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Benny Profane's avatar

From the fawning profile of Jake Sullivan in the New Yorker: "But, when it came to the subject of the war itself, and why Biden has staked so much on helping Ukraine fight it, Sullivan struck an unusually impassioned note. “As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn,’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one,” he said. “There are very few conflicts that I have seen—maybe none—in the post-Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy. And we’re on the side of the good guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”"

And, this is a man, to support your arguments about the incompetence of the PMC, "During his senior year, [at Yale] he scored a rare trifecta—“the academic equivalent of horse racing’s Triple Crown,” as the Yale Bulletin put it—winning all three of the most prestigious fellowships available to American undergraduates: the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Truman. Sullivan opted for the Rhodes, earned a master’s in international relations at Oxford, and took time out to compete in the world collegiate debate championships in Sydney, finishing second. He then went to Yale Law School and, after graduating, secured a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Stephen Breyer."

There you go. One of our Best and Brightest using Rocky and Red Dawn as moral lessons. At least he didn't mention a Marvel character or two, but one wonders what his action figure collection consists of.

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Feral Finster's avatar

A man named "Machiavelli" caused much outrage at the time when he described how rulers come up with hilariously elaborate justifications for all manner of war, conquest, plunder and rapine, all glibly aided by their fawning courtiers, when the real goal is conquest, plunder, rapine and power.

Machiavelli caused such outrage because, of course, he was correct, in the sense that he accurately described observable reality without all the happy horseshit.

The problem is not that we are governed by muddle-headed sappy idealists, but by cynical full-bore sociopaths.

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