OK now, Simplicius

Two weeks ago, I wrote how, if the MSM is dying, some alternative venues that are single-issue with potentially too narrow a focus may die as well.

I was thinking primarily of some, like Simplicius, who has made the "MSM is dying" claim, with his narrow focus, for the most part, on the Russia-Ukraine war.

And, contra Simp's raison d'etre, Russia-Ukraine, no Trump does NOT want to end the Ukraine war tomorrow. If you don't see that, like Simplicius, who still didn't fully see it two weeks ago, though he was starting to self-enlighten, you're fixated or something. But, last week, he went backward again, as he still doesn't seem to get that this is the actual Trump on Ukraine. There's no "faltering," it's the actual Trump. I'll buy you a coffee if you'll wake up and smell it. Let's not forget — in case Simplicius has never mentioned it — that Trump sold Ukraine weapons that Dear Leader Obama refused to sell. Let's also remember to discount most of Trump's Deep State blatherings, unlike the guy up top. Trump chose to sell these weapons to Ukraine.

Update: Turns out he has a second Substack (and maybe more?). 

And, he's got "subverticals" within that. On one of them? This, which both approaches conspiracy theory and shows that he's got an ultimately Eurocentric view of history.

But first, the conspiracy theory part:

Without losing ourselves down the rabbit hole, we can say that Milner and his cohort—the likes of which included Lord Nathaniel Rothschild, Cecil Rhodes, and every other influential baron and titan of the day—orchestrated conflicts from the Boer War to WW1 to advance their stake

Uh, no, dude. Gavrilo Princip, from a Serbian "emerging state" that was still 50 percent pig farmers, wasn't controlled by any of those people.

He goes on about other stuff. Using Qwant, not Google, first hit for the Milner Group? Insurance company founded in 1958. Wikipedia has no such entry; it has a subsection "Quigley and the Milner Group" under its Carroll Quigley entry. It notes that Quigley first talked about the Round Table movement and was also a big ass conspiracy theorist. At the end of that quoted paragraph? Simplicius calls said Quigley a "famed researcher." He previously mentions the Round Table movement. That and Lord Milner's Kindergarten (both with Wiki entries) are also not what Simplicius implies.

Per a site called Lobster Magazine, seen via another Wiki entry, the mandarins of the "deep state," at least in Britain, do do enough stupidity to fuel such theories.

What's really weird in all of this, beyond Simplicius' own weirdness, is that Quigley himself was an archivist for the Council on Foreign Relations, itself the subject of many a conspiracy theory beyond its actual stupidities hither and yon. 

As for Quigley's other claims? The dominions themselves replaced the British Empire with the Commonwealth so they had control over their own foreign policies. Milner's group, all British, had nothing to do with that.

From there, it's off to John Dewey allegedly working for a post-WWI incarnation of the New World Order, because that's what secular humanism is all about, isn't it?

As for wars and all of the above? Stock exchanges throughout Europe shut for the first weeks, if not the first couple of months, of WWI. Conventional macroeconomics says the world of finance doesn't like the uncertainties of at least the start of wars. And, Simplicius ignores that Nathan Rothschild in the UK wasn't the only member of his family running around various countries of Europe at this time.

As for post-WWII restructuring? He ignores that Uncle Joe Stalin also had a hand in it. The Marshall Plan started because Stalin was trying to get Turkey, neutral in WWII, give up Turkish Armenia. He also, already at Potsdam, was trying to claim possession of Libya, which had been an Italian colony, because of Italians having fought on the Eastern Front. And — and this was NOT the reason Truman dropped either bomb —in the USSR's entry into the war against Japan, he was eyeing Hokkaido.

See, Simplicius, or Max Blumenthal, or whoever the hell you are, I can call out non-Western as well as Western imperialism, and do so without conspiracy theories. (No, I don't think he really is Max; but, by only critiquing Western imperialism, he comes off as someone like Max. Actually, with his Anglo-American elites conspiracy theories, he sounds even more like John Helmer.)

But that's not all. Riffing on a piece by Freddie de Boer, he says:

The truth is that the majority of homeless people aren’t ‘temporarily displaced’ or ‘underemployed’, but rather people who have voluntarily checked out of a society they no longer feel comfortable, or capable of, navigating. Even if you were to offer them a “job” and a place to live, a good portion of them would turn it down in favor of the purity of the wild.

Uh, no, dood. These people have not "voluntarily" checked out. I've talked here, and even more at my other blog, about what I generally call "psychological constraint" on free will, or something similar. The idea is that traditional determinism is wrong, or Not.Even.Wrong, but past, or present, life issues, place psychological constraint on our action. With both mental illness and drug addiction, that's definitely true.

As for "purity of the wild" bullshit? Compounding your first error with some neo-Rousselian take makes it only worse.

Now, he may, or may not, be right about problems with UBI, but that's besides the point.

Finally, contra Simplicius, any of his stanners, or an apparent tankie I ran into on Substack and quickly enough uncrossed paths again? I know the difference between conspiracy and conspiracy theory.