US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
Oh, it’s not about abandoning knowledge or being nomads or anything like that. Not that it’s wrong if people want that sort of thing. But more about flat granular, answerable government. You can and still should fund and encourage research and science under a system like that.
It’s about not having a large government or business telling you that you are to be sacrificed. Tough luck as they dump the negative externalities onto you. More star trek less 1million BC.
But human nature and society has a lot of evolution to do before then. So until then, it’s important to keep concentrated power to a minimum. That’s the one thing most abusive governments share. Unanswerable people at the top, sending down commands according to their whims or ideology. Regardless or especially because of who it hurts. See trump and immigrants or Xi an uhygers/Tibetan’s/hongkongers or democracy advocates in general.
It’s like that saying, I don’t know if it was Carl Sagan or who it was who said it, and I paraphrase- our technological development vastly outpaces our cultural development.
These old power structures cannot hold 8 billion people in a modern society run on digital communication, they were never designed for it. We need a new system, a whole new model, and then some way to spread that model organically, grass roots like. I have been thinking about it a lot.
Thanks for sharing- if I may ask you, what kind of society do you envision? What form and shape would it take? Do you have a realistic idea of what you would want to see?