Lol, I liked the phrase he applied to the ukrainian army - "being killed in industrial quantities." For an ESL guy, he coins some excellent phrases.
And his insights are quite deep. He compares the acumen of the European elites to that of theAmerican elites. That is an important comparison. There was a time when the bluster and the teenage angst of the USA was something that European nations looked to harness and contain - and now, they are absorbed by it and subject to it, and he is registering this sea change.
I like that very much, because it is a critical before-and-after that happened slowly and gradually, like the frog in the heating water. We are half a century out from the passing of Franco, and the default-lens through which we imagine European competence and culture and even
potential requires adjusting. Failure to adjust that lens results in errant and anachronistic reasoning. It is somewhat jarring to all-at-once apprehend that there is no great division anymore between Europe and The US, in terms of the spiritual and intellectual dimensions of their respective elites. All are corrupted in a similar way, made who they are by the same decisions of the 20th century shot callers, whose focus was ever on immediate concerns and never on the interests of future generations. Even Franco traded his grandchildren's culture for his immediate comfort, and as heroic a figure as he is, that sellout is a poison that runs through the veins of an emasculated Spanish polity.
He makes me question whether I have romanticized the very potential of the west to awaken. It has always been true for me that we COULD turn this thing around - that it is dark before the dawn, and that as Weimar awoke and became the reich, the west has at least the
capacity for the sun to shine again - the moral
capacity to throw off its chains with a mighty memory-shout of our peoples and a cultural renaissance to set the world spinning. And as long as we have that
capacity, history is fluid, up for grabs. But there is no communal capacity shared by multi-cultural nations states. Any such roar would be roared back at, from within. The racial and cultural landscape of every nation has been baffled so that the roar would be heard as a whisper - would never
reach its borders, much less transcend them.
I think that is the critical difference in our thinking. You have already been down the road that he is guiding me along. You have accepted the inevitability of the moral, economic, cultural and military shift between east and west. That is the aspect of your character that enrages
@Tempest62. You are an early adapter to a reoriented universe in which he is still disoriented. I am coming around, coming around - the DMZ betwixt the two of you.
I find myself shaking my head, bemusement dissipating. There's a little bit of horror in it, at a level that I long ago made peace with - such that I can apprehend the horror dispassionately and with interest, rather than resistance. There are levels and levels and levels at which truths of such moment must be absorbed and accommodated, incorporated into a holistic view of the world. And this fellow is making me see that everything that went before and informed who I am today - WW1, the Spanish Civil War, WWII, the cold war, the waxing of American Empire and the waning of Europe, - all of these have led to this historical inevitability; that what I perceived as an historical intersection isn't.
There's no off ramp. That's what I am hearing through the excellent lecture this guy has prepared. It's already written, and mostly what I can do is watch, wait, prepare, and make the necessary internal and external accommodations to live in a world I had chatted about, uttered caveats about - but never completely believed in.
When you complain, ur friends roll their eyes and ur enemies rejoice
"Because I SAY I am" is a todler's tantrum, not "science"
You cannot betray me - only yourself, to me.
Who cuts off your dick is not a friend
An opinion you won't defend is not your own
Humanity's Law of the Jungle: Survival NOT of the fittest, but of the tribe
When peeing in the pool, stand on the edge
If gender is not sex, why should a gender claim change what sex you shower with?