A residential bomb shelter in a tower block island development somewhere in Kyiv, Ukraine, 10 July 2024 - Just so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind, the blast that killed 27 sick childred was from a missile. A walk around ground zero and the neighborhood shows that in the way glass and a sprinkling of other random stuff are so neatly shattered over the streets: it’s the result of a calculated, industrially-tuned blast wave.
And it’s impossible to doubt it was a deliberate hit. When all is said and done, the Russians have done a bang up job of wrecking the country’s electricity production - lots of good targeting in those many many attempts to get their bombs through. Also, this particular mass killing follows many other hits on civilian targets that defy any explanation but the intent to murder people at work, people at play, people just being people.
If we consider that Russia’s
Ship of State is commanded by a bully - a human type or character (I don’t recall if Theophrastus has one or not and can’t check because I am currently in an air raid) - rather than a rational actor - a psychosocial profile - a mass murder of children makes more sense.
Unlike a rational actor, a bully has no goal; they are a type of human, basically, a psychic windmill, set to “win”.
“Win” for a windmill just means “churning”.
Donald Trump is a good example of how this churning works and why a bully is often misunderstood by rational actors.
Trump’s famous “unpredictability” or “opportunism” or “transactionalism” is just a way to keep himself churning. His “achievements” are entirely incidental - he sees no contradiction in overturning Roe vs Wade and denying responsibility for wrecking abortion rights, for instance, while the achievements cited by supporters are largely in their own minds.
Trump supporters and opponents, brought up in a society that worships winning, just assume Trump means “winning” as they do: dominating or mastering a situation and achieving desired and gratifying result. But Trump doesn’t. He’s just keeping on keeping on.
Similarly, murdering some sick children is just Putin’s windmill churning. It signals or it should signal, to NATO bigwigs that the bully has churned into its default position: he doesn’t give a shit about what they think or feel or how powerful they are.
From the get go, a bully effectually thrusts all the responsibility for what happens next on those who share space with them. These, mostly ordinary people, either by dint of their bureaucratic position or personal disposition, are all rational actors.
They are asking themselves, If he (Putin) does not care, what can we do (to make him care)?
Those who have had particularly rebellious teenage children or experience with sexual or other types of harassers know what I mean. With a bully, the bullied or harassed always hold the responsibility bag.
Responsibly, Putin’s opponents, like a flustered E. Jean Caroll wondering what to do when and after Trump humped her behind the clothes rack in a public place, always fall into prudently searching for responsible responses to a flagrant lack of personal responsibility. Trump zips up his fly and walks away; Putin hugs that Mohendra Mohdi guy in Red Square.
But there’s no use trying to bring a bully to reason. Searching for responses makes the rational actor waste their time trying to get in the bully’s churning head. And since the others are responding, the bully has the sense of winning.
How, frustrating, depressing to think, hiding down here in this catch-as-catch-can shelter, that this Putin asshole doesn’t care if he kills me and my friends or not - even as a mere edifying act of terror. E. Jean Caroll, I salute your years of tenacious patience and forbearance.
So what to do with a bully if not respond?
First off, it’s impossible to make a person care and, in respect to a bully, even more impossible since not giving a shit is keeping their little windmill a-churning. Then, and this important, Putin’s actions, like Trump’s, like any bully’s, are not connected with any particular goal or objective. He’ll lob a nuke or eat his dinner, as pleases. It has everything to do with him and nothing to do with you. And, finally, he just don’t care.
Down here in this basement hiding from him, it seems to me the only way to deal with Putin is to stop the churn of his windmill, give him a Putin equivalent of Trump’s 83-million/dollar judgment, which has effectively stopped the churn in E. Jean Caroll’s vicinity.
As a practical matter, I think that’s coming with the F-16s, which, with drones and good artillery, will pretty much stop Putin’s missiles, bombs and drones from coming into Ukraine. In addition, it will effectively end Russian sovereignty in a large swathe of Russia, a fact not likely to go down well with Russian patriots and plotters and which will thus keep him occupied elsewhere, among friends and familiars.
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