Unintelligent Intelligentsia
You're just another brick in the wall
When I began researching Vladimir Putin, I of course paid a lot of attention to his policies, his achievements, his occasional failures and mistakes over time, his gifts. In almost all respects he is without peer as a leader in modern times, having improved the lives and livelihoods of the Russian people, in all their diversity--at the same time establishing a new standard for international morality in a challenging global environment with its many issues, most of them resulting from the decline of moribund, sick, exceptionalist or neofascist empires under threat of pressure from below.
But it was very difficult to get accurate information about Putin or about his background both personal and cultural. The public mind has been poisoned.
I could not rely upon Western media, nor upon Western academia--what passes for the intelligentsia in G-7 countries – an intelligentsia without intelligence.
At the top of the list are of course political scientists and historians locked in the sweaty, unhealthy embrace of academic incest.
After that, come the social anthropologists and psychologists and psychiatrists will in all respects are less credible than shaman in the jungles of Brazil and quite insane,
In my last post, you got a taste of Putin's world in his own words– what he experienced as a child-- in an environment which no Western psychologist can imagine, and where Western assumptions about behavior are just cultural and malicious bias.
As a result, I spent a lot of time looking at Russian sources, and alternative anthropological and psychological texts such as Dabrowski and others.
Western non-thought
Researchgate:
Putin’s major personality-based strengths in a political role are his commanding demeanor and confident assertiveness. His major personality-based shortcomings are his uncompromising intransigence, lack of empathy and congeniality, and cognitive inflexibility.
The_Political_Personality_of_Russian_Federation_President_Vladimir_Putin Aubrey Immelman, PhD College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University
So Putin is stubborn, unwilling to compromise, unfeeling, unpleasant, and inflexible. which is why he brokered Minsk 1 and II Istanbul 1 and eats puppies.
Read Putin’s post again.
If you are on the mailing list for my special articles read Putin Articles 1, 2,and 3 .
But frankly,it might not do any good. So many people who went to college think they learnt something other than sex and drugs. Really?
Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone
All in all, it's just another brick in the wall
All in all, you're just another brick in the wall Roger Waters.
Academic Bots
Here’s another one academic bot.
Although numerous factors contributed to Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine, there are two that stand out. The first is the war provides Putin the opportunity to create a legacy for himself.
Legacies play a unique psychological role in which it helps an individual cope with certain aspects of their life, especially regarding one’s age (Horowitz, Stam, and Ellis 2015, 141-144 and Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski 2015, 100-123).
It also provides a way for a leader to shape not only their identity but the identity of their country.
The second is Putin’s personality. A leader’s personality can help explain their political behavior. According to political psychologists,
Putin is considered to exhibit a ‘dark personality.’ A leader with such a personality is believed to have certain psychological traits, which include being manipulative, deceptive, and narcissistic. These leaders even display psychopathic tendencies such as being impulsive, aggressive, and lacking empathy.
These traits, according to research, makes him less competent as a leader (Linden and Wilkes 2002). It also illustrates that with such a personality, Putin is a high risk-taker, and it is probable, given his narcissism, that he believed Russia’s army would easily be able to annex part of Ukraine quickly and effectively.
In doing so, Putin would not only illustrate Russia’s strength on a global stage but reinforce the Russian nationalistic identity, an identity that he is attempting to shape.
For the record, Ms. Titherington cites various research, none of which have to do with Putin specifically but is about general issues, saying in a complicated people what most people understand intuitively in commonsense terms.
As in duuuuhhhh….really?
Yeah, gettin’ older…gonna die…what did I DO in my life? Where is my legacy?
To apply these generalizations to Putin you must first assume that he is narcissistic psychopath and even now not yet at the age here he might be obsessed with his “legacy”.
The “dark triad “stuff (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) comes from Dr Vlad Beliavsky, who works for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and whose phrase was picked up by the Western media. The common elements of this triad are lack of empathy and altruism — which means people with these traits seek benefit for themselves while everyone else suffers. That is not the case with Putin (again, as I detail in my special articles for that) but is true of a rather large group of parasitic billionaires.
Back in my academic days, I thought I had earned a Fulbright at least partly through my research into why academics in the “Humanities” *(these days, the Inhumanities and the Anti-Social Sciences) always got things wrong. The answer to that question was easy—it’s because academic work is a cluster fuck -- you get ahead -- by proving yourself a member of the herd and smelling the right assholes. No doubt why no genius is recognized until he's dead.
Later I figured it out — no one at Harvard read my thesis. But they did read recommendations from some of my professors who for some strange reason thought I was ‘original” and agreed with me — and were all published refugees from Harvard or Stanford academic trauma,
No matter. I was just another brick in the wall.
A lot of things are really “common sense”-- something lacking in Western thought or misconstrued as ideas you get from others and therefore share like lice. What am I talking about is is the critical perception available to all of us, left over from the days when we lived in an always changing jungle and had to look for signs of danger or opportunity.
What you learn from others is important as long as you know that no one sees the same jungle.
The Zoo….
At the zoo, we got a lot of baby racoons. Which meant a lot of bottle-feeding. It was one of my happiest times!
Don’t expect anything until “ukraine” collapses. Russia doesn’t have to compromise and will not. This war is existential for Russians. US/YOUKAY/EU elites are now stupid, short sighted, and extremely vain and selfish, just like most of their citizenry. The “west” is no longer capable of producing statesmen. It hasn’t been capable of producing statesmen since the end of the 20th century.
Staggering is the only way I can describe how wrong Western media have always portrayed Putin. The lies the propaganda & downright falsehoods. Wrote by supposedly educated people. Who actually probably believe they're words are factual. As all of their research is based upon previous bullshit wrote about Putin.