Clown World Declares a Winner

Foreign Affairs declares Türkiye and Erdogan to be the winners of the sudden Syrian collapse:

In most capitals across the Middle East, the news of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall sparked immense anxiety. Ankara is not one of them. Rather than worrying about Syria’s prospects after more than a decade of conflict, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan sees opportunity in a post-Assad future. His optimism is well founded: out of all the region’s major players, Ankara has the strongest channels of communication and history of working with the Islamist group now in charge in Damascus, positioning it to reap the benefits of the Assad regime’s demise.

Chief among the rebel forces that ended Assad’s rule on Sunday is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a Sunni Muslim group that was previously affiliated with al Qaeda and is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the United Nations. Despite those designations, Turkey has provided indirect assistance to HTS. The Turkish military presence in the northwestern Syrian town of Idlib largely shielded the group from attacks by Syrian government forces, allowing it to run the province undisturbed for years. Turkey managed the flow of international aid into HTS-run areas, which increased the group’s legitimacy among locals. Trade across the Turkish border has provided HTS economic support, too.

All this has given Turkey influence over HTS. In October, Erdogan quashed plans for a rebel offensive in Aleppo; when rebel forces launched their campaign late last month, they likely did so with Erdogan’s approval. For years, Assad had been dragging his feet as Erdogan sought to mend ties with Damascus and repatriate the millions of Syrian refugees whose presence in Turkey undermined support for his ruling party. With Assad’s regional allies weakened by the Israeli campaign in Gaza and Lebanon, and Russia distracted in Ukraine, Erdogan saw an opportunity to force the Syrian leader to the table.

The rebels’ whirlwind success came as a surprise. Now, Assad is out of the picture altogether, and Erdogan is getting ready to cash in on his years-long investment in the Syrian opposition. Iran and Russia—Turkey’s main rivals in Syria—are chastened; a friendly government could soon be set up in Damascus, ready to welcome back refugees; and Assad’s departure could even open a window for remaining U.S. troops to leave, fulfilling a long-sought goal of Ankara’s. If it can avoid the potential dangers ahead, Turkey could end up a clear winner in Syria’s civil war.

Obviously Israel is one of the immediate winners; the Lebensraum advocates are already grabbing Syrian territory in the name of “self-defense”. But I’m not certain that convincing the rest of the world that any accommodation with the USA is impossible is likely to benefit the Netanhayu regime in the intermediate term.

Also, at some point, the Turkish desire for an Ottoman revival and Israeli dreams of a Greater Israeli Empire are bound to collide. And the numbers would appear to favor the Turks.

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The Liberal World Order is Over

Viktor Orban is correct, although ironically, it’s the fall of Syria, not Ukraine, that marks the end of the so-called Neo-Liberal Rules-Based World Order:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has claimed that his country’s refusal to conform to liberal ideology will yield considerable benefits in the future.

“The liberal world order is over,” he declared during a speech in Budapest on Tuesday. The conservative nationalist politician has been in power since 2010, winning successive elections on a platform of defying what he considers to be authoritarian rule by Brussels.

EU leaders have accused Orban of undermining democracy in Hungary and harming the economic bloc’s solidarity on the Ukraine conflict. He has argued that Brussels’ policies have been disastrous for EU member states.

“As the changes come, only those nations can be winners that can bring the most out of themselves,” Orban told a gathering of university students, as quoted by his office. “Those who assimilate, fall into line, are unable to show their own values or discover the strength inherent in their national character will soon become irrelevant.” 

The rapacity with which Israel and Turkey are seizing Syrian territory, and the shamelessness with which the USA refuses to condemn their actions demonstrates that even those countries which are favored by Clown World can’t be bothered to maintain the pretense of what previously passed for “international law” any longer.

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Five Lessons for Russia

Simplicius contemplates the lessons to be learned from the collapse of Syria and cites five lessons that the Russians should take from it.

FIVE LESSONS FOR RUSSIA

Doom and gloom are somewhat appropriate, but it is more important to think about the future now. What does the fall of Syria tell us?

  1. False Peace is Death. A bad faith ceasefire is a recipe for disaster and after Minsk and Astana should never be repeated. False peace is worse than war, because false peace means you still have to fight the war later, but at a disadvantage. No green busses or green corridors for the enemy, no deescalation zones, no freezing of any lines. The enemy has to be defeated completely: victory is a prerequisite for mercy. Until that is achieved, no ceasefires, only death under FABs.
  2. Collapse is always sudden. The Assad regime resisted NATO-Israeli aggression for 13 years. And then it fell in a week. Mistakes, systemic errors and structural attrition accumulate until a critical mass is reached, and at that point the smallest impact will bring down the entire house of cards. Likewise, our current enemy in the main theater will resist stubbornly, until he will not be able to anymore, and then we will see Big Arrows. All our efforts should be focused on damaging the enemy’s war-waging capabilities to reach that critical point.
  3. Infantry is King. A single full-sized, dependable Russian infantry brigade (or a Ukrainian one, for that matter) would have been able to defeat the Jihadi advance for good. They were completely overstretched and to a large degree their offensive was a bluff that only worked because the SAA didn’t even try to resist, they just ran. We had our own experience with a lack of infantry in the SMO — it led to the Kharkov oblast debacle in fall ’22. No matter what anyone says, no matter what technological advances there are, the infantry unit was and remains the central actor of history, upon which all else depends.
  4. Empire is secondary to the Nation. There was a loud public debate among patriotic circles in Russia when the intervention in Syria began in 2015. Personally, I was opposed to the intervention because it seemed absurd to me to send Russian men to die in a foreign desert while Russian people are suffering under the yoke of Banderite occupation just across the border. We were told by Kremlin propagandists that “Palmyra is a symbol for all mankind” and the Donbass is just, eh, the Donbass. Whatever. Now, Jihadi dogs will get to loot and destroy all that archaeological treasure of all mankind, and we have to fight for the Donbass, anyway. Was it worth it? I have always been staunchly pro-Assad, but a single square mile of Russian land in Novorossiya means more to me than the entire Middle East. A nation should have its priorities in order.
  5. You can’t change nature. Some peoples and countries are just unreliable. They will never have stable polities unless compelled by overwhelming force or foreign occupation. They will never build working institutions on their own. You can’t just offer them a comprehensive reform package and then shrug when they refuse to implement it. They will always be shitty client states if you work with them within a civilized framework. We know how to work around local particularities in other parts of the world, so we should let Middle East policy also be guided by this knowledge. They are not Warsaw Era-pact allies you can let do things on their own.

The most important lesson, of course, is to stop trusting to agreements with the agreement-incapable. The second-most important lesson is to recognize that every state and entity controlled by Clown World is agreement-incapable.

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He’s Not Wrong

George R. R. Martin excoriates the Hellmouth’s mediocrities who inevitably make the works of others “their own” by ruining them.

Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin doubled down when Hollywood does an adaptation it should be a “faithful adaptation.” In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Martin stated, “Maybe I’m one of the few people in Hollywood who still thinks that when you adapt a work of art, a novel, a short story, you should do a faithful adaptation. It annoys me too much because they change things and I don’t think they generally improve them.”

“Everywhere you look, there are more screenwriters and producers eager to take great stories and ‘make them their own.’ It does not seem to matter whether the source material was written by Stan Lee, Charles Dickens, Ian Fleming, Roald Dahl, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Raymond Chandler, Jane Austen, or… well, anyone. No matter how major a writer it is, no matter how great the book, there always seems to be someone on hand who thinks he can do better, eager to take the story and ‘improve’ on it.”

He continued, “’The book is the book, the film is the film,’ they will tell you, as if they were saying something profound. Then they make the story their own. They never make it better, though. Nine hundred ninety-nine times out of a thousand, they make it worse.”

The truth is that subverting and ruining truth and beauty is one of the purposes of Hollywood. They’re greedy, to be sure, but their greed is less of a priority for them than their obligation to render what is true false and what is beautiful ugly. They are not only the enemies of God, they are the enemies of the good, the beautiful, and the true.

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Fake Alzheimer’s Science

The latest scientific scandal isn’t even remotely surprising. Most science – yes, MOST science – is fraudulent. And we’re not talking about obviously fake science like vaccines, psychiatry, and evolutionary biology, we’re talking about gold-standard, peer-reviewed studies published in well-respected science journals that are landmark studies that serve as the basis for the present scientific consensus in the relevant field:

Science magazine said Thursday that it uncovered evidence that images in the much-cited study, published 16 years ago in the journal Nature, may have been doctored.

The findings have thrown skepticism on the work of Sylvain Lesné, a neuroscientist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, and his research, which fueled interest in a specific assembly of proteins as a promising target for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Lesné didn’t respond to NBC News’ requests for comment, nor did he provide comment to Science magazine.

Science said it found more than 20 “suspect” papers by Lesné and identified more than 70 instances of possible image tampering in his studies. A whistleblower, Dr. Matthew Schrag, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University, raised concerns last year about the possible manipulation of images in multiple papers.

Karl Herrup, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute who wasn’t involved in the investigation, said the findings are “really bad for science.”

“It’s never shameful to be wrong in science,” said Herrup, who also works at the school’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. “A lot of the best science was done by people being wrong and proving first if they were wrong and then why they were wrong. What is completely toxic to science is to be fraudulent.”

The science is usually the very last thing you can trust; you’re literally better off trusting a coin toss. On average, scientists are more corrupt and less reliable than used car salesmen. And if the scientists and politicians are in agreement, you can be 100-percent certain that whatever it is that they’re trying to push on you is false.

Technological advancement does not depend upon science, that is an inversion of the actual relationship. In most cases, the technology precedes the scientific understanding that results from applying the technology to various hypotheses. For example, my hypothesis that atheism is actually the loss of a connection to the spiritual plane which is the result of brain damage that can either be congenital or caused by vaccines cannot be tested until a technology is invented that is capable of identifying and quantifying that connection. Until then, we’re limited to the sort of social science that only supports the hypothesis that there is an observable link between atheism and autism, though not necessarily a causal one.

We have a word for science that is reliable. And that word is engineering. You will note that scientists do not, for the most part, engineer anything.

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Why Russia Quit on Syria

Andrei Martyanov’s citation of a Russian journalist helps explain why the Russians finally stopped protecting the Assad regime in Syria:

I do not feel sorry for the Syrian authorities. I remember too well how, back in 2012, we, Russian journalists, were “squeezed” at border control, with all our luggage turned inside out, and our cameras and photo cameras confiscated. Then they hounded us around the offices of various ministries, putting us through an unsolvable puzzle of obtaining various papers and permits. And Western reporters were practically carried around in their arms, trying to demonstrate their liberal views against the backdrop of the uprising in Daraa. These are not my personal grievances. This, among other things, was an expression of their attitude towards my country. Condescending, with rolled eyes and a disdainfully raised upper lip. Then we saved Syria in 2013, if anyone doesn’t remember. Obama was going to cover it with carpet bombing after the chemical provocation in Eastern Ghouta. And thanks to the efforts of Russian diplomacy, the catastrophe was averted. Postponed, as it turns out now. In 2015, we came to Assad’s aid again when the terrorists were five kilometers from the center of Damascus. And as best we could, we patched up this patchwork quilt, consisting of various religious, social, forbidden and not so forbidden pieces, between which contradictions grew.

Now Israel and Turkey will divide up whatever parts of the country ISIS-HTS are not allowed to keep. It appears the US military is already bombing their jihadist proxy army; one wonders how it is going to respond to the Turkish invasion of Kurdistan.

I would also keep an eye out for similarly sudden events in Ukraine; Martyanov and others believe Russia dropping its support for the Assad regime was traded for US dropping its support for the Kiev regime and that this was not necessarily the win for Clown World that it appears to be.

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If You Want Sigma

I’ve added a paywall to Sigma Game for those who are interested in what will be a very modest amount of subscriber-only content. One post per week will be at least partially-paywalled, as per the example of today’s post. I’m basically following the model of Simplicius here, who provides a substantial amount of free content with a dash of paywalled-content to essentially express appreciation for his backers.

Communication is an art, not a science. But we can nevertheless apply certain scientific principles to the practice of that art, which is to say that we can observe existing patterns, formulate hypotheses about the way those patterns reliably play out, and then test those hypotheses.

Being more a student of social interaction than a participant by nature and nurture alike, I have done this and I have determined that a considerable amount of social conflict is caused by the use of just two words.

The first conflict-inspiring word is “why”. While there is a school of thought that teaches a) there are no stupid questions, b) all curiosity is merited and must be assuaged, and c) all questions are innocent and posed in good faith, this is an objectively stupid school and all three of its assumptions are observably incorrect.

If you ever wonder why there isn’t just one single subscription to everything, it’s because I have learned the hard way over time that every project needs to be capable of standing alone on the basis of its own merits. Where one gets into trouble is misallocating resources from productive projects to an unproductive one, and keeping the streams separate is the best way to avoid the temptation to prop up something that really doesn’t have the support required to justify the time and effort required to keep it going.

But please note that there is absolutely no need for any VP reader to feel any pressure to back externalities like Sigma Game that are also offered for free. The community here is absolutely fantastic in its support for our various projects, and the paywall is primarily intended for those outside this community who are encountering the SSH and experiencing its utility for the first time to express their support for it.

“SSH awareness is an invaluable tool and what better place to come for the regular dose of it than straight to the source?”

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Burning the Village to Save the Village

Clown World is systematically destroying its own justifications for its right to govern the nations, as Simplicius observes in the aftermath of the fall of Syria and the failed presidential coup in South Korea:

The short-term obsessed West considers the various CIA-sponsored subversions of the democratic processes as “winning”: but have these people given any thought to what precedent they’re setting? They are burning their foundations, lighting their entire house on fire. In the hopes of smoking out a few ostensible ‘wasps’ they now stand to destroy their entire order within a generation.

The perception of the West’s miserable ‘Rules Based Order’ will never be repaired after this—the rest of the free world is watching and learning precisely how ‘Rule of Law’ hews to principle; the West will never regain their trust, and its institutions will forever carry the stench and stain of political interference and hidden hatred for true democracy—which has always been a token byword meant to excuse the Western order’s imperialistic overreach.

The Western order has turned into an odor, and the global south can’t pinch its nostrils hard enough.

Long concealed beneath the hypnotic glitz and glam of the hegemon’s ‘magic show’ was that the ‘indivisible’ idol of democracy has always been apportioned into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms, as necessity dictates. It was hidden well at one time, with Western leaders who at least made attempts at pretenses to maintain the fable. Now things have spiralled down the drain so quickly that desperate measures are required—with all precautions tossed out with the bath water, to reveal the ugly face of the Western political system kept buried in the ash of its conquests for so long.

In short: they don’t have the time to construct elaborate myths and schemes any longer, instead forced to merely act on instinct to save their foundering empire. But in doing so, they have hastened its decline by revealing just how illiberal and despotic it has been all this time.

It’s hardly news that the neo-liberal rules-based world order is neither liberal nor rules-based, but it is remarkable to see how “democracy” has been redefined to mean “whatever the ruling foreign elite demands” everywhere from Moldova to Ireland.

While this dropping of the democratic veil is a good sign that Clown World’s power and influence are on the wane, as the unexpected fall of the Assad regime in Syria shows, just because a beast is wounded does not mean that it is no longer dangerous.

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Worse Than Infidels

No matter how much you despise the Boomers, you don’t despise them enough. We keep seeing this sort of thing again and again and again.

My husband should have inherited the farm he grew up on. After our first child was born, my husband called his dad and asked if he could come home and help farm. The answer was No. The farm will be auctioned off to Blackrock. Four generations of land will die with the selfishness of the boomers.

And remember, no generation inherited as much wealth, or will leave a smaller percentage of that wealth behind, than the Boomers.

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The Word Descended

This is a very different sort of Christmas carol. It’s probably not at all to your taste, and certainly isn’t one you’ll hear any carolers ever sing, but it’s reflective of a Christmas sermon I heard many years ago by Greg Boyd, one which I’ve never forgotten, about the more somber aspects of Christmas. You can listen to it on UATV.

The Word Descended
God made real
A child is born
For his ordeal
A cleansing flame
The sacrifice
To free Mankind
He paid the price

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