>>15882464

>howdy

>https://voxday.net/2022/03/16/why-trump-failed/

>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10617637/Trump-admits-misread-Putin-surprised-invasion-Ukraine.html

Why Trump Failed

>Posted on March 16, 2022 by VD

Donald Trump’s failure to cross the Rubicon is explained by his reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Former President Donald Trump admitted he believed Russian President Vladimir Putin was only trying to ‘negotiate’ when he sent troops to the Ukraine border and was ‘surprised’ when the Kremlin leader actually invaded the country.

‘I’m surprised — I’m surprised. I thought he was negotiating when he sent his troops to the border. I thought he was negotiating,’ Trump told the Washington Examiner during a Tuesday evening phone interview from his Mar-a-Lago estate. ‘I thought it was a tough way to negotiate but a smart way to negotiate.’

Trump, who seemingly developed a close working relationship with Moscow during his presidency, said Putin has ‘very much changed’ since the pair last worked together.

‘I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with — you know, like every trade deal. We’ve never made a good trade deal until I came along,’ Trump said. ‘And then he went in — and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.’

I’ve mentioned this observation before, but Trump’s character has never been demonstrated more clearly than by this comment about Vladimir Putin. Trump’s strength is that he is a legitimately great negotiator. However, as with all successful men, his weaknesses are related to his strengths. Trump is a talker, not a doer. He is a negotiator, not a warrior. He conflates speech with action. He’s not a fighter, and never having been punched in the face or thrown down another man in the judo ring, he doesn’t understand men who are.

Of course he thought Putin was negotiating by mobilizing the Russian Army, threatening an invasion, and issuing an ultimatum, because he thinks everything is a negotiation. Hence his failure to take action after the fraudulent election of 2020; there probably wasn’t any chance of him actually doing so even if the US military could have been relied upon to obey its Commander-in-Chief – something we can’t know either way despite what various people claim – because for him even an approach to the Rubicon would have been a negotiating point rather than the beginning of a military action.

Remember, the Senate was massively surprised when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and marched on Rome, because despite his military successes on the Mediterranean and in Gaul, they knew him to be a skilled politician and negotiator. And negotiators always prefer jaw-jaw to war-war.

So Trump is a negotiator and Putin is a fighter. What, one wonders, is Xi Xinping?

DISCUSS ON SG

Posted on March 16, 2022 by VD

Tagged philosophy, politics, war

>https://voxday.net/2022/03/16/the-least-of-the-charges/

>https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-am-asking-for-a-coherent-set-of

The Least of the Charges

>Posted on March 16, 2022 by VD

Hypocrisy is arguably among the least of the charges that can be accurately lodged against The Empire That Never Ended. Given that its influence rests entirely on lies, redefinitions, and sophistic rhetorical manipulation, it’s hardly a surprise that an institution also known as The Empire of Lies should be shamelessly hypocritical. But it is worth observing nevertheless, if only to disarm its rhetoric.

Since people insist on bringing up the moral principles of self-determination and freedom of association, I insist that those principles be equally and fairly applied. That is a thing that human beings do, when it comes to questions of morality, to demand that they be universally invoked if they are to be invoked at all. I don’t know what kind of weird moral world people are living in where they think it’s some irrelevant dodge to maintain the essential notion of universalism. Those who use the term “whataboutism” are alleging that their targets are avoiding hard conversations and real engagement through distraction, but that is in fact precisely the function that the term uses in our discourse, to allow people to wriggle out of considering America’s terrible history of crimes abroad. And to the extent that this dynamic is identified at all, it’s never matched with an attendant focus on the stuff that was disallowed from the conversation. People don’t say “that’s whataboutism” at 2:00 and then say “OK let’s get serious about what America’s drug war has done to Mexico” at 2:30.

The people who say “whataboutism” don’t want to talk about carpet bombing in Cambodia. They don’t want to talk about death squads in El Salvador. They don’t want to talk about reinstalling the Shah in Iran. They don’t want to talk about the murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. They don’t want to talk about giving a hit list to rampaging anti-Communists in Indonesia. They don’t want to talk about the US’s role in installing a far-right government in Honduras. They don’t want to talk about US support for apartheid in South Africa. They don’t want to talk about unexploded ordnance that still kills and maims in Laos. They don’t want to talk about supporting the hideously corrupt drug lord post-Taliban regime in Afghanistan. They don’t want to talk about aiding literal Nazis and Italian fascists in taking over the government in Albania. They don’t want to talk about giving support to the far-right government’s “dirty war” in Argentina. They don’t want to talk about the US-instigated far-right coup in Ghana. They don’t want to talk about our illegal bombing of Yugoslavia. They don’t want to talk about centuries of mistreatment of Haiti, such as sponsoring the coup against Aristide. They don’t want to talk about sparking 36 years of ruinous civil war, and attendant slaughters of indigenous people, in Guatemala. They don’t want to talk about our drone war in Pakistan. They don’t want to talk about how much longer this list could go on….

I asked some really basic questions in this post – do you really think the United States operates under the principle of self-determination for other nations? Do Cuba or any other disfavored countries enjoy self-determination from the influence of the United States? Why are we allowed to dictate who neighbors ally with, where Russia is not? Are you all really so blind to your country’s history? And not one comment, among hundreds, has credibly provided a coherent answer to the basic moral questions at hand.

Those limited to the rhetoric should never be expected to directly answer dialectical questions. Because they can’t. All they have is emotion, and emotion is intrinsically irrational and incoherent.

And liars will never be troubled by their inconsistency. It’s the least of their concerns.

DISCUSS ON SG

Posted on March 16, 2022 by VD

Tagged globalism, rhetoric

>>15882592

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CybJWxhf668

PBS NewsHour full episode, March 15, 2022

>107,962 views| Mar 15, 2022

[Yovanovitch] | MASKED

Tuesday on the NewsHour, Russian forces escalate their bombardment of Kyiv as civilian casualties mount, and we speak with the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine about Russian motives and Ukrainian resistance. Then, the White House and Congress spar over COVID-19 funding, and we look at how COVID-19 is straining a mental healthcare system already under-resourced.

>>15882704

>>15882750

>>15882881

o7

>>15883040

Immanuel Velikovsky

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky.jpg

Immanuel Velikovsky at the 1974 American Association for the Advancement of Science Conference in San Francisco

Born 10 June 1895

Vitebsk, Russian Empire (in present-day Belarus)

Died 17 November 1979 (aged 84)

Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.

Alma mater Moscow State University

Immanuel Velikovsky (/ˌvɛliˈkɒfski/; Russian: Иммануил Великовский, IPA: [ɪmənʊˈil vʲɪlʲɪˈkofskʲɪj]; 10 June [O.S. 29 May] 1895 – 17 November 1979) was a Russian, Israeli, and American scholar. He is the author of several books offering pseudohistorical interpretations of ancient history, including the U.S. bestseller Worlds in Collision published in 1950.[1] Earlier, he had played a role in the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, and was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Velikovsky's work is frequently cited as a canonical example of pseudoscience and has been used as an example of the demarcation problem.[2]

His books use comparative mythology and ancient literary sources (including the Old Testament) to argue that Earth suffered catastrophic close contacts with other planets (principally Venus and Mars) in ancient history. In positioning Velikovsky among catastrophists including Hans Bellamy, Ignatius Donnelly, and Johann Gottlieb Radlof [de],[3] the British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier noted "… Velikovsky is not so much the first of the new catastrophists …; he is the last in a line of traditional catastrophists going back to mediaeval times and probably earlier."[4] Velikovsky argued that electromagnetic effects play an important role in celestial mechanics. He also proposed a revised chronology for ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, and other cultures of the ancient Near East. The revised chronology aimed at explaining the so-called "dark age" of the eastern Mediterranean (c. 1100–750 BC) and reconciling biblical history with mainstream archaeology and Egyptian chronology.

In general, Velikovsky's theories have been ignored or vigorously rejected by the academic community.[5] Nonetheless, his books often sold well and gained an enthusiastic support in lay circles, often fuelled by claims of unfair treatment for Velikovsky by orthodox academia.[6][7][8][9] The controversy surrounding his work and its reception is often referred to as "the Velikovsky affair".[10][11][12]

…

Childhood and early education

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Lithuanian Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus). The son of Shimon (Simon Yehiel) Velikovsky (1859–1937) and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscow, where he performed well in Russian and mathematics. He graduated with a gold medal in 1913. Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh. He returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, enrolled in the University of Moscow, and received a medical degree in 1921.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Upon taking his medical degree, Velikovsky left Russia for Berlin. With the financial support of his father, Velikovsky edited and published two volumes of scientific papers translated into Hebrew. The volumes were titled Scripta Universitatis Atque Bibliothecae Hierosolymitanarum ("Writings of the Jerusalem University & Library"). He enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the volume dealing with mathematics and physics. This project was a cornerstone in the formation of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as the fledgling university was able to donate copies of the Scripta to the libraries of other academic institutions in exchange for complimentary copies of publications from those institutions.

In 1923, Velikovsky married Elisheva Kramer, a young violinist.

Career as a psychiatrist

Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna. During this time, he had about a dozen papers published in medical and psychoanalytic journals. He was also published in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.[13]

…

Emigration to the US and a career as an author

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York City, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton. The book was inspired by Freud's Moses and Monotheism and explored the possibility that Pharaoh Akhenaton was the legendary Oedipus. Freud had argued that Akhenaton, the supposedly monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh, was the source of the religious principles that Moses taught to the people of Israel in the desert. Freud's claim (and that of others before him) was based in part on the resemblance of Psalm 104 in the Bible to the Great Hymn to the Aten, an Egyptian hymn discovered on the wall of the tomb of Akhenaten's courtier, Ay, in Akhenaten's city of Akhetaten. To disprove Freud's claim and to prove the Exodus as such, Velikovsky sought evidence for the Exodus in Egyptian documents. One such document was the Ipuwer Papyrus, which he felt reported events similar to several of the Biblical plagues. Since conventional Egyptology dated the Ipuwer Papyrus much earlier than either the Biblical date for the Exodus (ca. 1500—1450 BCE) or the Exodus date accepted by many of those who accepted the conventional chronology of Egypt (ca. 1250 BCE), Velikovsky had to revise the conventional chronology.

Within weeks of his arrival in the United States, World War II began. Launching on a tangent from his original book project, Velikovsky began to develop the radical catastrophist cosmology and revised chronology theories for which he would become notorious. For the remainder of the Second World War, now as a permanent resident of New York City, he continued to research and write about his ideas, searching for a means to disseminate them to academia and the public. He privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945 (Theses for the Reconstruction of Ancient History and Cosmos Without Gravitation). He mailed copies of the latter to academic libraries and scientists, including Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1947.

In 1950, after eight publishing houses rejected the Worlds in Collision manuscript,[14] it was finally published by Macmillan, which had a large presence in the academic textbook market. Even before its appearance, the book was enveloped by furious controversy, when Harper's Magazine published a highly positive feature on it, as did Reader's Digest, with what would today be called a creationist slant. This came to the attention of Shapley, who opposed the publication of the work, having been made familiar with Velikovsky's claims through the pamphlet Velikovsky had given him. Shapley threatened to organise a textbook boycott of Macmillan for its publication of Worlds in Collision, and within two months the book was transferred to Doubleday. It was by then a bestseller in the United States. In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the Earth in Upheaval (a geological volume) in 1955. In November 1952, Velikovsky moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses. After this period, he began to receive more requests to speak. He lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America. In 1972, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation aired a one-hour television special featuring Velikovsky and his work, and this was followed by a thirty-minute documentary by the BBC in 1973.

During the remainder of the 1970s, Velikovsky devoted a great deal of his time and energy to rebutting his critics in academia, and he continued to tour North America and Europe to deliver lectures on his ideas. By that time, the elderly Velikovsky suffered from diabetes and intermittent depression, which his daughter said may have been exacerbated by the academic establishment's continuing rejection of his work.[15][third-party source needed] He died in 1979.

…