Donald Trump’s base claims to have been cheated out of winning the 2020 American election, and so there are a few cheerleaders on X apparently devoted to the surreal task of expressing outrage as an offensive measure. Trump hire Liz Harringtonhas been insistent about a lost election that Trump, in fact, has been trying to steal for himself.
DJT-delusional, grandiose, messianic and without normal boundaries and limits. The psychology’s well known. Nothing was taken away from the #AmericanPeople in the course of the 2020 election.
Our #UnitedStatesOfAmerica is no medieval polity. It is no “mafia state”. It is a modern secular democratic republic, and not one elected official, including President, “rules” by cabal, divine right, fraudulent claims, force, or violence.
In fact, the role of an American President is not to rule the country but to act as its most powerful management executive in compliance with the Constitution of the United States and its Legislative and Judicial branches. Only recently, so it seems to me, has the Republican Party embarked on or endorsed a program of what appears an effort to install authoritarian, corrupt, and evidently criminal control of the state.
The Xpression has been well received, and here you may see it yourself.
I have found “X-pression” becoming pointless as the forest wakes up, all of the birdies go tweet tweet tweet and one’s own expression drowns in the cacophony. Nonetheless, X interaction feels engaging and here serves as part of a morning routine involving strong coffee, access to a portion of the world’s best journalism online, and, sigh, also a collection of voices practically medieval in their bludgeoning unreason.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) analysis has included review of Israeli military launch records; radar air activity tracking records; reverse-tracked rocket fire traced to the proximity of the hospital, i.e., rocket trajectory show the launch took place south of the hospital–and not far from it; and independent video of the actual failure of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s rocket.
In intercepted audio communications, launch controller-tracker officers note the location of launch as a cemetery behind the hospital . . . . So there’s the location south of the hospital–a cemetery!–and both cause and opportunity to lie about the attempt.
Regarding the matter of Hamas having lied to Palestinians to cover the shame attending a failed rocket launch (while blaming it on the other guy), the ways have always been several: cover, deflect, deny, erase, fabricate, frame, and omit.
No more clear an example of #MedievalVModern may appear than the war that has broken out between #Hamas and #Israel. For Hamas, only the weapons are modern. The motivations have been deeply medieval, well rooted in directed misperception, i.e., disinformation, fabrications, lies promoted and sustained by edict and enforced by unquestionable and vicious authority. In essence-this on the Gaza Strip-the #Palestinians have been perceptually controlled by their own “leaders”, and they are now bound to be driven to destruction by them too.
Sviatoslav finally succeeded in destroying Khazar imperial power in the 960s. The Khazar fortresses of Sarkel and Tamatarkha fell to the Rus in 965, with the capital city of Atil following circa 967 or 969. A visitor to Atil wrote soon after the sacking of the city: “The Rus attacked, and no grape or raisin remained, not a leaf on a branch.”
Today’s Khazarian and Rus descendants and others who have come to define Ukraine’s cultural, ethnic, and tribal endowments in total have become #ModernPeople, overwhelmingly lawful, fair and just, and peaceful in business and in general comportment while the most corrupt of persistent medieval thugs, Viktor Yanukovych, had been booted back to Moscow by general popular revolution, e.g., https://world.time.com/2014/02/22/ukraines-president-flees-protestors-capture-kiev/ and with the moral support of Ukraine’s army.
Hamas X Russian Political Absolutism, Barbarism, and Mafia
While Russia professes good will daily through its X-platformed embassy sites, its claims inevitably belie its own horrendous evil in the realms of chaos and mass destruction. The at-hand BackChannels references: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/06/28/a-dark-mirror-in-language/. For those most evil, language may be perverted to cover crime in the present and humiliation in the past as the rogue malign narcissistic psychology fashions strategies in language to match.
#Putin, #TsarNobody in my #Zelensky-inspired desktop world, has with his KGB/FSB cohort proven immune to inconveniences posed by conscience (note: I’ve made a trope of “delusional, grandiose, and messianic ideation with an absence of normal boundaries, conscience, and limits” as shorthand for Narcissistic Personality Disorder and the political expression of the same beneath the label of “Malignant Narcissism”). For perhaps the most horrifying example of Putinesque stage management and perceptual control: #OperationStormInMoscow AKA #MoscowApartmentBombings, and here-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2023/05/03/reference-journalist-alexander-zhilin-operation-storm-in-moscow-aka-moscow-apartment-bombings/.
When it comes to bombing apartment buildings in the dead of night, none have done it better than #MadVlad who today threatens nuclear annihilation using the same methods in language inversion and psychological project to blackmail the west into the abandonment of Ukraine. And that’s “above the table”, i.e., in plain sight.
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The speech came after hardline political scientists and commentators in Russia said a return to nuclear testing could send a powerful message to Moscow’s enemies in the west. “I hear calls to start testing nuclear weapons, to return to testing,” Putin said.
Some in Russia have called for Putin to detonate a nuclear bomb to show the west that Moscow’s patience over its support for Ukraine and apparent unwillingness to negotiate is wearing thin.
Hamas has long found a sympathetic (or sympathetic-acting) presence in Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the Middle East. While it has been an independent actor, it appears to have also long-ingested the former communist state’s anti-Semitic rants and emphatic absolutism while holding itself n place with methods familiar to all dictatorships (for overview: https://freedomhouse.org/country/gaza-strip/freedom-world/2023).
Much has been written about the #RussianMafiaState. For quick reference->
Israel has been hampered in its assistance to Ukraine by a deconfliction arrangement with Russia over Syrian airspace (e.g., https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/russia-sees-military-coordination-with-israel-syria-continuing-2022-02-26/). Nonetheless, The Jewish State has arrived today with biblical, global, and modern histories. In Israel it has a homeland; around the world, it contains communities of all races and cultural strands bound together by Judaism, its Torah, and Jewish experience and lore across thousands of years; and it has so contributed to the ideas of the west that the entire political culture may refer to itself as “Judeo-Christian” as well as “Greco-Roman”. The barbarians from European North and Asian East have in Russia chosen to remain defined by whatever fear they may install in others and then tribute exact or steal in wealth. That’s what they did in the Byzantine and Medieval Eras, and that is what they are doing now.
In the Middle East, the Palestinians have served Russia as a block and goad to the west and the burgeoning and vibrant cultures associated with the democratic open societies of the world whose freedoms may be well symbolized by Israel’s vitality.
In Eastern Europe, Ukraine by revolution, election, and today war has in every possible way become part of the west, leaving Russia to attempt its capture and subjection or destruction even while “Muscovy” dies or destroys itself for its own archaic and deeply displaced, misguided, and perverse ambitions.
The Anti-Defamation League and Elon Musk have been sparring over the fate of hate speech on Musk’s “Digital Commons”, so I call it–#DigitalCommons–on X. The ADL appears to believe Musk is a publisher who should be responsible for the content of his web site while Musk appears devoted to the broadest legal freedom of speech concept and feel the obligation to sustain X uncensored. In the way of X, I’ve weighed in. Clearly, Musk neither authors nor edits the platform he administers in his role as a technologist. Forthwith, my opinion at X address https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim/status/1703418994139566319 –>
Single platform publishing has eliminated the boundaries that once sustained mainstream, fringe, and marginal communities in each their own domains. Today, the #DigitalCommons offers all everything at once in one place. That would not be a problem but for #AgitProp #Conspiracy #Disinformation #Incitement and #Recruitment into organizations or movements criminal or once marginalized by paper-based distribution.
Rx. Defenders of laws and within bounds civil behavior may have to go direct to their antagonists. Conspiracy, defamation, incitement (to crime) needs must be fielded, and the #DigitalCommons may not be itself the policing element.
Note: in the United States, not all speech has been protected under the First Amendment. Defamation, libel, and slander may be brought to court by suit or tort; conspiracy to commit crime or incitement to violence may be detected and met by the power of the State through its law enforcement agencies.
Putin has turned out a monster fairly bathing in blood; Trump has been all but declared a felon several times over–his image will lose the “alleged” before the charges against him; and here Musk, the world’s wealthiest industrialist appears ill-informed and lacking in insight. The first two I would cast as feudal-medieval thugs and in modern parlance “malignant narcissists”; the third has expressed concern for his fellow travelers in the most democratic terms, but while his platform, literally, and stature give him a mighty voice, he appears without background for the world he may view, also literally, from outer space.
Here follow three brief X-Riposte (I guess) to his callous and naive suggestion on Russia’s ethnocide in Ukraine: “Both sides should agree to a truce.”–>
#RussiaOutOfUkraine#TsarNobody has made an art of murdering families in their sleep-https://t.co/9SO99Ig1T4 Is that criminal and politically criminal mentality one you would engage in gentlemanly diplomacy, a slight adjustment of borders?
I know I know my little bit of history in relation to Russia but am no match for Ph.D’s in Russian Studies–and to my own disadvantage, don’t speak a word of the language. On the other hand, inflection points and nodes may emerge from broad and general knowledge (plus boundless curiosity), and that much I have enjoyed in abundance. With respect to Russian history, I do know that those who crossed from what is today Scandinavia found the northern soil of the new continent thin and consequently would roam south for more fertile land (credit the thought to Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974).
For vision, it helps to have background, engagement over time, an understanding of historic as well as present issues, and awareness–sometimes in depth–of variables contributing mightily to the way things look and, in fact, appear real and true with high confidence.
Packaged here for compression, all cited URL’s may be unpacked but perhaps not in a simple hour or a day, but to any devoted to seeing how things work and have worked, what matters a little more time?
For the technology-enabled future of greatest benefit to humanity, both Putin and Trump must be defeated as the anachronistic and far bent personalities each has become. For Ukraine, there will be no security for Russia left as a politically intact and ever ruthless and vicious kleptocracy with imperial ambitions; for the United States, there should be no drift into criminal horse dealing of its own and the compromising of the privileges, prerogatives, and rights of citizenship without bounds of the nation’s Constitution and established political and social ideals, processes, and traditions.
One step down, Retired European wrote, “Exactly, Russia is the new Nazis”, and to that I responded:
#Russia had been the inspiration for Germany's Nazis via Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. This is basic-https://t.co/3z7Hgmdvcf It's only history and change for the #ModernWorld is inevitable. https://t.co/lBhnpdgrsv needs unpacking, but it's there to help all good find courage.
For my followers in many social media quarters, the concept of “Malignant Narcissism” as a political interpretation of Narcissistic Personality Disorder needs no introduction.
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In the region of the Paranoid Delusional Narcissistic Reflection of Motivation, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson Maria Zakharova wrote, “Terrorist methods have become routine for the #Kievregime and the most odious terrorists in world history would envy the scale of it.”
Twitter lends itself most of all to squawking and very little to I-Thou conversational exchange. Here, #SovietPostSovietRussia claims human rights violations for traitors with heart, courage, and narcissistic leanings who may have–I’m not certain–been able to address their core issues (in order of mention: America is being run like a prison camp; intrusion into private lives is possible, undeniable, and probable; and there should be no state secrets-everything should be online) via other channels and methods. In any case, adult, cognizant, and sophisticated Americans should understand that all states have secret lives and ours in America fewer than others (although that’s a box always a little bit compelling for unpacking).
Chelsea, Edward, and Julian hacked, extracted, and delivered top secret data to Russia, so of course they're Russian heroes.
#TsarNobody and his crew have been the schoolyard bullies who want your lunch money and your lasting fidelity to their glory. So far, none but a pissed off Prigozhin, another former criminal, has dared question Putin’s military leadership. The idea of the Tsar right up there with God appears to remain fixed in the Russian psyche, which has also practical fear of so obviously criminal a power as Tsar Nobody knows all of their secrets, controls their careers and paychecks, has ways of assaulting (or murdering) any Russian, so far, anywhere in the world by means traditional–that would be defenestration, for example–and surreal, i.e., Polonium Tea.
In effect, Putin has all of Russia enslaved to and within his own delusional and malign narcissistic fantasia.
None dare leave who have “achieved” any stature within his realm.
Putin may believe himself the personification of Russia, i.e., that Putin is Russia, but Putin is not Russia, and the cognizant and educated among Russians know it and know furthermore the Kremlin feeds Russia’s public–“The Masses” given Putin’s weird Imperialist-Stalinist revanche–garbage.
Given the dangers, including nuclear blackmail as evidenced by the mining of the Zaporizhzha Nuclear Power Plant, the possession of so-called “tactical nukes”, and the inveigling of Belarus in nuclear threat ambition, Putin may be expected to fail from within.
This morning, I posted two notes to European and global security expert Nicolas Tenzer’s Twitter feed–>
“My hope is you’ll see that Ukraine makes significant progress on their offensive and that it generates a negotiated settlement". Highly misleading words from @POTUS.#Russia must be fully defeated. There cannot be "pease talks" with #Russia. Period.https://t.co/ryZZO9lEts
I may have shared this with you already but it's appropriate here-https://t.co/Er9BwQ6Psl Putin's power resides in slavish obedience, not esteem; while he's made clear the price of disobedient intent, he may not have the internal support he believes he has and may yet be refused.
Putin's ascent to power, Moscow Apartment Bombings & all, may have been predicated on the discomforts of disaffected KGB at the end of the Cold War. Those weren't going to be left out of power & muscled back.
What is a feudal tyrant doing as the head of a still powerful and promising Russia?
Part of the answer involves a cosmic “Why not?”
As a gang, disaffected KGB–out of power, out of work in suddenly post-Communist Moscow–may have had a thick-as-thieves coordination and ruthlessness fit to their former secret policing mission and experience. Then too, they would have garnered the cooperation and interest of the post-Cold War peaceful of a productive Europe and North America.
“Why not?” for that as well.
Add condemnation, disapproval, and strong “red line” talk–TALK!–for aggression or barbaric actions undertaken on behalf of absolute power from Chechnya to Afghanistan to Ukraine and the United States (remember the Internet Research Agency!)–all squawk on the part of The West while all remained barbaric and criminal on the part of Moscow and its favored circles of disreputable mediocrities.
Left to grow Russia in his own mafia, mercenary, parochial, post-Soviet, rapacious, and ruthless manner, Putin put Russia’s army and his own demented narcissistic will on the big step into Europe, first Crimea in 2014 in response to the big “Nyet!” and boot given his lackey Viktor Yanukovych, and then the greater portion of the Breadbasket of Europe herself in February 2022.
Have Russians the will or wish themselves to be made criminal, desperate, dumb, and enslaved?
Have the less evident “forces of order” the intent and will to embrace and support those ends?
Perhaps Putin has finally gotten a certain attention secretly craved.
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