Turn Off Your Irony Meter
Before reading this or you could lose it to the overload. Jillian made it into a test, but Natasha gives you both barrels to the midsection.
I provide it as a public service, but turn down that meter before looking below the fold.
The BBC reports Rice attacks Kremlin’s power grip
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has voiced concern about Russia’s direction by saying too much power is concentrated within the Kremlin.
Her comments, made during a visit to Moscow, will be seen as a thinly veiled criticism of President Vladimir Putin.
Earlier she met human rights activists and said she wanted to help them build institutions to protect people from the “arbitrary power of the state”.
…Afterwards she told reporters: “I think that there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary.”
She added: “I am quite confident that your goal is to build institutions that are indigenous to Russia… but that are also respectful of what we all know to be universal values.”
Those values included “the rights of individuals to liberty…, the right to assembly, the right to not have to deal with the arbitrary power of the state”, Ms Rice said.
The Kremlin will respond that they consulted the writings of an eminent American legal scholar, a former attorney with the United States Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who is now a professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, the University of California, Berkeley, which indicate this is the way for power to be distributed in a constitutional democracy.
10 comments
To quote Alanis Morresette….”Isn’t It Ironic?”
There has to be a new word for this, something beyond hypocrisy, something with the base arrogance involved.
I think the word you’re looking for, Bryan, is ὕβρις.
Hubris is certainly in the mix, Michael, and the assumption of a blessing from on high does link it to the Greek understanding of the word with the disrespect for higher powers included.
Nemesis will not overlook the fellow travelers.
It isn’t Νέμεσις I’m worried about. It’s the very unholy third member of the most unholy trinity κόρος…ὕβρις…ἄτη (superabundance….overweening arrogance….ruination) that lay at the root of all the great Greek tragedies that keeps me lying awake at night. We’ve done more than enough of our share of the first two for the third to be far away. I just hope that whatever form that ruination takes, it stays away from me and mine…unlikely though that may be.
OT: You seem to have received your new machine for your trip.
The final act is coming, and no one can be sure of the fallout.
Yes, I picked it up Friday. And by the by, thanks for the suggestion about looking at IBM and HP. I wound up going with a ThinkPad T61. Some of the keys are in different places from what I’m used to (and there are more of them), but otherwise, it’s working like a dream. And I love the fact that the battery’s good enough that I can actually take it with me around the house. The old one was pretty much tethered to a power outlet.
Batteries are the biggest problem with laptops and I don’t see much progress being made as people are milking lithium ion for all it’s worth, rather than looking for something better.
I’m glad it worked out.
Put as politely as I can manage, is there any evidence that Condi knows jack (and I’m not referring to the Australian PM) about the Kremlin?
Michael, I regret that my exposure to the Greeks is only in English translation, but I fear that your concerns are all too well justified.
Batteries are the ongoing problem with all laptops, sooner or later. Indeed, the battery is the only problem with my current laptop (by WinBook; they no longer make laptops, to my great regret). The underlying problem is that batteries are a mature technology, and dramatic advances of the sort that would help us all are few and far between.
Steve, it’s almost like she reformatted her “hard drive” when she went to Stanford and the facilities management position.
We still study the Greeks because we never learned the lessons they taught.