luc said:
In case you haven't seen it, this is excellent: https://www.sott.net/article/367271-The-problem-with-the-MeToo-movement
It's hard to wrap your head around this nonsense, probably because it is riddled with postmodern contradictions. On the one hand, women are absolved of all responsibility whatsoever - it's all about the "bad men". Like the woman in the article said, you don't tell people that they don't need to put their seat-belts on while driving but should instead tell the other drivers to not do stupid things like crashing into your car. Yet this logic is applied to assault on women - it's just ridiculous.
On the other hand, they proclaim even little girls can be so responsible as to give their consent to sexual acts! It's all so upside-down, horrible and brain-dead
Contradictions abound!
When the elites are so contradictory, what else can the people be?
Even Trump, who is, let's say, 'the best of American elites', is contradictory - and he's
far less so than the neocon/neolib ideologues ranged against him.
I listened to his keynote speech at the APEC summit in Vietnam last weekend. Going by comments on social media, his base loved it.
He praised a number of Asian countries for their economic development in recent decades, which, he intimated, was thanks to their embrace of "
the rule of law, human rights, and respect for private property." He then proceeded to complain - gently, not too bombastically; but he
was complaining nevertheless - that the US has not been treated fairly by those poorer countries, not following WTO rules, and generally abusing the US' open market while they protect their industries with tariffs and regulation, etc., because "
government, not private industry, makes key decisions."
Completely ignoring for a minute that government also makes key decisions in the US (except that it's a shadow, deep govt), and completely ignoring what hitherto US-controlled institutions like the WTO, IMF and World Bank has done to those countries in the not-so-distant past, and completely ignoring that they
have tried to follow WTO rules but couldn't ever quite manage to because the US kept changing the rules thanks to its majority voting rights in those institutions...(whew! See? I'm trying to make it all fit so that things are less contradictory!)... I was struck by Trump's mention of the core ideological precepts that form what the US determines to be the standard for democracy: "
the Rule of Law, human rights, and respect for private property", which we know is completely arbitrary nonsense that amounts to ideological cover for the
actual rule: 'Whatever is best for American interests... is best for eveyone's interests!'
It's a recitation of the exceptionalist ideology we'd expect to hear from Obama or Bush, or Soros NGOs, but which sounds jarringly contradictory coming from someone we know is capable of cutting through the BS by simply spitting out 'how things actually are'. I suppose an interesting question would be: was Trump even aware that his speech was peppered with the same liberal ideology he sees through on many other fronts?
Consider also the context in which he said this: Vietnam, at Da Nang, where US troops landed to kick-start 'the Vietnam War', and where enough Agent Orange was stored to defoliate much of the country and cause genetic birth defects to this day. But again, overlooking past crimes for a minute, and imagining that 'we're all equally sovereign, independent nations now', Trump lauded the host nation - in what seemed a dig at 'non-democratic' China - as being the “
world’s 3rd-largest democracy”… except that it
isn't, certainly not by the standards he had just set: Vietnam is actually ruled as a communist state,
a la China!
The major current contradiction at the level of elites is of course the West's appalling treatment of Russia (the contradiction being, specifically, that the West's stance that Russia is barbaric, backwards, evil, etc. is 180 degrees reversed from observable reality: Russia is in fact conducting itself relatively impeccably in international affairs).
We had some discussion here recently about what the whole anti-Russia hysteria is
'really' leading to, or revolving around. Some of us felt there had to be some particular, as yet unknown, reason why the US deep state is terrified that Trump might ally the US with Putin's Russia. I wasn't so sure. Imagine you were 'putting deep staters to the question' to find out the REAL reason why they are so certain that American-Russian collaboration would be 'EVIL!'
I think they'd give you a range of reasons, with some or even most of those reasons overlapping, but which on the whole would not form a logically consistent answer. In other words, I think that, at root,
they don't themselves know why they know it's 'so wrong' to be nice to Russia - it just 'is'.
As was said in the silly puppet movie
Team America: World Police: "We have lost I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E.!" And when intelligence is lost at the top, mushed brains proliferate below.
