Democracy is not exported by missile strike

My Sunday movie was Swan Song, a documentary about putting on the ballet Swan Lake. The title has a second meaning in that it was the last production by former ballet star and artistic director Karen Kain. Kain was a big deal in Canadian ballet. She became a principle dancer and a star at a young age, even becoming a protegé of Rudolf Nureyev. She has a painting of herself done by Andy Warhol. After she retired from dancing she joined the leadership of the National Ballet of Canada and rose to becoming the artistic director. Back in 2020 Kain decided the NBC’s production of Swan Lake would be her last. She wanted something different than the standard treatment the ballet usually got. But COVID delayed that for a couple years. This documentary is about what has to happen to get the show from concept to opening night. Swan Lake is a ballet by Peter Tchaikovsky. An evil guy turns women into swans. Through the help of the Swan Queen they try to get their humanity back – and that’s about all I know about the plot. There are principle dancers, though a major part of this ballet is the corps de ballet, the women who portray all those swans. This production might have had a corps of two dozen. And that’s what makes this ballet difficult, these two dozen dancers have to move in synchronization or the critics will pounce. The film shows Kain at work guiding the production. She was in charge, but she wasn’t the choreographer, working out what each dancer did when. That was done by Robert Binet. So there are several scenes where Binet shows Kain what the dancers have done so far and does that meet with her approval. We also see some of the life of principle dancer Jurgita Dronina, who played the Swan Queen. Her life started in the Soviet Union. Her family escaped when it collapsed. We also see Shae Estrada, who is in the corps who faces tensions because she doesn’t fit in. She’s also a lesbian, though that doesn’t seem to be the source of tension. Something this film doesn’t show is the scenery design and what goes into that. We see some of the scenery being made and some of the installation at the theater, but not the design. As opening night approaches and the company shifts from the studio to the stage with scenery, lighting, and costumes, a lot of adjustments need to be made. Kain and Binet hope it all gels by the time they are before an audience. Since the show is so strenuous there are four sets of principle dancers that rotate the roles. But the corps has to rehearse with all four sets. I quite enjoyed it. I’ve written about capitalism needs to be strongly regulated to survive and thrive, and to be compatible with democracy. I did a long post on that based on articles by Trenz Pruca. Daily Kos community member dratler says there is a country that is regulating capitalism quite well so that their economy is thriving and doing all the things that capitalism does best. From my earlier post an easy guess is that country is not the US, where late stage capitalism is making a mess of things. No, this country is China. While democracy is not a part of the Chinese system...

China’s great industrial firms are beating ours, Europe’s and even some in Japan in productivity, price and more recently quality. They are nearly all privately owned and privately run and therefore “capitalistic” in every sense. In this respect, they resemble the robust private firms of the postwar US.

We used to have such a robust economy. That was after WWII when capitalism gave us an amazing array of innovative goods and services. That was also a time when business was strictly regulated and antitrust laws were enforced. Those in control may be the Chinese Communist Party, but their handling of the economy is nothing like the state control of the Soviet Union. Many in US politics see “Communist” in the name and don’t see how it differs from the disastrous Soviet model. The author returns the focus to the US, listing three (out of many) signs that US capitalism is collapsing. The first is “financialization,” which is making money without producing anything. An example is the huge number of private equity firms that buy up property or companies, load them with debt to finance the purchase, then squeeze out all the wealth they can before letting the husk file for bankruptcy. Workers and other shareholders get little to nothing. Another example is cryptocurrencies. Do we really need a replacement for money, credit cards, and internet services like PayPal that already thrive? The only people who benefit from crypto are criminals. The second sign of economic decline is the crash in the rate of real innovation (by this dratler excludes software, which just improves productivity).

During the late nineteenth and the last century, we Americans made or rapidly adopted most of the innovations that make our modern world. They include electric lighting, airplanes, electric grids, voice recording, broadcast radio, antibiotics, television, high-altitude flight (with pressurized cabins), rocket ships for space flight, digital computers, transistors, chips full of tiny transistors, minicomputers, microcomputers/PCs, MRIs, CAT scans, cells phones, smart phones, genomic medicine, and now “designer drugs” conceived by computers analyzing possible chemical compounds. Yet since Apple introduced the first smart phone nearly twenty years ago, I can’t think of any physical invention (except perhaps genomic medicine and designer drugs) that we Americans produced or rapidly adopted that is remotely comparable in economic potential to any of those in the previous paragraph.

And the software improvements – social media and AI – have many undesirable side effects. The third sign is marketing, advertising, public relations, and propaganda all combined into the word promotion or “promo.” In all forms it is the effort of getting people to do thing, not in their own best interest, but in the interest of the information provider. Much (most? all?) is based on things not true. Disinformation rivals facts. An example of promo is web searches. One had been able to used logic operators, such as “this” and “not that” to search directly for something. Now the search results are flooded by paid promotions to prioritize their links, whether the match is close or not. And I’m pretty sure “not that” searching does not work. AI is supposedly free of that promo pressure, but likely won’t stay that way. Besides, isn’t the power and wonderfulness of AI also propaganda?

It’s the capitalism of a self-indulgent, self-regarding, under-educated, over-egoed and exploitive computer/financial class that has no clue about physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, medicine or the histories of successful human societies. It’s a recipe for the most rapid decline of a successful capitalist democracy in human history. ... The essence of today’s China is a vast state-capitalist nation, ruled by smart, practical leaders (many of them trained as engineers) whose main motivators appear to be not their own private wealth, but their nation’s advancement. If you’d ask me to compare the leadership of China’s elite with the “leadership” of our tech-bro class and the likes of Elon Musk, I’d say there isn’t even a contest. Intelligence, experience, practical knowledge, genuine scientific curiosity and real patriotism beat ego, self-regard, self-aggrandizement and self-enrichment as useful character traits and motivations every time.

Before you complain, I’m very aware that China does not permit many rights I hold dear, the top being freedom of speech that includes the freedom to criticize the government. I don’t want to live in such a country. But we can admire and learn from the way the Chinese regulate capitalism. In Sunday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted an editorial in El País discussing the nasty guy’s operation to kidnap Maduro of Venezuela.

Donald Trump’s decision caps a year of impulsive, personalistic foreign policy that ignores multilateral norms. Trump is not acting here as a guarantor of democracy, but rather placing force above the rule of law. Other powers will take note of these new rules as they look at Taiwan or Ukraine. Pointing this out is not a defense of the Venezuelan regime, but a warning: democracy is not exported by missile strike, nor imposed from the air —much less when invoked by someone who has repeatedly shown contempt for institutions.[...] Added to this political ambition is another, no less alarming: the announcement that U.S. companies will take over Venezuela’s oil industry to “make money,” reinforcing the perception that the intervention is not aimed at restoring rights, but at managing power and wealth. Even if the reconstruction of devastated infrastructure is invoked, this amounts to the forcible external appropriation of natural resources, blurring the line between aid, investment, and economic domination.

Collette Capriles of the New York Times

For Venezuelans, our situation will not be fixed by Mr. Maduro’s departure, let alone by a foreign occupying force. We are not a nation held together by a government or a social contract, but a collection of individuals trapped in a struggle for survival. Replacing the man at the top will not dismantle the web of bosses, private loyalties, corrupt practices and institutional ruins that have replaced public life here.

Whitney Neulich, Sophie Hills, and Caitlin Babcock of Christian Science Monitor

“If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership? What stops [Russian leader] Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president?” asked Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, following Saturday’s operation. “Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”

In the comments there are, of course, many memes and cartoons about Venezuela. That includes a meme posted by exlrrp:

Anyone who has a problem with Maduro being captured and brought to justice should review the following footage of what Maduro did to his own people. THIS IS WHO YOU STAND WITH COMMIES. Free Venezuela!

Mickey Lenin responded:

The city of Portland would like a word.

Oliver Burdick tweeted:

Homosexuality is a different type of evil. The Bible rarely refers to something as “an abomination.”

Dr. Kevin M. Young responded

Sweet Summer Child, the Bible lists at least FORTY-TWO different things as an "abomination" (תּוֹעֵבַה). That isn't a rarity; it's one of the most common words the Bible uses for anything that is taboo. The 42+ include: — Businessmen who lie — Using faulty weights/measures — Divorce — Breaking Fri/Saturday Sabbath — Arrogance Oh, it also lists "those who bring false witness or stir up conflict in a community" as an abomination, like you are here. That, along with your arrogance and (I presume) your lack of keeping the Sabbath each Fri/Sat, YOU ARE AN ABOMINATION THRICE OVER. So you might as well go ahead and have sex with that dude.

Melanie D’Arrigo tweeted:

Trump’s billionaire allies now control X, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Truth and Twitch. They own Fox News, CBS, WaPo, WSJ and NY Post — plus 185+ local tv stations and news in 100 markets. They control the AI you're asking for answers, the algorithms feeding you content, your personal data you've given up for access, and the devices you rely on. The news and your privacy are now what Trump and his billionaire pals say it is. This is all by design.

That tweet includes a chart of which rich dude owns what. Larry & David Ellison: CBS News, CBS, Paramount+, plutoTV, TikTok. Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and a few more logos I’m not familiar with. Murdoch Family: Fox (including News, Business, TV stations), tubi, Wall Street Journal, New York Post. Sinclair Family: 185+ local news affiliates of ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and CW, plus The Baltimore Sun. Jeff Bezos: The WashingtonPost, Prime Video, twitch, Wondery. Alphabet Inc.: Google, YouTube, Android, Google Play, Gemini, Blogger (where these words get posted). Elon Musk: X, XA, Grok. Apple Corp.: Apple, AppleTV, iTunes, Apple Intelligence. Sam Altman: ChatGPT. Every so often I’m reminded Doonsbury by Garry Trudeau is still around. His comic from Sunday is pretty good.