Paul KrugmanGood roundup of the anti-Zelensky right, but I think it misses one additional point: the importance of the musclebound, thuggish Russian soldier in right-wing iconography 1/ https://www.thebulwark.com/putins-useful-idiots-right-wingers-lose-it-over-zelensky-visit/
Before Putin's war, lots of people on the right, from Ted Cruz on down, idolized bicep-flexing Russians who were supposed to be much tougher than our supposedly pampered service members 2/
Even now you see people saying "a woke military is a weak military" — in the face of the definitely anti-woke Russian army's string of disasters . And how many times has Tucker Carlson declared that Russia is winning? 3/
You don't have to be a military expert to see that while courage and endurance are as important as ever, a modern military also needs smart people who can act on their own initiative 4/
And that recruiting people from as wide a pool as possible, and with the promise of decent treatment, is going to work better than brutalizing and hazing. But admitting that would undermine the whole RW world view 5/
So Ukraine must lose, and Russia win, to vindicate the worship of thuggishness 6/
BJ Kennedy@pkrugman There are a lot of folks that have spent a decade or so with a worldview that was simply "everything the left thinks is good must be bad" and absolutely nothing else. Some of them will have a hard time turning that off.
John 0tter@arcdrag
Americans, from liberals to the extreme right, have a pugnacious tendency toward #abductive reasoning. Rather than building on collective/inferred premises, the absence of ideology is itself the ideology.
*liberally sprays self with Žižek repellant*
@pkrugman