when "the system" becomes "the enemy"

the lessons of international order for domestic systems

the US mission to venezuela, snatching maduro and his wife from their very home, shattering what was alleged to be a next gen chinese air defense without a single loss of aircraft, and decapitating a (to many minds) illegitimate and certainly (to any reasonable mind) an oppressive government is a controversial act with widespread geopolitical ramifications that go beyond just monroe doctrine, energy, and intelligence community/NGO meddling (though it contains all these things).

i shall perhaps dig into that in a later stack, but for the purposes of this one i’d like to speak of the tribal and systemic response to the operation in which all the predictable people are saying the predictable things

you hardly have to be a frontier LLM to guess how the sentences of virtually every speaker here end and there can be little doubt that team donkey would be trying to gear up for “impeachment 3.0: the lawfare continues” were they in power in congress.

(from this story)

and, of course, the endlessly agitated “protestariariat” is out again claiming to stand for the venezuelan people who themselves are in the streets cheering for this. you kind of cannot make this up.

others, predictably, took different views and while perhaps one could argue about law and legalism here, as a matter of longstanding practice, what just occurred is far from unusual.

the EU aristocrats are also making all the noises one would expect and bleating appeals to the hilarity of “international law” which, let’s face it, is not and has never really been a thing. it’s the rulebook the weak wave around at the strong and use as a pretext to go do what they were going to do anyway. the US played along with the fig leaf of “this was a DEA action to arrest an indicted narcotrafficker” to humor them but they (reasonably enough) don’t seem to be buying it.

but the key question is this:

“so what?”

ursula might as well be jumping up and down in funny pantaloons and waving a halberd at the monroe doctrine. you thought trump was joking about the gulf of america? he was not.

this creates the hilarity of a situation in which governments and parties need to now defend a regime they recently reviled and the irony of “so now you oppose flying venezuelan criminals to the US?” is thick, but this is not the real nub of the issue.

mostly, what this gang does not like is that this was a very strong power move. both china and russia had been supporting this client state in our backyard. china literally had a delegation there in caracas seeking more oil and more influence when this went down. i’m guessing they got the message and ideas like “the US is only there for the oil!” fall kind of flat when one returts “and what, russia, china, and iran were there for the arepas and salsa dancing?”

this is bad news for russia as it will tank oil prices (though they can probably just sell to china and make up for what the chinese will lose from venezuela. it’s also bad news for canada who is sure gonna wish they had that keystone pipeline in place. it’s bad news for iran who just lost some drone factories and saw what their air defenses are actually worth and are watching rangers mass in the UK. europe once more gets to sit and look irrelevant and the DC dems likewise with a side order of “yeah, of course no one told you. you’d have leaked it.”

maduro, heir to chavez, was a brutal and awful leader holding a country in dire penury and tyranny by brute force and falsified elections. they took a rich nation exporting oil and food to reduced it to starvation and eating the zoo animals (yes, really).

and watching the US left, the EU, and the UN all tut and fret about supporting a group that just won the nobel peace prize is really quite telling. when asked to choose between any ethics at all, no matter how obvious, glaring, or compelling and “orange man bad” few even seem to need to stop to think. it’s easy to simply presume that TDS dominates utterly, but i think it’s worth looking a level deeper: why is this TDS so universal among the global left?

because trump (and increasingly most of america) does not believe in or respect the systems they use to retain power. and they know that their dog is all bark and no bite. so they MUST, at all costs maintin the illusion of prowess. every time he tests them, ignores them, laughs at them, the image of “transnational authority” falters. and soon it will collapse.

i once met a real live tiger trainer. i asked her how it works. she said “you have to start them very young and convince them that you are bigger and stronger than they are when they are kittens. you can never let this perception change. you replace physical dominance with a signal, a whistle, whatever but you have to keep them believing this. if they ever brush against you in the cage and knock you down? you need to send them to a zoo. they will rapidly figure out who the alpha is. and you’ll be tiger chow.”

this is why the “global talking shops” speak of international law and demand that it be “a UN operation” etc. once america realizes it’s the only actual tiger in a cage that has no real bars, well, suddenly everyone lives in a very different world.

rome did not ask the permission of other empires. rome just did things.

note that i speak not of desirability or wisdom here, only of capability and reality. let’s stay focused on that.

this was (thus far) a clean, surgical move to take down a savage narco-despot and root out foreign powers in the gulf of whatever we’re calling it these days. there was no apology for this, just “it needed doing” a move more akin to europe in the colonial periods than one of the post ww2 order. and that’s an important idea.

we can argue the ethics or advisability of this whole plan and formulate all manner of intricate legal theory or “what happens now?” questions, but i think this misses a bigger picture upon which focus will increasingly adhere:

as we consider any system of ethics or law, right and wrong, legal or illegal, we must realize that these are, in the final sense, only concepts for people working within a system.

underneath this lies everywhere and always the deeper law:

there is no “what one is allowed to do” there is only “what one can do” and “what one will do.”

you can pretend the world is otherwise, but when push actually comes to shove, it isn’t. it cannot be.

all against all, red in tooth and claw is always the final retort of power.

and any “system” that says otherwise exists only at the sufferance of those who possess the capacity for violence.

you might think you can f-around, but “find out” is always out there somewhere.

and those who seek to hide behind legalism often come to learn that the shield it provides is only as good as the commitment to the system beneath it and the power to command compliance.

and when you have a president of the US posting memes like this, well, you be the judge on the message being sent.

what one can do and what one will do is always the final game.

there is no pretense in what was just said. you cannot mistake a message like that and trump understands with crystalline clarity just what this affront to “international law” means. it’s 100% deliberate and 1000% calculated.

collaboration time in which we have to pretend to care what the UN or brussels thinks is over and the idea that the US needs to pretend to tolerate the weapons of china and russia and iran in our neighborhood.

is this less than even handed? yes, quite probably. but power superceeds hypocricy. we can debate whether this is good or bad, but that’s the eternal law and once evoked, “can” and “will” are all that remain.

the citizens of rome were not protected in foreign lands because rome was fair. they were protected because rome would pave your entire country if you harmed one.

this is not to say that there can be no good large scale orders.

life under systems to protect rights and peace is a good thing. such systems are worthy of protection. but what we must protect them from most of all is corruption and capture, misuse and manipulation. if a system is what a system does, then a corrupt system is corruption and it becomes the enemy.

and the pivot comes.

when one loses faith in systems and starts to see them as useless, or worse, rigged, then it both moral and sensible to tear these systems down. not just step outside them, efface them.

this is why the people who have captured these systems hate trump so much. it’s not personal, it’s that he is coming to take away their pretense to power, revealing it as illusion and helping tigers become tigers again.

systems always overturn this way.

when one sees one’s foes abuse and misuse an institution or practice or norm, over and over, at some point a reasonable human flips from seeking to uphold that system to seeking to destroy it. it is no longer trustworthy or functional and high agency people can only be induced to play so many games of “full fiat for me, full weight of law for thee” before they overturn the gameboard and come across the table at you.

this is most of world history and international relations. this brief, recent span of pretense to global institutions to keep the peace has been the outlier and even if it worked for a while, the institutions underneath it have become as captured and dishonest as they are feckless and impotent.

and, frankly, the united states underwrites their only real credibility around the application of power. apart from possibly china, the rest is cosplay.

the power of these transnationals extends no further than “stop or i’ll say stop again” a power and all the bad actors use them as figleafs to hide behind or ruses to clown the empathic.

“you must value this world order!” they say to the west, while placing no value in it themselves save that it keeps them in a game for which they otherwise lack table stakes.

and the lies wear thin. and then the “value” of saving these institutions starts to look like cost. so you chuck them.

the US is reaching this point and revealing the lie. these groups are tissue paper tigers. they have nothing, no prowess, no power, certainly no ability to pull off a raid like that or even see it coming.

and everyone just saw it. all they had left was the tatters of their faded pasts, ascribed influence and prestige lost in times long gone and the idea that “i can buy $6 billion of chinese anti-stealth radar and spot f22’s” just blew up in a cloud of radiator seeking missiles and impotence. russia, china, and iran were all in VZ. no mas.

“condemn” all you like.

the “international orders” are over. and they are big mad about it. they will jump up and down and howl and whine and vilify. they will find even greater excess of trump degrangement syndrome.

but in the end, they will do nothing.

because they can do nothing.

so now let’s extend this logic, because it applies not just to international relations, but to all forms of government at home and abroad.

it applies to all forms of systems.

and herein lies the danger and perhaps the course of things to come.

the systems within the US (and much of the west) have become dangerously corrupted and have for decades been bent upon creating situations akin to a one way ratchet: the systems used to create a set of circumstances, control, and problems cannot be used to un-create them.

this is not an accident.

it’s insurgency.

lawfare, migration as a weapon, censorship, preferencing, education, political persecution and suppression, and staggering campaigns of theft and plunder and indoctrination have been unleashed. as a result, we’re getting into some very dangerous waters here, the waters off the edge of the map where the monsters live.

and monsters do not respect your tainted law books.

the whole point of these sort of totalitarian takeovers is their totality. they grab education, courts, police, and government. they create problems so big that they cannot be fixed without stepping outside the “box” system that increasingly comes to resemble a civilizational coffin.

you cannot investigate this many people. you cannot run 10 million or even 1 million or perhaps even 100,000 people through the court system. you cannot arrest them or deport them within the confines of your own laws.

that’s the point.

it’s why they did it like this, it’s a form of asymmetric warfare where you box queensbury rules and they keep kicking you in the nuts and cold cocking you in the back of the head with a pipe wrench while the ref they bribed pretends not to see.

and like the global world order, this constitutes a most dangerous pivot because once you, the victim of all this, realize that “the system” is not yours anymore, that it is controlled by those seeking to conquer you, paid for with the money they stole from you and laundered through NGO’s and PAC’s, well that sort of eliminates the incentives to defend it, doesn’t it?

why work within it?

why not overturn the board and start again?

you do not fight the matrix from inside the matrix. you shut the matrix down and pull apart the machines.

past reactions to these sorts of takeovers have been dramatically authoritarian. you get pinochet or bukele. you get franco.

this is the part the left seems not to grasp, the reflexivity of the high agency people when they reach a point of “not wanting to live like this anymore” and the social contract goes to war, especially when it is a war they feel to be defensive, one they neither started nor instigated.

if the american left had a lick of sense, they’d be backing off as fast as their feet could carry them, jumping in to purge the corruption, the courts, and the grifter industrial complex of NGO’s and circular donor flows from piracy.

they’d go all in on shutting off benefits for illegals and sending them home.

but they won’t. it’s too far lost, the ones in power are too captured and complicit.

and so the rise of questions like “why in seven kinds of calamitous hell am i paying taxes for this?” will continue.

ideas like “maybe these judges belong in jail right next to the people they refuse to convict” will proliferate.

and when what has been seen gets big enough, when the problem is revealed to be sufficiently intractable as to be unsolveable from within the system, that’s how people finally just rise and the purges and showtrials begin.

law and even ethics go out the window and “the big, obvious thing” gets done - because it can be. and the will is there. it’s how you have a bukele moment where “the rights of the criminal with the scorpion tattooed on his neck” are sacrificed to the welfare of the rest of humanity.

it’s not a good solution and one with a rotten tendency to linger long after the purge as a new heavy, authoritarian hand and even if the first dictator is benign, their successors are often less so. but past a point, it’s still the least bad.

and it can happen here.

and it will.

you can feel the overton window starting to slide.

“illegal” only matters to those still invested in a legal system.

and once they are not, it’s a whole new gameboard.