Moveable Feast Cafe 2021/11/15 … Open Thread

Many thanks for the undeserved compliments. I have some rambling thoughts…

One of the wonderful things about books is that they create the option of discourse with the dead – Theodore Roosevelt noted this, among many others. So yes, Sun Tsu is decidedly available.

I’ve been re-reading, and recommend reading, “The Bay of Pigs” (J.C. Rodriguez) The affairs of curated “revolutions” such as we see (and in Cuba / Nicaragua / Belarus, etc, and in the Hegemon itself) are informed in this History. A flood of propaganda precedes the violence, typically. However the propaganda deceives also and especially the propagandists and their minions – creating a basic internal contradiction, or “conflict”. Rodriguez gives the example of Radio Swan’s propaganda and how such nonsense created the conflict between what the invading men believed and what they encountered. It was the CIA and the invaders who were making the error – propaganda creates latency in perception, and thus big errors, like expecting the Cuban Militias would surrender to the invaders…they did not.

Previously I wrote that Conflict and Life were inseparable. And that this is proved. I’d like to explain this a bit>

It’s established that where ever life is found the chemistry of the environmental fluid is unstable. This is because life requires several prerequisite activities. These include what the boffins call “consumptive acts” – eating, eliminating, and reproduction. In turn, these actions involve perception and chemical actions – which take Time. However this Time factor creates inescapably latency. The environment is unstable, and therefore errors occur due to changes which take place during the latency period, creating conflict, if we stay in the definition. This relation may be expressed in an equation. Actually smoothiex12 speaks of the “flaming datum”…the perception, and the response, with again latency. His is a specialty, but he applies the foundational principles. There is also “noise” involved in perception, errors there too.

Of course this foundational principle has a vast set of complex manifestations, as we see in animals and plants. These involve, generally, feed-backs between a host of living forms over a long Time, as well as basic variables in environment, such as insolation and radiation and “weather” in the largest and also most small sense…sudden deaths of dinosaurs, or a bean seed deciding to grow when it fails to rain, or perhaps a bacterium’s error when it chews into a fungi that kills it.

Now then, let me quote a classical scholar> “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature….” (Enoch Powell)

In some few life forms, such as the human, anticipation of conflict occurs. It is also often ignored.

That’s what Sun Tsu is all about. Conflict and it’s management is at the core of life, and it is the life of the state.

It’s also what MacBeth is about…Mac tried to stop Time. Hegemon is also making this error. see>
“The End of the Cold War and Shakespeare’s Macbeth” Vladimir Golstein ( https://offgraun.wordpress.com/2017/10/09/the-end-of-the-cold-war-and-shakespeares-macbeth/ )

Withal, Hegemon is in self-destruction. Here I’d like to recall the Phaedrus> “And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good—. Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?” Hegemon presumes to tell us. This is a manifestation of lack of virtue – error, if you like. It creates cathodic reluctance, or opposition among those it rules and also among those it does not rule, but which it seeks to rule. (Mac ordering “Hang those who speak of fear!” is a response indicating that he knows and fears that his people are liable to revolt, ie he himself is not legitimate.)

I would consider the implied assumptions behind the question posed “How are we going to remove this hegemon without war or major conflict?”

1) that we can, 2) that we ought to try, 3) that attempt would not make matters more dire, 4) that Hegemon is not in self-destruction, ie is stable. It seems to me that these assumptions are probably not valid.

Finally, dogs bark and caravan goes on. I expect that the environment will change and Hegemon will fail to adapt, Burnam Wood creeps closer. And yes, war with it. As smoothie says, these people are terribly ignorant ideologues, trapped in their own delusions. That’s a terminal disease.

…….

Well, the sun’s shining and Mr P has chores in the garden and shop… Adios my Friends, and best to all.