What is power?

Video: Why Putin Can't End the War: The Dictator's Trap

Oh my God, you're a MORON. What are you? A "woman"?

Most WOMEN lack real power so they count on being in the good graces of some MAN with power, like their daddy or whomever they are whoring themselves out to, and imagine he can clean up their mess. 

Reality: If he takes too many liberties to cover for some slut or ill-behaved offspring, he won't keep his position of power.

Power hath its privileges but people only make allowances for relatively insignificant personal quirks. There's a cost-benefit analysis involved and when the costs of putting up with you get to be too much, that deal ends.

Positions of power exist to serve a purpose and if you get into a position of power and misuse that power, there's typically some provision for removing you.

Historically, when the Roman empire existed, the Praetorian Guard removed terrible emperors by assassinating them. The Praetorian Guard was the body responsible for the Emperor's security and making sure no one else killed him.

From the Wikipedia piece about Claudius:

His survival led to him being declared emperor by the Praetorian Guard after Caligula's assassination, at which point he was the last adult male of his family.

Not stated directly in that sentence: Caligula was such an abusive nut job you probably know that without necessarily knowing anything else about the Roman Empire and Caligula was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard.

Claudius was still alive because he presented himself as a blithering idiot to survive his insane relatives who were murdering everyone they felt was somehow a threat to them. He turned out to be a competent Emperor, but at the time he was being installed as emperor on the detail that "Welp, we got exactly ONE living heir and that's this MORON." everyone believed him to be a RETARD.

And the Praetorian Guard said "Abusive nut job or RETARD? We'll take option two. We've had enough of THIS SHIT."

I tripped across the above clip by someone who presumably is some kind of commentator by profession and thus operates like a woman, not a man, because public opinion and social BS is his bread and butter. I was actually looking for a clip of Putin I happened to trip across and watch yesterday solely because it's the first clip I ran across that has his voice and his words with subtitles.

Other clips I've tripped across show him speaking but have a voiceover in English by someone else. I was curious how he comes across, what he sounds like.

And I was looking for it because I've been writing about Language Stuff and Photography and Film and the last thing he says is "We have an old rather not a saying or a parable but an ancient rule. Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours."

He appears to be speaking to an interviewer and replying to questions. He's looking for the right word or phrase. This is not a rehearsed speech written and researched and edited ahead of time and he is struggling to accurately express the idea he wishes to convey and goes through three phrases.

And I wanted to write about that one line, I wasn't sure where.

I'm a freelance writer and it is standard practice to tell writers to aim for a sixth grade or eighth grade reading level for work intended for a general audience.

There was a political campaign probably in the Deep South of the American US before TV where people went stumping -- where politicians physically traveled around and gave speeches while on campaign -- where one politician engaged in a smear campaign by using words the poorly-educated people wouldn't know and saying it in a salacious fashion, like "Do you know what men and women DID at the University he attended? They matriculated."

Definition of matriculate:

1. be enrolled at a college or university:

"he matriculated at the University of Vermont"

2. admit (a student) to a college or university.

No, the object of this smear campaign could not defend himself by telling the people "You ignorant fools! That just means I attended college. It has nothing to do with sex."

He lost. 

I've taken Classical Greek and I see depths of meaning in words most people don't seem to see. I have about six years of college and was taking advanced, college-equivalent classes before I got to college.

When I speak or write, I frequently carefully choose a particular word because it contains multiple meanings and there isn't a synonym which actually says that exactly. Synonyms frequently have one overt meaning which match and multiple other meanings which don't.

For a diverse audience, changing that one word can substantially alter the meaning that is conveyed.

Great art is typically filled with double entendre and is great art because of context that some people will have and others will not.

The Wikipedia article for the song Macarena partially agrees with things I've read previously in that it says Los Del Rio attended a private party and spontaneously sang an ode to a talented dancer and this got edited into what eventually became this well-known song.

Wikipedia says her name was Diana and this was used in the song originally and they changed it to Macarena in honor of the daughter of one of the singers. I read they originally said Magdelena which sounds a lot like Macarena and has a rich meaning for Catholics in South America.

I guess calling her Venus would be the closest English equivalent. They were saying something like "Oh, WHAT a WOMAN! She is the epitome of woman!"

I read that it was changed in part because the song is salacious and Magdelena is a religious reference and in part because there was already a popular song called Magdelena. So for marketing purposes and cultural respect, they wanted something similar enough to be evocative of that word without using that exact same word.

The boyfriend's name in the song is given as Vitorino and I read that in certain cultures this is a name meaning he's been cuckolded. It means his lady was unfaithful, which is a plot point in the song.

Most English-speaking listeners won't know such details and references but many Spanish-speaking listeners will and that fact likely fueled its popularity.

A word that doesn't sound similar to Magdelena wouldn't have made the song insanely popular. A name other than Vitorino wouldn't have said the same thing to some audiences.

I also read Macarena means a resident of a particular upscale neighborhood in some large city in South America. So that adds additional color, like describing this young woman as a wealthy upper class teen in a place like Los Angeles or Atlanta.

The song was wildly popular in part because there's a wealth of rich meaning to which most English speakers are completely oblivious.

When I was in college taking French, someone offered to pay me to translate something to English for them and I spoke with my French professor about how much to charge. She told me what I was asking was reasonable given my level of comprehension of French.

She then talked about a translation job she did, I think it was a novel in English that she translated to French, and she told me the first sentence of the novel in English and talked about the double entendre it contained and how she translated it to retain both meanings.

She said someone like her gets paid more than someone like me because I can't pull that off and things will get lost in translation.

Whatever Russian words Putin used, there are probably multiple ways to translate that to English and some will retain one meaning but lose another. You can bet money the translator is not slavishly devoted to making sure an English-speaking audience accurately understands him.

When I was a child, my mother was outraged at news footage where the translator said "That's a lie." and the man speaking Russian actually said "That's not true." Because my mother spoke Russian. She was required to take it in school while growing up in East Germany.

"Not true" and "a lie" share one meaning -- it's not factually accurate -- but "not true" is neutral and doesn't suggest motive. Perhaps you made a mistake. Perhaps you heard wrong. "Lie" means you know it's not true and you have malicious intent.

Can't imagine why a Russian during the Cold War would have his statement twisted like that. Such a mystery! (That's sarcasm, in case it needs to be said.)

It's extremely easy to twist someone's meaning in a malicious fashion without necessarily outright making up crap they didn't say at all. But when most Americans don't speak Russian, you can probably also just make stuff up as you see fit or to serve your boss's agenda or whatever.

Movie clip about exactly that kind of thing.

Okay, that's a long tangent. The first clip is of some MORON making up unfounded analysis about why Putin does stuff based on girly-sounding motives about emotionally manipulating the people and being too stupid to find a way to walk it back and I doubt he knows what he's talking about.

According to Wikipedia, Putin has two college degrees, a law degree completed in 1975 and a degree in economics from a Mining University involving a thesis on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy completed in 1997, plus he attended a German language immersion program as a kid and is fluent in German.

So probably like real men, his eye is on real problems, like food shortages. He's probably in Ukraine because Russia has trouble acquiring enough food for its people and Ukraine is "the bread basket" of the region.

Because if people are going to die anyway, better to have them die in battle trying to solve the problem than die of starvation while pretending YOU are a nice guy and invading other countries is evil behavior you would never engage in.

So what is power?

Knowledge is power and Putin is an educated man.

Women have trouble learning certain things because we don't have access to the same experiences as men and even if a man tries to clue a woman, women frequently act like "You're just a sexist pig!" and don't want to take that feedback seriously and then men stop trying to help us idiots and start worrying about not being dragged by some ungrateful backstabbing bitch who thinks you are just gatekeeping her out, you sexist pig!

Influence is power. Being able to get taken seriously or believed and trusted.

This is rooted in know how and proving your know how to other people such that you get taken seriously.

Yes, theoretically after you have a reputation with a large number of people you COULD lie and manipulate, but if you spent YEARS creating that hard-won reputation, only a fool would want to cut their own throat that way.

Power is a combination of knowing how to get things done in practical terms in the real world with gravity and chemistry and deadlines and financial limits and etc. plus adequate cooperation from people to meaningfully move the needle at scale and not just be some mad scientist doing incredible amazing things no one believes anyone can do.

There's a trope called Reed Richards is Useless because superheroes cure someone of cancer because he's all SPECIAL...and it doesn't lead to global progress in medicine. He's the only one that gets cured.

Women routinely think power is only manipulating people into doing what you want and typically fail to understand the underlying dynamics of accomplishing something meaningful and getting enough buy in to make it bigger than yourself and not solely about you.

And idiot girly-man commentators whose LIFE is talking shit on TV probably don't know anything about that.

I don't know what Putin is up to, but he's been head of state in some fashion or other for one of the biggest countries in the world since 2000. That's a quarter century.

That manipulative BULLSHIT may work in the US where we have presidential term limits and our current president openly brags he rigged the election and we continue to let him cosplay the WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MAN while no one likes anything he does and Americans fight his every order in the courts, but it's probably not how one stays the defacto leader of Russia for 25 years and counting.