Anti-Trump ≠ Anti-Empire

I’ve seen that people in Europe and Switzerland are starting to proudly boycott U.S.-American products, as if they’re standing on a principle or something.

They are not anti-Empire. They are anti-Trump.

They are pissed at Trump for having “abandoned” Ukraine and Europe, which they think leaves them wide open to be invaded within weeks by what they call the U.S.‘s new ally Russia.

This is almost laughably stupid, if it weren’t such a prevalent view among otherwise intelligent and well-reasoned people.

It just goes to show how you can manipulate anyone: if you can just get them to believe a couple of seemingly innocuous and unrelated lies or misrepresentations, then you can get intelligent people to convince themselves to hold the often-horrific views you wanted them to have, all without them noticing that they’ve been manipulated.

They will think that they’re being logical, they will think that they have come up with the idea, all on their own, to hate Russia with a burning passion and with an overriding priority.

Divorcing the empire is painful but necessary. The way they’re going about it, though, makes them just as stupid as Trump: they end up doing the right thing by accident, for utterly invalid and wrong-headed reasons.

Still.

We’ll take it!

Why wouldn’t we take a truffle from a blind pig, at least in the short term?

The medium-term and long-term problem is that, when people do the right thing by accident because they wildly misunderstand their world and its history, they are just as likely to use the exact same reasoning to do an even worse thing tomorrow.