Limbo More Than Ever
I have been absent from Limbo for longer than usual, due to the death of my father. Needless to say, a lot of noteworthy events have occurred in the world of public significance during my absence, but — also needless to say — nothing really substantial has changed.
A brief roundup of what I have observed, unsurprisingly, upon my return to the real world.
Vladimir Putin continues his absolutely stoppable but nevertheless utterly successful war of annihilation, kidnapping, and history-rewriting imperialism against the U.S. Republican Party. Will all those Trump-loving fakes and losers (I am trying to use a vocabulary they can relate to) finally shut up with the mindless smugness of their “Russia hoax” denialism? Could it ever be more obvious that Donald Trump, by means of his most effective media backers, along with the party faithful his lowest-possible-brow brand of demagoguery has left morally and intellectually decimated, is an agent of the Kremlin? No, it could not be more obvious — just as the same thing could not have been more obvious about his presidential predecessor. As I recall very well, however, the ersatz conservative media celebrities and the grassroots voter faction they have poisoned were only too eager to shout of Obama’s sellout to Putin, while being unable to admit the far more complete and unconcealed pro-Putin machinations of their idol Trump. Is this because they know, deep down, that Trump is about fifty IQ points dumber than Obama, so that it is simply inconceivable to them that he, unlike the well-trained Marxist community organizer, could be doing something so nefarious as selling out his country to a KGB dictator?
I cannot deny that Trump really is that much dumber than Obama. But I also know that people even dumber than Trump can be traitors — all it takes is sufficient levels of greed and a weak man’s outsized self-preservation instinct, and we all know that Trump has those traits in abundance, as do his more overtly pro-Putin sycophants, from Tucker Carlson to Jordan Peterson.
Sick of weak men. Sick of them all.
Vladimir Putin’s most prominent internal political opponent, Alexei Navalny, has died at the hands, and in the custody, of Putin’s enforcers, after having previously been almost fatally poisoned by the same faction. Naturally, in response to being challenged on this point, Putin’s favorite American propaganda tool Tucker Carlson — Walter Duranty with half the cleverness but twice the greed — has returned to one of his favorite rhetorical defenses of his owner, to the effect that “All countries murder people, so why is Putin being singled out?”
To which, as I have before, I reply simply: “Really Tuckie? Well then perhaps you would like to send me a list of American opposition political candidates or critical journalists who have been murdered by an American president during your lifetime. Take your time, so as not to omit any important examples. I’ll wait. In the meantime, I will try to get my head around the moral reasoning entailed in your argument that Putin’s murders are no mark against him, since other people commit murder too.”
Nikki Haley’s candidacy, which never really got off the ground other than in the hearts of those establishmentarians desperate to persuade themselves there was still a way to stop Trump, is now dead for all intents and purposes, as she has lost the primary in her home state. Trump will be the Republican nominee, and if the Democrats insist on allowing Joe Biden to make a laughingstock of their party by running as the nation’s historic first fully senile presidential candidate, Trump will probably become president by default. I say by default, in the sense that all the Democrats would have to do to defeat Trump would be to stand someone, anyone, up against him in the debates, and yet, with Biden, they will be running the one and only candidate imaginable whom they can never allow to stand on a stage opposite anyone, for sadly obvious reasons.
How many Ukrainian children have been kidnapped by Putin so far? Just a question. And I dare you to go ahead and say, “Well, all governments kidnap hundreds of thousands of children, so why is Putin being singled out?”
To which my answer is…yes they do. But they usually call it “school,” and the parents by and large have submitted to this state kidnapping passively, even eagerly. Still, the Ukrainian case is a little different, wouldn’t you say?
A final thought, from somewhere beyond all the highly significant “reality” noted above: Palliative care, invented in my home country and initially intended as a dubious but half-defensible means of reducing suffering, is now, and not on its fringes but at its core, a euthanasia racket. Palliative care is about killing people, as efficiently as possible, while hoodwinking families into going along with it “for the good of the patient.” It is about saving resources and freeing up machines and beds. It would never exist in anything like its current form in any context but a government-controlled and -funded healthcare system, for it serves the best interests only of collectivist economics and systemic sustainability. No big news there, just a comment.
