The Republican love affair with Putin

This isn’t just about Putin avid supporter and the well-known professional liar, Tucker Carlson. It’s broader than just that Fox News freak show. It is about Republican Christian authoritarianism generally. Salon writes in an opinion piece:

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

Never mind the opinion polls and the Republican posturing. When the right sees Putin, they want what he's got.

That story of laughter and death and numbness [in Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara] applies to America's current situation as well. Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently told “The View” that Donald Trump wanted the power to kill with impunity. In explaining why Trump both admired and feared Vladimir Putin she said:

“I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him…. I also think he admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.”

A healthy society would have been stunned, disgusted, terrified and moved to action by Grisham's confession. The evident fact that Trump is a sociopath would have been the subject of extensive news coverage. If America were a healthy society, we would have an ongoing “national conversation” about the peril the country experienced from Trump, his Republican-fascist allies and their movement — danger that has only grown stronger.

A healthy society would now ask: How can we prevent another Donald Trump, another fascistic, sadistic demagogue, from ever coming to power?

What does it say about American society that Donald Trump and his cabal of coup plotters and other enemies of democracy and freedom have not been punished? That they are plotting in public how overthrow American democracy and return Trump to power without fear of punishment or other negative consequences? And that Trump still has many tens of millions of followers — many of whom are potentially willing to engage in acts of violence, and perhaps even die, at his command? What does that say about a country and a people?

What was the response to Grisham's comments about Donald Trump’s desire to commit murder? Silence and indifference. Neither the media nor the American people seem to care. They have become desensitized to what not long ago would have been judged unconscionable.

America is a pathocracy. The masses take their cues from corrupted elites. Malignant normality is the new normal. Political deviance has been normalized. The Age of Trump constantly offers further proof that a sick and broken society can accept just about anything, no matter how surreal and grotesque.

Fascism thrives in such societies. But the poison could not have spread so quickly if the soil and foundations were not toxic to begin with.

The essential question must be this: Who are the specific objects of ideation and worship for Donald Trump, the other American neofascists and their followers?

The most prominent example, of course, is Vladimir Putin. The American people and the world should not be swayed and bamboozled by the Republican Party and its propagandists, who are now trying to claim that they are diehard Cold Warriors, forever united against Putin and his aggression.

Today's Republican voters and other Trumpists are part of a political cult. They follow, uncritically, whatever directives and various signals are sent to them by Donald Trump, Fox News, the white right-wing evangelical churches and the larger right-wing echo chamber.

Public opinion polls taken before the invasion of Ukraine show that Republicans view Vladimir Putin as a better leader than Joe Biden. That is no coincidence. It is publicly known that Putin and Russia's intelligence agencies have been engaged in a long-term influence campaign designed to manipulate (and manage) the Republican Party, its leaders, the right-wing news media and their public.

Putin is an authoritarian and a demagogue. He is anti-human, anti-freedom and anti-democracy. He stands against the future and human progress and pluralism. To many of his admirers in America and the West, he is a leader of “White Christianity.” Putin has persecuted and imperiled the LGBTQ community, and is hostile to women's rights and women's equality. He kills and imprisons journalists, and is doing his best to silence free speech.

Putin's Russia is a plutocracy and a kleptocracy controlled by an oligarchic elite of white men. He uses secret police and other enforcers to terrorize any person or group he deems to be the enemy. Republicans in the U.S., and many of their allies and followers, want to exercise that kind of power in America.

In a new essay at the Boston Review, Bethany Moreton elaborates:

“Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom? 

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump's attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party. 

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin…. 

At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion”[1], the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right's overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin's cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.”

In total, the Republican fascists and the larger “conservative movement” have shown themselves to be Putin’s puppets. (emphasis added)

What a refreshing bit of reasoned clarity. It sounds like I wrote it! Salon is channeling Germaine. Will miracles never cease?

Question: Is Salon channeling Germaine or is it vice versa, or neither?

Footnote: 

1. Dominion theology (also known as dominionism): a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied. For example, dominion theology can include theonomy, but does not necessarily involve advocating Mosaic Law as the basis of government. The label is applied primarily toward groups of Christians in the United States.

Prominent adherents of these ideologies are Calvinist Christian reconstructionism, Roman Catholic integralism, Charismatic and Pentecostal Kingdom Now theology, New Apostolic Reformation, and perhaps others not identified here. Most of the contemporary movements labeled dominion theology arose in the 1970s from religious movements asserting aspects of Christian nationalism.

An example of dominionism in reformed theology is Christian reconstructionism, which originated with the teachings of R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s and 1970s. Rushdoony's theology focuses on theonomy (the rule of the Law of God), a belief that all of society should be ordered according to the laws that governed the Israelites in the Old Testament.

Catholic integralism has been characterized as a form of dominionist theology. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa have stated that Catholic integralists have entered into a non-traditional ecumenical alliance with Protestant reconstructionists who share “the same desire for religious influence in the political sphere.” Likewise, in the National Catholic Reporter, Joshua J. McElwee stated that Catholic integralists, along with their Protestant counterparts, wish to achieve the goal of establishing a “theocratic type of state.”

THESE PEOPLE WANT CHRISTIAN SHARIA, 

NOT THE US CONSTITUTION! 

Rushdoony propaganda: Christian dominion is not dictatorial,  

instead: “We try to meet human needs in the Lord,

we try in every way to be faithful to God by fulfilling

his law word, love is the fulfilling of the law, 

it is putting the love of God into force .... 

the love of man is manifested by being faithful to God”

(How about that for crackpot reasoning?)

According to current Christian nationalist dogma, God’s law word 

that Christian elites want backed by the force of real law enforced by 

real police and real courts include:  

Abortion is murder

God chose White males to dominate over all others

Homosexual sex is sin 

Women are to obey men

The White race is has dominion over all other races

Anglo-European culture has domination over all other cultures 

(e.g., put up a Christmas tree or else)

Open discrimination in commerce, employment and everything else 

against non-Christians and the LGBQT community, 

both of whom are profoundly sinful

Adulterers and sodomites are to be put to death by stoning

Church and state are the same

(e.g., give God, i.e., us, control of your tax dollars, all of ’em)

Plus other Old Testament commands as revealed by 

authoritarian Christian elites

Regarding Russian military problems with logistics, etc.

This 20 minute video describes the recent military history and strategy behind Putin's war on Ukraine. Flawed logistics strategy is part of Putin's mess. It offers an at least partial explanation for why the Russian military is having such a hard time in Ukraine.

According to dcleve, other factors in the Russian military's war troubles include:

• Before the invasion, the Russian military believed Putin's propaganda and lies about Ukraine, e.g., there was no Ukrainian nationalism or unity, and it was just a bunch of Nazis in power there, and that led the military generals to seriously underestimate the resistance they would face
• The Russian military limits individual initiative and creative thinking in its officers, a trait that goes back to Lenin and Stalin who feared intelligent, competent military officers and murdered most of them
• Russian rank and file military morale is low and that reduces fighting effectiveness
• Because Russia is a kleptocracy, nothing works well[1] because  the people in charge are focused on personal profit, therefore it is possible that corrupt oligarchs looted Russian some or much of Russia's ammunition and military supply stockpiles

Footnote: 

1. A personal anecdote: A colleague I worked with was invited by a fairly high-ranking, politically well-connected Russian scientist to give a talk at a science conference in St. Petersburg. In terms of things one normally associate with a professional conference, it was a disaster. Started late. No coffee or anything. The nearest place for food was a Starbucks a mile away, on foot. No Uber. The printed program was crap and had little to do with who wound up speaking or their topics or when they spoke -- it was all sort of ad hoc. In private conversations the Russian scientists spoke mostly about how to get the hell out of Russia and never come back. They hated it there. 

A 2nd personal anecdote: Once upon a time, the company I worked for was considering entering into a business deal in Russia. Our contacts, the politically well-connected Russian scientist mentioned above and his colleague, an intelligent and foresighted Russian army general were the route the company needed to get to Putin. Putin needed to bless the deal, like all major business deals in Russia. Without Putin's blessing and agreement on how much bribe money had to be paid to him personally, any business deal assets, including bank accounts, would be looted by Russian oligarchs and thieves. The general was the guy to contact Putin because he was highest up in the Russian hierarchy. The contact never occurred. The Russian scientist told us he had been killed in an accident. A Russian army tank accidentally ran him over and killed him. 

The bribery thing was the deal killer for the company. US law forbids US companies from bribing foreign officials and companies. It's unfair, but that's just the way it goes. The Chinese and other corrupt countries have a big advantage over the Americans in being able to bribe corrupt foreign officials and business executives.

For some partial corroboration of what goes in in the Russian military with competent officers, see dcleve's comments under point #3 here: https://dispol.blogspot.com/2022/03/zelenskys-speech-to-congress.html#comment-5795528410 . I never believed that the general was run over by a tank, but I did believe he was dead by unnatural causes. Over the years since then, the story about the general getting squashed by a tank seemed more and more plausible. The Russian scientists never lied to us as far as we knew. And, Putin really does murder people he dislikes for whatever reasons, e.g., by poisoning them, pushing people out of windows in tall buildings, etc. I now sort of believe the runaway tank story, or some close variant, e.g., squashed by a big military truck, is probably more true than not.

The lesson: Ya' gotta watch those Russkies. They're sneaky, especially the kleptocrats.

Republican attacks on inconvenient truth, and free and fair elections intensify

There's war going on not just in Ukraine. A huge one is going on in the US right now. The New York Times writes:

The Florida Legislature last week created a law enforcement agency — informally called the election police — to tackle what Gov. Ron DeSantis and other Republicans have declared an urgent problem: the roughly 0.000677 percent of voters suspected of committing voter fraud.

In Georgia, Republicans in the House passed a law on Tuesday handing new powers to police personnel who investigate allegations of election-related crimes.

And in Texas, the Republican attorney general already has created an “election integrity unit” charged solely with investigating illegal voting.

Voter fraud is exceedingly rare — and often accidental. Still, ambitious Republicans across the country are making a show of cracking down on voter crime this election year. Legislators in several states have moved to reorganize and rebrand law enforcement agencies while stiffening penalties for voting-related crimes. Republican district attorneys and state attorneys general are promoting their aggressive prosecutions, in some cases making felony cases out of situations that in the past might have been classified as honest mistakes.

In Texas, where Attorney General Ken Paxton announced his new “election integrity unit” in October to investigate election crimes, The Houston Chronicle reported that the six-prosecutor unit had spent $2.2 million and had closed three cases.

And in Wisconsin, where a swath of Republicans, including one candidate for governor, are seeking to decertify the state’s 2020 presidential election results on the basis of false claims of fraud, a report released last week by the Wisconsin Election Commission said that the state had referred to local prosecutors 95 instances of felons’ voting in 2020 when they were not allowed to. From among those cases, district attorneys have filed charges against 16 people.

“The underlying level of actual criminality, I don’t think that’s changed at all,” said Lorraine Minnite, a Rutgers University political science professor who has collected years of data on election fraud in America. “In an election of 130 million or 140 million people, it’s close to zero. The truth is not a priority; what is a priority is the political use of this issue.”  

“It didn’t seem to me there was any attempt to defraud,” Mr. Gruenke said [about 25 voters who gave a PO box address instead of their actual residence address]. “It would be a felony charge, and I thought that would be too heavy for what amounted to a typo or clerical error.” (emphasis added) 

In another recent article, the NYT commented on the current state of affairs in the GOP: 

The proposals are the latest twist in a decades-long crusade by Republicans against election fraud that has grown rapidly since Mr. Trump’s election loss in 2020 and his false claim that victory was stolen from him. .... Sweeping election-law revisions enacted by Florida and Georgia legislators last spring sharply limit the use of popular drop boxes for submitting absentee ballots, require identification to obtain mail-in ballots, make it harder to conduct voter-registration drives, and restrict or ban interactions — such as handing out snacks or water — with voters waiting in line to cast ballots.

In other words, the Republican Party has been opposed to free and fair elections for a long time. The 2020 elections made the Republican fever intensify.

A Radical Republican elite rails against 

free and fair elections in 1980 

The Georgia law includes incentives for police to crack down hard on protesters, and a requirement for permits in advance of all protests. One good way to shut protesters up is to deny permits to protest. Another is to permit protesting only in obscure places that few people will notice. Georgia Republicans really want law and order inflicted hard on non-Republicans and by God, they're gonna get it. Clerical errors now rise to the level of felonies for average voters. The standards are far more relaxed for Republican elites -- their 'mistakes' are forgivable, even their knowing criminal acts.

In Memphis TN, a woman was sentenced to six years in prison in January after registering to vote because she had a felony conviction and registering to vote was illegal for felons. That will teach her a well-deserved lesson.

The Republican Party's authoritarian attacks on democracy and civil liberties remain focused on subverting elections, limiting open free speech opposition and some other key anti-democratic tactics. America's radical right war on democracy, inconvenient truth and civil liberties is not going to stop any time soon. Most who cannot see the urgency and danger by now are unlikely to ever see it.

Something to cheer us all up

 

MIT predicted society would collapse by 2040. New data tells how we're doing

• Scientists in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology predicted the fall of society.
• Using the LtG model, the fall of society will take place around 2040.
• The 2100s will be comparable to the 1900s in terms of the world’s population, industrial output, food and resources.

Scientists in the 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a method to determine when the fall of society would take place. 

That method indicated the fall will be some point near the middle in the 21st century around 2040, and so far, their projections have been on track, new analysis suggests.

In 1972, a team of researchers studied the risks of a doomsday scenario, examining limited availability of natural resources and the rising costs that would subvert the expectation of economic growth in the second decade of the 21st century.

---

Using a system dynamics model that was published by the Club of Rome — a Swiss-based global think tank that includes current and former heads of state, United Nations bureaucrats, government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists and business leaders — the scientists were able to identify the upcoming limits to growth (LtG) to forecast of potential "global ecological and economic collapse coming up in the middle of the 21st Century," The Guardian reported. 

The Earth, according to LtG, has been terraformed beyond repair by greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, making the next generation to endure the "heavy legacy," a scarcity of mineral resources and a planet characterized by radioactive and heavy metal pollution.

In the '70s, the study was considered controversial and sparked debate, with some pundits misrepresenting the findings and methods, according to Vice.

However, Gaya Herrington, Director Advisory, Internal Audit & Enterprise Risk at major accounting firm KPMG, updated the LtG model in a published finding in the Yale Journal of Ecology in November 2020.

In Herrinton’s estimates, the world’s population, industrial output, food and resources will rapidly decline. The 2100s will be comparable to the 1900s, according to Vice. However, Herrington is treating her research as a personal project as a precaution to see how well the MIT model holds up.

Herrington’s study concluded that society has about another decade to change courses and avoid collapse by investing in sustainable technologies and equitable human development.

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/climate-change/563497-mit-predicted-society-would-collapse-by-2040

Another view:

In 1704, Isaac Newton predicted the end of the world sometime around (or after, “but not before”) the year 2060, using a strange series of mathematical calculations. Rather than study what he called the “book of nature,” he took as his source the supposed prophecies of the book of Revelation. While such predictions have always been central to Christianity, it is startling for modern people to look back and see the famed astronomer and physicist indulging them. For Newton, however, as Matthew Stanley writes at Science, “laying the foundation of modern physics and astronomy was a bit of a sideshow. He believed that his truly important work was deciphering ancient scriptures and uncovering the nature of the Christian religion.”

Over three hundred years later, we still have plenty of religious doomsayers predicting the end of the world with Bible codes. But in recent times, their ranks have seemingly been joined by scientists whose only professed aim is interpreting data from climate research and sustainability estimates given population growth and dwindling resources. The scientific predictions do not draw on ancient texts or theology, nor involve final battles between good and evil. Though there may be plagues and other horrible reckonings, these are predictably causal outcomes of over-production and consumption rather than divine wrath. Yet by some strange fluke, the science has arrived at the same apocalyptic date as Newton, plus or minus a decade or two.

The “end of the world” in these scenarios means the end of modern life as we know it: the collapse of industrialized societies, large-scale agricultural production, supply chains, stable climates, nation states…. Since the late sixties, an elite society of wealthy industrialists and scientists known as the Club of Rome (a frequent player in many conspiracy theories) has foreseen these disasters in the early 21st century. One of the sources of their vision is a computer program developed at MIT by computing pioneer and systems theorist Jay Forrester, whose model of global sustainability, one of the first of its kind, predicted civilizational collapse in 2040. “What the computer envisioned in the 1970s has by and large been coming true,” claims Paul Ratner at Big Think.

Those predictions include population growth and pollution levels, “worsening quality of life,” and “dwindling natural resources.” In the video at the top, see Australia’s ABC explain the computer’s calculations, “an electronic guided tour of our global behavior since 1900, and where that behavior will lead us,” says the presenter. The graph spans the years 1900 to 2060. “Quality of life” begins to sharply decline after 1940, and by 2020, the model predicts, the metric contracts to turn-of-the-century levels, meeting the sharp increase of the “Zed Curve” that charts pollution levels. (ABC revisited this reporting in 1999 with Club of Rome member Keith Suter.)

You can probably guess the rest—or you can read all about it in the 1972 Club of Rome-published report Limits to Growth, which drew wide popular attention to Jay Forrester’s books Urban Dynamics (1969) and World Dynamics (1971). Forrester, a figure of Newtonian stature in the worlds of computer science and management and systems theory—though not, like Newton, a Biblical prophecy enthusiast—more or less endorsed his conclusions to the end of his life in 2016. In one of his last interviews, at the age of 98, he told the MIT Technology Review, “I think the books stand all right.” But he also cautioned against acting without systematic thinking in the face of the globally interrelated issues the Club of Rome ominously calls “the problematic”:

Time after time … you’ll find people are reacting to a problem, they think they know what to do, and they don’t realize that what they’re doing is making a problem. This is a vicious [cycle], because as things get worse, there is more incentive to do things, and it gets worse and worse.

Where this vague warning is supposed to leave us is uncertain. If the current course is dire, “unsystematic” solutions may be worse? This theory also seems to leave powerfully vested human agents (like Exxon’s executives) wholly unaccountable for the coming collapse. Limits to Growth—scoffed at and disparagingly called “neo-Malthusian” by a host of libertarian critics—stands on far surer evidentiary footing than Newton’s weird predictions, and its climate forecasts, notes Christian Parenti, “were alarmingly prescient.” But for all this doom and gloom it’s worth bearing in mind that models of the future are not, in fact, the future. There are hard times ahead, but no theory, no matter how sophisticated, can account for every variable.

https://www.openculture.com/2022/03/m-i-t-computer-program-predicts-in-1973-that-civilization-will-end-by-2040.html

Maybe time to reassess the timeline with the world on the brink of a nuclear war? Whatcha think?