on the wrong side of history (and sanity)

kerry says that putin is engaged in a 19th century act. obama says that putin is on the wrong side of history. many's the time i've said this: this is a completely ridiculous structure of thought. history has no particular goal, and if it did it would not be the contemporary welfare mega-state or however obama of hollande envision it. no, you can't turn time around and commit nineteenth century acts. really the complete conceptual impossibility and anti-empirical a priori horseshit of this basic stance has got to go. if obama is sure that he knows the direction of history, which is for the world to become whatever he thinks it should become, this would be described in other contexts as psychotic. time runs in one direction at one pace and history, as far as we can tell, could end up anywhere or nowhere at all.