How dare these "Hollywood liberals" imply that anyone has ever suggested that anyone from the Trump administration has ever had any contact with anyone or anything which is Russian? I was hanging out with Jared Kushner recently, and he happened to see a bottle of vodka, and he had no idea what it was. He was about to try to use it to remove some dirt from ones of his shoes before I explained to him that vodka is something that people drink. By the way, he also had no idea what Russia was. He thought that Russia was a skin disease which cats sometimes get if they aren't ingesting a proper mix of vitamins. I had to explain to him that Russia is a large country extending from eastern Europe in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east.
Imagine Kushner's consternation, when I told him that some "liberals" like Mueller are trying to frame him for having improper dealings with people from a foreign country which, until recently, he had assumed was a feline skin disease!
Just try to imagine to shock felt by Donald Trump, Donald Trump, Jr, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, Anthony Scaramucci, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Wilbur Ross, Michael R Caputo, Rick Gates, Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Roger Stone and others, including Michael Cohen, Nigel Farage, Erik Prince (who some liberal hotheads describe as the founder of something they call "Blackwater") and Peter W Smith, at these so-called "allegations" that they have unreported business ties and contacts with officials, business people, banks and intelligence agencies from a country which they all had assumed was a cat's skin disease, and not a country at all, and that intelligence operatives from this so-called "country" are in possession of compromising personal and financial information about the President of the United States, and that there are all kinds of photographs and video and audio of half or more of them actually in this so-called "country" consorting with its government officials and various cronies of this murky figure to whom liberal refer as "Putin"?!
I mean, really! Who's kidding who, here?! Or should I say WHOM?!
Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label russia. Show all posts
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Monday, September 16, 2013
I Am Clicheoclast, Hear Me Roar
LISA: You shouldn't make generalizations about people who live in places you've never been.
BART: Yeah, Dad. That's what they do in Russia. [QUOTE NOT GUARANTEED EXACT, BUT THAT'S THE GIST OF IT]
Ah, if only the problem were limited to places people have never been. A story has hit concerning 2 Russians in their 20's arguing about Kant, an argument which escalated from words to fists to gunfire.
Predictably, and sadly, some people are responding to the story with cliches, such as: "This would never happen in the US, because you'd have to search far and wide before finding 2 Americans in their 20's who know who Kant is."
Not if you searched in university philosophy departments, that much is certain.
But of course you wouldn't have to resort to going to the nearest university.
It's typical -- sadly typical -- that such remarks are routinely made in the midst of Americans who are not asking questions such as, "Who is Kant?" because they already know who Kant is, but that doesn't stop the people who are delivering the cliches from considering themselves to be wise, nor does it stop many many people -- Americans, mostly -- from chiming in and agreeing, and somehow failing to see, although it's hard to see how anything could be much clearer, that they themselves are a refutation of the cliches with which they are agreeing.
Sadly typical as well is how few people seem to grasp that this particular cliche about Americans never having heard of Kant is nonsense. So far I've seen just one person challenge it. Me.
This is a particularly striking example of the power of cliches to blind people and switch their brains off.
PS: There may be one way in which Russians actually have an advantage over Americans when it comes to studying Kant, a significant advantage: it may be that more Russians than Americans have read Kant untranslated. That's just a guess on my part, but it rests partly on the sad fact that the cliche about proud smug American monoligualism is not entirely unfounded, and partly on the rather large physical presence of German scholars in Russia going back to before Kant's time, and a correspondingly large knowledge of the German language among Russian academics. And, well, #3: Karl Marx.
BART: Yeah, Dad. That's what they do in Russia. [QUOTE NOT GUARANTEED EXACT, BUT THAT'S THE GIST OF IT]
Ah, if only the problem were limited to places people have never been. A story has hit concerning 2 Russians in their 20's arguing about Kant, an argument which escalated from words to fists to gunfire.
Predictably, and sadly, some people are responding to the story with cliches, such as: "This would never happen in the US, because you'd have to search far and wide before finding 2 Americans in their 20's who know who Kant is."
Not if you searched in university philosophy departments, that much is certain.
But of course you wouldn't have to resort to going to the nearest university.
It's typical -- sadly typical -- that such remarks are routinely made in the midst of Americans who are not asking questions such as, "Who is Kant?" because they already know who Kant is, but that doesn't stop the people who are delivering the cliches from considering themselves to be wise, nor does it stop many many people -- Americans, mostly -- from chiming in and agreeing, and somehow failing to see, although it's hard to see how anything could be much clearer, that they themselves are a refutation of the cliches with which they are agreeing.
Sadly typical as well is how few people seem to grasp that this particular cliche about Americans never having heard of Kant is nonsense. So far I've seen just one person challenge it. Me.
This is a particularly striking example of the power of cliches to blind people and switch their brains off.
PS: There may be one way in which Russians actually have an advantage over Americans when it comes to studying Kant, a significant advantage: it may be that more Russians than Americans have read Kant untranslated. That's just a guess on my part, but it rests partly on the sad fact that the cliche about proud smug American monoligualism is not entirely unfounded, and partly on the rather large physical presence of German scholars in Russia going back to before Kant's time, and a correspondingly large knowledge of the German language among Russian academics. And, well, #3: Karl Marx.
Thursday, March 28, 2013
Socialist Realism vs Sitcoms
Much has been made (in the US at least) of that strange Soviet-era artistic genre, Socialist Realism: paintings, sculptures, posters, films, novels and other art forms produced in a manner pleasing to the regime, purporting to portray daily life in the Socialist bloc realistically and, anyone could see, not doing so:
Only recently have similarities between Socialist Realism in the Soviet bloc and broadcast television in the US occurred to me. Why only recently, I wonder. The parallels are many, deep and obvious, especially when one considers the quintessential product of American TV, the sitcom. Like Socialist Realism, it panders to the regime, willingly submitting to ridiculous levels of governmental censorship, and purports to convey everyday reality, and conveys a patently artificial, government-approved dream-world instead. Even the allowed speech is artificial. Artificial obscene words are invented to replace the real ones.
And there is that American pinnacle of artificiality, the laugh track. Viewers can't even be trusted to decide for themselves what is and isn't funny, they must be prompted when it is appropriate to laugh. Thankfully, the laugh track is finally fading away, not appearing in all sitcoms anymore. (Because the Cold War is over?)
Much has also been made (in the US at least) with the troubles had in Communist countries by artists who eschewed the easier success promised by Socialist Realism and produced art which was more serious. As if serious, non-pandering artists have tended to have it easy in capitalist countries!
In his novel Jud Süß, based on the true story of an 18th-century Jewish financier who rose for a while to a position of great power as an adviser to the Duke of Württemberg, only to fall victim to an antisemitic campaign and be executed, Lion Feuchtwanger points out some of the similarities between Germans and Jews. He suggests that perhaps great similarity is a necessary pre-condition for great enmity. The German Duke has nightmares in which he and his Jewish adviser and another Jew hold hands and unwillingly execute a stiff and grotesque dance, inexorably bound together. The financier comes to believe, maybe it's true, maybe not, that his real father was a German nobleman. I wonder whether the US and Russia could ever have been such great enemies if they were not similar in many ways. Those parallels between Socialist Realism and the sitcom, that's just one small example, one symptom, of profound similarities between two huge, relatively new, often crude, extremely powerful nations, similarities which might be much more obvious to most people in Western Europe or Latin America than to most Americans or Russians.
Only recently have similarities between Socialist Realism in the Soviet bloc and broadcast television in the US occurred to me. Why only recently, I wonder. The parallels are many, deep and obvious, especially when one considers the quintessential product of American TV, the sitcom. Like Socialist Realism, it panders to the regime, willingly submitting to ridiculous levels of governmental censorship, and purports to convey everyday reality, and conveys a patently artificial, government-approved dream-world instead. Even the allowed speech is artificial. Artificial obscene words are invented to replace the real ones.
And there is that American pinnacle of artificiality, the laugh track. Viewers can't even be trusted to decide for themselves what is and isn't funny, they must be prompted when it is appropriate to laugh. Thankfully, the laugh track is finally fading away, not appearing in all sitcoms anymore. (Because the Cold War is over?)
Much has also been made (in the US at least) with the troubles had in Communist countries by artists who eschewed the easier success promised by Socialist Realism and produced art which was more serious. As if serious, non-pandering artists have tended to have it easy in capitalist countries!
In his novel Jud Süß, based on the true story of an 18th-century Jewish financier who rose for a while to a position of great power as an adviser to the Duke of Württemberg, only to fall victim to an antisemitic campaign and be executed, Lion Feuchtwanger points out some of the similarities between Germans and Jews. He suggests that perhaps great similarity is a necessary pre-condition for great enmity. The German Duke has nightmares in which he and his Jewish adviser and another Jew hold hands and unwillingly execute a stiff and grotesque dance, inexorably bound together. The financier comes to believe, maybe it's true, maybe not, that his real father was a German nobleman. I wonder whether the US and Russia could ever have been such great enemies if they were not similar in many ways. Those parallels between Socialist Realism and the sitcom, that's just one small example, one symptom, of profound similarities between two huge, relatively new, often crude, extremely powerful nations, similarities which might be much more obvious to most people in Western Europe or Latin America than to most Americans or Russians.
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