|
The MoA Week In Review – OT 2021-066
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
Other issues:
Spying:
Covid-19 – Fluvoxamine:
China Tech cleanup:
Iran:
Use as open thread …
The evacuation’s not yet done, but post-evacuation essays are already being written and published. The first is Alastair Crooke’s The ‘Great Reset’ in Microcosm: “Data Driven Defeat” in Afghanistan is informed by several sources, the first of which is cited thusly:
““A retired Navy SEAL who served in the White House under both Bush and Obama reflected,[that] ‘collectively the system is incapable of taking a step back to question basic assumptions.’ That ‘system’ is best understood, not simply as a military or foreign policy body, but as a euphemism for the habits and institutions of an American ruling class that has exhibited an almost limitless collective capacity for deflecting the costs of failure.
“This class in general, and the people in charge of the war in Afghanistan in particular, believed in informational and management solutions to existential problems. They elevated data points and statistical indices to avoid choosing prudent goals and organizing the proper strategies to achieve them. They believed in their own providential destiny and that of people like them to rule, regardless of their failures”. [Emphasis Original]
Crooke thus writes:
“The flaw was that Afghanistan as a liberal progressive vision was a hoax in the first place: Afghanistan was invaded, and occupied, because of its geography. It was the ideal platform from which to perturb Central Asia, and thus unsettle Russia and China.
“No one was truly committed because there was really no longer any Afghanistan to commit to. Whomsoever could steal from the Americans did so. The Ghani regime collapsed in a matter of days, because it was ‘never there’ to begin with: A Potemkin Village, whose role lay in perpetuating a fiction, or rather the myth of America’s Grand Vision of itself as the shaper and guardian of ‘our’ global future.
“The true gravity for America and Europe of the present psychological ‘moment’ is not only that nation-building, as a project intended to stand up liberal values been revealed as having ‘achieved nothing’, but Afghanistan débacle has underlined the limitations to technical managerialism in way that is impossible to miss.” [My Emphasis]
Crooke then paraphrases Robert Kagan:
“that the ‘global values’ project (however tenuous its basis in reality) nonetheless has become essential to preserving ‘democracy’ at home: For, he suggests, an America that retreats from global hegemony, would no longer possess the domestic group solidarity to preserve America as ‘idea’, at home, either.
“What Kagan is saying here is important — It may constitute the true cost of the Afghanistan débacle. Every élite class advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating myths can take many forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted, or lose their credibility – when people no longer believe in the narrative, or the claims which underpin that political ‘idea’ – then it is ‘game over’. [My Emphasis]
If that becomes true, Caitlin Johnstone and many others will be jubilant as the Establishment Narrative collapses. But Crooke’s not finished. He then cites and links to the second main source, an essay by Swedish intellectual, Malcolm Kyeyune, “Farewell to Bourgeois Kings”, whose pen thrust sinks in deeply:
“The American withdrawal has turned into a rout of the most desperate sort, with nobody really seeming to be in charge or claiming responsibility. Who will evacuate the american civilians? Who knows? Maybe the plucky russians could do Uncle Sam a solid – the russian consular staff is still there, they didn’t flee Kabul by piling into a waiting helicopter, after all – and help America’s wayward sons and daughters now that America herself seems to just have given up on the job? Maybe it’s now Xi Jinping’s job to clean up this godawful mess, or perhaps the taliban themselves will have to take responsibility for the safety of American citizens and soldiers, given that the actual superpower in the room seems so incapable of doing it? It is hard to talk about the unfolding situation without becoming excessively sarcastic; stories of military dogs being given seating on planes while afghanis desperately cling to the wings just outside the cabin window, or the local McDonalds in Kabul being temporarily staffed by marines, almost defy words. They might not be true, but they don’t exactly beggar belief; the department of defense making sure McDonalds can keep itself staffed in its final days of operation thanks to USMC jarheads pitching in to flip burgers is no more ridiculous than Emperor Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns down around him. What makes this moment in history so, well, historic, is the almost inescapable sense, shared across the political and national spectrum, that we are watching something very similar before our very eyes: the American empire is burning, and nobody knows what to do about it, much less how to put the fire out.” [My Emphasis]
Kyeyune then cites the famous essay by Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, then puts the citation into his own words:
“What Schmitt is saying here is very important, and it might very well end up being the true cost of the Afghanistan debacle. Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.”
Crooke then grandly concludes what many of us have already speculated about:
“There is therefore, little mystery as to why the Taliban took over Kabul so quickly. Not only did the project per se lack legitimacy for Afghans, but that aura of claimed expertise, of technological inevitability that has protected the élite managerial class, has been exposed by the sheer dysfunctionality on display, as the West frantically flees Kabul. And it is precisely how it has ended that has really drawn back the curtain, and shown the world the rot festering beneath.” [My Emphasis]
The questions now become: How fast will the rot disintegrate and how much damage will ensue?
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 30 2021 21:16 utc | 117
@c1ue #112:
As usual, you purport to know things but clearly you don’t.
You have just described yourself.
It isn’t just me pronouncing open source security is shyte, it is one of the titans of the open source area – Paul Vixie.
First of all, Paul Vixie is certainly not a “titan” of open source. More importantly, I don’t care what Paul Vixie or anyone else thinks. I only care about logical arguments.
Nor has Mr. Vixie made a blanket pronouncement – he stated a specific reason why OS software security is shyte.
And I stated a specific reason for why this argument does not apply to GrapheneOS: it does not have “tens to hundreds of billions of lines of code”. To give you a sense of scale, AOSP 8.0.0 has 26 million lines of .cpp/.java code.
Nor is your commentary about “long term” relevant – it is precisely the maintenance of long term open source code which is the source of so many security problems.
Congratulations, you have zero reading comprehension skills. The “long-term” qualifier applied not to the age of the code base, but to the goal of the open-source movement to return control of devices back to users, which requires writing open-source firmware for all processors inside devices, which is hard because these processors don’t have publicly available documentation. It is these efforts to reverse-engineer popular processors and/or find vendors that will agree to make their documentation public, as well as writing the first open-source implementation of the relevant firmware that are hard and, therefore, are long-term goals.
New OS stuff tends to be not used – but there are all sorts of open source bits being called by other open source bits which are fundamentally insecure and have been so for decades.
Guess what, there are people who understand this and have set out to create new open-source operating systems focused on security precisely because of their understanding.
But thanks again for underlining just how little you know vs. the hype you believe.
Thanks for underlining your complete inability to comprehend what others are writing about and your neurotic fixation on “debunking the hype”, even in situations where no one is hyping anything, which causes you to trip up and fall flat on your face—again and again.
Last time you were “debunking the hype”, you claimed that:
It is irrelevant because for every GW of solar or wind capacity that China builds, it builds 10x in coal fired.
I showed to you that it’s actually 0.6×, not 10×.
You also claimed that:
…the CCP is not trying to be carbon neutral.
I showed to you that the share of China’s electricity generated from carbon-neutral sources grew from 26.3% in 2015 to 32.7% in 2019, i.e., that CPC is indeed moving towards carbon neutrality.
I also showed that the share from renewable sources (sans nuclear) grew from 23.3% to 27.9%, to which you replied that:
…the actual percentage of China’s overall energy picture from renewables is vanishingly small.
A person who describes 27.9% as a “vanishingly small” percentage is a clown.
Posted by: S | Aug 30 2021 23:08 utc | 127
Quick comment:
Lumping together all of Stalin’s legacy to discredit his WWII leadership is an attempt to weaken modern Russia, FM Lavrov claims
It ends with this standardized journalistic paragraph:
Stalin, born in Georgia as Joseph Jughashvili, became leader of the USSR in 1924, following the death of revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. The legacy of the former leader splits opinion inside modern Russia. For some, he is a hero for his leadership through World War II, but for another segment of society, he was a tyrant who led a repressive and murderous regime. For others, he is a mixture of the two.
This information is objectively wrong.
Stalin didn’t become leader of the USSR in 1924.
First, the office of “leader” didn’t exist and never existed in the USSR: nobody knew how the system would work, and there wasn’t one specific office that made you the chief of the executive and the armed forces of the USSR. There was the office of president of the USSR, but that was more like a title created with the clear intent of giving a lifetime achievement title for Lenin himself. The chaotic and heavily decentralized system of the USSR was so confused that some even consider Sverdlov as the first head-of-state of the USSR. Lenin was also the president of Sovnarkom.
The only constant of the Soviet system, present from its very beginning (when it was still called the RSFSR) to its very end, was that the de facto governing body was the Politburo of the VKP(B) [KPSS]. That’s the reason Russia/USSR didn’t disintegrate even during the chaotic days of the Revolution and Civil War. It was only with time and necessity that the VKP(B) consolidated as the de facto Soviet State itself. By that time, it was found out that the General Secretary was the most powerful office of the new system – but that was not obvious at all during the first years of the Revolution. After WWII, the system consolidated itself around a scheme where, in order to be the equivalent of the POTUS or a Prime Minister of the USSR, one had to accumulate two offices: general secretary of the VKP(B) and president of the Supreme Soviet (more importantly, of its presidium); this system of dual office exists in China until the present times.
Just to give you a picture of how experimental the Soviet system was: in the aftermath of the Revolution, it was intended that the Supreme Soviet should be the absolute authority of the RSFSR (USSR). It was unpractical in reality, and it slowly and silently slid towards a ceremonial function to the presidium. It only exerted absolute power once: the decision to sign the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of 1918.
Second, Stalin didn’t succeed Lenin. For starters, the system was heavily experimental as already stated, so it was in flux. Secondly, Lenin was the absolute leadership because of individual merit, not because of the offices he had or didn’t have. Thirdly, Stalin wasn’t Lenin’s “favorite”: by logical order of political succession, Trotsky was the favorite (as Lenin’s personal favorite), followed by Zinoviev (the closest to Lenin). It was Zinoviev – not Stalin – who consecrated the term “Leninism”, precisely to prop himself up in a theoretical battle for succession. Even if you exclude these two, you could still argue in an institutionalist line that Stalin would still be behind Kamenev in this line of succession, as he was the president of the Moscow VKP(B).
Stalin would only become the obvious most powerful member of the VKP(B) in 1926, after Trotsky’s defeat, and only become the de facto leadership of the USSR by 1928, after the defeat of the rightist deviation of the party. By that time, the doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” was already the common sense of the vast majority of the Soviet people. Stalin rose to power because of the hegemony of “Socialism in One Country”, not the contrary; and because the system revealed that the power of organization of the Party was more important that anything else. Trotsky and Zinoviev were intellectuals with no popular base, who were only effective Party members and State servants under tutelage and direct guidance of Lenin; when he died, they became just random intellectuals.
Last but not least, there’s Lavrov’s speech:
“I absolutely agree that history must not be touched,” he told the war veterans. “By the way, attacks on Stalin as the main villain, lumping together everything he did before, during, and after the war, is also part of that very attack on our past and the outcome of World War II.”
There are many reasons why this falsification of History is perpetuated until the present day, none of them having nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with Communism:
1) The non-Stalinist Left in the West (from the social-democrats to the Trotskyists) need to amalgamate all of Stalin’s “crimes” together because the legitimacy of Stalin’s policies lie on one fact alone: war was coming and the USSR had to industrialize at breakneck speed at all costs. By stating his policies actually retarded industrialization and dismantled the Red Army, they can paint Stalin’s policy as an absolute failure, whereas the opposite argument would completely vindicate him;
2) The liberals, in addition to #1 (which they topple with some anachronistic humanitarian arguments), also can claim that it was the USA, not the USSR, that defeated the Third Reich and therefore the world, thus putting capitalism as different from nazi-fascism while painting it as the true progressive force for humanity instead of socialism.
Posted by: vk | Sep 1 2021 13:34 utc | 189
It’s yet again another September first and the traditional opening day of school holiday in Russia. This year, Putin’s in Vladivostok addressing children there in person and those of the nation via video. He has an important announcement:
“First of all, I would, of course, like to congratulate the little first-grade pupils who will go to school for the first time, as well as their parents, mothers, grandmothers and educators. In reality, we always do this, and this is the right thing to do because high school pupils are already in a sort of preset mode, they meet with their friends and peers, this is a continuation of the academic process they get accustomed to from the second or third grade. However, first-grade pupils are opening a new page in life, they are facing a new destiny, beginning to acquire knowledge and to choose their place in life and their subsequent careers.
“This is a highly important period in the life of little children. As bureaucrats say in such cases, I would like to take advantage of this opportunity and to ask all other Russian school pupils to give a warm welcome to the little children at the schools and to support them all the way, in the direct sense of the word and figuratively speaking. This is the first thing that I wanted to say.
“Secondly, you know that we have reinstated the Soviet-era, and later Russian, Znaniye [Knowledge] Society that aims to help people, and young people to find their place in life and to choose an interesting direction that will fascinate them, so that he or she will want to commit the rest of his or her life to it.”
What!!?? No teaching to the test as done within the Outlaw US Empire. Going back to–GASP–a “Soviet-era” institution (we were told all of those were abject failures) that promotes a knowledge-based philosophy that understands that all people have talents and can contribute to society. Here in the West, we have no need for such a society when everything one needs to know can be found via computer. Here’s Putin’s retort:
“Of course, there are many so-called information resources in the modern world, including the internet and Runet. You name it, they got it. And it appears that users can learn just about anything there, including information about the stars, the centre of the earth, tacks, nails and diamonds. But there is a problem linked with the quality of this information. There is a lot of information rubbish which is often presented as the ultimate truth. But we should not trust this information which is provided by people posing as specialists, rather than real professionals.
“Znaniye Society and its work involve real professionals specialising in every narrow field of knowledge, and it is certainly possible to trust them and to base one’s own perceptions of any specific phenomenon and its future development on their information and to decide whether it is interesting to you personally and whether it is something you would be ready to devote your entire life to later on.” [My Emphasis]
So, Znaniye Society will act as a sort of alternative, trustworthy, Wiki along the lines of career counselors whose job is to guide a student to discover his/her intellectual bliss.
And as is his custom, Putin will deliver a lecture of sorts based on his own expertise; and after a short revelation of his CV, he honestly concedes:
“Then there is another field – as they say, wake me up in the middle of the night and I will tell you anything concerning domestic and foreign policy. I could have chosen this topic if I had wanted to.
“But I chose history as today’s subject. I do not really consider myself a specialist or an expert, so this will not be a real lesson – just a conversation on the proposed theme. An exchange.
“So why do you think I picked this specific field? Firstly, it is quite fascinating. Secondly, it is very important and covers a whole range of matters. In fact, history is the pivot, the foundation of all humanitarian knowledge including literature, music, philosophy, natural sciences, and so on. Learning all this is extremely important because we are interested in knowing how things were done before; it is even more important because it helps us understand the world we are living in today and the future we are heading into.”
As a historian, I couldn’t provide any better reasoning for my field of study, which unfortunately is done so disgustingly poorly here in Liberal LaLa Land where it’s deemed you really don’t need to know any history at all, not even your own.
The English transcript isn’t finished yet, but I was going to end my comment at this point and highly suggest barflies click the link and read Putin’s lesson for today that he gave to all Russia’s schoolkids, professors, parents, and others, for it’s not at all what any Western leader has to say to his people, not even close. Sputnik has an article some may have read already that gives part of Putin’s lesson that’s not yet in the English transcript away. So yes, I would regard this as a very serious national address by Russia’s President. Yet, the audience that really needs the lecture isn’t Russians; it’s those residing within the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals.
Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 1 2021 17:04 utc | 199
|
