Something came out today in the Ukraine war news that I feel is worth noting for future reference. It looks like there is some effective guerrilla warfare being conducted by The Russians or proxies inside Romania. This is expected in Multiform War. I guess I kind of expected to see more of it in Russian-occupied former Ukraine areas, but so far we haven’t heard that much. But NATO Romania? Makes sense given that NATO support is probably crossing the border in that direction, but here we are with active warfare going on inside a NATO country. Seems significant. I dunno.
In unrelated news, I was talking to ChatGPT again today. As you all know, I do not like PoliSci. One of my pet peeves is how PoliScieners always use left and right to talk about almost everybody. I don’t like it, so I am going to crusade against it. Some. Now and then. Today I asked ChatGPT to reorganize the seating assignments in the US House of representatives so that it more or less reflected the national map of congressional districts. In other words, put the Washington congressmen in the back left (from the Speaker’s viewpoint), the Maine reps in the back right, Florida in the front right, etc. No more “reaching across the aisle” BS. Someone already told me that the new seating arrangement might cause the left-right paradigm to suffer some, but that it would definitely spark a bunch of fistfights. Win win.
In the mid ´90s I was in the excellent CGSC library at Ft. Leavenworth, perusing the magazine racks, which also thankfully and usefully included leftist journals. Addressing some then-current controversy, I noted that the “far-left” and the “far-right” positions were analyzing the controversy very similarly, and I came to the conclusion that the left-right bi-polar scale we have been programmed into normally using as an analytical template is in error, it is much more like a circle with the theoretical “center” at the top and the two far ends meeting at the bottom. And since that time, I also reject bi-polar scales in general.
George, I ask you to go a little farther with me on this. Consider that the founding fathers did not have left-right political geometry to ponder or misuse. It came with the French Revolution after ours was in the can. On every point on the left-right line, whether that line straight or circle, sits a concentrator of power. Left-rightism reached its ideal form in the 1930s when one end held national socialists and the other international socialists, but they were all socialists. Maybe in the middle we could find mentioned some unionizing socialists or proselytizing socialists. The battles and wars of left versus right were never anywhere as revolutionary as the American Revolution. If we had to have a geometric analogy and we don’t, our revolution would be better pondered as diffusion versus concentration — a great part of what makes it exceptional — the idea that power does not have to be concentrated. Left-right thinking is a constrictor. It’s PoliSci 101. Let’s toss it into the dustbin.