Friends, sometimes we forget that every year brings us that much closer to the Workers' Paradise, thanks to the ironclad laws of dialectical materialism... What a source of comfort, am I right?
In France, this May Day, leftists celebrated by rioting, as per usual, but they did so with alacrity this year because they're still mad that they can't retire at 62. The poor dears!
https://www.newsmax.com/world/globaltalk/france-protests-macron/2023/05/01/id/1118159/
Meanwhile, the AP is airbrushing history -- a leftist speciality -- by continuously redefining the word "insurrection". It turns out that behaving badly inside a capitol building isn't necessarily tantamount to insurrection! Gee, how about that?
Of course, all this is mere trivia compared to this next story, and I truly mean that. Marxism is 90% nonsense, but demography really is destiny, in a profound way, and we just hit a demographic milestone that ought to be grabbing everyone's attention. You and I have always lived in a world in which the world's most populous country was China. No more! Now it's India. Man, that sea change crept up on us, didn't it? In fact, we barely hear about India. China is the no-longer-sleeping dragon that's going to shake the world. Russia is the erstwhile totalitarian superpower that everyone loves to hate. But India? What's India known for? Sacred cows and spicy food? In truth, India has changed a great deal since you last took note of it, and it's gaining steam all the time. It has a long way to go before it catches up with China, in the economic or political or reputational or military sense, but trust me: we ignore the world's biggest country (in human terms) at our peril! (P.S. Keep in mind that British India included current India, plus Pakistan and Bangladesh and sometimes Burma. In other words, if the British still held sway there, they would be ruling over around 1.9 billion people today. But instead they're trying to figure out which gender they are, like all the rest of us Western pantywaists. How the mighty are fallen!)
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-65322706
It looks like the GOP House has succeeded in forcing President Biden to negotiate on the debt ceiling. Wow! That's big news. I don't expect Republicans will get much for their trouble, or if they even want much, other than to declare victory, but it's nice to see a little give and take in D.C. again.
Finally, we've been hearing for years how the U.S. economy is circling the drain, and yet the promised recession never quite seems to arrive, or at least it never bites as fiercely as expected. We've also been hearing about how our financial system is hopelessly overextended and doomed. Well, there too the U.S. has shown surprising resilience -- the U.S. dollar in particular, which remains strong against most global currencies. Is the party just beginning to end, though? Maybe. It bears watching.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-air-has-come-out-of-the-dollar-36c4c03f?mod=hp_lead_pos2
Dr. Waddy from Jack: What bitter folly plagues humanity. Imagine,, a doctrine which, when having a chance in power, killed upward of 100,000,000 of its own citizens and ruined the lives of incalculable multitudes. Yet it is widely celebrated on May 1.Gimme a break! I know many on the left think they champion justice and well being. So did Stalin, in his hellishly subhuman way. Today's left dreams of an idyllic future by definition empirically unverifiable. Yet starkly revealed in the harshest of factual lights is the execrable 20th century history of the left in complete power; how terrible that it is so widely dismissed. We don't honor Naziism; why give a doctrine every iota as presumptuously and fundamentally EVIL as that of the Nazis, and its present manifestation in cultural marxism ,anything other than execration?
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: I know it is perhaps trite ," think of all the starving Chinese and don't complain" (and when I received that admonition in the 50s there were incalculable millions of them thanks to communism) buthaving seen 3rd world poverty I'm permanently astonished by American prosperity. A good supermarket, to which most of us have affordable access, is a wonderland and is sure to be viewed as such by people from economies made artificially dysfunctional by tyrannical leftist dream mongering. Gotta be some pretty solid reasons why this is so.
ReplyDeleteDr Waddy from Jack: Speaker McCarthy is doing a good job of returning the House to a modicum of common sense despite the unredeeming presence of the Pelosiite rump. It fosters confidence that we will be spared that part of its will the left deigns to use legislation to accomplish. True, measures like a responsible Federal budget will die in Schumer's dictatorship but in aggressively advancing common sense antidotes to leftist presumption and incipient totalitarianism the House majority focuses much needed attention on leftist contempt for the real America and builds opposition to it. One party ban crazy NY State presents a telling example of the consequences of unrestrained left wing sway. Speaker McCarthy and Gov. DeSantis are showing the way in zero tolerance of fanatic woke cultural marxists and those who would spend the U.S.into a collapse they fully purpose.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy from Jack: About 25 years ago I read of a book, I think by V.S. Naipaul, entited India: a Wounded Civilization. The title certainly seemed apt at the time.Some time ago I read an informed comment : "if you want to know what was like to live 2000 years ago, try Calcutta". When I planned a trip to India which I never made, an expert on India told me: "don't go to Calcutta until you've spent much time in India; you'll be stepping over dead bodies". But in my semester in Singapore I frequented the extensive Indian section. In a Singapore which was perhaps South and S.E.Asias' most prosperous nation I saw people in that section sleeping on thin blankets on sidewalks at night and I saw that nowhere else in the country. Yet, I walked that section free of any concern about crime and experienced sincere friendliness. But wait, isn't it a maxim in the U.S. (which you question at hazard of summary denunciation) that "poverty " is crime's guarantor? Gee, maybe culture has something to do with the presence or relative absence of predatory mayhem. Well then, colonialization, yes , that was India's curse. But British domination did shield India from conquest by brutal Russia, a wounded civilization itself and a merciless ruler. A recent Indian President or Premier commented publicly:" Its time we acknowledge that Britain's rule afforded us many benefits". I've heard that opinion in person from Indians.The advanced civilizations of the English speaking world bear witness to that truth in their own countries.
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: India's present progress toward prosperity is a development to be CELEBRATED! They did it on their own without far left inhumanity and it is endlessly redeeming to witness multitudes gaining the myriad benefits of an increasingly sound economy; its a true miracle. Marxism can claim no such success to lend some little reward to the incalculable misery it has forced on its wretchedly unlucky populations.Finally, the people of spiritually exalted India have gotten a break! Maybe it IS possible to rid the world of destitution without chancing murderous leftist revolution and its always betrayed promises.
ReplyDeleteJack, Marxism is the virus that we never quite seem to shake -- which continually mutates and reinfects the body politic, and may kill us more surely in its more subtle, "cultural" variety than it did in its original, class warfare form, although in that flavor too it packed a mighty punch!
ReplyDeleteYou're right about the productivity and prosperity of modern (mostly) capitalist society. I guess the question is: how much stultifying statism can you layer on top of that capitalist system before the latter collapses under the strain? We're slowly finding out. Luckily the answer is clearly: A LOT! Here are some figures on public spending as a percentage of GDP, and you'll note that it is a majority of GDP already in many Western countries, although these figures are for 2021 and thus somewhat inflated by the pandemic.
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/exp@FPP/USA/FRA/JPN/GBR/SWE/ESP/ITA/ZAF/IND
True: McCarthy and House Republicans are at least slowing down our forced march to socialism, and they are propagating an opposition narrative that, should Americans decide that the present state of the country is simply intolerable, could lead them to change course. Let's hope!
Agreed: what India has accomplished economically and socially, all while maintaining (more or less) a Western-style commitment to individual rights and democracy, is darn impressive, and it inspires hope that the world will be an immeasurably better place for most of its inhabitants fifty or a hundred years from now than it is today (and that's saying something). One does have to wonder, of course, whether democracy will continue to thrive in the developing world when/if the land of its birth -- the West -- forsakes it, and indeed what will happen to world stability and prosperity if the USA isn't around to be its guarantor. The good times won't last forever. That we know for sure.