Day's Links - 2016-09-16

In the episode " CrossTalk: Bullhorns Revolt" on Russia Today, there was a discussion about the warmongering and hypocrisy of the West. It discussed something which they referred to as "American exceptionalism", but also other topics such as how the Western countries seem not to run out of excuses in which to divide the world between those who attack and those who can be attacked and killed off.

Dmitry Babich spoke of the fact that whereas before the criteria was race or culture, nowadays it's values; "our values are better than yours". These unspecified values are then used to launch whatever war tickles their fancy.

This is not as abstract as it seems, as I recently had dinner with someone exhibiting the same caricatured opinion of an ignoramus that we often see in caricatures. He even believed that Donald Trump could be a Russian stooge placed in the U.S. political system to work for Russian interests. I frankly thought that nobody, at least in Sweden where we don't have much of the same anti-Trump intensitey, would believe such nonsense, but there we have it. He was also of the opinion that having done the Iraq war, the U.S. and the rest of the war criminal gang should have proceeded into Iran. I must admit I was almost speechless, especially as this person claims to be a Christian, although not a Catholic, thank goodness. He was along the line of "democracy this", "democracy that", that the democratic countries can do pretty much whatever they want and seemed to be under the illusion that somehow democracy is good in and of itself, or even a force for good.

It kind of really brought home the point that Alexander Mercouris made in that CrossTalk episode, that what counts as reasoning in the West nowadays is the moronic and dangerous notion that

"We are virtuous regardless of what we do."