Recent Comments

1. about 2 years ago on Doonesbury

   35273??

2. over 2 years ago on Doonesbury

   “Authoritarian personalities tend to take the opposite view [rephrasing Blackstone’s ratio ]. Communists employed similar reasoning during the uprisings in Jiangxi, China in the 1930s: “Better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person go free,” and during uprisings in Vietnam in the 1950s: “Better to kill ten innocent people than let a guilty person escape.” Similarly, in Cambodia, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge adopted a similar policy: “better arrest an innocent person than leave a guilty one free.”

   I seem to remember that Stalin adopted a similar motto to justify the Terror Purges of the 30’s

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio#Viewpoints_in_politics

3. over 2 years ago on Doonesbury

   I am sure it will end up in disaster

4. about 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   It surprises me that so few comparisons are made with the 2014 ISIS advance in northern Iraq.

   There, too, a fictitious national army made up by corrupted local tribal leaders under the patronage of Western powers gave way to the first hint of danger.

   There, too, their sponsors were eager to believe the paper notion that a profusion of money spent did result in real improvement other than being rerouted into not-so secret private bank accounts.

   There, too, the same powerful foreign administrators were more interested in fostering their careers (and possibly worse) pretending not to see that the recipients of their funding, were actively suppressing those that tried to organise self-defence and improve the lot of their people.

   What will happen now will be a rehash of what happened in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of the soviets (or similarly in Iraq, for that matter).

   The loose coalition of the Taliban will splinter along ethnic lines, and in the general weakening caused by the internecine civil war, the Afghan ISIS, that belong to a foreign different ideological faction and therefore inherently more united, will eventually prevail in most of the Country.

   Back to zero.

5. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Why use science to modify my understanding of reality when I can modify reality to suit my understanding?

6. over 3 years ago on Doonesbury

   Replying to @PeterMarcus “If ever there was a time for reflection and gradual reform, rather than high-volume reaction, surely it’s now?”

   Looking back at history is one of the ways to reflect on present-day problems. One doesn’t compare past and present as like for like but try to see the reasons behind events, and see to what extents they apply today. Berlusconi, Johnson or Trump are farcical figures (and yet they caused much grief and death, lets not forget) but they are symptoms not causes. In a world where technology has empowered buffoons to be Vishnu-like :“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” any thinking person has to “reflect” that some warnings need to be shouted until they are understood.

7. almost 4 years ago on Doonesbury

   25 years later multiply for 1k and more…

8. almost 4 years ago on Doonesbury

   Trump has surrounded himself with hyper-loyalists (actually cult-fantasists) and possibly his already tenuous grip on reality, may have slipped further away. He may be convinced he is fighting the Qanon-Satanist conspiracy and attempt a coup-d’etat. The fact that it would have no chance of success wouldn’t preclude it from happening. Insanity has its escalating way…

9. about 4 years ago on Doonesbury

   Why not?

10. over 4 years ago on Doonesbury

    Let’s go back to pure tribalism. Each neighbourhood decides what tribe it belongs to and has a simple foreign policy of hating all the other tribes, as an inevitable by-product of hating those members of their own tribe that don’t conform.That’s the way to run the world…traditional, simple and especially not global.