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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-73
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Covid-19:
The greater depression:
Civil War of 2020:
Liars:
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu presented U.S. President Donald Trump with a doctored video which showed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas calling for the murder of children, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Bob Woodward in his new book "Rage". <
Dune:
- Dune (1984/2020) side-by-side comparison (vid)
A side-by-side, shot-for-shot comparison between the trailer for Dune (2020) and the 1984 film adapted from the same novel by Frank Herbert. This video is meant to show the variety of choices made by two different groups of filmmakers 36 years apart when adapting the same written work.
The David Lynch original looks better to me.
Use as open thread …
juliania re Dune: There is in fact a relationship between the movie Lawrence of Arabia and Dune, even in the white man who leads the desert dwellers to safety. (We may be sure the Atreides are “white.”) They have a common source, the man T.E. Lawrence, author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, once famed for its spiritual wisdom drawn from the people of Arabia. There is a lot more to Herbert’s novel than warmed over Lawrence, but that was one of his influences. Hence the obvious similarities. I suppose one could focus on the obvious dissimilarities…
LuRenJia@216 seems to want to narrowly restrict “religion” to worship of a personal deity. A private dictionary is irrefutable, of course. I say that listing the I Ching, a book of divination, as a classic, along with the book of rites, is quite enough of an appeal to the supernatural. Mandating the performance of the rites is also open acknowledgement of the supernatural.
A more or less random quotation from the Doctrine of the Mean (one of the four Confucian books alongside the Analects, the Great Learning and Mencius.
“The Master said, “How greatly filian was Shun! His virtue was that of a sage; his dignity was the throne; his riches were all within the four seas. He offered his sacrifices in his ancestral temple, and his descendants preserved the sacrifices to himself. Therefore having such great virtue, it could not but be that he should obtain the throne, that he should obtain those riches, that he should obtain his fame, that he should attain to his lon life. Thus it is that Heaven, in the production of things, is sure to be boutiful to them, according to their qualities. Hence the tree that is flourishing, it nourishes, while that which is ready to fall, it overthrows. In the Book of Poetry, it is said, “The admirable amiable prince displayed conspicuously his excelling virtue, adjusting his people, and adjusting his officers. Therefore, he received from Heaven his emoluments of dignity. It protected him, assisted him, decreed him the throne; sending from Heaven these favors, as it were repeatedly” We may say therefore that he who is greatly virtuous will be sure to receive the appointment of Heaven.” Admittedly a public domain translation by James Legge, but, public domain is cheap.
The declaration is that “Heaven” rewards virtue, of the emperor at least. That matters of course because the emperor performing the rites serves some sort of supernatural function. So no, the emperor was not a pope in the sense of pronouncing on doctrine. But the ancestral rites are comparable to a Pope consecrating a bishop or saying Mass. Certainly, “Heaven” here is not “Nature.” You could write “Providence,” but that’s just a nondenominational synonym for “God.”
Another way of putting is to remember—or be told, if one didn’t already know—that the popular religion of the average church goer may be very, very different from the refined ideas of the educated theologians. Often they are well-versed in secular philosophy, a field which has often be deemed a handmaiden to theology, anyhow. It is notorious that clergy may have far less literal beliefs in the supernatural, even to the point of not accepting Jesus did miracles. But that does not mean Christianity is not a supernatural religion with a personal deity. Popular Confucianism blends in with Chinese traditional medicine, for one. Daoism is not just Laozi and Zhuangzi either. Daoism is also the popular religion you mention. The high-minded, purified versions of Confucianism, Daoism, Christianity, even Stoicism in the late Roman empire, were not magically separate from popular worship. The elites just wished they were.
But again, if one chooses a private definition rather than actual usage, there is no refutation.
Posted by: steven t johnson | Sep 16 2020 1:33 utc | 228
@ Posted by: Piotr Berman | Sep 16 2020 21:53 utc | 268
It makes sense. Let’s follow the whole thing in a timeline, from past to present:
1) Belarus color revolution (early August); we know for a fact it was headed by the EU, therefore by Germany;
2) Navalny fake poisoning (late August); Navalny flew to Germany (Berlin, of all cities) at personal request of her wife. Germany spearheads the attack against Russia.
So have almost simultaneous operations in East Europe, divided by two weeks. Both events involve the same country: Germany.
But there’s a “1.5” moment in this timeline, one which complicated Germany’s master plan:
1.5) Belarus color revolution failed too quickly, even before Navalny was “poisoned” (mid August).
Germany certainly planned the whole thing to be successful. I don’t have to prove that, it’s simply human nature to like winning and hate losing.
Let’s assume everything went according to the plan. We would then have:
Belarus color revolution success, Lukashenko toppled, liberal junta empowered in Minsk → EU and NATO get a foothold in Minsk (the gateway to invade and flatten Moscow militarily) → Navalny is “poisoned”, Putin gets on the defensive, giving time for NATO and the EU to consolidate their newly gained position → Russia is completely vulnerable militarily and economically (new sanctions), opening the way to a neo-Yeltsin after Putin’s death.
This pattern follows the Ukrainian one. Indeed, what saved the day for Russia in Ukraine was the fact that the brave peoples of the Donbass and Crimea acted quickly and decisively, completely neutralizing all the gains of the EU in Western Ukraine and, to top it off, creating a financial black hole to the IMF (as Western Ukraine is a failed state). Yes, you heard that right: the milky bar you’re buying in the USA and Europe is financing neo-nazis in Western Ukraine.
Belarus wasn’t so simple: it is a big plains, indefensible if invaded. There’s no “Belarusian Donbass”. Lucky for Russia, again, there’s a little piece of paper called “Union State” and Lukashenko is a very popular head-of-state, who commands absolute power in Belarus. He quickly and easily crushed the color revolutionaries and took decisive action in the frontier with Lithuania and Poland and mercilessly arrested Western and Russian “journalists” (i.e. propagandists). The Europeans miscalculated: they didn’t take into account that Lukashenko, as a communist, doesn’t believe in those transcendental postmodern liberal credos. As a Marxist, he doesn’t believe in fairy tales.
Whatever the details, fact is such an aggressive expansion attempt led by Germany marries well with its old Prussian doctrine. Germany is an American protectorate, but it’s hard to believe it is in a such deplorable state as to allow the CIA and NATO to use it as a façade to war against Russia. There must be some boundaries. If that’s correct, then there must exist a nationalist, “Prussian” faction of the German bourgeoisie with huge influence in the Bundestag. Indeed, the German car industry has significant investments in Russia proper. I think they want even more – specially if sweetened with cheap gas (Nordstream II finalization).
But, with loss, comes division, and the failure of the Belarus color revolution compromised the Navalny phase of the operation. My hypothesis here is that some Atlanticist faction of the German bourgeoisie – which represents the traditional spirit of West Germany, the spirit of the Cold War – took the reins of the Bundestag and used the Navalny operation as an anti-NS II operation. I’ve already mentioned the list, which includes the Green Party and others. They certainly have friends: Lithuania, Poland, West Ukraine and the other Baltics immediately came to their support for the cancellation of the NS-II. Militarily speaking, the picture here is clear: East Europe is to be converted into a buffer zone between Russia and “Europe”. The German Atlanticists certainly plan to use Polish and Baltic hate towards Russia to forever cut it off from the European Peninsula (EU). This also aligns much better with NATO’s interests, as we can deduce from the sad case of Norway and, to a lesser degree, Sweden (with their evil/Russian dolphins and whales theory).
All this little story only makes sense if there are two factions in the German capitalist class, with roughly the same power.
Posted by: vk | Sep 19 2020 22:31 utc | 271
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