Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Tuesday, February 8, 2022

The Internationale

 In America, we tend to look at global trends and assume they are just things about America, because foreign countries don't exist. So, Trumpism is a uniquely American phenomenon. 

Except it's not.

Antivax nonsense is not unique to the United States, what IS unique to the US is that a major political party is pushing this nonsense, as opposed to marginal Rightist groups in Europe and Canada. 

A lot of these roads lead back to Moscow. Russia is a weak nation economically, overly dependent on resource extraction and little hope to leverage its human capitol, as it experiences a brain drain to the West. It has nukes, sure, but the main thing it does is ratfuck the West. Russia helped fund Brexit, Catalonian independence and Trump. They push anti-vax nonsense to cripple and divide their foes.

From a Russian perspective, the rest of the world is out to get them, so they must divide the rest of the world into warring camps that cannot focus on them. Putin's recent saber rattling over Ukraine has achieved the exact opposite of his goals and united the West against him. I would guess he's looking for an exit ramp.

Still, if Russia was not a dysfunctional petro-state relying on exacerbating the West's own dysfunctions, we would be a lot better off.

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