Dateline: MOSCOW—In an exclusive interview with Fancypants Magazine,
Vladimir Putin took offense at the allegation that Donald Trump was competent enough
to have colluded with the Russian government in the hacking of the American political
system that helped win Trump the presidency.
“Trump deserves no credit for that Russian triumph,” said
Putin. “Just as the Soviets did the lion’s share of the work in defeating the
Nazis, my army of hackers vanquished American imperialism almost singlehandedly
by securing Trump’s victory, sowing chaos in America that won’t be repaired for
generations.”
According to Putin, Trump is merely his and his oligarchs’
pawn, not a co-conspirator. “Sure, we helped elect Trump by various underhanded
means. And sure, Trump would have applauded our efforts. But Trump is brainless
and has nothing he could deliberately offer us without screwing it up first. We
wouldn’t accept his conscious attempts to pay us back since he’d just bungle
any pro-Russia scheme in his typical ham-handed manner.
“No, we saved Trump from ignominious failure after his near financial
ruin, when no American lenders would touch him, given his tendency to bankrupt
his companies. Through Bayrock Group, Russian oligarchs invested in
his brand and in his family’s ventures at the start of his media career, in
2002. As Eric Trump said, ‘We don’t rely on American banks. We have all
the funding we need out of Russia.’
“We did this to prop up that psycho-clown,
positioning him as a living WMD to one day blow up the American empire.
“Then we pulled the trigger in 2016, when we
helped to bring down Hillary Clinton by hacking the DNC and manipulating the
egomaniacs and bean-counters in charge of American mass media, supplying them
with fake news they couldn’t resist recirculating.
“Again, we did all this and asked for nothing
in return from Trump. Trump’s being Trump is thanks enough. Being himself, he
couldn’t avoid bringing down the American government from within, once he
became president. He couldn’t help but divide and trash his own country due to
his mental disorders and stupendous incompetence.”
Putin insists on taking all the credit for
Russia’s role in helping to bring Trump to power. Although during the campaign Trump
publicly called for Russia to hack the DNC and retrieve Hillary’s secret emails,
the Russian hackers were busy waging a full-spectrum cyber assault on the American
political system.
“Yes, we heard Trump’s plea for aid against
Hillary Clinton, but Trump deserves no credit for the genius we displayed in
our steering of the American election. He’s a bumbling buffoon that we wanted
to win, because Clinton, the vicious neoliberal, is a hundred times more
threatening to us than Trump, who can be led by the nose just by flattering him
once in a while.”
Putin hopes, though, that Americans continue to
“feed Trump’s ego” with charges of his treachery.
“You have to know what you’re doing to be a co-conspirator,”
Putin said. “You have to be able to put one foot in front of the other without
knocking over a table, slipping and landing on a dog, rolling through a wall
and bringing the whole house down.
“But the more Americans are dazzled by the
conspiracy theories and build up Trump as a criminal mastermind, the more they’ll
stoke his rage and hasten their downfall via his clownish overcompensations.
Naturally, they’ll ignore what I have to say, since who could trust Putin?”
How do you feel about Ezra Levant?
ReplyDeleteI don't follow Ezra Levant closely, but I saw him a few times on the short-lived Sun Times Network. That conservative TV channel shut down after only four years because of very poor viewership, which says something about Levant. He's a "conservative" and therefore a bully, but he's also Canadian and therefore he's civil, so he's not like the rabid troglodytes you find in American "conservative" circles.
DeleteI'd agree with Levant about freedom of speech and the Canadian Human Rights Councils, but I doubt we'd agree on much else. Even his stance against fundamentalist Islam seems wrongheaded. He'd likely take a mere secular humanistic view against radical, militant religions, and so he'd contrast Judaism with Islam.
So he'd miss the point of postmodern criticism of hyper-rationality. For example, he'd fail to see the role of reason in the Washington Consensus (technoscience, neoliberal capitalism and materialistic consumerism) that's responsible for systematically destroying the planet and most animal species, not just a few hundred civilians here or there as in the case of Islamist terrorism.
He'd also fail to see that the exclusivity of Jewish monotheism is the root of current Islamist zealotry. The problem is monotheism, and so Judaism, Christianity, and Islam must all be condemned, although Christianity is the worst for aesthetic reasons, because of its excessive incoherence.
Levant's libertarianism is narrow-minded; he lacks a sufficiently-deep philosophical perspective to put daily events into something approaching their ultimate context.
Some of us view the "destruction of animal species" as a positive. If we aren't lamenting the destruction of the dinosaurs by natural means, why lament the destruction of any other species?
Delete"The lioness sinks her scimitar talons into the zebra’s rump. They rip through the tough hide and anchor deep into the muscle. The startled animal lets out a loud bellow as its body hits the ground. An instant later the lioness releases her claws from its buttocks and sinks her teeth into the zebra’s throat, choking off the sound of terror. Her canine teeth are long and sharp, but an animal as large as a zebra has a massive neck, with a thick layer of muscle beneath the skin, so although the teeth puncture the hide they are too short to reach any major blood vessels. She must therefore kill the zebra by asphyxiation, clamping her powerful jaws around its trachea (windpipe), cutting off the air to its lungs. It is a slow death. If this had been a small animal, say a Thomson’s gazelle (Gazella thomsoni) the size of a large dog, she would have bitten it through the nape of the neck; her canine teeth would then have probably crushed the vertebrae or the base of the skull, causing instant death. As it is, the zebra’s death throes will last five or six minutes"
Well, I've speculated that the function of a self-conscious species may be to serve as life's executioner, which should be the environmentalist's nightmare.
DeleteBut even if extinguishing animal species achieved the greater good of eliminating suffering in the world, a byproduct would likely be our destruction too, since the ecosystem would go as well and we depend on the complex interconnections that make up the food web. For example, the death of bees could eventually kill us off.
Why lament the death of an animal species? Because the much-greater rate of extinctions we're responsible for, compared to what happens naturally with no intelligent design is short-sighted. We certainly haven't killed off all these species for any moral reason, because we take pity on these creatures. We kill them off for food, fur, horns, or to make room for more overpopulated cities. There's not much nobility in that for us.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/04/humankind-as-lifes-executioner.html
the vividly described predation of a zebra by a lion which anonymous quotes is from christopher mcgowan's 1997 book "the raptor and the lamb: predators and prey in the living world"
ReplyDelete