Last Sunday I Washed My Car

...instead of going to church... 

And I put out a little sign so my neighbors could see what I did!

So Then, What Is Soft Power?

In a previous post I mentioned the concept of "hard power" as applied to nations.  A simple definition of hard power is the ability of a particular nation to use economic and/or military means to force other nations to submit to its will.  A question naturally arises: what is the definition of "soft power"?  And what contrasts exist between the definitions of hard power versus soft power, as well as the difference in their mechanisms of action and their effects?

To answer that question, we can look to the sorts of formal, scholarly definitions crafted by well-credentialed academics.  One such academic was the late Joseph S. Nye, who originally developed soft power as a formal concept.  (See Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics, Chapter 4, 04/05/2004.)  Another academic, Rebecca Kivak, summarized Nye's conclusions as follows: "Soft power refers to a nation's ability to attract and persuade others through culture, political values, and foreign policies, fostering a sense of admiration and shared objectives...Soft power is the capacity of a country to get what it wants by endearing itself to others through attraction...Countries who use soft power rely on earning admiration." ("Soft and Hard Power," Kivak, EBSCO, 2025.)  Kivak also stated that "Soft power operates through the resources of culture, political ideals, and foreign policies...Culture consists of a country's values, ideals, and social practices, including its popular culture."

These formal definitions of soft power may be a mouthful to digest, but I'd like to focus on a few key words: namely, admiration, attraction, and persuasion.  It seems reasonable that admiration would lead to attraction, and attraction would lead to persuasion.  Admiration is the first step, the prerequisite to every other step in the process.  How then does a person or a collective of people (up to and including a nation) go about earning admiration?

It is interesting (and bitingly funny in a dark sort of way) that the nations of the Global North sought to use propaganda as a tool to foster admiration in the people at whom the propaganda was aimed.  Nye's book talks about how in the 20th century, the U.S., Britain, and Germany tried to use propaganda to earn points with audiences in Latin America and other nations of the Global South, and how even when Britain, the U.S., and Germany were at war, each tried to use its organs of propaganda to influence the citizens of the nation which it was fighting.  Thus did propaganda and national mass media (including visual art, movies, novels, music, and TV shows) come to be counted as tools of soft power.  This assessment of soft power was only partially accurate.  To quote one former CCM musician who was "defrocked" after cheating on his wife in the first decade of the 21st century, "the lie is always cheaper than the truth."  Or, as Wallace Stevens once wrote, "Let be be finale of seem."  Propagandists who sell things that don't live up to their hype eventually get found out.

So then, what steps are required to build a durable foundation for admiration?  Let's look at how a single individual might truthfully craft a persona worthy of admiration.  It seems that the first thing such a person needs to do is to manage his own affairs well.  In other words, what's needed is a person who provides for himself by means of honest work, a person who takes care of himself, a person who is not enslaved to addictions, a person who lives within his means, a person who to the utmost of his own personal ability tries to live an orderly, wise, and self-controlled life.  The challenges to such a life are increasing in these days of rampant inequality, yet this ideal is what we should all be aiming for, as encapsulated in the quote: "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing." - 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12.

The second thing our admirable person needs is to cultivate and possess a useful skill, a skill or craft or competency that meets needs in the world at large, even as it says  "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful." - Titus 3:14.  The kinds of skills that meet the emerging needs of the 21st century will require setting aside regular daily and weekly time for self-cultivation and self-education.  Acquiring these skills may also require enrolling as a working adult in continuing education classes and seminars taught by reputable teachers.  I would also like to suggest that for many people, the ultimate goal of this self-cultivation should be to achieve full self-employment.  But self-employment is just my own personal bias.  YMMV.

The third thing our admirable person needs is to actively practice hospitality.  This hospitality should consist of deeds of active charity toward others, and especially toward those who can't repay the favors shown to them by the person practicing hospitality.  In the New Testament, this is seen in the hospitality shown by the Good Samaritan toward the man who was almost killed by robbers (Luke 10:25-37.  Note that this hospitality was cross-cultural, inter-ethnic, and inter-religion!), and in passages like Luke 14:12-14 and James 1:27 and 2:15-16, and 1 John 3:17.

To sum up, a person who manages himself well, possesses and continues to cultivate an occupational skill useful in the larger world, and shows practical, material kindness and charity to those around him (especially those who are poor or marginalized or who can't pay him back) will be regarded by many as an admirable person.  Such a person will then be an attractive person as well.  That admirable character and attractiveness will make him a persuasive person.  And his persuasiveness will not depend on expensive PR/marketing campaigns, propagandists or spin doctors, but on the genuine evidence of the person's genuine beneficial character.  Now when we have not just one such person but entire collectives of such people, they can wield a tremendous amount of soft power.  And the reputation, benevolence, and values of such collectives can serve as a powerful contrast to the societies in which these collectives are embedded when those larger societies have been taken over by autocrats, tyrants, dictators, fascists and others who want to create a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by trashing everyone else.

Thus a key goal of the people who build parallel institutions in order to resist the society of the tyrant should be to cultivate this kind of genuine soft power.  Those who are part of such parallel institutions should aim to earn the reputation of providing needed works or services which the society of the oppressor is unwilling to provide.  To quote from "How to Undermine Authoritarian Control: On Empowering Parallel Institutions" (Goldman and Levin, Z Magazine, 2 April 2026), 

As authoritarianism attempts to take root in America, there are several time-tested strategies from other countries and contexts on how to fight back most effectively when the ruling regime controls most branches of government. One strategy that has been especially effective across diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts is building parallel institutions: filling the voids of government functions, services, and resources created by authoritarian regimes and their abandonment of obligations to the people. By showing government shortcomings instead of just talking about them, then organizing regular people to help fill those gaps, parallel institutions build alternative power and influence.

 From Brazil to Ukraine and India to Sudan, parallel institutions have been effective at safely and peacefully undermining authoritarian control by taking care of people where the government won’t.   [Emphasis added.]

When such parallel institutions cultivate themselves to such an extent that their soft power exceeds the cultural power of the autocratic society in which they are embedded, the collapse of the autocratic regime is only a short step away.  This power reversal should be simple to achieve in autocratic or dictatorial societies, since the whole goal of the dictator or fascist is to create a society in which one small privileged group of people gets all the goodies of the society while everyone else is starved to death.  I am thinking particularly of Russia just now as a nation that has been so thoroughly cannibalized by rich parasites that it may be on the verge of economic collapse.  As Russia's collapse is being aided and abetted by rampant elite corruption, the United States under Trump and the Rethuglicans has begun to head down the same path.  In these days, let us who count ourselves among the resistance cultivate our individual and collective soft power!

Resistance Gardening

As I mentioned in a previous post, we know that many American farmers - especially farmers who are in red states - solidly support Trump.  We also know that these farmers have begun to feel serious pain from the sanctions imposed on them by the nations to which they used to export their produce.  These sanctions were imposed by these nations in response to the tariffs on these nations' exports which were imposed by Trump.  We can increase the pressure on Trump's base by reducing our dependence on the things produced by his base.  This includes farm produce. Therefore a few months ago, I recharged my garden beds with composted cow manure and in February I started planting vegetables.  I've been planting every couple of weeks since then.  Here's what things look like today:

Snow peas, fava beans and radishes
(along with salsify and potato volunteers from last year).

Fava beans, radishes, and asparagus.

Some of the books I've been using for guidance.

This coming weekend, I intend to plant more.  I'd like to succeed in growing lettuce and bok choy (also known as 白菜）.  Also, my apple and pear trees should do well this year.  This year's garden produce represents things that I won't be buying at the supermarket.  Readers can look at my urban garden as my small step toward imposing my own sanctions on some of the red state farmers who supported Trump.  I expect that my sanctions will be delicious...

P.S. Please do continue to support those farmers who are not aligned with the Trump regime, but who instead are part of the resistance.  In particular please support the farm of Aimee and Homero.  Aimee writes the blog New To Farm Life.

The Unavoidable Cost of Process

I want to open this post with a quote from something I wrote back in January 2021, when there were high hopes among historically oppressed peoples in the United States who thought that the election victory of Biden and Harris meant that we all could put days of horror and oppression permanently behind us.  The quote is as follows:

...Those who support the supremacy of the world's dominant peoples have created a world in which a select few get to Make Themselves Great by exploiting everyone else. Blessedly, these exploiters have suffered a setback as a result of the beginning of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris.  However, it would be a mistake for those who are members of historically oppressed groups in the United States to take the incoming Biden administration as a permanent state of affairs in the United States.  Nor should the incoming administration be regarded as permission for these groups to become lazy or complacent.  As the Good Book says, "Do not trust in princes, in a son of a man in whom there is no salvation."  A world free from the tyranny of the few, a world which is shared equally by all of its peoples - this world will not magically come into being by itself.  We who are among the oppressed must still organize or die.  

I have further argued that this organization must be the kind of deep organizing that produces lasting structures of power by, for, and of the historically oppressed.  Why is this kind of organizing necessary?  And why is hasty short-term mobilization of people inadequate to produce lasting change? To answer that question, I present the following quotes from Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy:

Dictatorships usually exist primarily because of the internal power distribution in the home country. The population and society are too weak to cause the dictatorship serious problems, wealth and power are concentrated in too few hands. Although dictatorships may benefit from or be somewhat weakened by international actions, their continuation is dependent primarily on internal factors. [Emphasis added.]

And, 

It should be remembered that against a dictatorship the objective of the grand strategy is not simply to bring down the dictators but to install a democratic system and make the rise of a new dictatorship impossible. To accomplish these objectives, the chosen means of

struggle will need to contribute to a change in the distribution of effective power in the society. Under the dictatorship the population and civil institutions of the society have been too weak... [Emphasis added.]

When we look at a nation such as the United States, we see how government capture by wealthy people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and by wealthy corporations such as Target, Walmart, Amazon, Tesla, News Corporation and others has led to a drastic weakening of the power that ordinary people in the United States have over their own lives.  This capture has driven the rapid increase in inequality in the U.S., and is a powerful cause of the capture of the U.S. Federal government by Donald Trump and the Republican Party.  While resistance to the present state of affairs can be expressed through economic noncooperation such as refusals to buy things from the owners of such corporations, a robust resistance movement also requires the oppressed to start building structures of collective self-reliance among themselves to replace the structures built by their oppressors.  To quote from another book, Recovering Nonviolent History, by Maciej Bartkowski,

An important element of the indirect form of resistance described in a number of chapters was the development of an autonomous society with every aspect of self-rule well before a formal independence was achieved.  Often, it took the form of society’s own schooling system, self-managed economic cooperatives, social services organizations, and judicial or quasi- governing institutions. The idea was not to take the fight directly—with the use of collective actions—to a more powerful and brutal adversary but rather to transform the society first and, through that transformation, liberate it from the control of the [oppressor]. This was a stealth resistance more than an open confrontation. Society was seen as a social organism that could grow, defy [the oppressor], and defend itself via its own self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement. [Emphasis added.  Words in brackets also added by me.]

To put it quite bluntly, those who are among the historically oppressed are going to have to start building their own collective structures for meeting their own needs.   (Hopefully I can write in more depth on this topic in future posts.) Those structures (also known as organizations) will have to start small, but we must all start somewhere.  Over the long term, moreover, these collectives must become the foundation of a society of equity and equality that can't any longer be dominated by the big, the rich, and the powerful.  This combination of economic and cultural withdrawal from the dominant systems (through such things as frugality and boycotts) along with the creation of parallel structures, collectives, and institutions that are NOT part of the dominant systems is what eventually erodes the power of unjust dominant systems and causes their collapse.  And this approach works far better than simply engaging in repeated mass protest marches.  Those who think that hasty mobilizations and mass protest marches are the only things needed for effective resistance should read the short story 拔苗助长。It's an object lesson on what happens to people who don't understand the proper process which must be followed to make something grow!  Bringing about certain processes involves a certain unavoidable cost, a certain unavoidable investment of effort and time.  In other words, ya gotta pay your dues...

The Shrinking Superbowl?

At present, the most popular televised sporting event in the United States is the Superbowl.  For those readers who do not live in the U.S., the Superbowl is the final championship event of the American football season.  American football is an interesting cultural invention, springing as it did out of the "muscular Christianity" promoted by prominent 19th-century white American and British theologians who rejected the New Testament's commandments to nonviolence.  (See also "In the Hands of God: Theology and the Benefits of American Football", Ethan Levin, Harvard University, 2022; and The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports, Paul Emory Putz, Oxford University Press, 2024).  

Because this "muscular Christianity" rejects nonviolence, American football is surprisingly violent - as seen in the large number of concussion injuries sustained in youth football such as played in Pop Warner leagues.  It should be no surprise that the rate of concussions increases as athletes grow, mature, and become stronger.  Thus high school football players face greater concussion risk than Pop Warner players, and the risk increases still further for college football players.  The grand prize for violence (and concussions) goes to the NFL, where really big guys are paid lots of money to crash into each other as hard as they can.  Typical performance statistics for one of these typical living crash test dummies are as follows (information taken from gobigrecruiting.com):

• Height: 6'5"
• Weight: 280 lbs.
• 40 yard dash time: 5.0 seconds
• Bench press: 320 lbs.
• Squat: 450 lbs.

As for the Superbowl itself, according to one source, over the last fifteen years viewership has never been less than 100 million people.  According to several sources, the 2025 Superbowl was the most watched event in television history in the United States.  However, most media sources report that the 2026 Superbowl suffered a ratings decline.  The most optimistic estimates state that the decline was no more than two percent.  However, other sources question both this statistic and the methodology by which it was derived.  These other sources estimate that the actual decline in viewership was closer to ten percent.  (See also "Samba TV Shows Second Year of Viewership Decline for Super Bowl Halftime Show as Media Touts Record Bad Bunny Viewership", in which more rigorous tracking methods produced an estimate of the actual decline at 13 percent.)

It is interesting to read of the reasons given by certain media pundits for the viewership decline.  Some commentators state that this year's game was simply not that interesting because of weak player and team performance.  Other commentators point to a weakness of the halftime show which featured some guy named "Bad Bunny."  (Who is he? Never heard of him.)  Some have gotten a bit closer to the truth of the matter in their noting that Gen Z seems increasingly disinclined to get wrapped up in sports at all.  But almost none of the usual commentators seems to have noticed that an increasing number of Americans of all ages are consciously, openly, vocally disconnecting from the mainstream American culture that has been vomited onto them by the organs of that mainstream American culture.  This includes an increasing number of people who are choosing not to celebrate the 4th of July, not to participate in Black Friday or Cyber Monday shopping orgies, and ... not to watch the Superbowl!  As for myself, I don't give two cents and a stick of chewing gum about American football or the Superbowl, and thus I haven't watched a single televised football game in a very, very long time.  American football stands in my mind as a symbol and symptom of the pathology, emptiness and uselessness of modern mainstream American culture.  Perhaps this year's ratings decline is a sign that other Americans are coming to the same conclusion.  I can't help but wonder if the decline in this year's Superbowl ratings isn't also a collective act of strategic nonviolent resistance - in withdrawing economic and cultural cooperation and patronage from the systems of our oppressors.  Perhaps it's a message to the masters of our present economy that the days of fun and games are over for them as long as they continue to support a murderous and corrupt President and his political party.  Time will tell...

-Facebook -YouTube -X -Threads -Instagram -"Fox News" -Reddit -Quora -Rednote

Over the last few years I have noticed a disturbing trend regarding breaking news or emergent events.  If I when I want to find out about such events I try to use standard commercially-available search engines such as Google or Bing (or DuckDuckGo or Ecosia, which like Bing, are owned by Microsoft) the top search results are usually links to posts on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram or Reddit or similar platforms.  Links to articles written by actual professional journalists who follow long-standing codes of journalistic ethics (including fact-checking) are becoming increasingly hard to find.  

Let me just say straight up: posts on social media platforms are not journalism.  Therefore I do not trust these when they offer "breaking news" flashes.  From the Russian aggression against Ukraine to the current mess in the Mideast, I therefore do NOT consult anything found on YouTube, Quora, Rednote, Facebook, or the like.  The fact that posts on these platforms have been displacing genuine journalism can be attributed to multiple causes, such as the corporatization and monopolization of historically independent news outlets, the diversion of advertising revenue from historically independent news outlets to the owners of massively deployed social media platforms, and the massive gaming of the system of page and website rankings on the largest search platforms.  However, one particular cause is the fact that the providers of responsible journalism have increasingly hidden their content behind paywalls.  This in turn is probably an effect of the diversion of advertising revenue from actual news outlets to the owners of social media platforms.

So I'd like to set forth my strategy for coping with this proliferation of hot air and word salad on social media served up by search engines instead of actual journalism.  Whenever I try to find out more details about an emerging story of interest, I use one of the features of advanced search that was originally deployed on Google.  If, for instance, I hear a report or rumor that a dozen giant heads of lettuce grew legs and walked through a town in the Midwest, killing dozens of people, I type in the search box of my search engine of choice something like '"giant heads of lettuce" walking' and see what search results come up.  If the first two or three pages of search results are dominated by links with titles like "Facebook: You've Got to See This! - Giant Heads of Lettuce On the Rampage!" or, "YouTube: Midwest Town Threatened By Lettuce!" then I modify my search query as follows.  I type into the search box '"giant heads of lettuce" walking -Youtube -Facebook -Reddit -Instagram -Threads -X -Quora -"Fox News" -Tiktok' and run a new search query.  The way this works is that whatever I type in quotes such as "giant heads of lettuce" returns search results that contain that quoted phrase verbatim.  On the other hand, whatever keywords have a short dash (-) in front of them are excluded from the search.  This means that any search results offered by a platform that has a dash in front of it are excluded from my search results.

This method works tolerably well for general searches, although it breaks down seriously when I try to search for pictures.  For instance, if I click on the "Images" tab of my search page and type -"baboon brushing teeth" "wikimedia commons"' in the search box, I will definitely get all kinds of images that are NOT hosted by Wikimedia Commons!  If, moreover, I try to use the dash prefix to exclude those images that are not hosted by Wikimedia Commons, they will show up anyway.  So maybe my prefix dash method is not so foolproof after all.  If search providers ruin general search in the same way that they have ruined image search, then my prefix dash method of filtering search results will break down.  But never fear - I still have other methods up my sleeve.

Two Knuckleheads Versus A Near-Peer

So once again I'm so out of touch with the rest of the world that a couple of acquaintances had to tell me today that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran before I became aware of this fact.  Why have I chosen to isolate myself to such a degree that I'm not aware of breaking news? Simply because I already know that the world is a messed-up place, and that this is due in no small part to the United States of America.  We are now reaping the chaos that results from over 45 years of behind-the-scenes machinations by white supremacists and American exceptionalists.  The combination of white supremacy and American exceptionalism has worked synergistically to produce an extremely potent social toxin.  That toxin produced Trumpism, but it certainly did not begin with Trump.  Rather, there is an entire cabal of damnably malignant men to blame, an entire coterie of rich and powerful people, an entire demographic of people whose souls are a pile of garbage.

I'll say at the outset that from my limited reading of the situation, the attack against Iran was unprovoked.  It was not an act of retaliation against any Iranian attack on Israel or the U.S.   In other words, Iran did not throw the first punch.  This shows that the regimes of both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are guilty of a criminal act.  (Regarding Israel, my last shreds of sympathy for Israel are evaporating right now.  Netanyahu seems like a singularly rigid, unimaginative, and brittle head of state in such times as these.)  The problem for both nations is that Iran is much closer to a near-peer to the U.S. than Venezuela was, and is much more populous than Israel.  Attacking Iran has probably erased any fault lines that previously existed in Iranian society, and the attack will harden anti-Israel sentiment across the entire Mideast. Israel, having managed to alienate many people by its actions in Gaza, seems bent on escalating the alienation still further.  As for Iran, it has defensive and offensive missile capabilities which pose a serious threat to U.S. military assets in the region.  It has begun to use those capabilities.  And those capabilities are about to be augmented.

It's time for the rest of the world to recognize that the United States is now itself a rogue state.  The rest of the world does indeed have the collective power to bring this rogue state to heel, but only if it presents a united or nearly united front.  As for whether bringing the U.S. to heel involves military responses, I will reserve any comment or opinion.  However, the rest of the world can definitely impose the kinds of steps of economic noncooperation (including even sanctions) that can render the U.S. powerless.  Please decouple from the U.S. - completely.

I'll also say that those members of the U.S. military who choose to obey Trump's orders are men without conscience.  They may be merely people who have chosen to indulge in what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil, or they may have chosen more enthusiastically to support the Trump/America First agenda, but either way they are people who have thereby forever lost my respect.  Right now I don't support our troops.

An additional problem for the U.S. is that this nation's malignant narcissism - expressed through the potent poison of white supremacy and American exceptionalism - may damage and erode the capability of the leaders of the U.S. to discern reality to such an extent that they will choose to launch unprovoked military attacks on nations that are even closer to near-peer status than Iran.  This could result in disastrous consequences for the world in general and for the U.S. in particular.  These consequences may last a very long time.