Not just that, but a 3WMan at the start of a three-day weekend–which is damn rare, when you don’t have a legit job.

Pascal again. Today it’s Neutrality Studies, writ large.

Alrighty. Look, saith he.

You cannot be neutral if you are not first independent. If you’re a puppet or a proxy or a satellite or colonized, you’re going to be pulled in on whatever side your master is on–you’ll Follow him/her.

If you are independent, and also truly neutral, then both parties to a conflict will expend some effort to pull you toward their point of view and position in that conflict.

It’s happened to you more than once, at the interpersonal and familial levels. (I’m sure examples will leap immediately to mind.) It works much the same geopolitically. According to Pascal’s Science.

When I cry Duopoly! and refuse to vote for either half of it, it doesn’t mean that I’m refusing to take a position. Quite the contrary.

I’m just taking my own position rather than that of a ‘party’, a position that happens to be shall we say … Non-Aligned.

To any demand, or coercive or cajoling pressure to move toward this side or that side … I have to say it like the man in the video says it:

“No, ain’t working for us. Over here, we do our own thing.”

The Armenian guy points out how sometimes “non-aligned” becomes a factional entity unto itself. Even a ‘movement’. That’s worth keeping in mind, belletrist. (Also, Pascal, I don’t really see how ‘territorial integrity’ and ‘self-rule’ are de facto contradictory at all, but let’s move on.)

That damn China. It’s the closest thing possible to an autarky within Modernity, and man does that inconvenient truth make the Merkins edgy. The Unipolar moment, ever since ’89, has never been a moment of peace–the Unipole has no damn use at all for peace–and as unipolarity hitches and seizes and dies it’s going to get much worse, before it ever, if it ever, gets better.

Tensions and conflict are nothing more than disguised opportunities for Exploitation. Just ask the Rand Corporation, or any wicked dipshit western think-tank you care to favor with your faith.

“You don’t want to be a tool.” Christ in a bucket what resonance that has, of a Friday evening where we all sit poised on the final brink ennit. Bet your Golden BMW on that little gem, speaking of faith.

We close with a question.

How can setting off exploding pagers in public and private places, killing children and bad guys alike in the process, NOT be an act of state-sponsored terrorism?

It’s rhetorical.

So you’re off the hook.

Maybe even entitled to be neutral, rather than a collaborationist.