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(via (7) @napoleonfour on Tumblr)

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STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (1987-1994) “Haven” (1.11)

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I don't know how people came to think that "the banality of evil" means "evil people are people too".

That's also true but it's not what the banality of evil means.

The term was coined by Hannah Arendt in her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the "final solution" in the Holocaust.

It describes the way in which the Nazis at large and Eichmann in particular have turned the horrendous act of mass murder into just another job, disconnecting themselves morally and emotionally from their actions.

Before the death camps and gas chambers, Nazi soldiers simply shot Jews into mass graves by the hundreds of thousands. It was a lot cheaper and faster, but it caused great psychological distress for the murderers who pulled the trigger.

The leadership's solution was a massively upscaled version of the "gas vans" they used to mass murder hundreds of thousands of Germans with disabilities and mental health issues.

Shooting bound civilians in point blank range over and over is something you can't just pretend you're not doing or is no big deal. But if you're just the guy who sorts people into groups. Or just the guy that funnels them into a room. Or just the guy who opens a cannister on the roof. It's much easier to distance yourself from what you know is happening.

The same principle applies to much lesser evils, like soldiers operating drones from a distance, or insurance workers denying coverage for life-saving treatment.

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I was talking to a kid in my daughter’s class today, and she said that she thought it would be fun to write a story about the Titanic, but with supernatural creatures.

So I said, “Yeah, that would great! What would the creatures do? Would they save the Titanic from sinking?”

And she gave me the most disgusted look. I have never seen a 9 year old face look so appalled.

“No,” she said, speaking very clearly so as to never be so grossly misunderstood again, “they’re going to eat the passengers.”

God I hope she lets me read it.

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clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right

here i am

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This is sadly the only explanation that makes any sense.

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The stock market is crashing today because Trump is doing what he said he would do.

The amount of optimism STILL remaining that Trump simply won’t be able to accomplish what he promises, and that things will be okay, is honestly surprising.

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Edward Gorey

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It’s the Department Of Grifter Exploitation

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Benjamin Booker’s new album is amazingly good. Very different direction from his blues-punk debut, some of it even leans toward trio-hop.

Just wow.

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“There’s a saying: “May you live in interesting times.”

“To begin, it’s a curse. “Interesting” in this case uniformly means “Oh god, death is raining down upon us and we shall all perish wailing and possibly on fire.” If someone wanted to say something nice to you, they wouldn’t tell you to live in “interesting” times. They would say something like, “I wish you eternal happiness” or “May you have peace” or “Live long and prosper” and so on. They wouldn’t say “Live in interesting times.” If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do.

“Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free.

“Second, the curse is almost always ascribed to the Chinese, which is a flat-out lie. As far as anyone can tell it appeared in English first but was ascribed to the Chinese, probably due to a combination of casual racism and because someone wanted to be a shithole of a human being but didn’t want it to be marked down against them personally. A sort of “Hey, I’m not saying this, those terrible Chinese are saying it, I’m just telling you what they said” maneuver.

“So not only are they not your friend, they may be also a bigot and passive-aggressive.

“That said, the Chinese do have a saying from which it is alleged that the bigoted passive-aggressive curse may have been derived: “宁为太平犬，莫做乱世人” which, roughly translated, means “It’s better to be a dog in peace, than a man in war.” Which is a maxim which is neither bigoted nor passive-aggressive, and about which I find a lot to agree with.

“The point is this: My name is Lieutenant Harry Wilson. I’ve been a man in war for a very long time now. I think it would be preferable to be a dog in peace. I’ve been working toward that for a while.

“My problem is, I live in interesting times.”

Excerpt From The End of All Things, by John Scalzi

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One of the things I like most about science fiction is that it allows an author to be completely speculative about a world and its situation while in most cases making an obvious commentary on reality. The fantastic parts remove it from our experience just enough to buckle in for an adventure without always needing to understand all of the parallels with our current or our recent politics & culture.

But those parallels are always there, waiting for us to dig into them.

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People are the worst.

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cleared so hard