Endorses Vice President Harris to succeed him.
Donald Trump, you must now agree to a Presidential debate with your new POTUS candidate rival, without delay. Failure to do so will speak a Library of Congress worth of hardbound volumes—that of a crass bully unwilling to face the forensic vaporization this woman of color will surely inflict on you in live view of a national and global audience.
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ERRATA ON TRUMP POIGNANCY
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JULY 22 UPDATE
I just made a donation to Kamala Harris for President.
Patriotic GOP strategist Rick Wilson and Project Lincoln are unreservedly in.
MUSICAL ERRATUM
A BRIEF ASIDE
My citations and excerpts custom and its rationale.to wit:
In addition to my numerous subscribed and episodically perused online periodicals, I read 2-3 books per week, and have done so for decades. On this blog (along with several others of mine), I often post "lengthy" excerpts (though far less in length than you'd see in the typical Amazon "Look Inside" preview). My readers deserve to hear directly from the authors in full salient topical contexts, with MY opinions significantly subordinated. Per "Fair Use" law—[1] I have never done ANY of this for money; nor do I solicit or receive freebie "reviewer copies," [2] I am consistently scrupulous to provide author / publisher / seller links, and I routinely apprise authors of my activities in support of their efforts.
Just published.
All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of an autocratic state. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the army and the police. The army and the police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the twenty-first century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services—military, paramilitary, police—and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. The members of these networks are connected not only to one another within a given autocracy but also to networks in other autocratic countries, and sometimes in democracies too. Corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country may arm, equip, and train the police in many others. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms and media networks that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote another’s—as well as themes: the degeneracy of democracy, the stability of autocracy, the evil of America.
This is not to say that there is some secret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor is our conflict with them a black-and-white, binary contest, a “Cold War 2.0.” Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats. Their regimes have different historical roots, different goals, different aesthetics. Chinese communism and Russian nationalism differ not only from each other but from Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialism, North Korea’s Juche, or the Shia radicalism of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of them differ from the Arab monarchies and others—Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Vietnam—which mostly don’t seek to undermine the democratic world. They also differ from the softer autocracies and hybrid democracies, sometimes called illiberal democracies—Turkey, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Hungary—which sometimes align with the democratic world and sometimes don’t. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, this group operates not like a bloc but rather like an agglomeration of companies, bound not by ideology but rather by a ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve their personal wealth and power: Autocracy, Inc.
Instead of ideas, the strongmen who lead Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Angola, Myanmar, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe, Mali, Belarus, Sudan, Azerbaijan, and perhaps three dozen others share a determination to deprive their citizens of any real influence or public voice, to push back against all forms of transparency or accountability, and to repress anyone, at home or abroad, who challenges them…
Applebaum, Anne. Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World (pp. 1-3). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Could scarcely be more timely. Anne Applebaum is the Real Deal.
More to come...
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