Irrational Discourse

Blogging has been slow, but not because I’m tired or losing interest. I am, of course, entirely uninterested in the election process at this stage of the game because it consists of nothing but posturing, game playing and media silliness. I will pay more attention when the stakes become higher as voting nears.

The problem is that I will not write about something unless I am able to research it sufficiently to know what I am talking about, and current issues other than the election are just too long on hype and too short on fact.

It appears to me that Russia is the only rational actor in the Middle East and that we are by far and away the least rational, but the government and media is pumping out so much propaganda on the issue that it’s hard to tell.

Everyone seems to recognize that invading Iraq and taking out the strongman that controlled the Iraqi government led to chaos and the creation of ISIS, but somehow our government thinks that taking out the government of Syria will not have anything like a similar outcome. Why would we think that?

We constantly admit that Syria is involved in a civil war, but when the Syrian Army bombs rebel positions we accusingly claim that “Assad is bombing his own people.”  What were we doing during our own civil war when we subjected Vicksburg to an intense continuous artillery bombardment for three weeks, and when we burned Atlanta to the ground?

Somehow, Bush is a monster for creating chaos in Iraq, but Obama will be a hero for creating chaos in Libya and, if he succeeds in his efforts to do so, in Syria.

We take NATO, an entirely military alliance, right up to the border of Russia, and somehow it is Russia who is the aggressor that is trying to spread its ideology and recreate an empire.

We are critical of Russia for involving themselves in the Syrian civil war, and warn them that they will “become engaged in a quagmire” for doing so, despite the fact that we have been actively engaged in that civil war ourselves for several years.

We are freaked out that China is building military bases outside its national borders, claiming that they threaten international goodwill and peace by doing so, notwithstanding that we have more than 700 military bases spread all over the globe.

So, how does one engage in rational discourse on any of this? Every time I pick a subject and sit down to write about it, I just sort of lose the bubble and give it up.