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Can someone please tell me that when I was being driven at double the speed limit in Greece that I nodded off and slept through a collision with a car in the opposite lane (also driving at double the speed limit)?
If I am in a coma this may explain why I seem to have returned to a Britain where Peter 'our atmosphere has no substantial difference from the moon' Hitchens is talking more sense than either of our main political parties.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
'American-trained he (Saakashvilli) may be, but his opponents and critics fall victim to blatantly Soviet-style methods of intimidation. He is also adept at bombastic propaganda.
Do we really want young men from the Midlands of England and the Lowlands of Scotland fighting and dying for years to come to save this dubious creature from his own unhinged, wilful conflict with the Kremlin?
You might think not, but David Cameron is all for it. In an amazing demonstration of unfitness for office, the Tory leader last week wrote one of the daftest articles I have ever seen.
He wants Georgia to be allowed into Nato, so committing this country to come to Georgia’s defence if it is attacked. He wants to do the same for Ukraine. '
Yes, the maniac who thinks the ludicrous Great Global Warming Swindle pulls the carpet from under 90% of peer reviewed research actually summed up the Georgian crisis perfectly, whilst David Miliband and David Cameron have both written idiotic Manichean accounts of brave 'democratic' Georgia against Darth Putin.
'For me, the fog of war does not obscure the basic points', Miliband decently states. 'the first week of August South Ossetian provocation prompted a Georgian military response. This then provided a pretext for overwhelming Russian aggression in and beyond the borders of South Ossetia.
'Provocation', eh? Of course 'a military response' is completely different from 'overwhelming Russian aggression'. And of course 'prompt' and 'pretext' are completely different matters. 'Russian forces also entered the rest of Georgia from Abkhazia. ' The rest of Georgia? eh?
' In this case Russia has blatantly violated the sovereignty of a neighbouring (and democratic) country.'
Yes, our old friend 'democratic' again. Saakashvilli sends dissidents to prison and breaks up demonstrations with riot police. But he's a democrat. Look, it says here he's a democrat.
'In respect of Russia, I favour hard-headed engagement that leverages the benefits that the Kremlin needs from the international system - economically and politically - into a force for responsible behaviour from Russia.'
Yes, political benefits, like Gorbachev was given for his cooperation. Like not expanding Nato. Oh, wait.
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A belated christmas present, Gregor:
http://exiledonline.com/how-to-screw-up … ork/all/1/
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Belated thanks. I actually had a wonderful Christmas and the Priest staying with us brought an ethnic-Georgian Russian guest, with whom I became good friends. A wonderful chap, but… well, for us Orthodox being crazy is a matter of pride. And the political views of most Orthodox are beyond crazy. For example, my good friend Vachtang doesn’t like the Armenians because 800 years ago ONE Armenian showed the Turks a pass into Georgia.
I also have a good Romanian friend who doesn’t like Greece because ONE Ottoman Pasha OF GREEK ANCESTRY brutally ruled Medieval Dacia.
If being Orthodox biases my views on politics it’s a bias to have f-k all to do with my cousins on a political level. A casus belli could be a peasant being knifed a Millenia ago.
The eXile is a real gem. I got to reading it after the recent post on Thomas Friedman. My absolute favourite has to be the genius who is ‘The War Nerd’. Incidentally, he wrote a brilliant sociopathic piece on the Ossetian war:
http://exiledonline.com/ossetia-all-ove … e-whining/
Crazy? Dangerously unhinged? Just compare it to the unmitigated horseshit of Timothy Garton Ash’s take on the issue:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … /russia.eu
Ash is regarded as ‘a liberal’. I take this to mean that he insults the readers’ intelligence with a series of disclaimers about how neither side is perfect before a ‘but’, which is a hinge for right-wing propaganda. So this article is fairly formulaic. Emotional description of Georgian suffering (but not of Ossetian suffering) and an acknowledgement that Georgian leaders were ‘idiots’ (not evil) for bombing civilian areas. Sure enough, even before I got to it, I knew that ‘but’ would find its way in. After speaking about the faults of Georgia (and America’s war in Iraq where white phosphorus was used against civilians), the ‘but’ appears:
‘But finding fault with the US (a sport at which Europeans excel) and Georgia (a faraway country of which most Europeans know nothing) reduces by not one jot or tittle the challenge Russia now poses to the whole way western Europe has tried to conduct human affairs since 1945 - and the creed most of Europe has lived by since 1989.’
I don’t quite get what the US has to do with it really. The ‘fault’ was with tie chewing loon Saakashvilli bombing civilians for belonging to a different ethnic group.
‘That's our fundamental claim, which Putin's Russia now challenges head on. Its message is that the unilateral use of force in the advancement of national interests is part of what great powers do; that the EU's postmodern, multilateral, law-based order is a transient 20th-century anachronism; and that, in the words of Thucydides's Melian dialogue, "the strong do what they can, and the weak submit".’
"the strong do what they can, and the weak submit"? Isn’t that Saakashvili’s ethos? Personally, I’d happily lay down my life for the EU’s ‘postmodern’ ‘law based order’. I thought the whole Georgia/ Russia thing was two autocratic, corrupt states fighting each other over poorly defined borders because the Georgians wanted to crush an ethnic group using tanks and artillery. The Ossetians wanted to join Russia, but the Russians didn’t want Ossetia in its borders. Which must have been a real disappointment for the hysterical twits like Ash, Cameron and Miliband.
By the time I got to Timmy blabbering about ‘a new Yalta’, I tuned out. But this stunning piece of bone-headed idiocy really stunned me:
‘Our new working assumption, however, must be that it will for the foreseeable future remain Putin's Russia: a ruthless great power, determined to roll back the influence of the west and establish its own 19th-century style sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space’
A ‘19th-century style sphere of influence’. If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s a retro sphere of influence. Why not a good 20th century style sphere of influence… like America had in Latin America and France has in Africa. Oh wait, they are probably a thousand times more lethal. Oddly enough, Ash’s soulmate John McCain said exactly the same thing, that Putin wants to resurrect the Russian Empire.
And it still is ‘Putin’s Russia’ as far as Ash is concerned.
Bah, I’m going back to reading the war nerd for common sense and a cohesive ethos.
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More rubbish from The Guardian: ‘Vladimir Putin’s undersized protégé did his masters bidding again’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interac … dev-jintao
Is that a fact? Could it be that he was acting on the will of the Russian people, or even the Ossetians who did not want to be bombed and attacked with tanks?
But why waste time thinking when you can recycle neocon drivel in a ‘left wing’ newspaper? Of course not one of the twelve comments is positive, but the strange paradox is that the more The Guardian moves to the neo-liberal right, the less it appeals to its marketed audience.
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