Category Archives: English

Analyze This: On ‘The Factor,’ Psychologizing Passes As Analysis

Conservatism, Democrats, English, Foreign Policy, Reason, Republicans, Russia

Bill O’Reilly, star of Fox New, has this Pavlovian response to any suggested comparison between Russian and American military bellicosity: he foams at the mouth. Why is it absolutely verboten, on The Factor, to compare Russia’s “excursion” into Ukraine to America’s naturally illicit and illegal occupations of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, on and on?

You’re in for a treat. In defense of their reflexive rejection of the reasonable, if inaccurate, comparison—for decades the US has been far more aggressive than Russia in its foreign policy—don’t expect argument from Bill, Juan Williams and the gang. What you get is a form of ad hominem, or psychologizing.

President Vladimir Putin, said (today, Monday, March 3) Bill, is a thug. That’s why he can’t be compared to “a good country” like the US. (Childish doesn’t begin to cover this stuff.) Apparently Bush and Obama are never to be called thugs.

Why, Billy? Because they’re American?

The other “argument” for the lack of validity of said comparison was that Putin seeks the recrudescence of the Russian empire (my usage; Bill and the gang did not use that word. Read about Bill’s valiant but botched attempts to promote English). Bill has read Putin’s mind, and knows he wants Russia to be an empire again. Hence we cannot compare the actions on the ground of the two countries.

If ever you doubted that liberals and conservatives are situated on the same foreign-policy continuum, listen to the prescriptions for Ukraine of leftist Juan Williams. On the same silly segment, the Fox News “analyst” recommended that the US freeze the assets of individual Russians, stateside and abroad, expel visiting Russians and stop Russians from traveling to the US, all in retaliation for the presence of Russian forces in Crimea (which is dominated by a Russian-speaking population). Williams, naturally, also wants to see economic sanctions placed on Russia.

Williams is an “analyst” in the same way Bill O’Reilly is a thinker.

Blood Brothers, The Ukraine And ‘The Enduring Schism’

English, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Correctness, Russia

Blood brother is a perfectly good, if colorful, phrase to denote fealty between like-minded men. Yet in the land of the terminally stupid, linguistic flourish can become a liability; the use of a phrase “proof” of a Nazi mindset, whatever that means.

Hush. Don’t tell our deracinated neoconservative and neoliberal leaders, stateside, but “blood brother,” a perfectly proper appellation deployed by Ted Nugent to describe his affinity for “Texas Republican gubernatorial hopeful Greg Abbott,” works as well to explain many a conflict in Europe (and the US).

What I take away from Nebojsa Malic’s fascinating historic insight into the complex dynamics that undergird “present-day trouble in Ukraine” is that it stands in stark contrast to the simplistic paradigm with which Anglo-American neoconservatives rape the same reality.

Malic, who is now at the The Reiss Institute for Serbian Studies, Writes:

… can be traced back not to the Mongol invasion that destroyed the first Russian state, but to the 1595 Union of Brest – when, under tremendous pressure of the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, some of the Orthodox clergy decided to submit to Rome. These “Uniates” have been the driving force behind the creation of a separate, anti-Russian, “Ukrainian” identity at almost every point in history since. They allied with Poland during the civil war that brought the Bolsheviks to power and reorganized the tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union; likewise, they allied with Hitler in 1941, and were sheltered by the British after 1945 as “good Catholics and fervent anti-Communists” (see here). Since Ukraine became an independent state in 1991 (following Boris Yeltsin’s dissolution of the USSR), they’ve sought to dominate its politics, which culminated recently with the “Maidan” coup. …

… While other factors – such as Islam, or geopolitics – have certainly played a role, the millennium-long history of Catholic hostility towards the Orthodox is the key to understanding the conflicts in Europe’s East. Not surprisingly, it is also the explanation least mentioned and examined. It doesn’t take a genius to see why.

MORE.

UPDATED: How Do I Hate Thee, Barack Hussein Obama? Let Me Count The Ways

Barack Obama, English, Healthcare, Literature, South-Africa

As some of you know, I’ve been waylaid by a diabolical flu, now in its 5th week. Recovery is glacial. Today came a setback dealt by a bill for $307! The bill, for a meager chest X-Ray, is one I never imagined I’d get. Something as elementary as ruling out pneumonia in a patient is no longer covered in full, thanks to fuckface Obama. And I enjoyed a good insurance plan before fuckface’s distribution scheme went into effect. I can’t imagine the costs shouldered by those of you who did not have as comprehensive a plan as I had.

So How Do I Hate Thee, Barack Hussein Obama?

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
I hate thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I hate thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I hate thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I hate thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I hate with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I hate thee with a hate I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I hate thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but hate thee better after death.

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

UPDATE: “Not even in South Africa would we pay so much for an X-ray..!! R3300.25 No way… what the hell is happening there??” Brian James Smith via Facebook.

Do You Hate ‘Dynamism’? Or Wonder WTF It Means?!

English, IMMIGRATION, Labor, libertarianism

Other than lite libertarian Virginia Postrel, who uses the word “dynamism”?

Ms. Postrel is an establishment-endorsed libertarian. A filament of the Postrel faith, expressed in her first book, “The Future and its Enemies,” is that all change is good, always. All that glitters is gold was the essence of Ms. Postrel’s second manifesto, “The Substance of Style.”

Profound stuff.

In any event, the answer to the question posed above is: George Will and a bunch of libertarian losers.

Will was lecturing radio host Laura Ingraham about the “economic dynamism” with which millions of low- or no skill illegal immigrants slated for amnesty will infuse the American workforce. (Not according to Harvard economist George Borjas.)

During this libertarian love-in at the border, the dynamism concept was deployed to libel those who’re not as hip about the proven miseries of diversity:

“They hate ‘dynamism'” was the phrase used 19 minutes into this broadcast.

Far and away more damning than the use of the cant phrase dynamism is the absence of intellectual oscillation among the participants. This anarchist “debate” reminds one of Dorothy Parker’s immortal words about Jack Kerouac and his buddies: “When they speak at all it is to tell each other how great they are.”

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