so, is assad a dictator or not?

i'm not running for office, so i don't have to pander. and, the fact is that it's a ridiculously ignorant way to frame the situation. i'm going to tell you the story the way i understand it, which may have more detail than any existing candidates are actually even aware of.

in terms of actual technical power, yes - assad is at the top of a hierarchy. but, so is the queen of england, and nobody actually cares what she says. assad is more like a constitutional monarch than an actual dictator - a powerless figurehead, thrust into power by accident. the real power is in the hands of the military, and currently even actually in the hands of the kremlin.

syria is under a military dictatorship, and has been for a long time. on the death of his father, who was an actual dictator (i think he even had a moustache), power was supposed to pass to assad's brother, who had been groomed for the position for many years. as the remaining assad was actually assumed to be out of the succession, he ended up in england, where he became an optometrist.

that's right: assad is actually an eye doctor. he didn't spend his youth studying machievelli, he spent it studying biology. he has a phd, and had a practice in london.

but, by circumstance, he found himself in power - sort of. he was a pawn of the generals from the start, making few decisions and projecting little influence. but, being back from england, with an english-born wife, he actually kind of had a thing for democracy. as a consequence, his focus on his return has not been to consolidate power, but to abolish it; assad's sole goal as the monarch of syria for years has been to prepare a path to step down. he actually put a constitution up to a referendum in 2012.

so, not only does he not actually have any real power as a head of state, but he's trying to get out of being the head of state altogether. i'm not sure if anybody's really explained it to him recently, but last i heard, he actually wanted to go back to his practice in london. some dictator, right?

the saudis of course have a hate-on for anything resembling democracy, and created havoc in the country in order to try to stop it from happening. had that not happened, he'd no doubt be back in london, tending to his practice. as it is, he's stuck in a complicated conflict that he has little influence over.

my guess is that putin thinks he's an imbecile that is incapable of governing.

see, this is the case i thought wilson-raybould was moved out over.

brison resigned over apparent favouritism regarding an old money ship-building contract. was there any pressure put on the former minister to drop charges in this investigation, as well? that's what i initially deduced was the case, anyways....

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/mark-norman-trudeau-wernick-butts-1.5029737

there we go - that's what i want to see.

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/civilians-take-arms-chase-islamist-rebels-town-northern-hama-videos/

While Bayaral is a marginal figure in Turkey, Kirchner warned that his statement demonstrated that the government’s pious base exerted “bottom-up pressure against [a secular] way of life without having to impose legal constraints.”

yeah, he needs some bottom-up pressure, alright.

i think this guy needs to spend a few nights with a nice boy, myself.

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/beardless-men-look-like-girls-provoke-gay-thoughts-says-muslim-preacher/

remember: the s-300s are not the s-400s, which have been such an important (if unreported) factor in the iranian nuclear talks. and, the russians seem just as willing to sell them to the saudis, too.

we don't know how well the syrians are going to use them. we don't know how well the israelis will react to them. we just know that it's a substantive deterrent, once the syrians actually activate them.

they say they're close. we'll see what happens.

i think the russians are focusing more on the election, myself. the israeli military has been pushing back on netanyahu re:iran for years and may be getting fed up with him...

https://www.almasdarnews.com/article/syrian-military-nearly-ready-to-use-s-300-system-source/

i'm staunchly disappointed - if not particularly surprised - by trump's decision to keep troops in syria, and hope that it doesn't - but fully expect that it will - lead to rising tensions with regional powers in the region.

unlike russia and turkey and iran, the united states has no legitimate presence in the region and should leave the territory of the sovereign state of syria immediately.

well, if the judge sentenced him to 4.5 years and he's served it (including time awaiting trial) then you have to let him out. you can't just hold him indefinitely for no cause.

i mean, i'm not suggesting indefinite incarceration - i'm just insisting we actually enforce our laws.

if he was sentenced and did his time, that's an example of the system working, not an example of it failing.

that said, i would hope that this person is properly monitored for the foreseeable future, and that any further attempts to engage in terrorist activity are met with increasingly steep penalties.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4986036/canadian-tried-join-terror-group-syria-released-parole-despite-high-risk-public-safety/?utm_source=Other&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014

this is horrifically undemocratic - the kind of thing you'd expect to see in a country like iran, not the united states of america.

https://globalnews.ca/news/4987115/donald-trump-new-jersey-ballot/?utm_source=Other&utm_medium=MostPopular&utm_campaign=2014

"but, i read about foucault in a course on marxism at university."

and, how much did you pay to join the book club at that bourgeois institution?

you didn't even get a membership card, did you?

universities are good places to learn about engineering; marxism, not so much.

identity politics as we understand them come from a french writer named foucault, who wrote widely about "hegemony" from this kind of depraved position. there's no deficit of criticism of foucault's writings from the left, most notably by habermas and chomsky, who both saw him as morally depraved. near the end of his life, he ended up supporting the iranian revolution, on the grounds that it would introduce a concept of moral purity in a collapse of capitalism; and, in this bizarre embrace of the most violent tendencies of fundamentalist islam, you can see his interest in what he called "hegemony" - the source of what we call "identity politics" was obsessed with the brutal application of hierarchy and power. one wonders if he might have tortured cats, as a child.

we don't have to wonder where this came from, though, as it's easy enough to trace.

the france of foucault's time was still a function of the revolution, so a substantial amount of his writing was created within it's context. any student of the french revolution is introduced to edmund burke, by necessity. speaking personally, i would have little interest in burke otherwise, but have read quite a bit of it due to his position in a lengthy series of arguments. you can't avoid him if you want to..

burke is otherwise known in england as the "father of modern conservatism" for creating a system where everybody knows his and her place, in an elaborate hierarchy with the church at the top and the peasants at the bottom. in burke's system, people are wholly defined by characteristics such as age, race, gender, place of birth and, of course, class. burke also wrote in favour of the american revolution (even while opposing the french one), but that is not important, right now.

what foucault actually did is take burke's system and flip it over on itself, before eventually subsuming his own politics within it. his entire concept of hegemony is fundamentally burkean in concept, to the point of being a logical conclusion.

now, people will argue that he was dismantling it, but that doesn't actually hold up - not any more than the arguments in favour of identity politics hold up today. he completely accepted burke's world view, then tried to find ways to subvert it - but always disingenuously, because he had that morbid attraction to authoritarianism, to hierarchy, to the enforcement of naked power with a blunt object.

the left has always seen through this, but liberalism picked it up at some point, and now we have this monster we have to slay before it gets out of hand. the iranian revolution may be an extreme analogy, but it is nonetheless where this goes if left completely unchecked.