re: #110 The Ghost of a Flea

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No, they’re stupid but they have so much money and entrenched power that their failures look like successes. They never lose so much that it registers as an irretrievable loss…but that’s a bad metric. The better metric is to look at what they aspired to versus what they produced.

They helped create all the cultural elements that lead to the current open fascism because they imagined themselves as the natural oligarchs—the old money, the good family—who would be able to ride herd over all the fucking soup brained hogs that live for revanchism. They also dismantled all the institutions that could call corruption to account because that was necessary to both evade taxes and to fight a colonial war in Iraq. Their plans only ever half-assed worked and we’re all living in the collateral damage, but instead of judging their competence by comparing what they predicted would happened versus what happened, we’re using the flat standard of “did they get away with it?”

They’re not Sith Lords, they’re just jackasses with so much cash that they never have to admit they failed and therefore the scale of their fuck-up has been dropped on the entire world. This is a thing that happens over and over in history: assholes hopped up on hubris imagine that they can use reactionary forces to further control the plebs but miscalculate.They’re not pulling “privatize profits, socialize costs” because they’re Sun Tzu, but because they’re failures who’s only real skill is already being hooked into the culture of power that exists to avoid accountability. They’re as cunning as a secondary infection; as strategic as syphilitic cancre.

They were smart enough to bail out when they did. They’ll get away with it, too, even though (as you point out) they were among the major progenitors of the disaster in the first place. Liz, who started life as a draft-dodging gimmick, is touted as a model of integrity, with everything before last winter suddenly forgotten.