There has been a coup in Niger, and a fiercely anti-Western government is in power, the first to cut France (and indeed the whole West) off from some very important raw materials. The interesting thing about this is how such a thing can take place today. In an age of ubiquitous satellites and absolute surveillance of all communications, Western intelligence services are unable to detect that an anti-Western coup is afoot. Or the coup plotters (or their sponsors) have managed to negotiate support from someone in those intelligence services, so the relevant information has simply been lost in the apparatus. Which is the same thing.
Quite possibly confirming that Western power ends at the borders of the EU and the borders of the US. The world is a different place than it was a few years ago.
On wealth and poverty
As one ages, one gradually loses various illusions. One of them is the myth that industriousness leads to wealth and idleness to poverty. That is, industriousness leads to wealth. But it leads to wealth for those who appropriate the results of that work. Not the wealth of the hard-working man.
This is not to completely deny that it can play a partial role (the industrious person has a house in better condition than the lazy person, for example) and that there are occasional historical periods when industriousness allows for decent wealth (we saw this under communist rule, for example), but these are partial matters.
On the road to wealth is the person who can appropriate the results of other people’s work. On the road to poverty is the one whose work is appropriated. The economy can then be described as a complex game where everyone tries to get others to work for him, and he tries to work for no one. Whoever employs 100 people is richer than the one who employs 10. And whoever employs 1,000 people is richer than the “100 man.” It’s not a disaster and no reason to be offended. It has been so in all ages, and when the rules are set well, everyone can benefit. But the problem is that the rules are rarely set well.
On the other hand, that does not mean that we should take seriously the propaganda about someone ‘giving people jobs’, which sounds like they are giving away their property. In reality, he is taking their work.
As in Gogol’s time
The more well-read may still remember the play The Reviser. A hilarious comedy about 19th century Russia, about the imaginative exploitation of fear of the upper class, also about characters ready to grovel before anyone who can give even the slightest impression of belonging to those at the top. It is quite easy to pretend to be a reviser sent by the top when my opponents are not checking anything, analyzing anything, calculating anything… the primal instinct of blind obedience and blind humiliation prevails.
So we laugh at the Russians of the 19th century, and lo and behold. Here we are in the 21st century, the Czech Republic, and we are ruled by people who have been put in power by American ambassadors and Soros’ Open Society Foundation. A concert by Anna Netrebko, a world-class opera singer with an Austrian passport, is about to take place in Prague and panic is breaking out. The singer is of Russian origin! What should we do? Who will give us orders? To whom shall we obey? The American protectors don’t give a damn. Neither the German Chancellor nor the EU leadership cares. What now? We can’t think for ourselves. We can only humiliate ourselves. And we have no one to humiliate! Fortunately, there is still the Ukrainian ambassador, who has no real power, but he has a lot of nerve. So the former Minister of Justice, Pospíšil, goes to the Ukrainian ambassador and asks for instructions.
The history of this is different from that of mid-19th century Tsarist Russia, but the difference is surprisingly small.
On identification
So it looks like we are slowly coming to the end of the period when people could “identify” with the other sex and when the ruling class forced normal people to accept it. Which mainly took the form of making the bearded guy feel like a busty blonde, and everyone had to pretend that they really thought he was the blonde.
It’s just that it’s progressive. So there are reports coming out of the UK of a schoolgirl who feels catty and insists on her teacher pouring milk into her bowl. The boys identify as dinosaurs and demand a special meaty diet and special treatment. And so on. The government has put a stop to this in schools for now, but it is not a long-term solution.
There are really only two options. Either you allow it, then the game becomes universal and chaos gradually erupts. The aforementioned bearded man who feels like a busty blonde will become absolutely uninteresting among dinosaurs, solar system planets, Cleopatras and Napoleons. Or you ban it, and then a group of human rights activists who feel like pussies and dinosaurs emerge. Those activists win because the rules are set up so that the activists win every time.
What is the lesson here? That it’s good to distinguish between what is truly lethal to civilization and short-term moronicity that will destroy itself. Which is not to dispute that transgender rampage has caused and will continue to cause thousands upon thousands of personal tragedies.
On income and property equality
Western societies are being torn apart by rapidly growing inequalities. But what to do about it? Many (though by no means all) are willing to admit that large social and property inequalities are a problem. Often so serious that they prevent people from living normal lives. But if the state intervenes forcefully, it may end up creating another privileged elite – the state maintainers of equality – and things will get even worse.
Sometimes we encounter solutions based on an obsession with equality of opportunity. That inequality supposedly doesn’t matter if everyone has been given a chance to get to the top. Especially in America, they like this view.
Is it really okay? Then imagine the following situation. There’s a mass of rightless slaves, and once in a while someone is drawn from that mass to be the owner of them all. Everyone has an equal statistical chance of being drawn. Does that help the undrawn? Will it lead to a more humane arrangement? Hardly.
It would help if the top and bottom were mixed up from time to time. And if nobody knew what their next job was. If the Speaker of Parliament lived with the possibility that in two years’ time she might swap places with a shop assistant from a small village, and if a board member of a large bank lived with the possibility that in two years’ time he might swap places with a warehouseman from Jihlava. Then they would probably support a completely different policy and aspire to a completely different world. But no one has invented such a thing and no one will invent it right away.