A criticism of how America is dealing with the Ukraine war

A column in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) offers a criticism of the prevailing narrative in the US:

Ukraine has become a proxy war for the United States

Russia’s outright defeat is now paramount to Washington, rather than peace in Ukraine. Trouncing Putin will remove an old foe, undermine the alliance between Moscow and Beijing, and allow the US to refocus total hostility on China

It seems increasingly clear that, so far as the United States is concerned, there is a big difference in goal and method when it comes to “saving Ukraine” and “defeating Russia”. The two goals are not the same and may even be incompatible. Is Russia’s defeat now the unstated end game that the US is seeking?

It’s worth observing that war cries are coincidentally reaching a fever pitch as to drown out alternative voices in the US while its mainstream media offer non-stop coverage on a foreign war that involves no US troops on the ground.

According to a study by the Tyndall Report, an authoritative journalism newsletter which has been tracking and analyzing nightly newscasts since 1987, the three major TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have spent more time together in their reporting on the Ukraine war than all other wars in the last 31 years, including those started by the US.

Of course, these are just three TV networks. Practically all other major news outlets in the US – and also in Europe – have been offering non-stop news coverage. For Europeans, though, it’s understandable because the war is right in their own backyard.

But for the US? Anyone who offers more nuanced analyses or explanations for the war now risks being denounced as “Putin’s American apologist”, “Putin’s pals”, “Russia’s stooges”, “Russian trolls”, “patsies” and “useful idiots”.

That’s what happens when the US media and political class are mobilised to promote and legitimate war efforts. President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly made peace overtures and even managed to kick off a few rounds of peace talks with Moscow. They were all met by silence from Washington.

When Kyiv said it was prepared to negotiate the status of Crimea and the Donbas coveted by Russia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken countered about the imperative to defend the “basic principle” that “one country cannot simply change the borders of another by force”.

It may be unspoken but it’s clear many in Washington, including those in the White House, think US interests lie with Russia’s defect, while peace in Ukraine is incidental.

In a recent interview on NPR (National Public Radio), [Hal Brands, Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies] offers a perfectly logical, if ruthless explanation behind the US strategy over the war in Ukraine.

“There’s long been a debate in the United States over whether we should prioritize competing with Russia or China or treat them as coequals. .... And that debate has flared up again in the context of this war. I think what the war indicates, though, is that the best way of putting pressure on China, which is the more dangerous and the more powerful of the two rivals, is actually to ensure that Russia is defeated, that it does not achieve its objectives in this war, because that will result in a weaker Russia, one that is less capable of putting pressure on the United States and its allies in Europe and thus less useful as a strategic partner for Beijing. .... The United States simply can’t avoid the reality that it has to contain both Russia and China simultaneously.” (emphasis added)

According to this rationale, the US is harming Ukraine by not doing all it can to support Zelensky's peace overtures to Putin. That does look plausible, assuming Putin would have been willing to negotiate a peace. 

One has to wonder about what it means to “contain” Russia and China. China is aggressively weaponizing the South China Sea, all of which it claims as China’s territorial waters. The Global Conflict Tracker comments:

Tensions between China and both the Philippines and Vietnam have recently cooled, even as China increased its military activity in the South China Sea by conducting a series of naval maneuvers and exercises in March and April 2018. Meanwhile, China continues to construct military and industrial outposts on artificial islands it has built in disputed waters.

The United States has also stepped up its military activity and naval presence in the region in recent years, including freedom of navigation operations (FONOPs) in January and March 2018. In a speech during his November 2017 visit to Southeast Asia, President Donald J. Trump emphasized the importance of such operations, and of ensuring free and open access to the South China Sea. Since May 2017, the United States has conducted six FONOPs in the region.  

China’s sweeping claims of sovereignty over the sea—and the sea’s estimated 11 billion barrels of untapped oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas—have antagonized competing claimants Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam. As early as the 1970s, countries began to claim islands and various zones in the South China Sea, such as the Spratly Islands, which possess rich natural resources and fishing areas.

China maintains [PDF] that, under international law, foreign militaries are not able to conduct intelligence-gathering activities, such as reconnaissance flights, in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). According to the United States, claimant countries, under UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), should have freedom of navigation through EEZs in the sea and are not required to notify claimants of military activities. In July 2016, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague issued its ruling on a claim brought against China by the Philippines under UNCLOS, ruling in favor of the Philippines on almost every count. While China is a signatory to the treaty, which established the tribunal, it refuses to accept the court’s authority.

Military conflict with China is possible. Assuming it is not already too late, a more robust US effort to foster a peace agreement between the Ukraine and Russia might be a better strategy.  It is not clear that the US and Europe can “contain” Russia or China, whatever containment means. It sounds like military conflict, either directly or through proxies.

Chinese aircraft carrier battle group

in the South China Sea

The basis for war with China

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for bringing the SCMP article to my attention.

Creative capitalism: Collusion to reduce employee pay

The New York Times writes:

A New Legal Tactic to Protect Workers’ Pay

The Justice Department is using antitrust law to charge employers with colluding to hold down wages. The move adds to a barrage of civil challenges.

Antitrust suits have long been part of the federal government’s arsenal to keep corporations from colluding or combining in ways that raise prices and hurt the consumer. Now the government is deploying the same weapon in another cause: protecting workers’ pay.

In a first, the Justice Department has brought a series of criminal cases against employers for colluding to suppress wages. The push started in December 2020, under the Trump administration, with an indictment accusing a staffing agency in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of agreeing with rivals to suppress the pay of physical therapists. The department has now filed six criminal cases under the pillar of antitrust law, the Sherman Act, including prosecutions of employers of home health aides, nurses and aerospace engineers.

“Labor market collusion dots the entirety of the U.S. economy,” said Doha Mekki, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s antitrust division. “We’ve seen it in sectors across the board.”

“The expansion of Sherman Act criminal violations changes the ballgame when it comes to how companies engage with their workers,” noted an analysis by lawyers at White & Case, including J. Mark Gidley, chair of the firm’s global antitrust and competition practice. “Executives and managers could face jail time for proven horizontal wage-fixing conspiracies.” In addition to fines for corporations or individuals, the Sherman Act provides for prison terms of up to 10 years.  

And yet the Justice Department’s push builds on a rationale for criminal antitrust enforcement articulated since the Obama administration. “Colluding to fix wages is no different than colluding to suppress the prices of auto parts or homes sold at auction,” said Renata Hesse, acting assistant attorney general for antitrust, in November 2016. “Naked wage-fixing or no-poach agreements eliminate competition in the same irredeemable way as per se unlawful price-fixing and customer-allocation agreements do.” 

It will be interesting to see what the courts do with this. Pro-corporate judges will probably frown on expansion of the Sherman Act and protect the corporations ability to conspire to keep wages low. That would be in accord the the generally pro-business stance that conservative Republican judges tend to take. It is not clear how neoliberal Democratic judges will react to this, maybe about like the Republicans.

Predictably, Corporate America is alarmed. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce official commented: “In their minds, everything is an antitrust issue. But it is a limited one.” That indicates there is at least some basis in the law for concern by the business community. This will probably eventually wind up in the Supreme Court with the Republicans siding with the companies.

Good people with guns cannot stop bad people with guns

In states that Republicans control, getting rid of gun regulations is almost as popular as passing election suppression laws and constant whining about the stolen 2020 election. The gun extremist ‘logic’, good people with guns will stop bad people with guns from shooting people, never made a lick of sense. There's waaay too many bad people with guns. And, it is waaay too easy for a bad person to whip out their gun(s) and start blazing away before the good people with their guns whip out their heat and spit hot lead at the bad person spitting hot lead.

The New York Times writes on a tragic road rage incident. 

Angry Drivers, Lots of Guns: An Explosion in Road Rage Shootings

Dozens have been reported in Texas alone amid a pandemic surge in gun purchases and a country increasingly on edge.

The trouble started with an argument between two drivers merging in slow traffic after an Astros baseball game last summer. It ended with two gunshots, fired from a moving Buick and exploding through the glass of a fleeing Ford pickup truck.

The bullets missed the truck’s driver, Paul Castro, but one — just one — struck his teenage son, David, who sat in the passenger seat. As Mr. Castro drove to get help, a 911 operator told him to apply pressure to the wound at the back of his son’s head. But David did not make it.

The random pointlessness of the killing shocked Houston. But it was one of dozens of similar incidents across the country over the past year amid an explosion of shootings and killings attributed to rage on the road.

These eruptions of sudden violence — a man in Tulsa, Okla., firing repeatedly after an argument at a red light; a Georgia driver shot while on a family road trip — are not unique to any part of America, among a population that is increasingly on edge and carrying guns. But they have been perhaps most pronounced on the roads of Texas.

“In the past, people curse one another, throw up the finger and keep moving,” Mayor Sylvester Turner of Houston said in an interview. “Now instead of throwing up the finger, they’re pulling out the gun and shooting.”  

Criminologists cautioned that any theory of motivation behind road rage shootings is hampered by a lack of data. Most police departments do not keep statistics on road rage episodes, in part because it is not itself a crime category. There is no federal database.

Arizona has tried to get a rough approximation of the number of road rage incidents, adding a box for “possible road rage” to the form filled out by police officers for car crashes in 2018. The data showed an increase in such incidents in 2021 compared with the previous two years, according to Alberto Gutier, the director of the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.

“It’s going crazy,” he said of road rage. “People are so stupid.”

So there we have it. Guns and bullets are starting to slowly replace flipping someone the bird and just moving on. Maybe people aren’t mostly stupid. Maybe most are mostly in a constant state of dark free speech-fueled fear, rage, hate, etc., and it finally explodes in a hail of bullets.

I assign most of the blame (~75% ?) to decades of a tsunami of intentionally divisive, deceitful, polarizing neo-fascist propaganda that has caused too many people of being irrationally terrified, enraged, intolerant and hateful, among some other bad emotional states. Fox News and all the rest of the neo-fascist radical right should be ashamed, but they are just making too damn much money for shame to be a serious concern. This is more evidence that the social glue needed to keep democracy vibrant and viable has mostly rotted away. That rot followed as morality rotted away from the Republican Party.

I spoke before of democracy slowly dying from thousands of all kinds of cuts. This road rage thing is just one kind of those anti-democratic cuts. 

NOTE: In addition to getting rid of nationwide abortion rights in the coming weeks, our Christian nationalist Supreme Court is also set to hand down a major ruling that experts predict will gut some of the remaining gun restriction laws. More gun violence is predicted to result from that in the coming years. 

Grannies with Guns:

Serious potential for a bad road rage outcome

Republicans with Guns

Higher potential for a bad road rage outcome

GOP pretense at competent mainstream governance collapses

What the GOP used to stand for

It has been known for a while that the Republican Party has lost interest in good faith governance and a serious policy debate. There is no concern for majority public opinion, and outright contempt for inconvenient truth. In view of what the GOP has become, there really isn't any reason to keep up the charade. The Republican Party stands for more wealth and power for the elites and extremist crackpot Christian fundamentalism. The dominant economic dogma is the fully debunked Horse and Sparrow theory. Alt-reality, alt-facts and extremist crackpottery is the basis on which the Republican Party exerts the power that (i) its millions of supporters give to it by their votes and open support, and (ii) its major donors get from the corruption of campaign contributions.

In the latest dropping of the pretense at good faith democratic governance, the bad faith neo-fascist Republican Party has officially withdrawn from participation in presidential debates. CNN writes:

The Republican National Committee voted unanimously on Thursday to withdraw from its participation in the Commission on Presidential Debates, the organization that has long governed general-election presidential debates.

In a statement, RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said the commission is "biased and has refused to enact simple and commonsense reforms to help ensure fair debates including hosting debates before voting begins and selecting moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage."

CNN has reached out to the commission for comment.

Thursday's vote comes after months of signals from the RNC that it sought a break from the commission. In June 2021, McDaniel sent a letter outlining several complaints about the commission's practices, reflecting former President Donald Trump's concerns about the conduct of the 2020 debates.

And in January, McDaniel sent another letter threatening to "prohibit future Republican nominees from participating in CPD-sponsored debates" unless the commission changed its rules.

The RNC has advocated for a number of changes to the commission, including adopting term limits for its board and prohibiting members from making public comments about any candidates. McDaniel, in an echo of Trump's concerns, has also pushed for more influence on which journalists moderate general election debates, asking the commission for a "transparent criteria for selecting debate moderators that would disqualify individuals from consideration who have apparent conflicts of interest due to personal, professional, or partisan factors."

Hypocrisy, etc.

The GOP complains about conflicts of interest if and only if it sees real or apparent conflicts as working against Republican interests. Real or apparent conflicts that benefit Republicans, e.g., Clarence Thomas voting in a US Supreme Court decision to hide his wife's crackpot extremism, are accepted and not spoken of. Silence in the face of Republican hypocrisy, lies bad behavior and etc., is in accordance with the standard Republican KYMS (keep your mouth shut) propaganda tactic. 

In fact, withdrawing from debates entirely is in accord with KYMS. As pointed out in a blog post here yesterday, maintaining KYMS discipline is 100% effective at preventing a blowhard politician, a hypocrite(s) and/or a bad actor(s) (crook, traitor, etc.) from uttering an easily debunkable lie, extremist crackpottery or something stupid. If one practices KYMS, one cannot PFIM (put foot in mouth). Debunkable lies, extremist crackpottery and stupid constitutes most (~80% ?) of the rhetoric and reasoning that flows from neo-fascist Republican elites these days. That leaves a lot of opportunities for PFIM that the GOP would rather not be part of.

A public service message from 

Christian nationalism: 

“The last religion you will ever experience”

(so help us God)

More evidence of Republican voter fraud and defensive propaganda tactics

Mark Meadows, fraudulent voter and elite 

Republican Party neo-fascist traitor

His valiant defense: No comment

The AP writes: 

Mark Meadows, a former chief of staff to President Donald Trump, has been removed from North Carolina’s list of registered voters after documents showed he lived in Virginia and voted in that state’s 2021 election, officials said Wednesday.

Questions arose about Meadows last month, when North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein’s office asked the State Bureau of Investigation to look into Meadows’ voter registration, which listed a home he never owned — and may never have visited — as his legal residence.

A representative for Meadows, a former congressman from the area, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Public records indicated Meadows had been registered to vote in Virginia and North Carolina, where he listed a mobile home he did not own as his legal residence weeks before casting a 2020 presidential election ballot in the state.

Meadows frequently raised the prospect of voter fraud before the 2020 presidential election, as polls showed Trump trailing Joe Biden, and in the months after Trump’s loss, to suggest Biden was not the legitimate winner. In his 2021 memoir, he repeated the baseless claims that the election was stolen.

Judges, election officials in both parties and Trump’s own attorney general has concluded there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The Republican 'keep your mouth shut' propaganda tactic

It is worth noting that Meadows, like nearly all Republican elites, when faced with evidence of their own or their tribe's or cult's bad behavior, almost always respond with no comment. Failure to respond to inconvenient facts or truths or evidence of bad behavior by a partisan or his/her tribe or cult is a powerful and routine propaganda tactic. Essentially all Republican politicians, propagandists and elites are expert at keeping their mouths shut in the face of bad behavior or crimes and broken laws by themselves and/or their side. The same behaviors are ruthlessly called out and self-righteous, but hypocritical, screams of LOCK 'EM UP!! abound when the other side does it.

The keep your mouth shut tactic is surprisingly effective. There are solid biological cognitive and social behavioral reasons for the effectiveness of staying silent in the face of bad news and crimes. Those reasons are:

• The tactic of silence is 100% effective at preventing easily fact checked lies and saying stupid things that make no sense and/or are easily rebutted. Put another way, silence is an excellent breeding ground for some reasonable doubt. That is all that is needed for plausible deniability.

• The tactic of silence is very effective at leaving minds willing to give the benefit of a doubt able to do so. When so motivated, e.g., by ideology or tribe or cult loyalty, he human mind  rapidly and unconsciously rationalizes and minimizes or completely explains away home team/cult bad behavior. Bad things, even awful ones, get rationalized into insignificance or non-existence. That reduces or eliminates the discomfort of cognitive dissonance when confronted with bad news.  

• The human minds evolved to operate in a default mindset of trust, which fades if the mind gets betrayed or cheated too often or too badly. By keeping one's mouth shut in the face of bad behavior or betrayal, some, maybe most, people who are still in the mental trust mode will default to trust, and that unconsciously kicks in a normal, automatic motivation to rationalize home team and/or home player bad behavior into insignificance or non-existence. Keeping one's mouth shut makes the pro-bad behavior mental trick easier to occur.    

• Although it has become weaponized and partisan for many or most Americans, society still believes in innocence until guilt is proven. These days, innocence appears to be mostly or completely taken for granted for Republican bad behavior by most of the Republican rank and file. That also applies to Democrats, but probably at a significantly lower intensity level. By keeping one's mouth shut, one says nothing that can affirmatively damage the bad actor's position in view of his/her bad behavior. 

Unfortunately, one does need to pay attention to political propaganda tactics these days. The Republican Party has sunk into a moral rot that accepts lies and deceit in service to the party and its agenda. The GOP uses propaganda tactics routinely and ruthlessly. There are no moral qualms left in nearly all of that party's elites any more. And sometimes, the Democratic elites are not so great about their honesty. But despite flaws and bad things with both, there is not badness equivalence between the two sides.

Plausible deniability usually means keeping one's mouth shut 

about one's own lies, sleaze and crimes

An American neo-fascist propaganda fantasy: Grooming

Propaganda-stoked social ferment

A person has to admit that propaganda gushing from modern American neo-fascists is persistent, creative and without much or any concern for contrary facts, truths or reasonable reasoning. For the professionals of radical right dark free speech and for the most part (completely?), there is no such a thing as an inconvenient fact, truth or reasoning. 

As part of the creativity division of the Republican Party propaganda Leviathan, radical right professionals are road testing a new, divisive lie. So far the creativity division, also know as the DLEMCS (Deceivers, Liars, Emotional manipulators and Crackpots Squad) is working feverishly on the “grooming” fantasy. This has its origins in Pizzagate lies and crackpottery. 

FiveThirtyEight writes on this exciting new Republican lie from the DLEMCS wonks in the Republican Party skunk works (Fox News, etc.):

Why So Many Conservatives Are Talking About ‘Grooming’ All Of A Sudden

“Grooming” has become the most recent scare tactic of choice for the right. Fox News host Laura Ingraham included a segment on her show last month where she claimed public schools have become “grooming centers” where “sexual brainwashing” takes place. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene recently tweeted that the Democrats are the party of “grooming and transitioning children.” Last week, One America News host Chanel Rion even called President Joe Biden “the groomer-in-chief.”

For the unfamiliar, “grooming” is a term typically reserved to describe the type of behavior that child sexual abusers use to coerce potential victims without being caught. But now some Republicans are using it against any Democrat (or company)1 who disagrees with them on certain policy issues. This is a deliberate tactic that was promoted as early as last summer by Christopher Rufo, the same conservative activist who helped muddle the language around critical race theory. “Grooming” is a term that neatly draws together both modern conspiracy theories and old homophobic stereotypes, while comfortably shielding itself under the guise of protecting children. Who, after all, can argue against the safety of kids? But by adopting this language to bolster their latest political pursuits, the right is both giving a nod to fringe conspiracy theorists and using an age-old tactic to dismantle LGBTQ rights.

“There is no better moral panic than a moral panic centered on potential harm to children,” said Emily Johnson, a history professor at Ball State University who specializes in U.S. histories of gender and sexuality.

This most recent round of high-profile “grooming” warnings seems to have started in early March, as Democrats attacked Florida’s law limiting what can be taught in schools. Republican defenders turned to “grooming” as a way to push back.

“The bill that liberals inaccurately call ‘Don’t Say Gay’ would be more accurately described as an Anti-Grooming Bill,” Christina Pushaw, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, tweeted on March 4. “If you’re against the Anti-Grooming Bill, you are probably a groomer or at least you don’t denounce the grooming of 4-8 year old children.”

Except there’s no mention of grooming in the law. Instead, it prohibits “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity” in kindergarten through third grade, “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”  

So if casting those who oppose this law as “pro-grooming” is not rooted in evidence, what is it rooted in? In part, it’s a dog whistle to the party’s most extreme, conspiracy-minded base. The foundation of the QAnon conspiracy theory is that there is a mass, secret, underground ring of Satanic pedophiles whose members consist of Democratic leaders and Hollywood elites. Painting anyone who opposes Florida’s law (i.e., mainly Democrats) as being pro-grooming fits neatly into that narrative and winks at QAnon adherents without requiring politicians on the right to actually endorse the outlandish theory.  

But what’s being normalized here isn’t grooming; it’s the use of homophobic rhetoric and conspiracy theory language. And it’s intended not to protect children but to advance political causes and slander political enemies.

There it is. The newest creation from the DLEMCS. American society is in for a major bout of moral panic with much wailing, gnashing of teeth, hair on fire, and panties twisted in an unpleasant bunch. One can look on with wonder at the endless fascination that Republicans and Christian nationalist authoritarians have with the sex lives of other people. They must be horribly repressed.

This promises to be a wild ride into the Republican Party’s toxic neo-fascist la-la land. It is time to get out the tinfoil hats, gird the loins and install the cod piece. 

Codpiece being modeled by

a sharp-looking metrosexual model