…sometimes…a metaphor for the times isn’t really what you need

Counselling charity Relate goes into administration [Guardian]

…let alone whole gaggles of the things

Maboula Soumahoro is a renowned French scholar and public intellectual. The holder of a PhD earned through studies both in France and at Columbia University in the US, she is an associate professor at the University of Tours, a specialist on the African diaspora, and one of France’s foremost academics when it comes to race relations.

So when the European parliament decided to invite her to an internal event last month as part of a dialogue to discuss ways to “promote equality and inclusion in the workplace”, it made perfect sense.

But the event never happened. First, the French far-right MEP Mathilde Androuët wrote to Roberta Metsola, the president of the parliament, seeking the cancellation of the event on the basis that Soumahoro had made statements with racist undertones and casting doubt on her expertise. Then the French far-right MEP, Marion Maréchal, formerly a member of the National Rally, led by her aunt, Marine Le Pen, weighed in, stepping up the pressure with a post on X that denounced Soumahoro in even more forceful terms as “an anti-White speaker”.

Maréchal’s criticisms would be laughable if they had not been so successful. In less than 24 hours the far right had, according to the French news organisation Mediapart, managed to have the event cancelled.
[…]
The accusations levelled at Soumahoro by Maréchal and her followers have been rebutted by the academic as an “unspeakable aggression”, a “violation” of her intellectual arguments and a distortion of the very meaning of racism. They have also been debunked in some detail by Mediapart: they simply do not hold up to scrutiny. Maréchal accused Soumahoro of being part of a “radical and provocative ideological fringe”, because she “promoted the concept of ‘racial burden’”, and endorsed the “conspiracy theory” of “white privilege”.

…dunno how long we gotta wait for backwards-ass shit to quit being the height of fucking fashion…but…my patience is looking pretty fucking threadbare at this juncture

Even if one wants to take issue with Soumahoro’s theories, we are in a global context in which the far right is growing in strength. It is deeply dismaying to see how easily an authoritative Black woman can be smeared and silenced by the far right of the ideological spectrum as it shifts the public discourse rightward by alleging “anti-whiteness”.

…failure to set the bar at being-white-is-an-advantage being perceived as a lived-experience equivalence to the systemic disadvantages of living-while-not-white…even for the ones who think they mean what they’re saying rather than merely being willing to spout any shite for rhetorical advantage in the peanut-brained gallery…is some broke-brain bitching from the home of the bankrupt braintrust

France is used to controversies over the visibility of Black and brown figures. Earlier this year, I wrote about the outrage that greeted the announcement that Aya Nakamura would sing at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics. And whenever a person gains a public profile by being outspoken on race, the risk of being sidelined is high. I myself have had to deal with cancellations and was forced off a government advisory body shortly after being appointed. The reason given was that I claim the existence of institutional racism in France.

France is also so attached to its so-called colour-blindness that it cannot stand the public existence of anyone who challenges the theoretical universalism of our republic.

According to Maréchal, Soumahoro is seeking to introduce into France and Europe “a virulent, conflict-driven approach to social relations”. This is an intentional attempt to rewrite history. Europe’s long colonial past is what has ingrained racism and white supremacy in the fabric of our societies. And that deliberate denial of our history allows far-right ideas to gain increasing influence within institutions.

…if this is what never forgetting looks like

Let us not forget that the National Rally was originally co-founded as the Front National by Jean-Marie Le Pen Maréchal’s grandfather, who was convicted on numerous occasions of hate speech and charged with being a Holocaust denier, alongside former Nazi collaborators.

…fuck…if there was even a little bit less stuff out there looking at unimaginably dumb shit & getting all “hold my beer…” I’d say something dumb like “that’s got to be the dumbest shit I ever heard”

The far right, stronger than ever after the June European elections, “has begun a strategic attack” on people like her, Soumahoro says. She “feels honoured” to be “identified as an enemy” of the far right.

Despite her resilience, this ugly episode proves her point. It reinforces the vital nature of her research into the functioning and impact of racism.

The emboldened European far right is waging a culture war, and targeting people who dare to call out prejudice, especially people of colour who embody the ideas and values it wants to annihilate. We cannot allow this thinking to dominate our public sphere: Europe and its shared institutions must be safe spaces for everyone.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/03/how-has-the-french-far-right-managed-to-cancel-a-black-anti-racism-scholar-for-racism

…I mean…I don’t disagree with the sentiment…but…how much of europe feels like a safe space for anyone…because most of the shittier bits of the picture look a lot like the shit history says populaces tend to revert to when in a state of existential terror…it’s after the countless dead part that you can get them to hold still long enough to found an NHS without getting mad about the people who might benefit from it that aren’t them personally…& I honestly don’t think…even as a commited fan of irony…that committing to kill more of ourselves than the planet can until it starts to feel sorry for the ones left crushed by survivors’ guilt & turns into the garden of eden like some sort of planetary palliative care institution…is what I’d call a viable plan for the salvation of humanity

…but what do I know about safe spaces?

This is Liz Truss’s safe space. America, her last refuge. A nation that regards her 49-day tenure as prime minister a badge of honour rather than a sign of failure. In the UK, no one wants to know Liz any more. The Tory party just wish she would crawl under a stone. She’s the source of much of their embarrassment. Nor could her former constituents wait to see the back of her. Her loss was Norfolk’s gain. But in the US, she still has some credibility among the far right. She still matters.

…back around when natural born killers came out & ollie stone was giving it large about how either you hadn’t seen his movie & he couldn’t care less what you thought of it…or you’d paid to see his movie & he already had your money which was all he was interested in so your opinion could go fuck itself…&…I dunno…had watched his own shit so many times over that the extent to which it was so up itself it kind of ruined the whole thing he was shooting for…a much cheaper & less successful flick called SFW ran a narrative that bordered on idiocracy level of “did the onion lot do this?”…& the public mood swung from “so fucking what…” to “everything matters…”

…&…I dunno if I’m going with why-not-both.gif or “you get how everything includes nuance, right?”

Now, you have to think carefully before writing about the Trusster these days. You don’t want to be seen to be doing anything that might possibly be seen to encourage her. She would rather be talked about than not. Even if what is said is not that flattering. Her conscious state always hovers around the flat-line. So there’s always the danger of indulging her narcissism.

…the conviction that you can protect yourself from other people being pricks about life by being a bigger prick on a pre-emptive basis…is some cognitively-challenged weak-assery…but…like liz…if you take the broad strokes to be a cookie-cutter sort of banality-of-evil deal…that’s a template you’re going be in danger of wearing out from overuse

No one has ever before crashed and burned so quickly. Nor has someone with so few obvious talents ever been so over-promoted. And that’s a crowded market place. So she has become an object of fascination. One whose story we need to see to a conclusion. Slowly fading from relevance until she’s just an unfamiliar face at the Cenotaph commemorations. So I write with caution about someone who appears to be beyond treatment. Even her shrink has given up on her.

…hyperbole…or understatement…who the fuck can even tell at this point?

But even the losers get lucky some time. Liz is a protected species in some circles. No matter what she says or does, she can do no wrong. And the Heritage Foundation is her very own echo chamber. Where various “alt-right” hardliners and deadbeats congregate to promote each other’s ideas. Where Liz can be guaranteed a hearing – if only by a few – along with the kind of fee of which most of us can only dream. There’s money in rightwing Washington circles. It’s just less certain whether anyone is paying much attention.

Truss did not seem that bothered by the poor turnout. Then she seldom does. Possibly she is used to it. She remains one of the few people who can appear totally disconnected from the speech which she is giving. Her voice is flat, her face blank. It’s all rather disconcerting. She might as well be reading out her shopping list. Not starting world war three.

“It’s Thanksgiving,” said Liz. Nearly right. That was last week. “So I would like to start by thanking America for electing President Trump. Can you imagine what US foreign policy and the rest of the world would have looked like if Tump had been in power for the last four years?” Er … As it happens, we could. A march on the Capitol to overturn democracy. Appeasement with Putin. Large parts of Ukraine handed over to Russia.

Liz saw it all very differently. For a libertarian, her prescriptions are very Orwellian. Peace through War. It was all a bit confusing. As if her synapses were only partially connecting. Maybe that’s the best we can expect. As good as it gets for Liz. Iran would never have got near to nuclear capability if we had just been tougher on somebody or other. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her that Russia, China and North Korea might have been willing to help Tehran regardless. And 7 October would never have happened if Trump had been in the White House.

…it’s just…ok…I was gonna say I can’t really put it into words…& that might be true…but…the words don’t seem to matter overmuch since the pride of place seems to go to the hurt feeling of the fuck-your-feelings crowd…so…in a spirit of compromise…I’ll try explaining it in terms of feelings…using words?

…long time ago…when there wasn’t an internet & dinosaurs walked among us…the trailers came out…you maybe saw them cut as a tv ad or as a trailer before whatever you went to the cinema to see…long time later the cinema showed the movie…people talked about it…eventually some of them got aired on the telly…& I’d be happy to speculate about movies with folks I knew when at least one of us had seen the trailer…but eventually I figured out I was doing something wrong…it didn’t matter that I didn’t say anything that I couldn’t fairly claim was right there in the trailer…or unimaginatively extrapolated from there…so I wasn’t saying anything the makers of the film didn’t think you’d be fine having in your head in advance…it wasn’t the fault of the people who cut the trailers…if they got mad about what would in the undreamed of future be referred to as spoilers…those were my fault…& it was me who should cop a lot of flack about it

…& I could try to argue it was a side-effect of studying the stuff that I did…you spend a while running through literary greatest hits & a few from the lit crit hitlist & you might not have to wait around for save the cat to put a beat to it before some…meta-conventions, let’s say…start glaring at you

…&…if I’m honest…it was probably one of the things that pissed me off from time to time when I was young enough to make a full-time gig out of being pissed off about shit without really standing out much…but…I “got it”…I just kind of resented the distinct impression that apprently the world would be better off if I could get less…or just not admit there was anything to get…because that part seemed backwards…but I didn’t ever begrudge anyone the desire to fully enjoy a thing they did for recreational purposes…hopefully that isn’t the sort of distinction that invokes too high a nuance quotient to keep a train of thought on track…but…it’s probably also important that the effect remained in effect no matter how much I tried to pre-emptively censor my responses on such topics…which probably sounds like an exaggeration for effect…but…honest-to-a-god-I’m-honestly-skeptical-about-the-existence-of honest…more than once…someone I know has let me know that I ruined a film for them we never spoke about before they saw it

…the only reason I bring it up is because I figure it’s easier to relate to that picture than its kissing cousin…which…loosely speaking…would maybe be a combo logic/rhetoric deal…& I’m not laying claim to some preternatural grasp of pedagogy with a baked in complete taxonomy of the things the way descartes tried to smuggle god beyond fundamental doubt…but…you don’t need to know the latin one to know a rose by any other name

A fallacy is a kind of error in reasoning. The list of fallacies below contains 231 names of the most common fallacies, and it provides brief explanations and examples of each of them. Fallacious reasoning should not be persuasive, but it too often is.

The vast majority of the commonly identified fallacies involve arguments, although some involve only explanations, or definitions, or questions, or other products of reasoning. Some researchers, although not most, use the term “fallacy” very broadly to indicate any false belief or cause of a false belief. The long list below includes some fallacies of these sorts if they have commonly-known names, but most are fallacies that involve kinds of errors made while arguing informally in natural language, that is, in everyday discourse.

A charge of fallacious reasoning always needs to be justified. The burden of proof is on your shoulders when you claim that someone’s reasoning is fallacious. Even if you do not explicitly give your reasons, it is your responsibility to be able to give them if challenged.

A piece of reasoning can have more than one fault and thereby commit more than one fallacy. If it is fallacious, this can be because of its form or its content or both. The formal fallacies are fallacious only because of their logical form, their structure. The Slippery Slope Fallacy is an informal fallacy that has the following form: Step 1 often leads to step 2. Step 2 often leads to step 3. Step 3 often leads to…until we reach an obviously unacceptable step, so step 1 is not acceptable. That form occurs in both good arguments and faulty arguments. The quality of an argument of this form depends crucially on the strength of the probabilities in going from one step to the next. The probabilities involve the argument’s content, not merely its logical form.

The discussion below that precedes the long alphabetical list of fallacies begins with an account of the ways in which the term “fallacy” is imprecise. Attention then turns to some of the competing and overlapping ways to classify fallacies of argumentation. Researchers in the field of fallacies disagree about which name of a fallacy is more helpful to use, whether some fallacies should be de-emphasized in favor of others, and which is the best taxonomy of the fallacies. Researchers in the field are also deeply divided about how to define the term “fallacy” itself and how to define certain fallacies. There is no agreement on whether there are necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing between fallacious and non-fallacious reasoning generally. Analogously, there is doubt in the field of ethics regarding whether researchers should pursue the goal of providing necessary and sufficient conditions for distinguishing moral actions from immoral ones.

https://iep.utm.edu/fallacy/

…but…when I get the feeling I used to when being given shit how it was my fault someone else didn’t enjoy a thing I hadn’t watched yet as much as they thought they would have if in addition to not having talked to me about it beforehand I’d been good enough not to exist at all…or have ever existed…so no trace of said existence could somehow have contrived to commit this grevious offense…it’s more often about how they figure I’ll claim something or other is bullshit than the movies, these days…the ambient spoiler level has apparently breached some sort of threshold for those…or it’s the grey hair coming through that makes people only hit me with cushions…like an homage to monty python’s inquisition

…&…I try…because it’s self-defeating to let some shit wind you up not to take it the wrong way…but…it’s frustrating…being told the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate something…that’s…RIGHT FUCKING THERE…FUCKING SCREAMING AT YOU…like…how are you not seeing that to a point where I have to explain it?

By now we were in full stream of unconsciousness. The west was dying on its feet because of the rise of neo-Marxist philosophies. Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, and Emmanuel Macron were all part of a communist conspiracy. It would be news to them. As it was to us.

Then there were the eco-extremists – AKA people concerned about the climate crisis – and the anti-colonialists. These too were all bad. It was quite deranged. Just a repeat of her pet hates that had never made any sense when she had come up with them the first time. A world that was unrecognisable to everyone apart from the delusional and the paranoid.

Finally: the solution. Israel should be allowed to do anything it liked to Iran. Bomb it. Obliterate it. Use nukes if necessary. Whatever it takes. And if Israel wasn’t up to the task, then the US should step in and do it for them. Economic sanctions. A first strike. Nothing was off-limits. We should also forget about the climate crisis. Stop being wimps and drill, baby, drill. The US. Europe. Everywhere.

This was just the start. The civil service and all bureaucracies should be eliminated. The Blob de-Blobbed. They were all secret Commies. Perhaps we should be nuking them too. This seemed more of a random swipe. Europe had become morally weak. A stain on the world. The international criminal court should be ignored. America should take over the world. It was time for a Judaeo-Christian Nato to take on the Barbarians. The age of appeasement was over. Let the hunger games begin.

…& I’m a fan of the pratchett thing about million-to-one shots coming through 9 times out of 10…but…only if they’re precise odds…that kind of thing is fun to me…but…hume had a point…you can spend all day writing learned shit about how you can’t depend on the sun rising tomorrow & no matter how many times you line ’em up & knock ’em down like physics is real logically speaking next time the billiard balls might fly off at unpredictable tangents like natural laws are merely suggestions we use for the sake of convenience…but sometimes you need to knock it off & go hang out in the pub for a bit…maybe have something tasty…& a few drinks…maybe pay for it by beating your mates at billiards becuase theory is all very well but winning on the table is about practice…&…consistency…as irony would have it…so…I don’t love feeling like I’m betting the farm on a particular sort of million-to-one-shot*

[* …maybe…we don’t have hard numbers…might even not be possible to derive those…which is fun…aren’t we having fun?]

Just a smattering of applause could be heard as Liz stopped mid-sentence. Almost as if the audience was in shock. This was too mad even for a thinktank that promoted Donald Trump. If you’re too much for the Heritage Foundation, then your time is probably just about up. We can but hope.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/dec/02/liz-truss-is-apparently-too-mad-even-for-a-rightwing-us-audience

…à propos of nothing in particular…one of the people I wasted a considerable portion of my youth with watching all manner of hong kong movies of questionable quality…was…let’s put it this way…one of their favorites was a ’70s joint called the fatal flying guillotines…the bad guy has a “style” that lets him…basically…fling things like wrought iron birdcages around on the end of seemingly infinitely long chains that defy physics to the point that he can drop them on an opponent’s head like a fisherman casting a fly to a rise…at which point the concealed blades inside the bottom rim sever your head from your body

https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-flying-guillotine-series-in-all-its-weird-glory/

…personally…I preferred the one with the bloody birds, myself…I digress…point being…the only constant is change…& their review of the raid 2 was that it was “a bit too stabby for me”…everybody’s got a line…but some of them are in funny places…suffice to say that after having agreed barely a year before that to go see a ninja movie so obscure its main draw was the star being a k-pop idol when those weren’t big in my part of the world…so…it was surreal to sit in a screening room with only half a dozen others…all girls…from enough different parts of the world that between the movie dialogue, the english subs & the multi-lingual keeping-up-to-speed of companions who couldn’t understand a word…while live action cartoon violence splattered all over the screen in full accordance with genre imperatives…I didn’t see that coming…sure…some shit is obvious

Failed attorney general pick Matt Gaetz has asked Elon Musk to buy CNN, days after the billionaire joked about purchasing MSNBC. The former U.S. representative turned Cameo star floated the idea on X, where he quoted a post showing the dramatic decline in primetime ratings post-election. “Acquisition Target, @elonmusk?” Gaetz wrote on X. Nielsen ratings data showed the network’s primetime audience fell 47% since the week prior to Election Day. President-elect Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. joked days earlier that he had the “funniest idea ever,” quoting an X post that falsely said Comcast was putting MSNBC for sale. “How much does it cost?” Musk wrote in response. As with CNN, the network has also suffered a dramatic dip in ratings, with the audience dropping off 53% since the week prior to Trump’s victory.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-squad-asks-elon-musk-to-buy-another-tv-network/

…& some you don’t see coming

Nuclear confrontation is fundamentally a form of communication — even after the first blows fall. Some in government see it as a language and revel in its complexity. This has been so ever since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 and the Soviet Union responded by testing its own device four years later. The ensuing dialogues have, with varying degrees of subtlety, involved tests, bans on tests, arms agreements, embargoes, clandestine and nonclandestine technology transfers and the occasional grand speech — a high-stakes conversation in which all sides have understood the fearsome price of miscommunication. These exchanges echo around the edges of a devil’s spiral. At the top of the spiral stand the preparations meant as deterrents. At the bottom stands all-out nuclear war.

…when jeremy corbyn was wowing the crowds at glastonbury…him ever being prime minister was the wrong side of a bright shining line that many considered to be an existential threat to the security of the globe…because he might not be able to give an answer that provides one to any question about where anti-semitism stops being an artificial cudgel to beat the left with & becomes a legitimate problem being shined on…but he was happy enough to say there were no circumstances he could imagine in which he’d be prepared to push the nuclear button…fuck a deterrent…true story…lot of scottish people who live life nearby faslane had some less-than-seperationist opinions on that…who wouldn’t necessarily be natural bedfellows for the florid daily mail & telegraph readers who birthed the term “gammon” as a thing people could be…but sung that tune in close harmony

The descent — in the language of nuclear war, an escalation — is shaped by grave uncertainties. How well do my enemies understand me, and how well do I understand them? Furthermore, how does my understanding of their understanding affect their understanding of me? These and similar questions stand like the endless images in opposing mirrors, but without diminishing in size. The threat they pose is immediate and real. It leaves us to grapple with the central truth of the nuclear age: The sole way for humanity to survive is to communicate clearly, to sustain that communication indefinitely and to understand how readily communications can be misunderstood. Crucial to handling the attendant distrust are fallback communications integral to the art of de-escalation — an art that has been neglected and is now dangerously foundering.

No one knows exactly how a war would unfold, only that the sort of “bolt from the blue” surprise attack around which all three great nuclear powers have built their deterrent structures is unlikely because of the strength of those very structures. The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield, leading to the counteruse of small nuclear weapons, leading to much of the world sliding uncontrollably into extinction.

…so…I meandered down to this point to give you time to think it over…because here’s the bit that seems like it was in the trailer that I don’t want to bear any messenger-shooting responsibility for having infected anybody’s preconceptions with

The best available model of such an event is an ultrasecret 1983 Pentagon war game called Proud Prophet. That game was a nuclear test of sorts, and it provided critical lessons that remain crucial today. It was unique in that by design it was largely unscripted, involved the highest levels of the U.S. military and its global warfighting commands and used actual communication channels, doctrines and secret war plans. One of its great strengths was that unlike any other war game involving the possibility of small-yield nuclear weapons, it ran freely and was allowed to play out to its natural conclusion: global devastation.

…so…speaking of spoilers…give you three guesses what year “war games” came out & said it in as many words about the only winning move being not to play…so…I don’t feel like abnormal levels of perspicacity are required to feel like that conclusion is…kinda inevitable…like…the clue is in the name…&/or acronym…the inevitable bit is what makes the assured thing true about the mutual destruction part…it’s stop-hitting-yourself played with atomic sticks & stones…but…that bit…is somehow a surprise?

The conclusion was a shock. The lesson drawn from it — that nuclear war cannot be controlled — had a decades-long effect on American strategy and therefore, in a world of opposing mirrors, on global strategies. It may be that someday in the future a survivor will be able to look back at our times and observe that the greatest tragedy in all of human history is that among current leaders in Russia and the United States, and perhaps other countries, the lesson was forgotten.

…so…there’s stuff you could be reading that’s more fun…like…someone crunched the data & figured out the specific date of the events alluded to in ice cube’s “it was a good day”…which if nothing else proves someone had one of those in living memory…but…if you’re game

Bracken did not buy into the winnable-war part. He was agnostic. But he believed, then as now, in the need to think clearly about such matters, and for a few years he became Kahn’s protégé. Over a decade working at Hudson, Bracken earned a Ph.D. from Yale in operations research, wrote a dissertation titled “The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces” that was subsequently published as a book and topped things off by accepting a teaching position at Yale. He was 35 and richly equipped with security clearances. It was 1983.

…so…just nine years before the “known good” day…big year ’83

That March, President Ronald Reagan gave a speech in which he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire.” To Moscow, such rhetoric seemed recklessly provocative. Two weeks later, Reagan doubled down by proposing to abandon the pact of mutually assured destruction upon which the peace had long relied. In its place, the United States would develop a hyperexpensive, multilayered shield against ballistic missiles. He called it the Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.). The press called it Star Wars. It remains far from possible even today, despite Donald Trump’s recent vow to expand on Israel’s modest and ultimately inadequate missile-defense system and build a comprehensive “Iron Dome” over the United States.

Reagan at least was not a huckster. He may have been naïve, but he was also sincere, and an avowed visionary. In the speech that introduced the concepts that would lead to Star Wars, he asked, “What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Then he called on the scientific community, “those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”

…that’s still a couple decades after philip k dick’s the zap gun came out as a book…some three years after the serialised version came out under the title “project ploughshare” in…hand to god…worlds of tomorrow magazine

…I don’t want to spoil a good book…but dr stangelove might have less inherent disdain for the concept of an arms race…sue me if that’s a spoiler to a work from the 60s that apparently nobody who can win an election will ever read…because the universe is mad…with me, apparently…even if it seems like I didn’t start no shit…so trust me when I say your additional weight on my back is likely to go unnoticed…& I strongly advise you to consider how big that makes your big man gambit…either in the grand scheme of things…or the list of shit I’m literally capable of noticing is even part of the stuff on my plate…& save us all the embarassment, eh?

The nuclear weapons he seemed most immediately interested in rendering obsolete belonged to the Soviet Union. Certainly the Soviets thought so. Four days after Reagan introduced the initiative, the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, condemned it. Andropov said, “In fact, the strategic offensive forces of the United States will continue to be developed and upgraded at full tilt and along a quite definite line” — to acquire a first-strike nuclear capability that rendered the Soviet Union “incapable of dealing a retaliatory strike.” In short, missile defenses would be “a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat.”

Our dear Andropov. He worried too much. Reagan’s missile shield was not to be. Soviet leaders came to understand this and abandoned thoughts they may have had of overwhelming it physically. But the misunderstandings remained profound on both sides. Moscow suspected that Washington was preparing for a first strike, Washington suspected the same of Moscow and each, we now know, was wrong.

…& when I say I’m just…sick of the part where everyone agrees the lesson is not to learn

The nuclear weapons he seemed most immediately interested in rendering obsolete belonged to the Soviet Union. Certainly the Soviets thought so. Four days after Reagan introduced the initiative, the Soviet leader, Yuri Andropov, condemned it. Andropov said, “In fact, the strategic offensive forces of the United States will continue to be developed and upgraded at full tilt and along a quite definite line” — to acquire a first-strike nuclear capability that rendered the Soviet Union “incapable of dealing a retaliatory strike.” In short, missile defenses would be “a bid to disarm the Soviet Union in the face of the U.S. nuclear threat.”

Our dear Andropov. He worried too much. Reagan’s missile shield was not to be. Soviet leaders came to understand this and abandoned thoughts they may have had of overwhelming it physically. But the misunderstandings remained profound on both sides. Moscow suspected that Washington was preparing for a first strike, Washington suspected the same of Moscow and each, we now know, was wrong.

…you can miss me with that shoot first & ask questions never…because those are somewhere beyond your reach along with any of the answers you ought to be on the hook for…bullshit

If the antagonists agreed on one thing, it was the advantage of shooting first, and perhaps — to avoid that regrettable step — the need to brandish survivable retaliatory arsenals. Despite those shared realizations, though, there was now one important difference. The Soviets had come to believe that their nuclear arsenal, though central to the country’s survival, was useful exclusively as a political tool. The Americans, by contrast, had been waffling over a wealth of choices. Bracken notes a few of them: attack pre-emptively to decapitate the enemy; launch on warning; launch under attack with enemy warheads exploding; escalate “horizontally” by shifting a war in Europe to Asia; create a two-front war by getting China to attack the Soviet Union; pre-position weapons in space; invade Eastern Europe with NATO armies; or of course, the new plan, to coolly execute a nuclear escalation with the goal of controlling and winning a limited nuclear war.

The war game that Weinberger proposed was something new — an ambitious setup meant primarily to educate him and the most senior decision makers in the United States. Based in offices at Fort McNair in Washington, it was to be played round the clock for two weeks, continue longer if necessary, stretch globally through classified communication channels to major American commands, involve hundreds of active-duty officers and civilian officials and use the actual ultrasecret war plans and vulnerability assessments to examine competing strategies in as realistic a manner as possible. Unknown to nearly all of the participants, Weinberger himself would be included, playing his authentic role as the leader of what would be called the blue team — though behind a stand-in who would obscure Weinberger’s presence by pretending to confer with lower-ranking advisers before reacting to events. Likewise, Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, would secretly join the exercise behind another stand-in.

The blue team would of course confront a Soviet red team, made up primarily of Pentagon officials, along with experts from the C.I.A. and the academic community. The third key player was a control team. The players would make their moves via connected computer terminals, paper communiqués or in-person meetings. The setup would allow the red team to see everything the red team did, and the blue team to see everything the blue team did. Only the control team would be able to see what both sides did. For instance, if the red team launched a strike, it would be up to the control team to take that in, make a damage assessment and communicate the assessment to both sides. Then play would proceed.

Paul Bracken was brought in to serve as a chronicler, with full access to wander the game and write down his observations. The designers could not have picked a better person for the job. Bracken saw the setup as genius, much as he saw its chief architect, the great Thomas Schelling himself. Speaking to me about Schelling, he said: “Tom always said that for generating situations you don’t anticipate, gaming is the best method. Why? Because somebody else is playing the enemy, and you’re not having to think up, ‘Here’s what the enemy might do.’ The problem is you can never surprise yourself.”

…we can’t?

…uh…but…a while ago this was all they-came-to-an-obvious-conclusion-based-on-people-being-reliably-people…& that came as a shock…so…those must be different from surprises, I guess

The hesitation suggested that restraint might prevail and led Karber at the time to posit that within the game the short-range exchanges might not automatically force an escalation to full-scale nuclear war. But the hesitation did not last. “What happens,” Karber said, “is that people start using longer-range systems. And once you go longer range against airfields — Katie, bar the door.”

As Proud Prophet ground on through the days and nights at Fort McNair, and the nuclear artillery duels stretched farther up and down the German front line, both sides started using missiles and jets to drop nuclear devices of greater destructive power onto the enemy’s rear. The devices were “theater” warheads, not yet the big boys, though many packed about three times the destructive punch of the Hiroshima bomb. Airports, harbors, depots, supply routes, command bases and communication infrastructure. These were fair game.

…what isn’t…when all is said & done?

Bracken, for his part, was armed only with the authority to move through the game’s firewalls, and the chance this had afforded him at any given moment to observe the thinking on the opposing sides. There were intervals when each side thought simultaneously that it was winning, and times when each side thought simultaneously that it was losing, and only Bracken and the control team knew it at the time.

…zen enough, yet?

Even then, all of the strikes were meant to be exclusively against military installations, or “counterforce” targets, as the jargon goes. However, the definition of “counterforce” was under pressure now to include the annihilation of the other kind of targets, called “countervalue,” which more commonly are known as cities. Karber said that by Day 7 no one was focusing much on the distinction anymore. The game was nearing the end. With Bracken looking on, the players at Fort McNair had bought in and grown genuinely angry. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Brussels were already gone. Every major German city was gone. Every major Polish city. And many others. Beyond the strikes shown on the map above, Sweden had been hit, as had Belarus, the Baltics, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and American appendages including Hawaii and Alaska.

Care had been taken to spare continental United States and European Russia, but casualties had already exceeded those of World War II, and this was when the fighting still remained mostly “tactical.” Surrender was out of the question for either side. NATO’s use of nuclear weapons had adhered to NATO doctrine, proceeding through the first two required stages, formally listed as Direct Defense and Deliberate Escalation. It had now met the requirements for the third and final stage, a full-on spasm attack that is known as a General Nuclear Response and officially defined as “massive nuclear strikes against the total nuclear threat, other military targets and urban-industrial targets as required.” In other words, the end of history.

Proud Prophet finished when no one remained to fight over nothing. Communication had utterly failed. The final use of the hotline was a message sent by Weinberger. Addressed to Moscow, it read, “May you burn in hell like you are going to burn here.”

…upwards of a dozen years after that stanford prison experiment this is a massive surprise to the people on whose shoulders matters of that sort of pith & moment rest…neat

Bracken tries not to overstate the importance of Proud Prophet. This may be why he maintains that despite its name, the game was not meant to be prophetic. But anyway, Ronald Reagan mellowed. Tensions eased. Nuclear war did not break out. Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, and by mutual agreement the United States and the Soviet Union began steep reductions of their nuclear arsenals, from historic highs of about 70,000 warheads combined down ultimately to the current level of about 5,500 each for the United States and Russia. These remaining 11,000 warheads (topped by an additional 1,500 warheads belonging to seven other countries) still yield the possibility of mass extinction and are currently being improved at the start of what has become a new arms race. But at the time, the Cold War had ended, overnight, and the United States had won as if by divine intervention. Americans then looked away and coasted. Various wars came, some to stay, but none were even potentially nuclear. NATO spread eastward like a hungry blob absorbing one country after the next right up to the Russian border. The Russians were in no condition to resist. In America, the apparatus of nuclear war remained in place, but the subject came to occupy the sleepiest corners of the military complex. Paul Bracken lamented the change. He told me that after the Cold War, the smart money lay elsewhere.

…some implicit biases…maybe aren’t such a bad thing…maybe it would even be a good thing if they were so implicit not a soul would ever run into a reason to consider them…much less doubt

The Chinese are tight-lipped about the program, so their reasoning is not entirely clear to outsiders, but it seems likely that they had grown concerned about what amounted to revolutionary advances in the American arsenal: drastic improvements in remote sensing and real-time intelligence gathering; drastic improvements in targeting accuracy; the accompanying reduction of required explosive yields; the subsequent reductions in radioactive fallout; the integration of conventional “smart” weapons, stealth, cyberwarfare and advanced technologies of many sorts into offensive strategic capabilities both in space and on the ground. From China’s perspective, mutual destruction was far from assured.

In other words, 30 years after the catastrophic end to Proud Prophet, the specter of “limited nuclear war” had returned. The worry now for China was that the United States seemed to be on the cusp of gaining such superiority that it could succeed with a sudden disarming attack that would destroy China’s meager arsenal without worry that China could shoot back. Speaking of America’s new capabilities as if addressing not just China but all of our nuclear-armed opponents, Bracken said to me: “Please don’t assume this is a plan to kill you. We are in the midst of a crazy revolution.” But an ominous one too. The writer and former Rand analyst Benjamin Schwarz made the parallel point to me that whether the American pursuit of nuclear dominance was intentional or the unplanned effect of a bureaucracy’s just doing its thing, dominance is the opposite of deterrence, and the outcome has been destabilizing. It hardly matters that the United States has no intention of striking first. What matters between nuclear powers, Schwarz said, is what the other guy thinks.

Then there is the MAGA factor. The Obama and Biden administrations were creatures of convention, and plenty dangerous as such, but they were therefore steady as well. The problem with Donald Trump, at least in terms of preventing nuclear Armageddon, is not that he is a warmonger, but that he is supremely unsteady.

Ronald Reagan famously said, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Trump’s own views on the matter have long been subject to interpretation, or misinterpretation. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book “Peril,” China was becoming increasingly concerned about the prospect of a secret U.S. strike in the run-up to the 2020 election. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, called his Chinese counterpart to assure him that no such plans were in effect. But during the waning days of the Trump administration, after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Milley had to call his Chinese counterpart again, this time to assure him that despite Trump’s apparent instability, the United States itself remained stable. Nancy Pelosi, then the speaker of the House and second in line to the presidency, called Milley with her own questions: What precautions were available to prevent an unstable president from initiating hostilities or accessing nuclear launch codes? Milley convened a meeting and advised officers in the nuclear chain to inform him immediately of any orders to launch nuclear weapons.

…& for my money the “feature” that he’s a more convincing maybe-mad-enough-to-do-it man than nixon…looks buggy as hell if you compile it through a russian transcoding

The danger, as Blair knew, is that many of those armchair strategists occupy offices in the Pentagon. Blair was an idealist, an abolitionist and one of the founders of Global Zero. He was also a missileer who knew the score. He understood that the first order of business has to be the avoidance of nuclear war, an imperative that — cruel irony — requires a credible threat of nuclear retaliation. Nuclear retaliation is not quite the same as nuclear warfighting, but it deploys all the same tools. The dilemma is inherent. A related problem is that deterring a nuclear war requires orderly preparations for the fight, and the fight when it comes is never orderly.

Paul Bracken explained the manner in which preparations for nuclear deterrence and war are crafted in Washington. He described the process as a ritual. First, he said, you draw up plans specifying the delivery systems — for instance, the ever-popular triad of bombers, submarines and silo-based heavy missiles. You add a mix of warheads and the communication channels that allow the weapons to be used. You also establish a formal chain of command and a scheme for the continuity of government.

…nobody could have seen it coming that it sounds pretty much exactly like the way that works in the zap gun…nobody…probably not even the ol’ horselover hisself

…reading VALIS is actually another good example of things that make me feel the way I do when I read the news of a morning…wouldn’t necessarily recommend that one…pretty much all his others are less sad to contemplate…even the stuff he was off his face further than spider jerusalem for…if those monkeys with their typewriters took that much speed all that shakespeare wouldn’t need an infinite timepsan to show up in

Then comes the operational stage. This is where you try to practice what you preach, testing the hardware that you have acquired and rehearsing the procedures that you have put in place. You get fluent with executions — for instance, missile launch procedures, or coordinated force deployments large and small, or the emergency evacuation of a surrogate cabinet. Privately, you may harbor doubts, but you do not write them up. Unstressed, the machinery seems impressive.

Then comes reality. Unexpected things happen, and lessons are learned from them but the conclusions are not necessarily discussed. People speak frankly around the hallway water cooler, but if they are ambitious, they do not pass their opinions up the chain. Why risk sounding naïve when you can assume that your superiors already know? Take command and control, the theoretically resilient communications network at the heart of the entire nuclear construct. Bracken points out that with the country under attack during the relative pinprick events of Sept. 11, 2001, the system failed and left the commander in chief, George W. Bush, to wander the skies aboard Air Force One, cut off from communication with Washington, unable even to make phone calls and dependent on intermittent reception of local television stations for the news. Bracken characterized the national security response to the attacks as “mashed potatoes.”

Communications are said to be better now, but Bracken seems quietly unconvinced. Such skepticism is widespread but generally hidden. There is a sense that it would be perilous to express doubts about even the most obvious of our nuclear weaknesses. Take, for example, our insistence on the right of nuclear first use to defend our allies. This is supposed to be the glue that holds the world together, part of “extended” deterrence — our proffered nuclear umbrella. But does anyone truly believe that the United States would follow through? In 1961, John F. Kennedy went to France to discuss, among other matters, Charles de Gaulle’s decision to build an independent nuclear arsenal. America was asking why the nuclear deterrence that it generously offered was seen to be insufficient. De Gaulle answered with a related question: Was America really willing to trade New York for Paris?

More important, did the Soviet really believe that to be true?

“That is the problem with extended deterrence,” Christopher Layne, a professor of international affairs at Texas A&M University, told me. “You have to assure your allies that you will do something incredibly irrational and risk committing national suicide. And you have to deter your adversaries by making them believe that you’re willing to take these risks to protect not your homeland but someone else’s homeland. Or in the case of Japan, some worthless rock piles in the southeast part of the East China Sea. I mean, we say we will defend the Senkaku Islands, but will we? Will we defend Taiwan? At the risk of our cities? Nobody really knows.”

Bracken flagged what he called the “transcendental madness” of the whole enterprise. He said: “Sometimes the only way to deal with it is with humor. ‘Dr. Strangelove’ started out as a serious movie about nuclear war, and Kubrick just couldn’t do it. So he turned it into a dark comedy.” But Bracken is not laughing. He believes that the nuclear modernization currently underway is necessary but misguided. He said, for instance: “Building a harder command-and-control system using blockchain so we can get the ‘go’ code to the missile forces is an improvement on one of the most fantastically unlikely scenarios that anyone can dream up. I’m at least looking at real-world threats and dangerous pathways to nuclear war. I don’t think a bolt from the blue is one of those. So I’m looking at the right problems, with inadequate skills perhaps, but the Pentagon is applying high levels of skills to the wrong problem.”

History shows that deterrence often fails and that countries can maneuver themselves into corners where they have no choice but to enter into wars they cannot win, wars of assured self-destruction. Now we are entering an era where nuclear arms control is an open question, nonproliferation has failed, conventional conflicts are spreading, overwrought nationalism is on the rise, the use of small nuclear weapons again seems possible, deterrence is weakening and fools dream of managing nuclear escalation in the midst of battle. Nuclear war in some form seems to be coming to the neighborhood. There is little sign that changes are being pursued to lower the risk. There is no reason to panic, but Katie, bar the door.

The Secret Pentagon War Game That ​Offers a Stark​ Warning for Our Times [NYT]

…anyway…about all the joe shouldn’t oughta’ve provided the pretext by trying to protect his kid taeks?

…stop making out you don’t get it & there’s no fucking nuance…if you insist on telling me that there’s no difference to be discerned between a non-purity-test-compliant deal where you say you won’t for long enough to not waste your time the way they’d try to crowing about it for the duration but ultimately you were always going to tell the bullies to lay off the kid…& claiming in a coourt of law that you can’t prosecute my kid because he doesn’t qualify as possessing enough intelligence to be accused of anything he says or does being on purpose, let alone done in the understanding of what he was doing

…because when you do that…it makes it real fucking hard for me to not assume anything & everything else you might claim to have the knowing of might be similarly fatuous & just start a mime routine about how I can’t see or hear you powered solely by the logical conclusions of the instinct for self-preservation

…so…I was gonna say some other shit & be done in time not to be late with the tunes instead of ending up here past due & short the nice sounds

…but…I refer you to the title

…so…I dunno…not going to tell you what movie to watch…but…if the people who at least get how all that shit works when it’s a movie believed for a hot minute that the reasons is does might mean people could understand that shit & apply it to making life suck less…we wouldn’t fucking be in this mess

…so…just be glad I didn’t close on the block-quote about how many tugs of what people would have to give about the truth for this to not be happening right now

…&…if I can’t get a mulligan on my whole day…hopefully a playlist at least will bob to the surface at some point?

…I’ll…get to that…I hope…but…currently stuck at the first fence trying to get past a couple of treats from watsky & sage francis…the former being the bit that goes

The future might defeat me, the internet can eat me · It really tastes like chicken when I bite the hand that feeds me.

…& the latter…mostly

if it hurts me more than it hurts you
then I won’t hurt you

I got more sense than virtue

…so…while I figure it out…here’s one each out of that pair of hole cards?

…might regret it & try to do better at beating through the rap reaction into something easier to whistle while you work…but with the fist two I’m already two past the chamber count the wu settled on as just right…so…here’s that trip dozen…or…some of it some people might call trap, I guess

…&…the count counts when things are standing up & being counted…with appropriate fervor

…I dunno…I expect if we try at least one of us could find a lesson in there somewhere

…seriously, though…it was like that before I got here