Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
Being a Great Man doesn't make you immune from mistakes and failures, even stupid ones. Napoleon - the prototypical "great man" - fruitlessly invaded Egypt, Haiti, and Russia, losing whole armies each time. In 1813-1814 he failed to make peace with his neighbors and preserve his dynasty, searching instead for a fruitless battlefield triumph. His attempt to reinstate himself in the 100 days was doomed from the get-go. He died on St. Helena in exile a broken man.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
It has been in the past, though. Chavez saved Cuba from just such a slow-rolling famine when he started shoveling oil money at the Cubans upon coming to power.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
The cult of action is not a new thing. It is, I suspect, a deep rooted psychological type. Speed, brutality, decisiveness - action for the sake of action - are conflated with effectiveness by certain kinds of people, while caution, planning, and introspection are viewed with contempt. Of course, it's hardly a universal perspective. You have plenty of people with pretty much the opposite view.
But this action was both. Yes, the incursion itself was accomplished very rapidly, but there were also breathless stories about the exhaustive preparation for the strike; how Delta Force built an exact replica of the building they snatched Maduro from to practice raid tactics and timing on (similar to how the SEALS practiced on a mock-up of Bin Laden's Abbottabad complex); how the administration was monitoring Maduro's comings and goings for months in order to build up a perfect picture of his habits and whereabouts, etc.
I don't think this can be pattern-matched to a fascist-futurist aesthetic "Cult of Speed" thing.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
Famously, the Brits did the same thing with war hero Winston Churchill - out the door as soon as the war was clearly over, to make room for post-war economic concerns.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
You'd need to install a super-powerful non-delegation doctrine preventing Congress from passing broad enabling acts and then leaving all the actual regulating to executive agencies. And probably ban cameras/TV from the House/Senate floor. Otherwise they'll just keep doing that and resuming their job as Jr Varsity TV pundits.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system.
Because the one thing that doesn't work in the current system is the legislative branch. We're good at electing national avatars, "good" at constructing deep-state bureaucracies, and good at having hypertrophic judiciaries/legal oversight.
What we're NOT good at is actually doing representative legislation. Congress is increasingly a useless puppet show. Outright eliminating the independent executive and shoving everything at congress (or a new "American Parliament") is liable just lock in civil service rule as it has in much of the rest of the anglosphere.
The coverage I've been seeing (admittedly from scattershot sources) has a fourth take, which is that regardless of the corruption allegations, the real reason Zhang was tossed was that he disagreed with Xi's alleged insistence that the PLA, PLAAF, and PLAAN prioritize having (or appearing to) have the capability to successfully invade and (re)conquer Taiwan by the end of 2027. Zhang allegedly believed that this was functionally impossible, and that the only way to even appear to comply with the political directive would be through a lot of boondoggles and diversion of effort away from other, more fundamental aspects of military training and readiness.
Again, I want to stress that I don't understand chinese and so can't read most of the coverage, and personally don't have much of a stake in this. However, I wanted to at least highlight that there's an alternative view out there, FWIW (which, again, may be nothing).
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