I am trying to watch Ezra Klein’s interview with Gillian Tett.
To say that people are confused is an understatement but there also is a very definite intention to deepen confusion.
I myself have trouble understanding what consumers and purveyors of confusion think they are doing and for what results.
Only very stupid persons can think that wars benefit anyone. I use “stupid” in the moral sense Dietrich Bonhoeffer came up with.
Putin is not better off for pursuing a barbaric invasion, rife with atrocities. At this point, even if Russia were able to subdue Ukraine in the long run, Russians would be less secure.
Putin cannot stop at any point. He must continue to invade neighboring countries to fulfill his totalitarian fantasy.
Netanyahu is not better off, Israel is not safer, for the barbaric retribution, and the people in Gaza did not gain anything from the atrocities Hamas committed, except misery and death.
At this point it is possible Musk and Trump could turn around and “make a deal” with Iran and anyone else who wants to attack Israel for no other reason than some weird shock value.
Meanwhile, we have these reasonable-sounding persons in positions information authority sowing confusion. Sadly, it seems many of us lack the knowledge, or the will to get it, to counter the nonsense.
Most often we find folks using large language model searches and summaries to frame their understanding.
Lacking a detailed coherent background in history that maps to our mostly unarticulated understanding of how human relations work, we wind up with this idiotic kind of discussion disconnected from consequences and common sense understanding of cause and effect.
This woman being interviewed can say with a straight face things like “Make America Great Again” is “a grand vision” to move from a “Neoliberal mindset” to a “mercantilist or hegemonic mindset” which is “all about power,” who has and who doesn’t have the power.
I look at her eyes and body language as she says “a new Bretton Woods system” and have trouble not concluding she is somewhat disconnected from her own statements about an “internal logic” to the economic chaos.
Her eyes say it all, as she says “all we can do is watch” and see what these rival factions inside the fascist movement are doing, and what comes from it.
Tett is an anthropologist. As she relates glibly that the last 200 years “has seen” different orientations about our economic relations, she fails to acknowledge how poorly those orientations worked.
Before WWI, imperialism, and between the wars, something else, and then Keynesian, and then Neoliberalism, there’s a failure to acknowledge that things before lead to the next things.
She strikes me as somewhat childishly disconnected from the reality behind her words. She has two children but she does not seem at all concerned about consequences for herself and them.
We just have to watch and see? Ways of looking at these things do change? Yes, they do, but we can tell from the methods and means what the outcomes are likely to be.
She mixes accurate observations about our current social relations with then oddly specious citations with questionable relevance.
We can agree that our relationships worldwide can be improved, but ought to recognize that these idiots causing chaos are not doing anything to move us to better conditions for anyone.
These bozos are creating conditions that exacerbate the problems. The disparity of wealth and power are irrefutably the cause of human misery and of the sense of grievance, fear, and of induced desperation which have, with the generous help of propaganda, given us the current unequivocally wrong direction in economic and foreign policies.
Klein and Tett seem authentically stupid for ignoring the obvious impact of these erratic actions and words.
I Dwell In Possibility 