Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased an average of $70 million every day of 2026, meaning that he could have offset The Post’s losses with what he’s made since Monday.
…I dunno…I could do a whole several-of-these just with different riffs on how & why in a genuine wealth of ways…that whole thing is offensive…& civic vandalism…&…I might not be able to not do some of that…but…would that feel like missing the point if it meant I never got around to the one about the two biggest hordes of nuclear weapons no longer being attached to formal agreements even nominally binding on those in a more-than-unilateral sense…because both the men who wouldn’t be sad if america went away in all the ways that mean anything were content to let the one we last got those parties to agree on back before at least one of them got their whole clowncar fired up for the purpose…timed out while it suited the people it ought to mean self-selected as being unfit to be in a position to let that happen…so
The last major treaty limiting nuclear weapons expires in two days—and Trump’s unwillingness to cede American power may escalate the already dangerous game of nuclear chicken, @radiofreetom.bsky.social writes.
…the markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent…&…the world can be all the way fucking insane even if it feels like the thing making it look like that’s you might be that you feel like the odd one out because you haven’t lost your tiny little mind?
The last nuclear arms treaty between the US and Russia expires tomorrow. For the first time since 1969, there will be no constraints.It's worth remembering that when Trump ended the Iran nuclear deal in his first term, he said there would be a "better deal." It never happened.
…look…not trying to teach an old dog a new trick…but…the point of “cheer up, love – it might never happen”…is for the “it” to be one you’d be *happy* to have never happen…not the sort of it that if it never happens it makes the thing that needs to never happen maybe not as hard to not-never-happen…&…that…should not be beyond the reasoning capacities of anyone who has a say in what happens with things that can be as bad for as many people as those things can be…because…that would be a thing you would need to be all the way insane to do that way on purpose…or to have selected people given responsibility for it who couldn’t do it if they tried their very hardest…it just…dress it up however you want to explain it…but that is as insane as anything seems like it could even potentially be
>North Korea having troops on the ground>>American tech companies shirking sanctions left and right>>>China providing a bunch of money to kill Ukrainians “But have you considered escalation?”
…sure…not understanding the matrix in the movie sense is sort of foundational to the ability to be part of the principle driving force behind all this so maybe it makes a given value of sense they failed to notice this part…but…there was clearly no plan for the matrix to be more than a singular film when they made it…so your protagonist mastering complete control at the level of “it’s like green lantern rules but don’t mention that because we trying to look cool right now”…so…the reality & the rules that define it are all extensions of his will to either let them run as they are or be different in so far as required for the expression of his thought & will in the manner of an omnipotent deity…&…if you’re there…you nerfed the game & there’s no stakes & you can’t wring another whole movie out of it that isn’t nothing but navel gazing…unless you pretend like you didn’t really & run like you hadn’t & just make out that you always meant to make this all about how much sense you’d made of the stuff that wasn’t intended to make sense because it was allegorical at best in how it operated in the bottled-lightning thing the one film was doing that can’t be computed with the people who think they know better what they made than the ones that set out to make it & just assume that everyone comes to it wanting to let it get away with pretending there was supposed to be intended to be a way to bolt the thing you want onto the thing you liked before by being more of the same
that stage of society when school children share the bond of having endured the camps together
…it works…when the audience paid to let it to…which has seemingly nothing to do with whether or not it works on its own terms based on the terms it set by being itself the first time…but…if your only metric is how many dollars in the black you are
We are deciding right now whether we want to be a country with ethnic cleansing and concentration camps.
…if it seems to be missing the point…maybe the point is there’s more points to be taken than you’re taking from it
Here’s the worst part about my name being in the Epstein Files: He didn’t even email his friend MY article. He emailed an aggregation of my article with my name in it. It's one thing to be the world's most evil pedophile, but at least read primary source materials when doing non-pedophile stuff.
…these people are who you know them to be…you…only think you didn’t know they were this bad before because you can’t bear to think about how you think anyone goes about ranking how bad bad is if you only compare it with the worst things you can think of that are so outlandishly bad that you can’t even bear to think about directly or you’ll need sedating & maybe you’ll never sound sane again…letting you is sort of in some senses the entire point of the existence of & development the way it did that of…society…so we all get to have a tenable comfort zone in which the sheer existential overload of trying to understand enough about the world for being in it not to kill you today is broadly a viable proposition that we think we can see when we get up in the mornings…because otherwise what’s the fucking point…that’s why it’s comforting to believe in conspiracy theories that make it all seem like if you just had about a clan of ninja you could cure what ails us in about a week
He cannot be clearer. There is no difference to him between bombing random fishermen on boats and shooting Americans protesters in the face
OMG. He literally went with "they were no angels" which is the mocking phrase people use to point out how authorities try to minimize their law enforcement executions. And he's using it earnestly because he doesn't realize how it's actually used.
…why would we need tapes…how can anyone not see what you are every time they look at you…or feel it so deep it hurts your fucking heart every time you fucking vomit forth the shit that emanates from the fetid sphincter in the front of the arse wedged in the collar of the suit that looks that shit but might still fit better than you fit in the place you squat when you aren’t slouching towards bethlehem like armageddon is your fucking huckleberry you supposedly human barely-sentient dingleberry of a dyspeptic dimestore desperate despot…dipshit
Sacking The Washington Post probably has Bezos high-fiving his yachted authoritarian friends, all thinking they’re noble Centurions putting a knife into some loudmouth Senator under cover of darkness and saving Rome in the process.
They fail to appreciate that they actually wrecked an aqueduct.
Their collective misunderstanding of the sources of American power – and how their largesse is all downstream from it – is authentically stunning.
They believe they did it on their own, that their fortune isn’t a freak effect of the tax code, the courts, the Navy, rivers, & land grant universities.
The central conceit of the “Let’s Build!” / “Defense Tech” crowd is identical;
that excellence is right around the corner, you just need to;
“cut the red tape”,
eliminate Wokeness,
cut DEI programming,
or heal some other imagined culture war injury & the US will stand like it’s 1954 again.
one thing i am confused about defense tech as someone who works in hardware(ish) is that the palantir cto went on odd lots and complained about the DIB but like…..they don't make anything physical! meanwhile lidar is getting dominated by the chinese!
The Palantir CTO is not someone who will be part of the solution. He should keep his head down and his mouth shut.
…bold to assume he “should keep his head”…but…I’ll spot the forces of civilization the possibility lopping those off should be towards the bottom of the list of options under consideration for reasons that have nothing to do with how much that sort of thing might be begged for by these sorts of beggars denying anyone but them is even eligible to be a chooser while they bugger who or whatever they’re of a mind to as their fancies take them…for now, anyway…even if it has been looking like that might be our mistake in the end?
In case anyone thinks OP is exaggerating the point
if the whole genocide thing wasn't enough for you, another good reason to get AIPAC money out of democratic politics is that the organization now exists to move republican donor money into democratic races to sow chaos and get the most republican-friendly democrat elected
Punchbowl has AOC quoted saying the same thing that I’ve been saying for the past few weeks re: AIPAC spending against pro-Israel Tom Malinowski.
“It’s quite shocking how moderate of a stance that they are mobilizing against. We’re not even talking about them targeting the left,” Ocasio-Cortez said
…if all these assholes was just one big asshole in the fashion of goliath…don’t tell me you wouldn’t be looking at david to aim that slingshot for a nutshot to put the head down where you could knock holes in it with itty bitty bits of something as hard or harder delivered at the greatest velocity someone with really good technique could impart
that tweet about how vance has 4chan politics with tumblr cadence – "pretty problematic of you to want to tax the rich when there's literally a (checks notes) white genocide going on right now"
Heads are going to explode 💥 Cato Institute just nuked the lie. Immigrants have cut U.S. deficits by $14.5 TRILLION since 1994, slashing the national debt by a third.All that “immigrants are bleeding us dry” noise? Absolute bullshit.1/3
Normal people are out there doing extraordinary things. My mom's health aide emailed me: ICE took 2 of her neighbors; when she told them they weren't welcome, she was met w/a rifle. Now she's driving a neighbor to work hidden in the back of her car & escorting the neighbor's kids to the bus stop.
My story on Elon Musk cutting safeguards at xAI is on the front page of today's @washingtonpost.com. I’m also among 100’s of reporters laid off. I absolutely loved my job my brilliant coworkers & the thrill of reporting @ the center of forces upending the world: AI & Silicon Valley’s political power
I can't speak to whether it is actually bortac and whether it is actually mortar launchers but I mentioned in my piece yesterday that I had witnessed tear gas being launched in the air in an arc over people's heads. This video I found on IG shows what I described
I'm not sure what to make of it, but every Somali I represent in immigration court currently (8 of them) have today had their hearings cancelled and their judges reassigned. They're now all assigned to a video judge from Louisiana and scheduled for court hearing in one month. 🧵
Always remember THEY DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH GUYS. In the realm of Online, they can just say things and have them treated as true. In the realm of Real Life, there are 115,000 polling places in America and DHS has like 15,000 dudes total.
It’s really important for people to internalize that, in the eyes of Washington DC’s foreign policy establishment, the biggest sin of the Obama presidency was concluding a deal with Iran that objectively satisfied the demands that Washington DC pretends to believe in.
Obama secured a deal over the objections of the entire Republican Party and a significant part of his own Democratic Party, including the objections of the man who is currently Senate Minority Leader, and then it was immediately torn up. But again: the deal did exactly what they claim they want.
I say pretend and claim because the last 10yrs since then should clarify that this was never what any of them wanted. They want the IRI gone. Obama undermined this by understanding that it wasn’t really in the interests of the US to repeat Iraq. A lot of these people want to try Iraq again.
If you don’t see that I don’t really know what to say tbh.
Plenty of criticisms of Obama which are completely legitimate but the last few years have really elucidated just how batshit a lot of US policy can really get.#
And this is almost as much an indictment of Dem foreign policy thinking as it is Republican. It is true that Obama managed to break convention and convince a lot of liberals too but so many both in Congress and in affiliated think tanks still have not learned anything from this episode. It’s absurd.
I mean the takeaway on this and Afghanistan is that there’s no benefit to being a dove tho
…world peace is just dumb, y’all…only uncool people want world peace…smart people see a bigger picture…see…that’s the picture they see when it’s the biggest their tiny mind can contain…but…that’s a tiny mind possessed by a tiny sliver of the thing that contains it that one of those probably ought not to be arrogant enough to imagine they can fit a complete conception of inside themselves like that even if they really do contain multitudes…either way…don’t know about you…but even if every second counts what those count for looks different on the timescale of geological time where mountains rise & seas fall…&…maybe rise again if you give it a bit if your biggest bigger picture fails to leave room for the possibility that peace being better than war is the kind of true that remains true even if its true you can’t avoid being at war…then…that people listen to you…much less enough of them that you &/or they could in fact go to war…is arguably the point at which we’re all fucking up
…the thing that makes the epstein stuff the same stuff as the grooming gangs stuff as the what happens to ladies that aren’t old ladies when your 1%-ers get high on their own supply…anytime anyone doesn’t tell about the horrible thing because of the more horrible thing that they were convinced would happen to them if they did & not the thing that ought to happen to the horror that did the thing…we…fucking know that’s all the same thing…& we pretend like that’s the thing that makes the epstein stuff this singularly enraging thing…while everyone knows that cart is the fucking horse & it isn’t the rarity of it that incenses people…they’re just used to it getting packaged that way…the thing that sets it apart is that it sets *itself* as of a piece with every other instance but the people doing it could not be less entitled to the reality of the facade they employed for protection of their mutual exercise of depravity with impunity as a signifier of their untouchable status as a god among men in a man’s world…in all the ways that every fucking story we ever fucking told ourselves was going to show us how to see so we could…just fucking not…FFS…but no…it’s stupid & dumb & naive to expect people not to be their worst selves & if you’re out there trying to be anything else that makes you a rube…I am very smart & this is my recipe for a world I’m telling you I think would be better & you agree so we must both be right lets go fuck shit up isn’t this great I’m having a great time
"this exists"no it doesn't"it won't work"bye"here's why that's a bad idea"also byei've run my own thing for almost four years and there's a lot i don't know but i've learned some shit. i think a bundle subscription would be a net positive for independent journalism.
Been working on a piece for a while (and he just…tweeted it out) about this as the far-right version of the Cultural Revolution. They have no constructive goal, just a drive to make every “intellectual” suffer. If they could send everyone with a BA to Qinghai (Montana) to dig ditches, they would.
I think it's best for everyone to understand that the unified class project of billionaires right now is to do to white collar workers what globalization and neoliberalism did to blue collar workers.
This is why it’s very important, believe it or not, to keep doing things that make you happy. Their goal is to immiserate you, me, and everyone remotely like us, and if you retain some joy in your life amid all this misery they’re failing.
…it is not “oh, ignore the elitist signifier of stolen intellectual valor” stuff to say the stupid hurts…fuck…I don’t even mean hurts me as much as that would be all the different sorts of ways it hurts all sorts of people in all sorts of stupidly real ways you don’t get to not feel when you’re on the raw end of…refracted through a functioning suite of cognitive faculties with the empathy expansion pack & a couple or three DLCs with some maps in of levels not currently being played…it’s not about who’s smart…or being smart…it’s about the stuff that’s there whether any of us is even a tiny bit not dumb or we’re all inveterate morons…just like fucking mathematics whether or not your idea of numeracy makes zero a functioning piece of deploy-able mechanical moment in the mechanism so you can actually boot the environment & load some shit that will operate you some functions…the point is if just that can come through the noise with a signal so strong it fucking overloads the apparatus….that’s pretty fucking stupid
A first step, sure. But there’s usually only 150 in the entire state. This drawdown means there will still be around 2,300 (15x the normal amount) unaccountable federal agents roaming our streets.
This and also … he could afford to enrage Trump, have Trump weaponize the government against all of his businesses, etc. — and he'd still have so much more money than he could ever spend in 10 lifetimes.
If you want to FINALLY watch Scott Bessent get pinned down on specifics about the illegal money laundering operation being conducted by the Trump admin from someone who knows WTF he’s talking about, this clip is your chance. Bessent gets destroyed.
Our founders, though deeply flawed, understood that democracy requires an informed citizenry and a government accountable to it people. That’s why the press is the only profession protected by the Constitution. It’s also why autocrats and oligarchs seek to control and destroy it.
Read this whole astonishing document. it should be taught as an object lesson in what volunteering to assist a fascist government does to your mind, body, and soul.
Kid Rock Halftime ShowYou made your eldest's birthday your unlock code so you'd remember it (you forget your anniversary and birthdays of your other children). You've invested in three "own the libs" distilleries. When "New Slang" came on the radio you almost crashed the car fighting back tears.
Westboro Baptist Church tried to make an Anti-Luigi Mangione poster but it just looks like Luigi is threatening billionaires and goes unironically hard af
Guys they are really, really not winning It sucks what they’re doing to our country, and my city especiallyGod only knows how much damage they’ll do before they’re stopped, much of it irreversible But they are very much not winning
ICE at the polls! Bannon is basically yelling “fire” in a crowded theater here. His objective is to cause chaos (and suppress votes on the left). And it’s already working.This threat works on multiple levels and doesn’t have to be “real” to serve its purpose. Let me explain & offer some advice.
NEW: since last year, a pair of "highly trained" feds have been involved in an array of incidents attacking crowds with chemical weapons. We used public records and open source analysis to identify Edgar Vazquez and Michael Sveum, alongside some other members of their tactical team. Read more:
The people with the most power in our society appear to be nothing more than a pack of rabid chimpanzees singularly focused on destroying the works of people immeasurably better than they are.
Just had to detach a quote exhorting people to support principled journalism by subscribing to the newspaper that laid me off during my paternity leave because somebody who made five times my salary had miscounted the beans and they refused to sign our union contract […] “Management has made a series of grave financial errors. As a consequence all those people will keep their jobs and you will lose yours. Hope your kids are all vaccinated, we hear that’s tough now.”
The Washpost's editor said today that, amid the layoffs, one of the Post's top priorities will be "national security, in DC and abroad."And at the same time, the Post is laying off every journalist in the Middle East. And Ukraine.
That Jeff Bezos's Amazon gave Brett Ratner, someone photographed with Jeffrey Epstein and in the Epstein Files, $75 million to make a doc about Melania Trump, while he chooses to destroy The Washington Post, says about all you need to know.
It’s true it seems, with no warning or explanation CIA simply discontinued and removed the World Factbook this week.
I imagine they’d say we have wikipedia now wo who needs it, but check the footnotes and see how many wiki entries get their data from the CIA factbook. Lots.
They closed the CIA World Factbook and deleted it entirely.
Our government no longer provides reliable information as a public good, and I doubt most people realize how damaging that is.
DC is actually being treated thoroughly as occupied territory. Tearing down monuments/media institutions, hostile takeover of its core economic engine and industry, suppression of its local municipal government and security forces
In less than a week the Kennedy Center has effectively closed and our local DC paper has been gutted, both by billionaires. I don’t think immigrants are our problem in this country.
NEWSElon Musk and others LOSE their bid to duck depositions in DOGE litigation. Judge doubts protections for "high-ranking government officials" for multiple reasons. It's unclear they ever had that status, and Musk "left government service." Doc buff.ly/uhpSOTz
– Me: Here's why this crazy thing is illegal / wrong / won't work. – A bunch of dimwits: You fool, what a moron thinking that matters! They do whatever they want!Absolutely useless and extremely common on here. It's not just doomerism, it's outright defeatism and completely misses the point.
I love how he just ends the conversation about European theatre after the regensburg-schweinfurt raid like that was the last thing that ever happened in the strategic bombing campaign lol
…fuck…if only it worked that way…welcome to thursday with the man, boys
…&…if I lose it…& go again with any of the dozens of these I could have done to you instead by just picking a different random selection to string together for the token flavors of the day’s recipe…so…fuck that…but…also…non-zero possibility I decide that is in fact how fucked my day is that I might as well because it’d seem like getting something done by comparison?
…meanwhile
…thank fuck there’s still another perspective to avail yourself of
26 Comments
Um, I studied the bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan too. WHERE’S MY FUCKING NYT BESTSELLER BOOK CONTRACT AND alleged INTELLECTUAL ACCOLADES???!??!??!?!?!?!??!?!
Gladwell is one dumb arrogant motherfucker. It wasn’t till 1946 when the fucking USAF or USAAF as it was known figured out that bombing industrial area and civilian areas was dumb fucking idea via the Strategic Bombing Survey which blew up most of the Bomber Mafia bullshit. They were better off knocking out the electrical power plants. Also… the bomber mafia INSISTED that bombers could defend themselves… but if it weren’t for the introduction of the P-51 Mustang the bomber losses from the daylight raids would have broken the 8th AF. We have contrarian fucks on the internet trying to say otherwise. The RAF’s nighttime bomb raids… were a disaster till the RAF nightfighters (based on the Mosquito mostly wood bomber) started going after the Luftwaffe nightfighters. RAF Bomber crews were needlessly getting slaughtered by simple things like the Schirage Muzik (the placement of 20mm or 30mm mounted in the fuselage of a nightfighter at an upward forward angle) so that the bomber was shot down by an olique angle attack avoiding the one place where the Lancaster had no guns or armor (the underside.)
As for Japan… the nastiest and most effective thing they did was the firebombing of Japanese cities (which my eldest uncle lived thru as a gunnery NCO in the IJA), but the reality was the submarine campaign that killed Japanese intercoastal shipping which cut off the North (which is Japan’s agricultural base) from the South (the industrial/population base) and nearly starved Japan to death. The firebombing was mostly icing on the death cake.
I do not doubt a word that you’ve written, Manchu. My question is, why is this clown bringing up WWII history and making stupid arguments? What’s the context here?
…can’t claim I found the time to get to the actual bottom of it…but…in as much as I’m capable of anything that looks like a tl;dr…even if you need a whole wikipedia page to seem like it isn’t the thing that needs one or both of those
The book follows the story of the Bomber Mafia, a group of American military officers, especially Major General Haywood S. Hansell, as they developed a wartime doctrine of daylight strategic bombing as a means to defeat an enemy with precision high-altitude aerial bombardment.[7] This could lead to a minimum of war-time casualties with new technology such as the Norden bombsight.[8] In that regard, this was at odds with the Royal Air Force’s doctrine of area bombing under the direction of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris.[9]
When the United States entered World War II, the Bomber Mafia’s doctrine proved of little military use and costly in implementation with the realities of current technology under real-world combat conditions.[10] This especially applied with Allied air raids on Japan where previously unaccounted atmospheric conditions such as the jet stream seriously interfered with operations under Hansell’s command.[11] The book examines Hansell’s replacement by Major General Curtis LeMay,[12] who implemented a series of tactical changes such as ordering bombing at a dramatically lower altitude to avoid the jet stream, removal of most of the bombers’ defensive weaponry to increase bomb payload and wholesale nighttime fire bombing with incendiaries like napalm to devastate many of the population centers of Japan.[13] The result furthered the Allies’ military objectives leading to Japan’s surrender, such as with the bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945.[14]
After the Gulf War, David L. Goldfein states that by then bombs could hit, with precision, a specific wing of a building.[15] At the time the book was released, a modern B-2 Stealth Bomber could approach a target without being detected on radar from 40,000 feet in altitude. The book concludes that “LeMay won the battle. […] Hansell won the war”.[16]
…better & indeed more likely first thoughts in terms of reference for context certainly exist but…bill hicks had a sequence of bits that showed up in a few technically not verbatim identical ways in recording that otherwise have at least some mutually exclusive parts so may or may not make sense to always say are the same set…there’s the one about the farming equipment…there’s the one with the jack palance impression about how “you all saw it – he had a gun”…there’s the one about the difference in the coverage as the elite republican guard you have yet to encounter becomes the republican guard until after enough continuous carpet bombing you reach the point of the republicans having made that shit up about there being guards out there…but…even if there weren’t ever any guards to begin with…saying you were doing it because it was the only way to suppress the oppressive forces of the 12ft tall desert warriors who eat tanks & shit bullets…was all you had to say for marcellus wallace to dispatch the wolf to get you out if you don’t mind looking a little stupid for a hot minute & can manage not to get into a death-feud before you get home…you can walk the earth like cain in kung-fu quoting bible verses & still get to be one of the fucking good guys, even
…but the actual fucking warriors that never fucking shot cyrus when he was bang in the middle of getting to the part where if we agree to stop fighting because if we’re talking about all of us by definition everywhere becomes ours & still takes nowhere away from anyone & nobody even has to argue about it much less fucking die until the ones left think they have about the right amount of space to move around without anything not to their liking making them feel uncomfortable so they can tell themselves it’s natural to expect for that to be a fact of life that comes with no effort expended on their end…there’s seemingly nobody paying attention anywhere but on a screen they can walk away from & keep saying that was just a lot of stuff that never happened & doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of important things that important people say are important enough that important amounts of numbers are involved in measuring them so that the right stuff comes up as being on top when you reach the bottom line…isn’t out to beat them down for the right to brag about what they did to the innocent parties
David Golfein doesn’t really get context. At the time Hansell believed the Norden Bombsight was basically had the same precision as a laser guided or JDAM bomb. That’s like saying David was correct in killing Goliath because if he fought him in the 2000s then he would have had a Barrett .50cal sniper rifle with 10X magnification scope instead of a rock and a sling.
It was tough reading Stephen Ambrose’ Citizen Soldiers because he was trying to justify the mistakes of the Murrica WW2 military leaders like the terrible individual replacement system which became even worse during Korea and Vietnam. No one wanted to be the FNG (aka fucking new guy) because they got killed or wounded usually in their first combat because new and stupid and ignorant and unlucky. Oliver Stone showed that in Platoon when the two new guys on ambush got killed or wounded (Charlie Sheen) because they didn’t know anything.
The worst example was trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Admiral David Callahan who died in the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal in part because he was stupid and arrogant. He got command of the Task Force because he was senior to Admiral Norman Scott who was an experienced combat leader unlike Callahan who commanded a desk for 2 years. Instead of letting the experienced combat leader Scott take command or even listen to him he did it all himself. Put his least experienced warships and the least capable radars up front and didn’t take the time to locate all his ships. His task force of five cruisers and eight destroyers blundered into a Japanese task force consisting of 2 battlecruisers and 14 escorts in the middle of a foggy night. He died quickly, but not before his flagship destroyed the USS Atlanta (flagship of Admiral Scott). The US Navy won the bar brawl despite him, not because of him (unlike some recent idiot historians in the 05-10 era tried.)
…in bill’s version…if you can “pull up G12” from your sears’ weapons catalogue (“weapons for all occasions”)…which…”it says here will destroy everything but their fillings in their teeth…which helps us pay for the war effort…cool”…& that means that you can win that war against the 5th largest army in the then world…at a US-fatality-count of…79…then…what…if you sent 80 guys you think you still would have won that fucking war?
…moreover…if you can watch video footage in real time of a smart bomb threading its needle down a chimney into a hardened bunker to take out your ace of spades & be the same country leaving ‘nam-style playing cards & forgetting kilroy was ever here before you were out in the world being an argument for better birth control than whatever leads to people who think the best birth control is a nazi eugenics principled one that they know how to monetize…then…couldn’t you plausibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
…for bart simpson it was “where’s my elephant?”…in the places bill played on his “flying saucer tour” it may or may not have been fair to say it was we “we want our thumbs” because they were still shouting “evolution” when other places had moved on to “revolution”…it’s not like it’s any more crazy for it to be someone saying “where’s my SmartFruit?” the way we say where’s my hoverboard or lightsaber or a tardis when it seems like one of those might be handy?
…apparently all the best people who are the best because they know best & that’s why they should definitely not stop being in charge…agree…that…well…they take full accountability for the way things are in all the ways it would be appropriate for them to that wouldn’t tip into a slippery slope anything could snowball down like the boulder in raiders of the lost ark but with them trying to be indiana jones…but…that wasn’t them you see & all the parts of it that seem like they must be somebody’s fault might not really be anybody’s fault so nobody can rightly be said to be so at fault that anyone ought to jump to any conclusions about anybody because really these days they’ll say anything about anybody if there’s something in it for them & apparently if all else fails “it can only make everything worse if I do” is on the drop down menu for acceptable ways to get the button that makes it show up on the internet where the playing field is deceptively level if your affect is flat enough?
Gladwell trying to revive the “great men” style of history. LeMay was a fucking psychopath, too!
But the weirdest thing of all is that it’s now been proven over and over and over and over that it’s nigh impossible to win a war just through air power, so like … nice job writing shaky history on an idea we know is incorrect?
It’s funny because my grandfather was a bombardier in a Martin B-26 Maurauder. He took part in the bombing of Pantelleria Island, which is one of the scant few times that a campaign was decided solely by air power. A tiny rock in the Mediterranean is hardly a use case.
…the little island with the famously shitty weather that was considered shitty on the basis it was so mid that it never got extreme & maybe that’s why the food was (it never really was but if the joke fits & you’re a real brit you ought to be able to wear it like terry’s lilac) so bland the denizens had to tell the rest of the world it knew of that all their stuff was actually its property now because their food needed to be the food back home…&…anything else that looked nice or seemed useful, really
…that…at some point before I had an accident of birth…became a place it at least used to be pretty hard to grow up in without an understanding of at least a bunch of perspectives on the aftermath of what it looks like to make it out the other side of one of those while getting to say you won…the blitz & such…something something…the machine gunners…something…corners of foreign fields…so on & so forth all the way from green & pleasant lands to jerusalem while your sword sleeps not & your arrows of desire shoot from your golden bow that’s burning like the bush did that one time & that goes for your whole ride…& odin might be the sort of one-eyed king that can cut it in a land of the blind but baby when you get that spear shaking you can cleave the sky the way that amateur moses pulled that penny-ante sideshow with a little bit of salty water that one time…don’t you rain on this parade & tell me I’m pissing into the wind…I’m tugging on superman’s cape here so I can pull the mask off the old lone ranger & spit in that fool’s eye for being friends with zorro like a good for nothing fake news faux american…let a motherfucker in a chariot of fire cook off like a truckbomb in a fireworks factory next to the nuclear facilty…fuck keeping the lights on we want it darker & we’re gonna paint it black…my sympathies to the gentleman of wealth & taste…it’s like iggy said…we just the passengers…some other fuckhead done hijacked the flight…nobody over here is the part of the problem you most pressingly need to be addressing right now…I…just don’t know what to tell you about where to start with where you’re starting to look like you don’t understand this already went or what that does to the way that what you’re doing looks…like…that…is not a statement synonymous with “the way you see it”…this…is not a controversial thing that I am saying…it is the opposite of a contentious statement…it is very possibly more accurate to claim it is in fact universally applicable to very literally all things…even the ones that are the right sort of things to be admissible to the smaller than I for one would have expected list of treasured things that are the sort of immutable stuff where either the way you see it is a way to see a thing that would be exactly the same thing you think it is whether you saw it or not…or…some part of that is not, if we ever found it expedient to have it matter enough to actually do in a sense where the term would still mean the same thing after imposing its own rules on itself…we might be “strictly speaking”…as true as it’s asking to get to be treated on spec because some other part of it can’t be separated from something that has valid credentials
…if the way places famous for how easy they’ve had it for as long as anyone left around can remember anyone having or not-having anything in all the places there are & have been all the people who could be remembering anything could be while they might currently be doing that…get to continue to be places where the unthinkable sort of tragedy that befell the twin towers remained as unthinkable as the unthinkable tragedy that is befalling the twin cities as a broadly direct result of a profoundly psychotic response to a paradigm-shifting alteration in the things that can be moved from the “it could never happen here to us no matter how many people it can’t be helped it might be happening to somewhere that aren’t any of us & that’s why anyone that says whatever it takes to make that still be true is evil & hates freedom & america & if that’s you then fuck it I don’t even care if you die in the burning wreckage of a landscape bombed back to the stone age you deserved it & I wouldn’t piss on you to douse the flames when I could make smores & post it on instagram for likes” one…somehow…despite everything the current affairs equivalent of chinese water torture…or…something analogous to a hybrid of loki’s fate with the serpent-venom eye-bath while also having to pull the sisyphean shift because those 16 tons aren’t gonna shift themselves & the rent is too damn high & the company store is never going to stock universal income much less restitution to buttress the pursuit of happiness with some nicely-leavened & baked-right-in truth & justice that has room on the side for reconciliation…once everyone maybe takes a few laps around the block on a cousin walk to develop an appropriate appetite so that doesn’t prove indigestible or otherwise result in some sort of undignified expulsion of bile-laced excreta?
There’s also a big part of me that feels like a lot of where we are now with everything is that we see who these “great men” are now in much realer time and it’s like, huh, you’re actually not really interesting or impressive and did you really email Jeff Epstein to shoot the shit, and their brains are so unreceptive to the idea that they’re not the unquestionable masters of the universe that oh well, gun to your head, it’s either your life or MY universe and I suggest you pick immediately.
…I begin to question if it’s even that they can’t be told no…like…they can…we don’t make sure they are nearly as much as it would take for it to make sense or seem to enough people to make enough of the right sorts of difference to be able to say they can’t do it or maybe just that they can’t get away with it…but they can & they have & they are…& they…do not handle that well
…so the whole damoclean sword in this arrangement is always “if you don’t let me do the thing nobody should be allowed to get away with even saying they should do never mind do & not have there be someone whose job it is to stop you that actually does before you do or imposes appropriate reactive forces to make as right as available your obvious & terrible wrongs…well…then you’ll be sorrier than if you did because of how fucked up we both know the place I’ll take this then will be”…then it’s literally no difference from the guy who would straight up get his ass kicked by people whose only income stream is babysitting money in a physical fight…who could catch a terminal case of a flight of stairs just being told to make their own way from the bottom to the top like they think they’re rocky balboa but with the same real-time requirement on the shot clock for the play…getting away with rocking anything between an overpriced trucker hat to festooning themselves in mil-tec AR-15-themed lethal force tactical fantasy-fest cosplay that kills…because then you can’t ignore them when they bitch that you shorted them a packet of mayo for the double portion of fries…actually…being more of a threat to others than they are a shambling mess of embarrassment & moral bankruptcy to themselves
…they all think they’re basically the villain in the bond movie because there are people enough like bond villains for fleming to have thought a reader would recognize a SPECTRE even if they’d laugh at a man from U.N.C.L.E. or think that a family dynasty that could kit out a full bond-villain grade lair on a tropical island might plausibly be the sort of international rescue altruistic super-wealth that bruce wayne not being so fucks with a particular subset of heads…at least if you could see the strings involved…kinda thing?
…I’m cautiously optimistic that the one weird trick is that when you tell them no…or anything they hear like they hear getting told no…you just…have to actually mean it…the way people mean it when they mean it enough to stand in the cold just to maybe blow a whistle or be ruder to someone than they’d usually consider polite or called for…or…maybe the people they feel strongly enough are shitbags to be out like that doing that like that despite it having nothing to do with anything they chose to make anybody’s business & everything to do with business that’s so much everybody’s they stopped being able to ignore that it was their business & this is what they look like when they take care of their business the way normal ordinary decent people do
…&…it turns out that when more people than would like to admit say more of what they say than they’d like to admit…what they mean when they say they mean stuff…is…not even a pale imitation of meaning that stuff the way those people currently mean the stuff about how that stuff looks if you have blood that boils because your heart works & you have a soul & you haven’t managed to fuck up your mind to the point where that isn’t painful to contemplate?
So I was noodling with this idea for a longer thing at some yet unknown later date, and I really think this starts with internal family dynamics. Every family has an asshole in it, whether it’s racist Facebook uncle or snooping grandma or whatever, and the play is never “We should loudly confront them on Christmas Eve” because nobody wants to shatter the peace and/or meet them at their level of asshole but like, if you don’t make it loudly and pointedly clear that you won’t take their bullshit, they’re just gonna keep doing their bullshit! Worse, eventually they’re gonna realize nobody will stop them if they want to do more bullshit because nobody did. It only escalates!
“Go along to get along” is, I think, a very liberal and reasonable idea that absolutely does not work if you’re up against a dedicated asshole. So to your point, yeah, we can tell them “no” but my point was both they would never accept it and also we don’t actually tell them “no” because they’re already impossibly rich and powerful and as we’ve seen with Epstein, there’s basically no lever to pull that changes that. You’d have to tell them no by actually gutting their power and wealth and nobody in power, of course, has even the slightest interest in that possibility. At most, these people lose a job they never should have held in the first place. That’s not really a “no.”
…I know…but don’t…you know how they get & it’ll only spoil everything for everyone because they won’t let it be any other way…but you’re right…we all know you’re right…just…try not to let it get to you…you deserve to enjoy this…we all do…everyone could do with having a nice relaxing time & it’s nice to all be together
…so…being the bigger or the better person is letting the smaller-minded way be the only way that doesn’t guarantee to suck for everyone…until that works like a super-power they learn to lean into
…& it upsets the bits of the family that you like…& in the end you do love all of your family so you don’t like to do that any more than you like to put up with the stuff you’re pulling an endurance test to not pop off about
…& if you keep it up long enough…you hit “the truth is they’re too old & set in their ways & they aren’t going to change so it’s basically cruel to antagonize them when the path where they create the least provocation to have the argument the better person in you kept not having for the sake of better people about how some people don’t seem to get that part of being a person is you ought to be trying to be a person getting better at being a person as you go or you’re claiming to be a person who thinks they can’t be improved on”
…& there is a 1:1 causation-compliant linkage which forms the structure of that correlation marrying up perfectly with people who know nothing of the things everyone ought to be capable of knowing without needing any help from anybody just by being a person & then doing a bit of sincere thinking about what that seems to mean & who they seem to be to themselves in a sense that other selves seem to be selves in some variation of other that are also all also the same sorts of things in ways & senses that apply to all of them even if the ways some things don’t apply to all of them extends to things like limbs & senses…or…cognitive or empathetic capacities/runtimes/whatever-that-shit-comes-packaged-in-that’s-brain-computable-on-humanOS?
…&…when it’s family…”now I’m older I think I should have had more of the rows I didn’t have when I was younger” is an uncomfortable way to discover you might have had less courage in some convictions you could have sworn you had back then & aren’t meaningfully any more strongly held now because they’re kinda all or nothing in that respect
…when it’s…”the way the world works” stuff?
…yeah…I definitely looked pretty hard at pretty regular intervals for a long time over the long time it’s been since it first seemed like it might be a nice thing to have an answer to…but…near as I’ve ever managed to figure…this is the only ride they give tickets out for…& the promotional material says that…however much it might not resemble any real persons either living or dead so it can instead be purely a vehicle for the profit of particular persons living maybe even after they’re dead…that “enough” of everyone “wants it to be this way”…so *that’s* why it is…& not because less-shitty people put up with more-shitty people for the sake of not wanting to wind up obliged to be worse people to spend time with or otherwise keep that up long enough to become the villain of their own story…because managing to suck it up & get along is its own slippery slope down which victims of their own conscience &/or competence can tumble like they only come in jack & jill versions when the wells are all poisoned & on top of hills to die on…or…whatever
…god-damn-it…it’s the fucking rhyme about the kingdom & the nail & the penny & oh-fuck-how-dumb-are-we-really-when-you-get-right-down-to-it?
…sorry
…very much look forward to you putting all of that entirely better so I find it funnier than when I wind up sounding like that, I guess?
…so…I’m not trying to claim I have any particular qualification that makes me the arbiter of where to draw the line…but…at some point the question ceases being making allowances for the things you wouldn’t choose that might be true of family you didn’t get to for the sake of the parts of that you wouldn’t choose to hurt
Only in America can you have two masked Gestapo named Jesus and Raymundo shoot a white citizen on video and still have Republican voters cheering them on. This is the most absurd country to have ever existed.
…and making analogous allowances for members of a family we’re all in to members of it who wouldn’t acknowledge their fellow parentage when that’s these people wanting to do this stuff?
I don’t think we should make concessions to the Masked Murderers Guild of America. I don’t think we should compromise so the Masked Murderers Guild of America stops using kidnapped kids from schools as bait. I thought this was already illegal. The Masked Murderers Guild of America should not exist.
That mask is also popular with neo-Nazi accelerationist groups, which I think is really important to mention. Just like it's important to mention that ICE agents in Denver have been dropping Ace of Spades cards where they've kidnapped people. The white nationalist culture at work is clear.
In 2009, this was the mask of a UK SAS character in “Call of Duty.” By 2015 it was de rigeur among Iraqi government commandos and Shiite militiamen. In 2018, in “Sicario 2,” it was what CIA surrogate characters wore to disguise themselves as cartel gunmen.
Now US law enforcement wears it.
Fucking surreal that people dressed like this and carrying assault rifles are permitted to kidnap people off our streets
It doesn’t matter because the ones at the top of that totem pole will never see any consequences of substance. They won’t lose their money or their power and they most certainly will not spend a solitary day in jail. What’s the point of all that money and power if you can’t behave like the rules don’t apply to you? Like so many other times when people find out what massive pieces of shit they are, ultimately another circus or loaf of bread comes along and this fades into the background eventually.
One of the things that made me fall in love with the nascent Gawker was that they had a piece on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, now widely discredited, and a commenter with that precious commenting status wrote something like, “The tipping point? It’s on top of his head!”
I think the “nobody came to repair the bridge” is a really insightful bit about what the ends of empire really look like. Whether it’s Hollywood or WW2, we tend to think about things as having concussive, clean endings, and … that just isn’t really how it’s ever happened in human history?
Like it’s possible America gets itself into a war it can’t win and we get the “ass in the jackpot” finale but it’s way more likely that we just are less next decade. And the next decade after that. And there’s no moment of decline but it’s just a trend that becomes so undeniable that it just flips from surprise to conventional wisdom without anyone even really noticing.
…even when the sun never sets on the empire at some point the empire…or the imperial parts…or just the emperor sometimes…or relevant equivalent playing piece in the applicable local variant board for “the great game” that those “great men” “play” with one another the way the more magnificent men played with their flying machines…sunsets themselves…usually after mistaking a portion of their own anatomy for the place the sun shines out of
…it’s…almost like even after all that adolescent stroppy stuff about independence…some kids can’t even see the examples their parents set for them
…but…if one of those is a parent that won’t admit brexit was a massive fuck up & you think you met a cool found-family uncle called vlad who might have seen some shit & can get you invited to shake it like a skeikh…or…at least with sheikhs & the people they can get to shake the stuff they do in the places there are for that mostly nobody gets to go because otherwise people might get…unruly…if they were forced to know what happens in those that doesn’t hurt anyone that matters so long as nobody that matters knows that’s somebody who’d care?
…that kid might go all the way off some pretty stout rails if they got a straight shot at developing enough momentum to have trouble with the curve right where nobody showed to fix that bridge?
I remember when Dubya invaded Iraq and basically told the entire international community to go fuck themselves, and that was the moment when I thought, “Huh. I guess I’ll get to learn what it feels like to be a citizen of the Roman Empire, or the British Empire, or…”
…maybe some things really are just to good to still be part of a world that seems to be the one ours seems to be these days
…but…if I had to bet…my bet would be that sara would want you to be able to flop down somewhere in the sort of company that would be never more delighted than they would be to flop all over you like there’s no such thing as personal space when you’re getting comfy with the pack that is the home team when the team is all home…because how else will you be able to see that being the same never more delighted that’s as delighted as everything else that’s as amazing as you are in the world is worth being so much it shows
…tough to know what it means to be a man about it when that means saying you lost your best friend that’s also all of everyone’s…but…damn…hope something’s there to warm you where you’re missing the warm spot on legs that…will be missed
@luigi-vuoto, sorry for your loss. I know sometimes loss of a pet can be even harder than a loss of a human. Sara looks like a great companion. Stay strong buddy!
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Um, I studied the bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan too. WHERE’S MY FUCKING NYT BESTSELLER BOOK CONTRACT AND alleged INTELLECTUAL ACCOLADES???!??!??!?!?!?!??!?!
Gladwell is one dumb arrogant motherfucker. It wasn’t till 1946 when the fucking USAF or USAAF as it was known figured out that bombing industrial area and civilian areas was dumb fucking idea via the Strategic Bombing Survey which blew up most of the Bomber Mafia bullshit. They were better off knocking out the electrical power plants. Also… the bomber mafia INSISTED that bombers could defend themselves… but if it weren’t for the introduction of the P-51 Mustang the bomber losses from the daylight raids would have broken the 8th AF. We have contrarian fucks on the internet trying to say otherwise. The RAF’s nighttime bomb raids… were a disaster till the RAF nightfighters (based on the Mosquito mostly wood bomber) started going after the Luftwaffe nightfighters. RAF Bomber crews were needlessly getting slaughtered by simple things like the Schirage Muzik (the placement of 20mm or 30mm mounted in the fuselage of a nightfighter at an upward forward angle) so that the bomber was shot down by an olique angle attack avoiding the one place where the Lancaster had no guns or armor (the underside.)
As for Japan… the nastiest and most effective thing they did was the firebombing of Japanese cities (which my eldest uncle lived thru as a gunnery NCO in the IJA), but the reality was the submarine campaign that killed Japanese intercoastal shipping which cut off the North (which is Japan’s agricultural base) from the South (the industrial/population base) and nearly starved Japan to death. The firebombing was mostly icing on the death cake.
I do not doubt a word that you’ve written, Manchu. My question is, why is this clown bringing up WWII history and making stupid arguments? What’s the context here?
…can’t claim I found the time to get to the actual bottom of it…but…in as much as I’m capable of anything that looks like a tl;dr…even if you need a whole wikipedia page to seem like it isn’t the thing that needs one or both of those
…better & indeed more likely first thoughts in terms of reference for context certainly exist but…bill hicks had a sequence of bits that showed up in a few technically not verbatim identical ways in recording that otherwise have at least some mutually exclusive parts so may or may not make sense to always say are the same set…there’s the one about the farming equipment…there’s the one with the jack palance impression about how “you all saw it – he had a gun”…there’s the one about the difference in the coverage as the elite republican guard you have yet to encounter becomes the republican guard until after enough continuous carpet bombing you reach the point of the republicans having made that shit up about there being guards out there…but…even if there weren’t ever any guards to begin with…saying you were doing it because it was the only way to suppress the oppressive forces of the 12ft tall desert warriors who eat tanks & shit bullets…was all you had to say for marcellus wallace to dispatch the wolf to get you out if you don’t mind looking a little stupid for a hot minute & can manage not to get into a death-feud before you get home…you can walk the earth like cain in kung-fu quoting bible verses & still get to be one of the fucking good guys, even
…but the actual fucking warriors that never fucking shot cyrus when he was bang in the middle of getting to the part where if we agree to stop fighting because if we’re talking about all of us by definition everywhere becomes ours & still takes nowhere away from anyone & nobody even has to argue about it much less fucking die until the ones left think they have about the right amount of space to move around without anything not to their liking making them feel uncomfortable so they can tell themselves it’s natural to expect for that to be a fact of life that comes with no effort expended on their end…there’s seemingly nobody paying attention anywhere but on a screen they can walk away from & keep saying that was just a lot of stuff that never happened & doesn’t mean anything in the grand scheme of important things that important people say are important enough that important amounts of numbers are involved in measuring them so that the right stuff comes up as being on top when you reach the bottom line…isn’t out to beat them down for the right to brag about what they did to the innocent parties
…we are so good at this we amaze myself sometimes
David Golfein doesn’t really get context. At the time Hansell believed the Norden Bombsight was basically had the same precision as a laser guided or JDAM bomb. That’s like saying David was correct in killing Goliath because if he fought him in the 2000s then he would have had a Barrett .50cal sniper rifle with 10X magnification scope instead of a rock and a sling.
It was tough reading Stephen Ambrose’ Citizen Soldiers because he was trying to justify the mistakes of the Murrica WW2 military leaders like the terrible individual replacement system which became even worse during Korea and Vietnam. No one wanted to be the FNG (aka fucking new guy) because they got killed or wounded usually in their first combat because new and stupid and ignorant and unlucky. Oliver Stone showed that in Platoon when the two new guys on ambush got killed or wounded (Charlie Sheen) because they didn’t know anything.
The worst example was trying to rehabilitate the reputation of Admiral David Callahan who died in the 1942 Battle of Guadalcanal in part because he was stupid and arrogant. He got command of the Task Force because he was senior to Admiral Norman Scott who was an experienced combat leader unlike Callahan who commanded a desk for 2 years. Instead of letting the experienced combat leader Scott take command or even listen to him he did it all himself. Put his least experienced warships and the least capable radars up front and didn’t take the time to locate all his ships. His task force of five cruisers and eight destroyers blundered into a Japanese task force consisting of 2 battlecruisers and 14 escorts in the middle of a foggy night. He died quickly, but not before his flagship destroyed the USS Atlanta (flagship of Admiral Scott). The US Navy won the bar brawl despite him, not because of him (unlike some recent idiot historians in the 05-10 era tried.)
…in bill’s version…if you can “pull up G12” from your sears’ weapons catalogue (“weapons for all occasions”)…which…”it says here will destroy everything but their fillings in their teeth…which helps us pay for the war effort…cool”…& that means that you can win that war against the 5th largest army in the then world…at a US-fatality-count of…79…then…what…if you sent 80 guys you think you still would have won that fucking war?
…moreover…if you can watch video footage in real time of a smart bomb threading its needle down a chimney into a hardened bunker to take out your ace of spades & be the same country leaving ‘nam-style playing cards & forgetting kilroy was ever here before you were out in the world being an argument for better birth control than whatever leads to people who think the best birth control is a nazi eugenics principled one that they know how to monetize…then…couldn’t you plausibly use that same technology to shoot food at hungry people?
…for bart simpson it was “where’s my elephant?”…in the places bill played on his “flying saucer tour” it may or may not have been fair to say it was we “we want our thumbs” because they were still shouting “evolution” when other places had moved on to “revolution”…it’s not like it’s any more crazy for it to be someone saying “where’s my SmartFruit?” the way we say where’s my hoverboard or lightsaber or a tardis when it seems like one of those might be handy?
…apparently all the best people who are the best because they know best & that’s why they should definitely not stop being in charge…agree…that…well…they take full accountability for the way things are in all the ways it would be appropriate for them to that wouldn’t tip into a slippery slope anything could snowball down like the boulder in raiders of the lost ark but with them trying to be indiana jones…but…that wasn’t them you see & all the parts of it that seem like they must be somebody’s fault might not really be anybody’s fault so nobody can rightly be said to be so at fault that anyone ought to jump to any conclusions about anybody because really these days they’ll say anything about anybody if there’s something in it for them & apparently if all else fails “it can only make everything worse if I do” is on the drop down menu for acceptable ways to get the button that makes it show up on the internet where the playing field is deceptively level if your affect is flat enough?
Gladwell trying to revive the “great men” style of history. LeMay was a fucking psychopath, too!
But the weirdest thing of all is that it’s now been proven over and over and over and over that it’s nigh impossible to win a war just through air power, so like … nice job writing shaky history on an idea we know is incorrect?
It’s funny because my grandfather was a bombardier in a Martin B-26 Maurauder. He took part in the bombing of Pantelleria Island, which is one of the scant few times that a campaign was decided solely by air power. A tiny rock in the Mediterranean is hardly a use case.
…the little island with the famously shitty weather that was considered shitty on the basis it was so mid that it never got extreme & maybe that’s why the food was (it never really was but if the joke fits & you’re a real brit you ought to be able to wear it like terry’s lilac) so bland the denizens had to tell the rest of the world it knew of that all their stuff was actually its property now because their food needed to be the food back home…&…anything else that looked nice or seemed useful, really
…that…at some point before I had an accident of birth…became a place it at least used to be pretty hard to grow up in without an understanding of at least a bunch of perspectives on the aftermath of what it looks like to make it out the other side of one of those while getting to say you won…the blitz & such…something something…the machine gunners…something…corners of foreign fields…so on & so forth all the way from green & pleasant lands to jerusalem while your sword sleeps not & your arrows of desire shoot from your golden bow that’s burning like the bush did that one time & that goes for your whole ride…& odin might be the sort of one-eyed king that can cut it in a land of the blind but baby when you get that spear shaking you can cleave the sky the way that amateur moses pulled that penny-ante sideshow with a little bit of salty water that one time…don’t you rain on this parade & tell me I’m pissing into the wind…I’m tugging on superman’s cape here so I can pull the mask off the old lone ranger & spit in that fool’s eye for being friends with zorro like a good for nothing fake news faux american…let a motherfucker in a chariot of fire cook off like a truckbomb in a fireworks factory next to the nuclear facilty…fuck keeping the lights on we want it darker & we’re gonna paint it black…my sympathies to the gentleman of wealth & taste…it’s like iggy said…we just the passengers…some other fuckhead done hijacked the flight…nobody over here is the part of the problem you most pressingly need to be addressing right now…I…just don’t know what to tell you about where to start with where you’re starting to look like you don’t understand this already went or what that does to the way that what you’re doing looks…like…that…is not a statement synonymous with “the way you see it”…this…is not a controversial thing that I am saying…it is the opposite of a contentious statement…it is very possibly more accurate to claim it is in fact universally applicable to very literally all things…even the ones that are the right sort of things to be admissible to the smaller than I for one would have expected list of treasured things that are the sort of immutable stuff where either the way you see it is a way to see a thing that would be exactly the same thing you think it is whether you saw it or not…or…some part of that is not, if we ever found it expedient to have it matter enough to actually do in a sense where the term would still mean the same thing after imposing its own rules on itself…we might be “strictly speaking”…as true as it’s asking to get to be treated on spec because some other part of it can’t be separated from something that has valid credentials
…if the way places famous for how easy they’ve had it for as long as anyone left around can remember anyone having or not-having anything in all the places there are & have been all the people who could be remembering anything could be while they might currently be doing that…get to continue to be places where the unthinkable sort of tragedy that befell the twin towers remained as unthinkable as the unthinkable tragedy that is befalling the twin cities as a broadly direct result of a profoundly psychotic response to a paradigm-shifting alteration in the things that can be moved from the “it could never happen here to us no matter how many people it can’t be helped it might be happening to somewhere that aren’t any of us & that’s why anyone that says whatever it takes to make that still be true is evil & hates freedom & america & if that’s you then fuck it I don’t even care if you die in the burning wreckage of a landscape bombed back to the stone age you deserved it & I wouldn’t piss on you to douse the flames when I could make smores & post it on instagram for likes” one…somehow…despite everything the current affairs equivalent of chinese water torture…or…something analogous to a hybrid of loki’s fate with the serpent-venom eye-bath while also having to pull the sisyphean shift because those 16 tons aren’t gonna shift themselves & the rent is too damn high & the company store is never going to stock universal income much less restitution to buttress the pursuit of happiness with some nicely-leavened & baked-right-in truth & justice that has room on the side for reconciliation…once everyone maybe takes a few laps around the block on a cousin walk to develop an appropriate appetite so that doesn’t prove indigestible or otherwise result in some sort of undignified expulsion of bile-laced excreta?
There’s also a big part of me that feels like a lot of where we are now with everything is that we see who these “great men” are now in much realer time and it’s like, huh, you’re actually not really interesting or impressive and did you really email Jeff Epstein to shoot the shit, and their brains are so unreceptive to the idea that they’re not the unquestionable masters of the universe that oh well, gun to your head, it’s either your life or MY universe and I suggest you pick immediately.
Or longer me: These freaks can’t be told “no.” https://deadsplinter.com/only-one-candidate-promises-a-world-without-consequences/
…I begin to question if it’s even that they can’t be told no…like…they can…we don’t make sure they are nearly as much as it would take for it to make sense or seem to enough people to make enough of the right sorts of difference to be able to say they can’t do it or maybe just that they can’t get away with it…but they can & they have & they are…& they…do not handle that well
…so the whole damoclean sword in this arrangement is always “if you don’t let me do the thing nobody should be allowed to get away with even saying they should do never mind do & not have there be someone whose job it is to stop you that actually does before you do or imposes appropriate reactive forces to make as right as available your obvious & terrible wrongs…well…then you’ll be sorrier than if you did because of how fucked up we both know the place I’ll take this then will be”…then it’s literally no difference from the guy who would straight up get his ass kicked by people whose only income stream is babysitting money in a physical fight…who could catch a terminal case of a flight of stairs just being told to make their own way from the bottom to the top like they think they’re rocky balboa but with the same real-time requirement on the shot clock for the play…getting away with rocking anything between an overpriced trucker hat to festooning themselves in mil-tec AR-15-themed lethal force tactical fantasy-fest cosplay that kills…because then you can’t ignore them when they bitch that you shorted them a packet of mayo for the double portion of fries…actually…being more of a threat to others than they are a shambling mess of embarrassment & moral bankruptcy to themselves
…they all think they’re basically the villain in the bond movie because there are people enough like bond villains for fleming to have thought a reader would recognize a SPECTRE even if they’d laugh at a man from U.N.C.L.E. or think that a family dynasty that could kit out a full bond-villain grade lair on a tropical island might plausibly be the sort of international rescue altruistic super-wealth that bruce wayne not being so fucks with a particular subset of heads…at least if you could see the strings involved…kinda thing?
…I’m cautiously optimistic that the one weird trick is that when you tell them no…or anything they hear like they hear getting told no…you just…have to actually mean it…the way people mean it when they mean it enough to stand in the cold just to maybe blow a whistle or be ruder to someone than they’d usually consider polite or called for…or…maybe the people they feel strongly enough are shitbags to be out like that doing that like that despite it having nothing to do with anything they chose to make anybody’s business & everything to do with business that’s so much everybody’s they stopped being able to ignore that it was their business & this is what they look like when they take care of their business the way normal ordinary decent people do
…&…it turns out that when more people than would like to admit say more of what they say than they’d like to admit…what they mean when they say they mean stuff…is…not even a pale imitation of meaning that stuff the way those people currently mean the stuff about how that stuff looks if you have blood that boils because your heart works & you have a soul & you haven’t managed to fuck up your mind to the point where that isn’t painful to contemplate?
So I was noodling with this idea for a longer thing at some yet unknown later date, and I really think this starts with internal family dynamics. Every family has an asshole in it, whether it’s racist Facebook uncle or snooping grandma or whatever, and the play is never “We should loudly confront them on Christmas Eve” because nobody wants to shatter the peace and/or meet them at their level of asshole but like, if you don’t make it loudly and pointedly clear that you won’t take their bullshit, they’re just gonna keep doing their bullshit! Worse, eventually they’re gonna realize nobody will stop them if they want to do more bullshit because nobody did. It only escalates!
“Go along to get along” is, I think, a very liberal and reasonable idea that absolutely does not work if you’re up against a dedicated asshole. So to your point, yeah, we can tell them “no” but my point was both they would never accept it and also we don’t actually tell them “no” because they’re already impossibly rich and powerful and as we’ve seen with Epstein, there’s basically no lever to pull that changes that. You’d have to tell them no by actually gutting their power and wealth and nobody in power, of course, has even the slightest interest in that possibility. At most, these people lose a job they never should have held in the first place. That’s not really a “no.”
…I know…but don’t…you know how they get & it’ll only spoil everything for everyone because they won’t let it be any other way…but you’re right…we all know you’re right…just…try not to let it get to you…you deserve to enjoy this…we all do…everyone could do with having a nice relaxing time & it’s nice to all be together
…so…being the bigger or the better person is letting the smaller-minded way be the only way that doesn’t guarantee to suck for everyone…until that works like a super-power they learn to lean into
…& it upsets the bits of the family that you like…& in the end you do love all of your family so you don’t like to do that any more than you like to put up with the stuff you’re pulling an endurance test to not pop off about
…& if you keep it up long enough…you hit “the truth is they’re too old & set in their ways & they aren’t going to change so it’s basically cruel to antagonize them when the path where they create the least provocation to have the argument the better person in you kept not having for the sake of better people about how some people don’t seem to get that part of being a person is you ought to be trying to be a person getting better at being a person as you go or you’re claiming to be a person who thinks they can’t be improved on”
…& there is a 1:1 causation-compliant linkage which forms the structure of that correlation marrying up perfectly with people who know nothing of the things everyone ought to be capable of knowing without needing any help from anybody just by being a person & then doing a bit of sincere thinking about what that seems to mean & who they seem to be to themselves in a sense that other selves seem to be selves in some variation of other that are also all also the same sorts of things in ways & senses that apply to all of them even if the ways some things don’t apply to all of them extends to things like limbs & senses…or…cognitive or empathetic capacities/runtimes/whatever-that-shit-comes-packaged-in-that’s-brain-computable-on-humanOS?
…&…when it’s family…”now I’m older I think I should have had more of the rows I didn’t have when I was younger” is an uncomfortable way to discover you might have had less courage in some convictions you could have sworn you had back then & aren’t meaningfully any more strongly held now because they’re kinda all or nothing in that respect
…when it’s…”the way the world works” stuff?
…yeah…I definitely looked pretty hard at pretty regular intervals for a long time over the long time it’s been since it first seemed like it might be a nice thing to have an answer to…but…near as I’ve ever managed to figure…this is the only ride they give tickets out for…& the promotional material says that…however much it might not resemble any real persons either living or dead so it can instead be purely a vehicle for the profit of particular persons living maybe even after they’re dead…that “enough” of everyone “wants it to be this way”…so *that’s* why it is…& not because less-shitty people put up with more-shitty people for the sake of not wanting to wind up obliged to be worse people to spend time with or otherwise keep that up long enough to become the villain of their own story…because managing to suck it up & get along is its own slippery slope down which victims of their own conscience &/or competence can tumble like they only come in jack & jill versions when the wells are all poisoned & on top of hills to die on…or…whatever
…god-damn-it…it’s the fucking rhyme about the kingdom & the nail & the penny & oh-fuck-how-dumb-are-we-really-when-you-get-right-down-to-it?
…sorry
…very much look forward to you putting all of that entirely better so I find it funnier than when I wind up sounding like that, I guess?
…so…I’m not trying to claim I have any particular qualification that makes me the arbiter of where to draw the line…but…at some point the question ceases being making allowances for the things you wouldn’t choose that might be true of family you didn’t get to for the sake of the parts of that you wouldn’t choose to hurt
…and making analogous allowances for members of a family we’re all in to members of it who wouldn’t acknowledge their fellow parentage when that’s these people wanting to do this stuff?
…none of it can wash its face
…any more than it isn’t ashamed to show that
It doesn’t matter because the ones at the top of that totem pole will never see any consequences of substance. They won’t lose their money or their power and they most certainly will not spend a solitary day in jail. What’s the point of all that money and power if you can’t behave like the rules don’t apply to you? Like so many other times when people find out what massive pieces of shit they are, ultimately another circus or loaf of bread comes along and this fades into the background eventually.
One of the things that made me fall in love with the nascent Gawker was that they had a piece on Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, now widely discredited, and a commenter with that precious commenting status wrote something like, “The tipping point? It’s on top of his head!”
https://surgoventures.org/malcolm-gladwell
Looks like it’s teetering. I hope so.
I think the “nobody came to repair the bridge” is a really insightful bit about what the ends of empire really look like. Whether it’s Hollywood or WW2, we tend to think about things as having concussive, clean endings, and … that just isn’t really how it’s ever happened in human history?
Like it’s possible America gets itself into a war it can’t win and we get the “ass in the jackpot” finale but it’s way more likely that we just are less next decade. And the next decade after that. And there’s no moment of decline but it’s just a trend that becomes so undeniable that it just flips from surprise to conventional wisdom without anyone even really noticing.
…even when the sun never sets on the empire at some point the empire…or the imperial parts…or just the emperor sometimes…or relevant equivalent playing piece in the applicable local variant board for “the great game” that those “great men” “play” with one another the way the more magnificent men played with their flying machines…sunsets themselves…usually after mistaking a portion of their own anatomy for the place the sun shines out of
…it’s…almost like even after all that adolescent stroppy stuff about independence…some kids can’t even see the examples their parents set for them
…but…if one of those is a parent that won’t admit brexit was a massive fuck up & you think you met a cool found-family uncle called vlad who might have seen some shit & can get you invited to shake it like a skeikh…or…at least with sheikhs & the people they can get to shake the stuff they do in the places there are for that mostly nobody gets to go because otherwise people might get…unruly…if they were forced to know what happens in those that doesn’t hurt anyone that matters so long as nobody that matters knows that’s somebody who’d care?
…that kid might go all the way off some pretty stout rails if they got a straight shot at developing enough momentum to have trouble with the curve right where nobody showed to fix that bridge?
I remember when Dubya invaded Iraq and basically told the entire international community to go fuck themselves, and that was the moment when I thought, “Huh. I guess I’ll get to learn what it feels like to be a citizen of the Roman Empire, or the British Empire, or…”
We lost a great friend today. RIP Sara.
…maybe some things really are just to good to still be part of a world that seems to be the one ours seems to be these days
…but…if I had to bet…my bet would be that sara would want you to be able to flop down somewhere in the sort of company that would be never more delighted than they would be to flop all over you like there’s no such thing as personal space when you’re getting comfy with the pack that is the home team when the team is all home…because how else will you be able to see that being the same never more delighted that’s as delighted as everything else that’s as amazing as you are in the world is worth being so much it shows
…tough to know what it means to be a man about it when that means saying you lost your best friend that’s also all of everyone’s…but…damn…hope something’s there to warm you where you’re missing the warm spot on legs that…will be missed
…condolences to the family
Obviously a very good girl. May her memory be a blessing!
My condolences.
@luigi-vuoto, sorry for your loss. I know sometimes loss of a pet can be even harder than a loss of a human. Sara looks like a great companion. Stay strong buddy!
…lol
…lmao, even