castlefreak

Cheney comes to mind.

Have you spoken to any Moscovites about living standards recently? Like this is so stupid. I would not trade for Russia's brutal treatment of dissidents but we don't exactly have a great record on that front Western countries…

My country had a coup in 2014 in order to install a leader friendly to US intel agencies. "Freedoms" were already flimsy.

RT or TASS URL would improve this argument.

I actually agree that it was a planned dressing down for optics sakes but the attempt is to try to get Zelenskyy out of the way for Trump / Putin direct deal to settle Ukraine matter and the success of this strategy will depend on whether the MAGA media hype will drown out the soft power enjoyers in terms of messaging.

Rhetorical moves are the primary vehicle of politics. You say something and people resonate with your message. You believe frivious "claims around heritage" are not deeply meaningful to people. Do you truly believe that should artificially overcome family ties, traditions, cultures, and, customs? (…Why would you even want to?)

Seems like it's all just a ploy for corporations trying to remake the world as suits them, helpful to have interchangable workers with no meaningful culture.

Peter was more sober thinker (probably literally and figuratively). Christopher was a better speaker, probably a better author but as I get older I realise how much more correct Peter was and still is.

How do you prevent post-tribalism from becoming yet another tribe?

I hopped out of being a good Marxist when I realised that there was absolutely no room for dissent. You basically are just a empty vessel for activist praxis. In other words, you do as you are told.

Also, there aren't really compelling alternatives to Capitalism that havent been extremely tested, with horrible results. IF they come up with a NEW system, that doesn't involve literally euthanising its dissenters, I would be into it.

The problem of our time is simply that the fruits of the global economy are distributed extremely poorly (jet set global urban intelligentsia isn't big enough) and there is no room for any nativistic or religious culture (call it spirituality, or whatever, it's important…). The folks left behind will simply replace the primacy of Corporate Memphis-style global capitalism with something cooler, economics and politics will be downstream from that culture.

There isn't a world where an living, breathing Christopher Hitchens wouldn't shed a tear at how internationalist, "steel-and-glass" culture has become in say, Paris, France. He also criticised the thinly-veiled American Imperialism ("democracy" or we shoot you) constantly.