Apologies are no doubt due for once again steering off - my self-appointed and intended, and moreover, duly notified - course...
Nevertheless I will do so, and insert some stuff about two of the global super-powers presently strutting the world stage...nations (i.e. Russia and China) led by individuals whose personality and character foibles and failings openly echo (and thus manage to accentuate) those found in their present American counterpart. But enough - on this occasion - of yet another reference to the 'Trump Phenomenon'...I intend (shortly) to deal with these two nations alone...
My topics (vis-a-vis China) will be familial assistance and Social Credit; vis-a-vis Russia - poisonings and commendable military de-escalation...
Tune in tomorrow!
As Promised...(Part One thereof, anyhow)
*Re China...A great big brickbat - and a small bouquet. The good news first - it's such a rarity/rare commodity these days...from a Western perspective, anyhow...vis-a-vis the land of the Dragon...
A hearty commendation for, a hands-off celebration of, a judge's enforcement, just the other day, of a law punishing grown-up kids who failed in their familial duty of providing succour to their ailing parents in their last years of life...-not only for actually having such a law on their books in the first place, but for having the sheer gall - the guts, the gumption & yes, the balls - to actually enforce 'em!
A principle flouted all the time these days in the increasingly 'ageist', compassionless, and self-serving, egocentric and me, myself and I-worshiping consumerist culture of the post-Christian West. Itself bringing to recollection the ever-timely and ageless admonition of the long-ridiculed and much-abused great Apostle Paul, who memorably advised his readers that
...if any widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show piety at home and to repay their parents; for this is good and acceptable before God. [The Holy Bible, New King James Version: 1 Timothy 5:4: (c) 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
But as for usurping the perfectly good, historically meaningful (and moreover, positive) term 'social credit' for its own nefarious purposes, for the Chinese Government to do so is an utter abomination. The term has long been - was for a long time - both in God's Own and in Canada's two most westernmost provinces, Alberta and British Columbia - synonymous with an unconventional and unorthodox but sound mixture of socialism and capitalism: economies/societies operating in the best of both worlds - adopting the best features of each system while avoiding the worst excesses of each. Witnessing such sheer innovations as worker shareholders in their own companies!
So for the Chinese Government - and, what's so much the worse, in the name of 24/7 surveillance of its citizenry from the veritable cradle to the grave - to misappropriate such a positive concept and practice in the interests of its self-serving, autocratic, authoritarian, totalitarian and tyrannical designs is an insult of the highest - or rather lowest - order possible. In moreover a regime presently overseen by a self-worshipping despot, such verbal misappropriation does a gross disservice to the English language, to the long-cherished idea that words actually mean something. As opposed to the presently in-vogue belief that they simply represent 'cultural capital', and thus can basically mean whatever one wishes them to.
And so - as indeed throughout the West these days with its historically revisionist, culturally relativistic, post-modern ethic where black means white and light means darkness and evil is good and good is apparently evil - this once-unique term and concept can be employed in the service of and made to fit the purposes of a diabolical regime and petty despot; whose use of said term, moreover, in its (and his) inexorable quest for ever and ever greater control and dominance over the lives of its (and his) citizenry makes Eric Blair's (that is, George Orwell's) classic 1984 look almost utopian - as opposed to dystopian - in its oh-so-prescient view of the future...
As Promised...(Part Two thereof)
Re Russia...Another Bouquet alongside a Brickbat
"Thank God", ff much pushing and shoving, arm-twisting and wrestling, manipulation and pressure: Russia has - however belatedly, dragging its feet (and all the rest) - finally relented in its impending onslaught against the last major rebel enclave/'holdout' of the town of Iglib in the bombed-to-smithereens Middle-Eastern one-time nation of Syria...-having been spared such ghastly fate, incredibly enough, through the efforts of a certain 'wretched Urr-da-wan' (as the name of Turkey's President-for-Life Erdogan phonetically transliterates)...
Though no real much less great credit can be given to Syria's own President al-Assad, nevertheless in so relenting yet another episode in the ongoing bloodbath that is Syria and its neighbours has been avoided...thus reprieving that sad and pitiable, piteous, pitiful and pathetic land one further bodyblow. And for that very real if relatively small mercy let us all be - however temporarily - thankful...
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