They might surrender, but I don’t think we should count on it.
The Sundance Kid
Remember that line, from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid? The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang have sprayed the middle of nowhere with bank notes from the excessively dynamited safe of a train sent to entrap them. Fleeing a large and $10,000 dead-or-alive posse, the two leaders’ efforts to dilute the threat by peeling away from the gang have failed. Ignoring the small fry, much to Cassidy’s indignation – “what about those guys?!” – the pursuers maintain undivided focus on Cassidy and the Kid.
As their horses tire and the gap narrows, Paul Newman’s Cassidy asks Robert Redford’s Kid to spell out the options, eliciting the Kid’s vanishingly implausible conjecture.
Bear it in mind as Rachel Blevins and Mark Sleboda take 28 minute stock of last weekend’s “Peace Conference” in the Swiss resort of Bürgenstock.
Zelenski to Putin. Surrender unconditionally – or else!
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All lies and jest; still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.
Paul Simon
Westerners who’ve realised we do not live in a democracy, but a rentier oligarchy pretending to be one, step out onto a perilous landscape. One common mistake, on first discovering there is indeed such a thing as The Ruling Class, is to leap to the conclusion that its members, or at least its vanguard, must be fiendishly clever. Nope, just more psychopathic, better connected or more driven than you and me. I’ve gone into this before and will do so again but today I want to look at a second common mistake.
We know mainstream corporate media are systemically incapable of being truthful on matters that cut to the heart of powerful interests, right? Alas, that doesn’t make “alternative” sources invariably correct. Would that things were so simple! For those who do care about truth, and know it won’t be found – when the stakes are high – in Guardian or Economist, the terrain can be dauntingly uphill. Not only is there a need to triangulate sources and wise up to where they are coming from; not to dismiss them out of hand but to factor in any slant. We need also to hone our instincts for detecting traps of the kind Cassidy and the Kid stepped into by robbing the wrong train.
Or to put it another way, to be on guard for our own confirmation biases.
There’s a story doing the rounds of a shrink taking his own life; at wits’ end and driven there by a psychopathic client. Here’s Global Research, June 7:
Moshe Yatom, a prominent Israeli psychiatrist who successfully cured the most extreme forms of mental illness throughout a distinguished career, was found dead at his home in Tel Aviv yesterday from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. A suicide note at his side explained that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been his patient for the last nine years, had “sucked the life right out of me.”
“I can’t take it anymore”, wrote Yatom.
“Robbery is redemption, apartheid is freedom, peace activists are terrorists, murder is self-defense, piracy is legality, Palestinians are Jordanians, annexation is liberation, there’s no end to his contradictions. Freud promised rationality would reign in the instinctual passions, but he never met Bibi Netanyahu. This guy would say Gandhi invented brass knuckles.”
Does this sound like bollocks to you? That’s because it is.
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“but there’s a need to hone our skills of detecting traps of the kind Cassidy and the Kid stepped into by robbing the wrong train.
Or to put it another way, to be on guard for our own confirmation biases.”
Quite. A trap which Blevins and Sleboda wade into in the embedded video in regard to the reports of what Stoltenburg is supposed to have claimed in regard NATO taking nuclear weapons out of storage.
Cue Bernard at MoA:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/06/couldnt-such-fake-news-start-wars.html#more
What was that poster from WW2? Loose talk costs lives or something along those lines.
Just wrote – and deleted – a needlessly convoluted reply to this Dave. Bottom line, I think it unfair to say Mark “waded into” any trap that matters. That said, MoA is right to conclude on the need to remember: