“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 17, 2016

Ending False Equivalency

“Did Republican politicians, so big on flag waving and impugning their rivals’ patriotism, reject this foreign aid to their cause? No, they didn’t. In fact, as far as I can tell, no major Republican figure was even willing to criticize Mr. Trump when he directly asked Russia to hack Mrs. Clinton.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It has long been obvious — except, apparently, to the news media — that the modern G.O.P. is a radical institution that is ready to violate democratic norms in the pursuit of power. Why should the norm of not accepting foreign assistance be any different?” ---Paul Krugman

1 comment:

John T. Maher said...

I always read Krugman expecting to disagree. Here I was surprised to see Krugman limit his discussion of the hacking discussion to Republicans and Trump's exhortation. Yes they are radicals, that is not news. They live a sphere of counterfactuals which are maddening to some many, but within that sphere they are willing to abandon loyalty to binarys such as logical consistency concerning social, economic and political norms.

Apparently, Russia hacked the election because its served Russian ends of containing the expansionist neoliberal threat that Mrs. Clinton's policies represented, under-discussed in this blog's otherwise quite insightful posting on US politics, in the Mid East and Syria. Call it a bloodless payback for the Ukrainian regime change. By this standards of humanism, Russia even looks the more ethical player: all they did was hack an election rather than instigate a coup and finance a civil war. Not that Russia is at all innocent in Ukraine either, but isn't it a better more an elegant agential mechanism to toss the US election than to start a war? Democracy served cold.