Putin figures that Trump will put an end to it in a month, so there’s no point launching nukes. Meanwhile, the hawks in the Pentagon and Biden administration get to have some fun blowing shit up.
By the way, as I heard someone say recently, can you imagine how Russians feel about German tanks being in Ukraine after the history Russia had in the 20th century with German invasions? Especially when part of the agreement about NATO not expanding if Russia allowed a re-united Germany was the fear of exactly that?
And the whole argument that NATO bases are “for defense” would ring a little hollow to Russian ears. Apart from the fact that it isn’t true, as they can obviously easily be used for firing missiles into Russia (as per Ukraine), they could also be used to prevent a retaliation from Russia in the event of a first strike from the West.
