Great article. I agree all the way. Also, thank you for using my picture from Afghanistan, which I made available on Flickr. I'm always happy to see that people find them useful even if the quality leaves something to be desired because many were shot with a cheap fixed-focus camera.
Thanks. The photo in the article was actually shot with a new Olympus OM-10 in '87. My earlier photos from Afghanistan in 1984 and 1985 were taken with a cheap Yashica. In my profile picture I'm still wearing the Pakul hat from Afghanistan but the shot was taken at the Batura Glacier in northern Hunza, Pakistan in 1985.
Again very cool. We’re all a bit older now eh! Funny 1987,(I was 24), we could never have understood the unintended consequences of helping these freedom fighters against the Russians, that chicken came home to roost in a big way.
Yes, that's right. I was 36 then. I was quite anti-Soviet and anti-communist back then -- but I have learned a lot since... Two months before the Soviets went into Afghanistan in 1979 I had actually traveled all across the Soviet Union, on the trans-Siberian. To me the country looked pretty shabby, not like a great superpower that threatened the west as I had learned earlier in the US. But when they intervened in Afghanistan I felt my anti-communist friends in America had been right. Events since then have led me to change my mind.
Fantastic. We humans work ourselves up into such a lather, we are idiots and know not what we do, unintentional consequences galore. Hippocrates had good advice I think: first do no harm.
We all know that those who tell the truth are castigated, reviled and detested. I hope that you can rise above such attacks and continue to espouse the truth. Our very existence relies on it.
Western culture is premised on ideals as absolutes. The long shadow of God.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Culture tends to see good and bad as some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, though they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, because society needs to function as a larger organism in times of stress.
People are ninety percent emotion and ten percent logic on a good day, yours truly included, so waving the bloody handkerchief is pretty effective in spooking the herd.
It would be one thing, if those pulling the strings actually had the interests of the larger society in mind, but it should be evident to even the most clueless this isn't the case.
If this dynamic is to be examined to a broad degree, it will take a deep dive into the cultural paradigm and this can only occur in the aftermath of a pretty significant reality check. Of which we might just be in the early stages.
Nature is cycles of expansion and consolidation. Politically this is somewhat expressed as liberalism as the expansion side and conservatism as the consolidation side. Though wokeness is really a consolidation of the liberal belief system of the last 60 years. The hard residual structure that originally flowered in the 60's and 70's, then became mainstream, as it schizophrenically acceded to Reaganism and its, "Greed is good." economic convenience of putting everything on credit and levered debt. (Though further enabling the banking sector to metastatically consume the rest of society.)
As they say, change happens one funeral at a time.
The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.
You say “Reality check” do you mean : post modern relativism is finally going to be called out as the bullshit,myopic disaster that it is? Reality as a mailable social construct is the post modern ascendency of stupidity and delusion that leads us to chaos,as in our current situation and it is our great undoing.
As for this reality check in and it’s early stages I highly doubt it
I think the current situation is like the straw that broke the camel's back. We have been going forth and multiplying for a very long time now and our linear, narrative, goal oriented culture is reaching the edge of the global petri dish, so we are going to have to come to terms with nature being cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback generated.
Consider time, God and money;
We are mobile organisms, so our experience is as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, therefore the assumption of time as the point of the present moving past to future, though the evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it is only present, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
As such, energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the nervous system sorts the patterns.
Consequently the intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, the math, than the processes generating them.
I could go on, but suffice to say I've been banned from various physics forums for this, though a few neuroscientists found it interesting.
As for God, aside from my original point, remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they exemplified a world where different groups managed to interrelate, without identifying as one, aka, multiculturalism. To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was forty years in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments.
The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being shed. Making monarchy the default political system for the next 1500 years. When the West went back to less centralized systems, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics. Though the tendency to view one's ideals as absolute runs through many of the subsequent ideologies.
Nodes and networks. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
As for money, it is a contract and accounting device, enabling society, we have come to see as a commodity to mine from society. The medium has become the message.
Which ties back into processes versus patterns. Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet one is dynamic, while the other is static.
Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.
I expressed similar sentiments in one of novels where the son had been blown to bits in Vietnam. Here is the excerpt. (Tyler being the son who never met his father because of the war).
One thing was for sure; they weren’t going to go off blindly to war. It’s hard to say Momma Daisy, Pappy and the rest had all become pacifists. To Tyler, that didn’t seem the right term. But there was a decided firmness against war. And he did know they all lived by Momma’s directive, “There ain’t no boy or girl in this family gonna go off and die for some president and the rich men that pull his strings. If somebody come marchin’ into Georgia, we’ll decide then what to do.”
Ya Andrew Jackson’s understanding of peace through strength: zero foreign adventures and military strength for the homeland ONLY. This was mainstream public opinion and elite consensus prior to Wilson taking America into WW1 .
As I said, Patrick, I have one more comment. One of your commenters complained about "indiscriminate Russian bombing" and a couple of more comments that prompted me to recall a story by Keith Laumer, the science fiction author, wherein he has his protagonist Retief, diplomat of the corps diplomatique terrestriene, listen to a rant from one of the species on the planet about another species on the planet. In the end, this character says, "do you agree Retief?" Retief's response is "Minus the slanted adjectives, yes." But that is a lot of what passes for news now a days. A bunch of slanted adjectives that tell you what you are supposed to understand about the "news" instead of, as Joe Friday would have said, "Just the facts, ma'am". Getting just the facts can be tough. Your commenter nom claiming the millions of refugees headed his way with their dead doesn't appear to discriminate between those fleeing Russian bombing and those fleeing Kievian shelling.
As always Patrick you lay out the situation - with chronological aspects and context and with a reasonable and unemotional clarity I truly admire. Thank heavens for voices such as yours. Jim K
A Canadian snowbird in Florida, I have many American friends and they all think America is “a leader not a hegemonic power” as per your piece on professor Hoffman, they are completely oblivious. Question: is the leadership at the New York Times also oblivious, blind to America’s true nature or is it cynicism and cunning at play?
Are they, NYT, true believers? Professor Deneen on his substack “the post liberal order” calls it “the political Gnosticism of imperial liberalism”. So once again my question is, in your opinion does NYT believe this nonsense: America is a leader not a hegemonic power?
Russia is a corrupt, Putin a murderer therefore let’s promote democracy, America’s values will save them. NYT can’t be that stupid, can they?
RJ. A lot of people ask this question. It's a good one but a little complicated to answer. There are, to begin, the true believers. They are down for ev'thing the paper has to say. But by and large, it's a question of false consciousness, Sartre's mauvaise foi. They pretend to believe what they say and do is true because they wouldn't have work otherwise. I think of it as Descartes turned upside down: "I think, therefore I am" becomes "I am, therefore I think."
Having worked at The Times (and other such publications) for many years, I can tell you those in the newsroom are effectively inside a bubble from which it is difficult to see out. This renders them perfectly capable of dismissing all perspectives other than the Times's.
In these ways I don't have a simple answer for you, but maybe answer enough here.
That explains the rank and file, what about senior management. I am a no one and I have decoded this stuff. I have a job and a life in the real world and yet I figured it out. AGSulzberger knows and chooses to be a shill to power, he and his Lieutenants knowingly propagate lies to persuade citizens to back aggression in favour of their interests, greed and lust for power. They have blood on their hands, they are evil.
It is hard to see into the relationships TImes management maintains with the national-security state. Certainly there are direct and probably frequent contacts with the intelligence agency and national-security people in the administration. On occasions in the past, as when Arthur Hayes Sulzberger signed a cooperation agreement with the C.I.A., this has been down on paper. Much of the time, however, noting needs to be said as Times management understands w/o being told what the line is and how to play a given story. The senior correspondents in Washington pay a sort of go-between role. They and their sources go through the motions of reporter-to-source when, in effect, the latter are telling the former how to handle a given matter. There have been occasions when a Washington correspondent will acknowledge in his piece that he has consulted with the admin as to what is O.K. to report.
Kinzer is good on this stuff in The Brothers. There are other such books. What I am saying is in the record.
One other point: The thought that the Times and other major dailies no longer have covert agents on staff is simply preposterous.
Thank you so much for that answer. It is silly of me to ask somebody of your standing to agree with my incendiary remarks: blood, evil. Your comment about it being on the record speaks volumes, (much more professionally).
https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/this-aint-putins-price-hike-notes?r=j0s6f&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Caitlin is much more direct than Peter L.
:-) No one can assert Caitlan ever beats around bush!
Killer
Great article. I agree all the way. Also, thank you for using my picture from Afghanistan, which I made available on Flickr. I'm always happy to see that people find them useful even if the quality leaves something to be desired because many were shot with a cheap fixed-focus camera.
That’s very cool, 35 years ago and a great picture. You kind a look like a mujahadeen yourself (please forgive my trespass, just an observation).
Thanks. The photo in the article was actually shot with a new Olympus OM-10 in '87. My earlier photos from Afghanistan in 1984 and 1985 were taken with a cheap Yashica. In my profile picture I'm still wearing the Pakul hat from Afghanistan but the shot was taken at the Batura Glacier in northern Hunza, Pakistan in 1985.
Again very cool. We’re all a bit older now eh! Funny 1987,(I was 24), we could never have understood the unintended consequences of helping these freedom fighters against the Russians, that chicken came home to roost in a big way.
Yes, that's right. I was 36 then. I was quite anti-Soviet and anti-communist back then -- but I have learned a lot since... Two months before the Soviets went into Afghanistan in 1979 I had actually traveled all across the Soviet Union, on the trans-Siberian. To me the country looked pretty shabby, not like a great superpower that threatened the west as I had learned earlier in the US. But when they intervened in Afghanistan I felt my anti-communist friends in America had been right. Events since then have led me to change my mind.
Fantastic. We humans work ourselves up into such a lather, we are idiots and know not what we do, unintentional consequences galore. Hippocrates had good advice I think: first do no harm.
We all know that those who tell the truth are castigated, reviled and detested. I hope that you can rise above such attacks and continue to espouse the truth. Our very existence relies on it.
Thank you--I agree with every word.
The trolley problem, writ large.
Western culture is premised on ideals as absolutes. The long shadow of God.
Logically a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. More the light shining through the film, than the images on it.
Culture tends to see good and bad as some cosmic conflict between the forces of righteousness and evil, though they are the basic biological binary of beneficial and detrimental, because society needs to function as a larger organism in times of stress.
People are ninety percent emotion and ten percent logic on a good day, yours truly included, so waving the bloody handkerchief is pretty effective in spooking the herd.
It would be one thing, if those pulling the strings actually had the interests of the larger society in mind, but it should be evident to even the most clueless this isn't the case.
If this dynamic is to be examined to a broad degree, it will take a deep dive into the cultural paradigm and this can only occur in the aftermath of a pretty significant reality check. Of which we might just be in the early stages.
John. Thanks this. Canst sen your email address to pl@patricklawrence.us, and we can take it from there. Best. p
https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/no-the-revolution-isnt-over?r=j0s6f&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
Nature is cycles of expansion and consolidation. Politically this is somewhat expressed as liberalism as the expansion side and conservatism as the consolidation side. Though wokeness is really a consolidation of the liberal belief system of the last 60 years. The hard residual structure that originally flowered in the 60's and 70's, then became mainstream, as it schizophrenically acceded to Reaganism and its, "Greed is good." economic convenience of putting everything on credit and levered debt. (Though further enabling the banking sector to metastatically consume the rest of society.)
As they say, change happens one funeral at a time.
The future is a continuation of the past, until it becomes a reaction to it.
One funeral at a time, change, that is fantastic
Very cool post, I learned a lot.
You say “Reality check” do you mean : post modern relativism is finally going to be called out as the bullshit,myopic disaster that it is? Reality as a mailable social construct is the post modern ascendency of stupidity and delusion that leads us to chaos,as in our current situation and it is our great undoing.
As for this reality check in and it’s early stages I highly doubt it
Putin called it an Empire Of Lies.
I think the current situation is like the straw that broke the camel's back. We have been going forth and multiplying for a very long time now and our linear, narrative, goal oriented culture is reaching the edge of the global petri dish, so we are going to have to come to terms with nature being cyclical, circular, reciprocal and feedback generated.
Consider time, God and money;
We are mobile organisms, so our experience is as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, therefore the assumption of time as the point of the present moving past to future, though the evident reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it is only present, creating time, temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
As such, energy, as process, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, while the nervous system sorts the patterns.
Consequently the intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, the math, than the processes generating them.
I could go on, but suffice to say I've been banned from various physics forums for this, though a few neuroscientists found it interesting.
As for God, aside from my original point, remember democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they exemplified a world where different groups managed to interrelate, without identifying as one, aka, multiculturalism. To the Ancients, monotheism was monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. The formative experience for Judaism was forty years in the desert, giving us the Ten Commandments.
The Romans adopted Christianity as the Empire solidified and remnants of the Republic were being shed. Making monarchy the default political system for the next 1500 years. When the West went back to less centralized systems, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics. Though the tendency to view one's ideals as absolute runs through many of the subsequent ideologies.
Nodes and networks. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
As for money, it is a contract and accounting device, enabling society, we have come to see as a commodity to mine from society. The medium has become the message.
Which ties back into processes versus patterns. Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet one is dynamic, while the other is static.
Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store.
Again I learned anew, thanks to you, my merry man.
This is an excellent analysis and review. Well done and well thought out.
Erik
The immense DNC-CIA’s Russia-gate hoax DIRECTLY led to the current catastrophe and tragedy in Ukraine
How US-backed Maidan coup, Russia-gate led to war in Ukraine
How US-backed Maidan coup, Russiagate led to war in Ukraine - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_Gzgu47wAc
Ukraine on Fire – Oliver Stone (now censored by Amazon, Google, etc.)
Ukraine On Fire (rumble.com)
https://rumble.com/vwxxi8-ukraine-on-fire.html
------------------------------------------------
Podcast: Thoughts on Ukraine - by Darryl Cooper (substack.com)
https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/podcast-thoughts-on-ukraine/comments?s=r
Podcast: Thoughts on Ukraine -- Darryl Cooper (March 13, 2022)
FYI -- Last summer Vladimir Putin wrote an article about the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine.
https://russiaeu.ru/en/news/article-russian-president-vladimir-putin-historical-unity-russians-and-ukrainians
I agree with others--very well laid out.
I expressed similar sentiments in one of novels where the son had been blown to bits in Vietnam. Here is the excerpt. (Tyler being the son who never met his father because of the war).
One thing was for sure; they weren’t going to go off blindly to war. It’s hard to say Momma Daisy, Pappy and the rest had all become pacifists. To Tyler, that didn’t seem the right term. But there was a decided firmness against war. And he did know they all lived by Momma’s directive, “There ain’t no boy or girl in this family gonna go off and die for some president and the rich men that pull his strings. If somebody come marchin’ into Georgia, we’ll decide then what to do.”
Ya Andrew Jackson’s understanding of peace through strength: zero foreign adventures and military strength for the homeland ONLY. This was mainstream public opinion and elite consensus prior to Wilson taking America into WW1 .
Wilson ... horrible president and still we name buildings and institutions after him!
As I said, Patrick, I have one more comment. One of your commenters complained about "indiscriminate Russian bombing" and a couple of more comments that prompted me to recall a story by Keith Laumer, the science fiction author, wherein he has his protagonist Retief, diplomat of the corps diplomatique terrestriene, listen to a rant from one of the species on the planet about another species on the planet. In the end, this character says, "do you agree Retief?" Retief's response is "Minus the slanted adjectives, yes." But that is a lot of what passes for news now a days. A bunch of slanted adjectives that tell you what you are supposed to understand about the "news" instead of, as Joe Friday would have said, "Just the facts, ma'am". Getting just the facts can be tough. Your commenter nom claiming the millions of refugees headed his way with their dead doesn't appear to discriminate between those fleeing Russian bombing and those fleeing Kievian shelling.
As always Patrick you lay out the situation - with chronological aspects and context and with a reasonable and unemotional clarity I truly admire. Thank heavens for voices such as yours. Jim K
A Canadian snowbird in Florida, I have many American friends and they all think America is “a leader not a hegemonic power” as per your piece on professor Hoffman, they are completely oblivious. Question: is the leadership at the New York Times also oblivious, blind to America’s true nature or is it cynicism and cunning at play?
Are they, NYT, true believers? Professor Deneen on his substack “the post liberal order” calls it “the political Gnosticism of imperial liberalism”. So once again my question is, in your opinion does NYT believe this nonsense: America is a leader not a hegemonic power?
Russia is a corrupt, Putin a murderer therefore let’s promote democracy, America’s values will save them. NYT can’t be that stupid, can they?
RJ. A lot of people ask this question. It's a good one but a little complicated to answer. There are, to begin, the true believers. They are down for ev'thing the paper has to say. But by and large, it's a question of false consciousness, Sartre's mauvaise foi. They pretend to believe what they say and do is true because they wouldn't have work otherwise. I think of it as Descartes turned upside down: "I think, therefore I am" becomes "I am, therefore I think."
Having worked at The Times (and other such publications) for many years, I can tell you those in the newsroom are effectively inside a bubble from which it is difficult to see out. This renders them perfectly capable of dismissing all perspectives other than the Times's.
In these ways I don't have a simple answer for you, but maybe answer enough here.
Thanks for reading and writing in.
P.L.
That explains the rank and file, what about senior management. I am a no one and I have decoded this stuff. I have a job and a life in the real world and yet I figured it out. AGSulzberger knows and chooses to be a shill to power, he and his Lieutenants knowingly propagate lies to persuade citizens to back aggression in favour of their interests, greed and lust for power. They have blood on their hands, they are evil.
Yes?
RJ.
It is hard to see into the relationships TImes management maintains with the national-security state. Certainly there are direct and probably frequent contacts with the intelligence agency and national-security people in the administration. On occasions in the past, as when Arthur Hayes Sulzberger signed a cooperation agreement with the C.I.A., this has been down on paper. Much of the time, however, noting needs to be said as Times management understands w/o being told what the line is and how to play a given story. The senior correspondents in Washington pay a sort of go-between role. They and their sources go through the motions of reporter-to-source when, in effect, the latter are telling the former how to handle a given matter. There have been occasions when a Washington correspondent will acknowledge in his piece that he has consulted with the admin as to what is O.K. to report.
Kinzer is good on this stuff in The Brothers. There are other such books. What I am saying is in the record.
One other point: The thought that the Times and other major dailies no longer have covert agents on staff is simply preposterous.
Thank you so much for that answer. It is silly of me to ask somebody of your standing to agree with my incendiary remarks: blood, evil. Your comment about it being on the record speaks volumes, (much more professionally).
Thank you for your great reporting.
I think rather than stupid, beholdin' in the better term.
Beholding would be cynical and cunning