cheese it, the cops!

Self-Esteem and Bauxite

By Crispin Sartwell

Political and economic realism - the sort associated with figures such as Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and even Karl Marx - was once common wisdom. Realism of this sort holds that, whatever their grand rhetoric or lofty ideals, political leaders and nations operate fundamentally in pursuit of their own self-interest, to increase their wealth and power. Few analysts, looking at the American role in the world today, seem to take that approach. They think about politics not as occurring in a world of concrete economic or military realities, but in a realm of pure symbology, a world of signs, emblems, indications.

All Korea experts and pundits seem to agree, for example, that in meeting with Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump gave Kim what he really wanted: a chance to appear on equal terms with the President of the United States, a recognition of his legitimacy as a world leader. They treated the sheer fact of the meeting, or the way that American and North Korean flags were displayed behind the leaders with equal emphasis, as the sorts of things Kim was trying to achieve, as what he most deeply wanted.

If so, Kim was behaving irrationally by the standards of political realism. Self-esteem enhancement is not in itself a practical outcome in the real world. Feeling oneself to be the equal of the President of the United States would no doubt make some people feel good. It won’t in itself help your economy or keep you from getting invaded or overthrown. That kind of symbolic transaction isn’t, in itself, much of anything. It’s quite hard to tell, for example, whether his detente with Trump helps or hurts Kim domestically, with the North Korean military or with popular opinion, such as it is.

We seem to be operating with an anti-realist or irrealist theory of political motivation: world politics is conceived as a struggle over imagery, in particular as a psycho-drama in which people and nations are working out their low self-esteem. At the moment, competition over unnatural resources seem more explanatory than that over natural ones, and we seem to think of the self-image of political leaders or of nations as the immaterial material over which the world struggles. This resource, a kind of psychic energy, seems to be scarce, and you don’t extract it from the ground, but from other leaders. Certainly, self-esteem seems to be the basic commodity in which Trump traffics: he often seems to be concerned primarily to enhance his own at the expense of other people’s, or to enhance other people’s in order to get what he wants from them.

That, however, doesn’t mean that the stuff is real, or that devoting your foreign policy or your life to it is sensible. If Kim really thought that a sheer handshake with POTUS was in itself some sort of tangible advantage, he needs a little lesson in capitalism: that sort of legitimacy and $2.50 will get you a chai latte. Feeling really good about yourself as a nation doesn’t in itself feed anyone or even line the pockets of the leadership.

People were taken aback, for example, that Trump praised Kim repeatedly as strong, smart, trustworthy, talented and so on. One thing Trump has noticed, I think, is that dealing out praise (and for that matter ridicule) doesn’t directly cost you anything. Profligate spending on compliments and insults - which appear at the moment to be the currency of international affairs - doesn’t increase the deficit. That Trump lurches from criticism and threats to fulsome praise suggests something about the nature of symbolic resources: they don’t actually cost anything, so you might as well deal them out freely. If they do affect people’s behavior, or if you can achieve something concrete by their use, why shouldn’t you?

Of course, the only reason they do affect people’s behavior is because those people have decided to move with you into your symbolic realm and to worry with you about the distribution of imaginary resources. So, for example, Trump’s insults directed at Justin Trudeau are greeted as an international crisis rather than, for example, a spat between egos. And if Trudeau lets Peter Navarro’s “special place in hell” affect Canadian trade policy, he is surely behaving irrationally. It is a flimsy world order, and one that perhaps exists only in the imagination, that can be interrupted by a few scorching Tweets directed at the G7.

One lesson that Trump’s own self-esteem drama and very casual way of doling out praise and insults should teach us is that we should pull back and regard what he says as, in general, neither particularly harmful nor particularly helpful in the real world, and also as not very closely connected to it. As we try to figure out what is actually going on, we could all use a return to realism. To reach any understanding, we’re going to have to get a bit less confused as between resources like self-esteem and resources like bauxite.

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy).

Lying liars, gross incompetents, and vague lunacy

Too much Monkey Business seems equally appropriate for an article about the current state of affairs. 

 

Latest article at Vets. Not often you get to set George Will up as inspiration. I am waiting for the explosion when he realizes that Kim Jon Un punked him and when he sees the stuff about the Baby Trump the Blimp floating around London during his visit. Plus, NATO will probably just ignore him and Putin will give him orders. Sucks to be Donald Trump; sucks worse, however, to be a citizen of the country he's sort of in charge of...

 

 

war blooming like a flower

it looks more or less like russia will fully engage in the ground war in syria, with troops, etc. no doubt they can quickly transform the balance on the ground.

i've been listening to lindsey graham on cnn. his view is that russians are assembling a regional force - assad's alawites, iran, hezbollah - and launching a ground war to prop up assad. in short, "russians and shiites". then he gives this: the russians are sort of doing what i thought we should do: form a regional force (in this case saudi arabia, jordan, kurds, turkey). he said the russians will destroy everything we've tried to do, rip up various cia programs. (that appears to be accurate).

so this raises the specter of shiite/sunni regional war (already well underway) now driven by one non-local, christiany superpower on each side, or images of world war 3 blossoming out of the middle east. 

our policy has been insane, actually. we have fueled the sunni/shiite religious war by forcing a shiite/iranian regime on iraq, and we are de facto allied with the shiites of iran. and then we're trying to assemble a sunni force to take out isis, even as sunni regimes implicitly support and covertly fund isis. saudi arabia is running a savage bombing campaign in yemen with our materiel against iranian-backed rebels, etc. whatever obama says, we've essentially let assad proceed, hoping he'll take out isis; we've been 'coordinating' with assad, and with iran. and saudi arabia. and we have soaked the whole region in weaponry thoroughly and for a long time.

we even, i think, implicitly approved a russian intervention, until it started to become evident what shape it would take. we're arming and funding both or all sides, just as though we hope for maximum chaos and are intent on taking practical measures to achieve it.

i think this situation is something we fundamentally created or at a minimum made possible and set off, with policies of mind-boggling idiocy starting with the iraq invasion. the only hopeful thing i can think of is that we are too, um, chickenshit actually to commit ground troops, or actually to confront russia (on ukraine/crimea, all we did was yap, e.g.).

on the other hand we are very likely to have a republican president, and if it's anyone but paul, that pres is liable to be belligerent and intent on restoring american pride, superduperpower status, and so on. e.g. kasich in the last debate squarely portrayed a worldwide struggle between islam and 'jewish and christian values.' we're still not all that good at distinguishing between muslims. well, they might not be too swift at distinguishing among non-muslims.

you really could get a pretty direct spread into europe and europe is already engulfed by refugees and russian expansion. it is embroiled, and could easily become much more embroiled.

then there's israel. it wouldn't be shocking if they more or less approved of the conflict, or are taking measures to keep it going (we're doing the same, but our motives are not sensible; theirs would be watching their enemies destroy each other). i don't think we have a clear picture of what they're doing in syria. but i do know this: if there's a republican pres (again, other than rand paul), s/he will do whatever israel tells himmer to do. this is another way you might get a explosive expansion of an already explosive situation. why are republicans the servants of israel? wackily enough, because of a protestant christian interpretation of the apocalypse. plenty of islamists are throwing down the apocalypse too, oh and probably some jews are too. this may appear demented, and yet expecting armageddon seems a little less fantastic every day. a key factor in putin's regime is the revival of the russian orthodox church.  quite the complex little religious situation.

then again, perhaps israel is lending substantial support to assad and the russian incursion. astonishingly, their interests align somewhat with iran's. then again, maybe they are also helping sisi and the saudi royal family against their islamists. the israelis would be trying to keep the armed conflict or isis from washing up right on their border. it's close. what happens if it gets closer?

and the situation is even more complex than that, because you have intra-religious conflicts, christian on christian (usa v russia), and intra-sunni civil wars in afghanistan, egypt, and libya.

republicans love to say that iran is the world's biggest state sponsor of terrorism, but it's really sunnis who are reaching into the west with a constant dripdrip of terrorism. this is a way various countries including the usa, can get sucked in, or how the front comes to calgary and marseilles and adelaide and xinjiang and both birminghams. we've already pretended that we've been in a 'war on terror' for 14 years, and a spectacular attack (perhaps a couple of assassinations) would be one way we get sucked in fully to a real war.

so, if there's a world religious war, how does that comport with everyone's idea of what the shape of history looks like? remember last week, when it was obvious that we were all engaged together in a progress toward secularization, freedom, and so on? univocal, progressive, or teleological conceptions of history are simplistic, self-congratulatory, and false.

surveil this

you'd have to say that this and this are promising, though relatively small, smackdowns of the surveilance state. nothing has ever been more obviously unconstitutional. nothing would more obviously make george washington go fetch his flintlock, raise an army, and engage in violent insurrection, as he did in the good ole days. 

A new peak in Crusader AXE's productivity

 

I realized recently that I have made several attempts at the blogging equivalent of the unified field theory, that is, following part I of an essay several days later with part II. I just don't usually do that because I'm lazy and easily distracted. 

But the continuing debacle of policy and politics that has prevailed since Bush and the Rehnquist stole the Supreme Court 14 years ago has hit a point where the outrage meter is pegged out here, and it's easy to remember why I was so pissed off the first time. 

I admit that I consider the Republicans in the House and Senate, the leaders especially, to be lower on the chain of consciousness than sunflowers and slugs. But I have absolutely no clue what the President is doing and why...he's a smart guy. OK, got it; so was Herbert Hoover. He's trying to be Kennedyesque, except most of us who remember John Kennedy and Bobby are members of AARP. Being Kennedyesque today comes off as Mike Dukakis. 

So between them, I'm irked. And, this Ebola Czar nonsense is insane. McCain the Rs have a bad idea -- we need a Czar! Long live th Czar!'; Obama appoints one, and they start screaming "Not that one; another one." Meanwhile, we have a very logical CZAR, the unconfirmed head of the National Health Service. Since nobody in Congress is bothering to pretend to do anything, aren't they recessed? Couldn't Obama appoint him? Or at least make him the CZAR? Nah...too easy. 

Screw these people. 

 

Convergence -- Pope Francis, Tom Friedman, Russ Douthart show up at Ana Marie Cox's place for Maureen dowd's brownies

 Sometimes I publish entire articles here, sometimes I do it somewhere else and just give you the Link. This is one of the later cases. I was struck by a variety of articles over the weekend -- the Pope's interview with a Spanish weekly, Friedman and Douthart's columns and then, of all things, Ana Marie Cox's piece in The Guardian this morning. I normally don't read either Friedman or Douthart and the Pope doesn't have a regular byline at the sites I visit. I religiously read Ana Marie.

Anyway, they were all approaching a serious issue -- what the hell should we do about Iraq kinda, sorta -- and seemed to be going at it from different perspectives and getting to the same point. The Pope's interview really triggered it, when he equated fundamentalism with violence. I think there's a lot of truth to it -- show me someone who wants to quote chapter and verse of everything in an appeal to authority, and I'll show you a guy who'd like to smite the unbeliever...which in Iraq boils down to Sunnis and Shiites smiting each other and anybody else like Christians, Sufis and other sects who wanders past. They all make good points == enjoy.

 http://thedefeatists.typepad.com/apoplectic/2014/06/looking-at-the-elephant.html

 

mass executions

one should maintain awareness of the extraordinarily brutal regime that is emerging in egypt, which flows toward both judicial and extra-judicial massacres. they're another group who has taken to calling all opponents terrorists, including excellent reporters. it's sad what has happened to the arab spring. the middle east has many problems, but looking at the thing squarely, government is exponentially the worst of them. think about the regimes in syria and egypt, but also the amazing peacemakers running israel, or the forces of iran and saudi arabia, who are prosecuting an armed conflict throughout the region, blowing outwards from the death-bound insanity that is syria. the whole region teeters on the edge of armed conflagration, and then i think too each country will consume itself from within (as syria already has), partly under the sponsorship of the others. but surely al-sisi has left the muslim brotherhood no possible alternative except armed resistance. i would think his behavior makes perfect al-qaedaish propaganda: who, really, is trying to repress islam? people who call themselves muslims. 

but you are my favorite non-existent person

of all institutions, both among those that are and among those that are not, i am least impressed by "international law". i quote peter simons' review of tim crane's the objects of thought (tls, february 28): "But Crane, in line with both common sense and Husserl, denies that there really are any non-existent objects." a controversial position indeed! and yet perhaps illustrated by this case.

crazy man, crazy

so now the line is that putin is "crazy", a "wild card", a "loose cannon", "out of touch with reality" and so on. amazing how the media will just mirror the crap officials are spouting, just as though they are incapable of thought. maybe it's all part of the attempt to scribble a little hitler mustache on the man. it's ridiculous, and i also don't see strategically how it's part of a sensible approach. for one thing, it keeps up the idea of extremely underestimating putin, which i feel might, in retrospect, not be seen as having been the best approach.

in fact, putin's finding fascists everywhere too, while people ask whether it's the cold war again, etc etc. i think one should respond to the facts on the ground now, not mount fantastic recapitulations of the ideological idiocies of times gone by.

those who remember history are condemned to simulate it

meanwhile, hillary, zbig and many others are using hitler in the 30s to understand putin now, or rather to pursue some propaganda aim that is rather hard to fathom. surely the only possible idea in going all hitler/appeasement is to mobilize europe for war. is that your idea? because if not what you're saying is idiotic. now, it's easy to think that if you want to deal with the present you have to know the past, if you forget it you'll repeat it, you have to learn the lessons of history, and a dozen other cliches. but really history blinds as much as it reveals: some dude on al jazeera was saying putin's stuck in the 30s, but he was himself just doing that 30s hitler thing. people pull out things like 'sudentenland' first of all to establish their credibilitty by bewildering non-historians, and second to have various manipulative propaganda effects. you think if you place what's happening now in 1937 or 1856 you'll understand it. no, you'll just be talking about 1937, and not even that. you'll blind yourself to what is happening in the unique now. you want a slot to stick it in, no matter how badly it fits: you're trying to understand what's happening now a priori without engaging it at all. it's all ideological blinders; it's all digression, distraction, misdirection. 

putin on the hits

really, i have not taken sides on ukraine so far, and in the first post where i sort of predicted an invasion (feb 27), i speculated that the us, faced with a similar situation, would consider military intervention too. but now let me point out a few things about putin. he consolidated his power and established his reputation with the chechen genocide. people claimed to be worried about security at the olympics, but there is no one you'd rather be handling your security if you don't care how it's done. he used tried and true techniques: rounding up the young man of, e.g., dagestan, torturing them, and dumping their bodies in shallow graves. he may be the richest man in the world, with all the feeling of impunity such a status bequeaths. he has no significant internal opposition, or threat to his political status; by a hundred techniques he has eliminated or isolated opponents. i don't regard him as a classic semi-cracked conqueror a la hitler or napoleon; but he is cagey and extremely aggressive and brutal when he wants to be. there is liable to be again something well-described as an empire when he is done.

restoring calm

yesterday at the white house: meeting of the joint chiefs, defense secretary, cia, etc. what were they discussing? ww3 scenarios, baby. and as they did so, i imagine them sort of sobbing, etc, not because they're sad about the suffering caused in a war, but because they have no realistic way to respond, and to say that the eu is a decadent quasi-state is an understatement; they're drafting capitulation documents right now, which is probably the main contingency plan recommended by the joint chiefs too. you can judge this by the weapon they actually launched, temporarily suspending g8 summit preparations. 

meanwhile ban ki moon urges in his riveting style that calm should be restored to the ukraine. oh that is exactly what putin will be doing over the next few days.

it is absolutely amazing how sluggish the hawking teds are on this. yesterday experts were still doubting, even as the obvious invasion had been in process for a day, that there would be an invasion. a british diplomat on cnn this morning: the solution is for the kiev government to assure its russian-oriented citizens that their interests will be taken into account. by my calculation they have 17 minutes to accomplish that. he says he doubts the russians will go further than the crimea, and he doesn't think they want to annex it. they have already annexed the crimea and the same thing is happening in east/south ukraine that happened there: mysterious armed men, russian flags being raised. i wonder if western experts will notice anything that happens over the next few days, or continue to deal with a reality of their own imagining. 

night wolves

so while i'm in prediction mode: yes, there will further incursions into ukraine, possibly rolling into kiev. no there is no possibility of military resistance. but i'm grooving on the biker gang angle.

unaccountable factors

'war in the crimea!' sure has a sweet late19th/early20th-century-type ring. i wonder what the response will be of the ottoman empire? and what about the habsburgs? there are so many unaccountable factors.

my mealy mouthweapon

i try to avoid i-told-you-sos. but i'm sort of proud i saw that coming. ok, now we proceed to the nothingness of the response. here's one 'threat': no g8 summit in sochi! "that's a big stick" said jane harman on cnn just now, and wolf was all like he couldn't believe they'd be considering such a step: boy, the situation must be bad. this is the problem with 'media' persons: they have lost the rather important distinction between real and merely symbolic events. i blame richard rorty. you deploy helicopter gunships, we counter with a proportionate volley of yacketsmackety. oooh don't make me come over there and murmur nonsense with my mealy mouthweapon! don't make me send john kerry over there to look at you blankly and rehearse a little empty script. words have power, after all. i'm picturing putin, as he coordinates the invasion and thinks about next steps, re-thinking the whole thing under this terrible threat, quailing at the mere thought. anyway, it's going to be all absolute emptiness: it's not in the interests of the ukraine, russia, europe: ok everyone is going to say those words in that order for days now, and yet it is the merest slop. which is all we got, y'all.

he'll pay a price, says obama. so what does that mean? according to experts, putin may just be squandering the good will that was created by the olympics! he really cares about his international standing, you know. but i would say that these are, how you say, non-things, unlike the crimean peninsula, which is a thing. 

pay attention

even as it sort of begins to seem that russian soldiers are 'securing' airports in the crimea, talking heads still seem sanguine: oh, i wouldn't expect a major incursion. dude: why do you think they want the airports? it's one way you stage an invasion. or maybe the idea is evacuation of russian citizens. but i don't really think so. both, perhaps. i just think we're a bit in a possible ww3 situation, and we had better pay attention. so say you have an indigenous pro-russian protest movement. that does not take the form of military vehicles/forces securing the airports. i'd look for a multi-modal russian intervention. today.

here's why it might not be ww3 even if there's an actual invasion: the government(s) of europe and the united states really have no resolve on something like this. all they will do is whine. the welfare-state dependent populations of these countries are not the sorts of people who would fight for anything or really push their governments to do so. putin will kick our ass and then grin sneeringly upon us. we will squawk and accept the new borders.

they say yanukovich is supposed to speak from russia in a bit. and al-jazeera, for example, asked one of its experts whether yanukovich is still relevant. believe it or not, he started talking about polling for the april presidential election. yanukovich is relevant insofar as putin thinks he'd be useful as a spokesman pushing the view that the legit gov has been overthrown etc, as a justification for the seizure of the crimea (to begin with), or as a provisional pres of east/south ukraine. i'd say not, because of the obvious kelptocracy. on the other hand, putin can relate to a kleptocrat. but if he is giving a speech today (scheduled for 8AM eastern), i'd pay attention to that too: it might be moment the russians make their intentions known more clearly, a sort of declaration of war.

uh oh

folks seem remarkably calm about this moment in the ukraine. i would not be so sure that the russian military is engaged in an exercise, and the crimean thing could easily provide or perhaps is being manufactured as an excuse for russian military incursion of one size or another. please remember that we are dealing with a rather swaggering macho leader who is very often trying to show the world his balls. but actually, if it were us sitting on that border with a big american-identified population over there and so on, we would be considering military intervention too. anyway, one fucks up when one predicts, but i would be worried about a blitzkrieg in the next couple of days.

venezuela, ukraine, and us

venezuela, ukraine: there they have pride. there they want freedom. here, we face one of the most effective exercises of totalitarian power ever created: a universal system of continual surveillance. why aren't we out in the streets, filling molotov cocktails and erecting barriers against storm troopers? because americans of our time hate and fear liberty, and love and respond sexually to their own subordination. all we want is to be raped by repulsive idiots such as james ("fucking") clapper. 

russia is capable of producing pussy riots. we are capable only of producing squads of hillary clintons: currently focus-grouping her positions and indeed her entire personality. 

Reflections on a bad idea using a competent rubric

 

 In which Crusader AXE has an existential crisis, smokes another cigar, and relects on being a gadfly and not getting involved in the Syrian Civil Wars as being entirely too easy and too smart. 

in fact it's a gas

all i do is complain. so now i'd like to suggest a proactive twobirds solution to various problems. i'd like to transpose the assad regime and its whole arsenal to ft. meade maryland, and let him have a crack at nsa headquarters. however the conflict comes out, as long as there is excruciating suffering, the world wins. they can argue as they croak about whose authority is less legitimate, who is more enthusiastic about or effective in subordinating their own population, who's the more shameless screeching liar and so on.

Muttering about strange places and dragons...

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the nature of valor, heroism and the waste thereof. Interestingly, I had a comment pulled on this at the site where I read the original article for my foul language. I referred to the evil bastards and ignorant fools who got us into Iraq. It was a veterans linked in site for Veterans. I'm actually miffed but mainly amused...the point of a polemic is to be polemical. I'm sure Crispin agrees. 

Rioting to protest joblessness and other social ills has scarred numerous cities across this tiny country since Dec. 17, after a 26-year-old man with a university degree set himself on fire when police confiscated his fruits and vegetables for selling without a permit.

christ what is wrong with these people? don't they see the necessity for sensible regulation? it's a matter of public health. you can't allow unlicensed fruit. are they rioting in favor of salmonella? not only that, but the police (really, only the police) have to eat. ok so america was propping up yet another corrupt dictator. but at least we brought them some fda and the sort of permitting system that makes the difference between a civilized society and a bag of angry weasels. anyway, i guess the ron paul revolution has reached tunisia.

have to say that the basic iranian chant form - "death to x" - seems a bit repetitive and not all that inspiring. they need a writer over there. all they are saying is give death a chance.

i guess i'm in mega-blog-mode today, my 51st birthday. hard to believe i've survived, but here i am.

anyway, i might point out that the story everyone has been pursuing is how the iran regime cannot control info in the age of facebook, twitter, youtube. but it's hard not to notice that cnn today just basically does not know what's happening on the streets, other than that perhaps the crackdown has come. but they're not confident even on that. explosion at the tomb of khomeini? what's happening? who knows, exactly? the crackdown on media, in other words, has been basically effective, and we won't know what's happening until it's over, if then. and the people of iran, also, probably are in the regime-generated fog.

one inspiring feature of khamenei's approach is that he insists on the rule of law. if the protesters allege vote fraud, they should pursue the proper legal channels. the fact that the people who made the laws and who enforce them are the very same people who dicked the vote is of course neither here nor there, "the law" being a trans-human truth rather than an instrument of power.

one good thing about clerics as political leaders: having direct access to the will of god, they are free of petty constraints such as rationality or reality.

Speaking in front of an audience of thousands that included President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he endorsed the president’s policies and insisted that the margin of victory — 11 million votes — accorded to Mr. Ahmadinejad in the official tally was so big that it could not have been falsified. “How can 11 million votes be replaced or changed?” he said.

now you might answer: well, you could burn the ballots. or just throw them in a landfill and announce any result you like, etc. but khamenei understands that, in fact, no election has ever been rigged anywhere, because that would theologically impossible. now that the protestors can get this clever argument - or at any rate, this lobotomized rhetorical question - on board, they will no doubt go home satisfied.

truly, as much as anything, this shows why you don't want to be a mullah, a priest, a rabbi. and why you don't want to be a king, a dictator, a supreme leader. and what you really don't want to be is both, because you undergo this long discipline in which the question is about texts and interpretations, and reasons or even basic ratiocination are entirely irrelevant. add extreme political power to that, in which whatever you might say, people just nod along, and pretty soon you're just spouting bullshit, expecting people to believe you. it's a personal disaster: you lose the ability to think at all. you're wise. but you're smart as a a shrubbery.

it's always excellent when a fundamentally authoritarian regime vows to investigate itself. but then it's excellent when any regime vows to investigate itself.

well, now, on the other hand: apparently the opposition put half a million people on the streets of tehran today.

see i think this might basically be right. roughly the only voices we get out of iran are western-educated exiles. one huge problem: there is no coverage from inside except from tehran. iran is a big country. what is actually going on? we get an extremely thin, slanted slice.

well, on cnn, christiane amanpour reporting, it was hard not to notice that there really were tens of thousands of people out on the streets for ahmadinejad (ma), while the crowds of protestors looked relatively modest. this could be due to a variety of factors; it's a lot easier to gather 20,000 people if the cops will cooperate. but i wouldn't simply assume the thing was fixed. people who are communicating with us are non-representative. obviously, it smells fishy. but i think we do wrong to think that ma doesn't have serious popular support.