degringolade

Taishō period (1912–1926) / Deiryu/ Bamboo

Spent time this morning looking in on the fruitless and depressing Jugfuck that is the Ukraine. I am improving my efficiency for this extravaganza of bullshit.

When it first started, I was sort of untrained and spent a lot of time being confused and wondering who in fact was lying or misrepresenting or was even just plain wrong. So I read a lot and pestered acquaintances from a long time ago and tried to figure out who was right and who was wrong.

Now, after a couple of months training, I am much better situated to make malformed and unsubstantiated judgements than I was at the beginning of the “special military operation”.

So, let's begin with the basics. The Rooskies learned well from our PR department: The last thing that you want to do in today's world is call a war a war. Just won’t do. Where we don’t go through the passé obligation of declaring a war and just go with the infinitely more flexible and morally labile “authorization for the use of military force”, and then go about killing everything in sight, the Rooskies went with “Special Military Operation” and then went in. I’m thinking that these two phrases need to be enshrined permanently within the dictionary of bullshit.

Second is the way of reporting. The Americans really went all out in Iraq to control the American press (remember “Imbedding”). I tend not to get all too het up about this as bullshit is a tactic of war and there is no one more skilled in bullshit than the mass media of both countries. So, on the subject of the main propaganda organs, one reads them for style and originality, but please, don’t think for a moment that the mass media of any of the squabbling children have any particular relationship to the truth.

Then we are down to the “social media”. This is kind of hopeless too. I think that the best that you can do is say that this is the area that gets you slightly closer to the truth than the government or the mass media. But for the most part, these folks are cheerleaders, All that you can do is try to extract the valid statements from the invalid statements. More than anything, you need to keep firmly in mind the simple idea that the truth is not established outside of your own brainpan and its cultural and historical predecessors.

The main problem facing us is teleology. We have a social, historical, and cultural need for slotting the things that happen around us as serving a purpose that we need to define and implement. We refuse to refer to the causes as the driving factor. We refuse to take responsibility for our past actions.