Debt Rattle Mar 25 2014: Cold Warning
- This topic has 4 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 10 years ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Charlotte Brooks Duke Ellington at bat near segregated motel in Florida April 1955 You can hurt a few handfuls of Putin’s people for a few days with s
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle Mar 25 2014: Cold Warning]When the USSR collapsed the US via NATO made absolutely certain that Russia would remain our enemy by expanding NATO Eastward. There was no possible purpose for NATO expansion except to be sure we cultivated an enemy or to be kind, an opponent.
American needs enemies. We invented Salafi Jihadists so they could become our enemy but we have been unable to contain them so we are turning back to old reliable Russia.
It helps to get some perspective on this. Tommy Friedman of all people provides some with a chat with George Kennan in 1998.
“Yes, tell your children, and your children’s children, that you lived in the age of Bill Clinton and William Cohen, the age of Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger, the age of Trent Lott and Joe Lieberman, and you too were present at the creation of the post-cold-war order, when these foreign policy Titans put their heads together and produced . . . a mouse.”
Nicole,
I can’t say I disagree with your conclusion:
Are we still going to be chest thumping by then? Or will we have learned to recognize the traits that make the leaders handpicked for us to vote for, unfit to represent out interests? I think that the poorer we get, and that process will forcibly continue, the more likely we are to pick the less competent ones. As long as they use the right words to promise us better days, and they look like they could work in TV, they got the job.That said, if we could lay some of the present incompetence at the feet of a complacency toward the competence of our politicians that we (ever more clearly now) could never afford, it’s curious that a loss of complacency may not actually inflect the trend back towards greater competence.
Do you have some mechanism or dynamic in mind that effects or selects for incompetence? Is it contradictory to hold that leaders are no so much incompetent as enacting policies that favour those whom they actually rather than nominally represent (Could we, alternatively, claim that to pursue a goal of narrowly distributed benefit would be reflective of a loss of competence at the level of goal-setting, which might in turn be a matter of selecting among options and theories that are themselves feckless…)
Indus, I’m not sure why you would think Nicole wrote this piece or other recent ones, but she didn’t. My name is at the top of them all.
As for the competence issue, our leaders are quite competent in serving their own issues, just not ours. But then, they – were – never meant to do the latter, so maybe I shouldn’t have used the word incompetent to begin with. And if I do, then in the sense of our political system not having the competence to select leaders that do act in our interest.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.