Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Putin Tells Everyone Exactly Who Created ISIS" video.

  1. +Dan Stevens Dan, Lol! And very largely right, imho.   I fondly remember a time, back in the late '60s to mid-70s, when the only place in the world where you could get a decent Russian word-processor was University of Wisconsin. My friend Roger Levien produced a monthly newsletter for the RAND Corporation, " Russian Computer Industry News." He printed 1,600 copies, 800 in English, which were distributed out of Langley, and 800 in Russian, which were the only way Soviets could find out how their industry worked. Through Gvishiani's network, I would guess. Back then, too, the Russian and Greek Orthodoxies were largely kept above water, and under the same budget and friendly eye, in the Bay Area. The idea was to keep them safe from the KGB and the Greek Colonels' thugs. The intention was that the Greek Socialists should learn civility at Berkeley, while the Russians should sing a lot, keepin traditional and very beautiful chants alive at their Church in the Haight-Ashbury, and learn Business Administration at Stanford. Sadly, things worked out exactly backward. The Greeks learned business administration, badly, and the Russians seem to have adopted Berkeley's well-known level of, uh, je ne sais qoi. Both groups aquired extraordinary levels of kleptomania, which they put into astonishingly widesperead effect on their returns home.   In the Russians' case I think this was their misinterpretation of capitalism under the Bakuninite dictum that "Property is theft." (A friend in Toronto hired a bunch of Russian acountants for a while, and they were brilliant: they had spent their whole professional lives keeping three sets of bokks, for the Gosplan, for the Party, and for the real world. This last set kept private to themselves, so they could keep the other two sets faintly coherent, even if aetherial. He had to fire them: they couldn't handle the notion that in Canada it is normal and possible to make money legally. The Greeks, on the ther hand, seem to have adopted Pete Seeger's notion that you don't rob banks, you steal them. The Russians, when they went back, stole not just banks but whole industries. In Kurt Vonnegut's immortal words, " And so it goes." Cheers, -dlj.
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  2. Alex Sytinskiy   Alex, all people make mistakes, and we're all sometimes ignorant, lazy, superstitious, and thoughtless. Part of the time.   This doesn't make us evil.  It makes us human. We're also kind, curious, sexy, compassionate, brave, loving, intelligent, musical, thoughtful, and a few other things besides.  You might even say we're pretty good, all things considered.  About as good as elephants, puppies, cats, ocotopuses, all of the rest of evolving creation.   "All men are evil" is always and everywhere a piece of delusion, given you free of charge by somebody who will sell you the cure.   It's free of charge like that first shot of heroin the dealer will give you to try it. Not a cheap deal to take. "Here, take this magic water, and it will cure your evil.  It only costs ten percent of your income for the rest of your life.  Come and visit me on my knees at my marble palace.  Any time."  That's what the "All men are evil" racket is all about.   Don't buy it.   Cheers,   -dlj.
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