Tonight's Simplicius post crystallized some thoughts I had -- not about Joe Biden, whose address he covered, but, rather, about Simplicius as a Substack writer. Here I will try to assess weaknesses and strengths.

Mostly Simplicius is interesting for his numerous posts on Ukraine, which are full of detail about how, exactly, the war is going. It's repeated a lot in the sources I read that Ukraine is losing the war; what I see is that it is obvious that nobody who claims that Ukraine is winning the war is willing to address the most important counter-claims of the other side. Most specifically, the "Ukraine is winning the war" side will not address the matter of catastrophic troop losses on the Ukrainian side. Their arguments seem limited to "oooh Ukraine conquered some chunk of Russian turf," ignoring the fact that all previous such claims have been one-and-done claims because, later, the Russians got back what the Ukrainians briefly had. What Simplicius adds to all that is fine detail. This year the West thought up new trick after new trick to keep the war a hot one, eventually settling upon a "frozen conflict" formula. Team Biden does not want to admit, of course, that such a formula depends upon the permission of the Russians, and the Russians have good reason not to negotiate with them at this time.

Still, Russia does not invade, and the battle lines have not really shifted all that much when one imagines that Russia has the power to end Ukraine's existence as a nation-state tomorrow. I think there are three likely explanations for this puzzling strategy -- kill off their armies but don't take a whole lot of turf. They are 1) land mines take a lot of time to clear, and Ukraine has laid a lot of them, 2) Ukraine is still quite scary as a military power despite its enormous losses, and 3) since Russia doesn't want to be held responsible for hostile western Ukraine, it has decided to wait until the regime negotiates its surrender. Simplicius has helped clarify these points for me.

At any rate, I wanted to say something right away about the main thesis of the new Simplicius post, to wit:

Well, that’s it folks. Tonight marks what may very well be the last gasp of le siècle Américain.

To be sure, the US role in the world is declining. But BRICS has not established its common currency just yet, and there are all of the reasons for assuming continued US hegemony that are given in Marco D'Eramo's piece American Decline? (from New Left Review in 2022). For instance, D'Eramo states that "the largest stakes in the physical Internet" are "held by American companies with close relations to Washington" (11) and that American domination of the "command of procedure" (13) is still intact. So it's important to imagine the decline in US hegemony as a fall from a great height. There's definitely a decline going on; but the ultimate crash still depends upon a great deal of declining yet to come.

Sometimes Simplicius goes overboard in his conclusions. This has to do with the one-sided push of his inquiries. The most extreme example of this I've yet seen is his piece Climate Paranoia, in which he appears to be arguing that the ridiculous ideas of the capitalist elites for mitigating climate change justify a certain climate change denial.

But, even though Simplicius has a one-sided push, that one side he pushes is a strong side. He spends a lot of space in his post pointing to Biden's hypocrisy:

He mocks Putin for claiming that the Soviet Union created Ukraine—that is, in essence, he’s defending the fact that Ukraine has a rightful mandate to exist despite being a rather artificial construct. Well, Palestine too was carved up and its remains turned into arbitrary, artificial states—so shouldn’t they likewise have a right to exist? What gives Israel the right to deny Palestine its own legal right to statehood, inherent to the original Partition Plan certified by the UN?

Now, I started to listen to Biden, and quickly grew sick of the lies, so I stopped. Generally I agree with Simplicius' gut revulsion at Biden. I do know what the lies are there for: if Team Biden were to admit that they've been lying all this time about Russia and about Ukraine, they'd have to admit that their whole Ukraine strategy was and is stupid. Of course, the Biden administration's Israel/ Palestine strategy is stupid, too, but it's easier to see that such a strategy is obviously culpable -- supporting genocide is, you know, bad. Simplicius focuses upon that easier-to-see part.

I think the "stupid" critique is the best one. After all, mirroring Team Biden's stupid foreign policy is 1) the stupid foreign policy of many European countries and 2) the Democratic Party's stupid strategy of backing Joe Biden for re-election. These stupidities involve large numbers of people; Joe Biden is merely the vortex of activity.

Besides, in his last post on Israel/ Palestine and Russia, Simplicius portrays the government of Israel as being highly tempted to go through with some rather stupid possible moves, which could include provoking Hezbollah into a rather wider war. In the same vein, Team Biden is tempted to provoke a rather stupid war with China. So sometimes Simplicius finds the right groove. If we actually do encounter the reckoning Simplicius predicts, it will be because our misleadership is just too damned stupid to properly use whatever advantages it still has.

So each day I look at the news, hoping to see that any of the current parade of idiots -- Zelensky, Olaf Scholz, Macron, Sunak, Biden, Netanyahu, and so on, will either 1) stop their idiocy or 2) resign or be removed. At the least I hope to see that any transformation of such a sort might occur at some future date. I think I have awhile to wait, and until such a time I think I can be entertained by Simplicius.