I don’t think anyone goes to school with the expressed goal of becoming a pundit. That’s not how the word is used.
“Punditry” is not a college major. And yet many hope for a career in the News Biz, which is punditry-adjacent.
Most people in Ukraine would really like a return to a civilized state vs the nightmare state they’re in, and believed that’s what they were voting for long ago, not realizing how caught up they were in geopolitical board games such as they play in the basement of the RAND corporation.
They grew up to find themselves pawns in someone else’s “great game” except it’s far from great, let alone noble. We’re talking about 1900s conditioned-reflexing ("knee-jerk" stuff) and geriatric brains, brains that forget (forget what?) what we already said about Taiwan some decades back.
There’s no there there, when it comes to brains among these particular pundit-posers. We learned all about it on The Walking Dead (AMC). They salivate for more violence under the veneer of selling commercials. “Good for ratings” means tacky and grotesque.
As Portlanders, we empathize with all municipalities wherein civil life has or had been replaced by strife. Perhaps the buildings still stand? Or are we a ghost town?
Or has order been restored and civilian life returned? Good news if so.
Or are we under martial law. Do we hide behind locked doors?
There’s no victory for Ukrainians in some kind of endless wars situation of perpetual buildup on both sides. The USers are already caught up in that racket and have been for decades, since Eisenhower, and it’s a no-win proposition.
A lifestyle of enjoying peace and neutrality (not taking sides as a right of self determination), and with no real interest in training for homicide as a profession, among young men especially, should be an acceptable option on Planet Earth. Any nation not free to be a non-belligerent, is not a free nation.
Not training to become a killer for some state or mercenary force, should be an OK choice, in any civilization worth that word.
However pundits will unconsciously equate “victory” with “engaging in endless wars” and judge your patriotism by your willingness to role model being menacing, towards whatever enemy du jour.
They take for granted that war is the default state, whereas world peace would be something freakish and weird. That’s the mirror world these demented pundits live in.
Hypernormalisation of the freakish: that’s something Mark Fisher wrote about. We feature his thinking at our School of Tomorrow.
