The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Vladimir Putin

Showing posts with label Vladimir Putin. Show all posts

November 30, 2018

The Emasculation Knob Goes To Eleven

Looking On

March 05, 2018

In Like A Lion And Out Like A Light

The thing of it is that getting Steele to spread the corrosive notion that the Russian Government had vetoe'd Trump's choice of Mitt Romney to be US Secretary of State is a perfect move for Russian policy whether or not the notion itself has a grain of truth to it. Once the seeds of such equivocalities are planted in the "proper soil," for which in this instance we will metaphorically substitute Mr. Steele, the transmission of those seeds by Mr. Steele will certainly serve to disrupt our polity, true or no.

If it can be taken as a given that post-Soviet Russian foreign policy includes a strain of sour-grapesist anti-Americanism, then this cleverly crafted imputation about Trump's willingness to do Putin's bidding is an enormous victory for Vlad's side.

December 22, 2016

Bated Breath

There is a summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in the foreseeable future.

For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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The ideas expressed here, and the words used to express them here, are the ideas and words of the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), which is to say "peter ramus," which is to say, me. Naturally, given their ultimate source, the ideas are half-formed at times, provisional always, and subject on mature reflection to substantial revision and, often enough, to outright repudiation by the Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal), by "peter ramus," and by me.

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