#GWOT

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Reality-Based Communities

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL next WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON next FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

Remember the Global War on Terror? I know, it's been a minute. But there was a time when we were all meant to take terrorism – real terrorism, the knocking-down-buildings kind, not the being-mean-to-Teslas kind – seriously.

Back in the early oughts, I remember picking up a copy of the Financial Times in an airport lounge and flipping through it, and coming across an "advice to corporate management" column in which the question was, "Should I take out terrorism insurance for my business?" The columnist's answer: "The actual risk to your business of a terrorism-related disruption rounds to zero. However: a) your shareholders don't understand this, an b) your insurance company does. That means that you can buy a very large amount of terrorism insurance for a very small amount of money, making this a cheap price to pay to mollify your easily frightened investors."

I never forgot that little piece of writing. It was a powerful reminder that successful large-scale enterprises must attend to the world as it is, not as ideology dictates that it should be. This was – and is – a deeply heterodox position among the ideological defenders of capitalism, who continue to uphold Milton Friedman's maxim that:

Truly important and significant hypotheses will be found to have "assumptions" that are wildly inaccurate descriptive representations of reality, and, in general, the more significant the theory, the more unrealistic the assumptions (in this sense)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine

These ideologues – who often cross over from boardrooms into governments – are with the GW Bush official who dismissed a journalist as a member of the "reality-based community":

When we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

But ultimately, someone has to make investments and plans that take accord of the world as it is, the adversaries they face, the real and material emergencies unfolding around them. When the Pentagon announces that henceforth the climate emergency will take a prime place in its threat assessments and budgets, that's not "the military going woke" – it's the military joining the reality-based community:

https://www.defensenews.com/opinion/commentary/2021/10/26/the-pentagon-has-to-include-climate-risk-in-all-of-its-plans-and-budgets/

This explains the radical shear between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page – in which you'll learn that governments can't solve any problems and markets solve all problems (including the problem of governments) – and the news reporting within, in which the critical role of the state in regulating and fueling markets is acknowledged.

The tension between the right's ideologues in boardrooms and governments and the operational people in charge of keeping the machines running has only escalated since the War on Terror days. There's an important sense in which leftists – as materialists – are playing the same game as these operational managers of capitalism. Take Thomas Piketty, the socialist economist whose blockbuster 2013 book Capital in the 21st Century argued that rising inequality threatened capitalism itself:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-21st-century/

By analyzing three centuries' worth of capital flows, Piketty showed that when inequality reached a certain tipping point, the result was societal upheaval that continued until so much capital had been destroyed that inequality was reduced (because everyone had been pauperized). Piketty appealed to capitalism's technocrats to institute redistributive programs. His point was that building hospitals and schools was ultimately cheaper than paying for the guard-labor you'd need to keep people from building guillotines outside the gates of your walled estate.

The rise and rise of surveillance tech, and its successors, such as lethal drones and offshore gulags, can be seen as a tacit acknowledgment of Piketty's thesis. By lowering the cost of guard labor, it might possible to stabilize a society with higher levels of inequality, by identifying and neutralizing the people who are radicalized by the system's unfairness before you get an outbreak of guillotines:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#less-lethals

But reality is stubborn. Capitalism's defenders can insist that society will continue to function while wages stagnate and greedflation stokes the cost of living crisis, but ultimately, the military can't afford to have a fighting force that's in hock to payday lender usurers who are tormenting their families with arm-breaker collection calls:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/03/payday-loan-apps-cost-new-yorkers-500-million-plus-new-study-estimates.html

As Stein's Law – a bedrock of finance – has it, "anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." The ideologues of capitalism can insist that Luigi Mangione is a monster and an aberration, an armed freeloader who wants something for nothing. But privately, their own security forces are telling them otherwise.

Writing for The American Prospect, Daniel Boguslaw reports on a leaked intelligence dossier from the Connecticut regional intelligence center – a "fusion center" created as part of the War on Terror – wherein we learn that the American people sees Mangione as a modern Robin Hood:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-27-intelligence-dossier-compares-luigi-mangione-robin-hood/

Many view Thompson as a symbolic representation of both as reports of insurance companies denying life sustaining medication coverage circulate online. It is not an unfair comparison to equate the current reaction toward Mangione to the reactions to Robin Hood, citizens may see Mangione’s alleged actions as an attack against a system designed to work against them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hM3IZbnzk_cMk7evX2Urnwh5zxhRHpD5/view

The Connecticut fusion center isn't the only part of capitalism's operational wing that's taking notice of this. Today, Ken Klippenstein reports on an FBI threat assessment about the "heightened threat to CEOs":

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/fbi-becomes-rent-a-cops-for-ceos

The report comes from the FBI's counter-terrorism wing, which (Klippenstein notes) is in the business of rooting out "pre-crime" – identifying people who haven't committed a crime and neutralizing them. As Klippenstein writes, Trump AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel have both vowed to treat anti-Tesla protests as acts of terror. That's the view from the top, but back on the front lines of the Connecticut fusion center, things are more reality-based:

[The public] may view the ensuing manhunt and subsequent arrest of Mangione as NYPD, and largely policing as a whole, as a tool that is willing to expend massive resources to protect the wealthy, while the average citizen is left to their own means for personal security.

Any good investor knows that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The only question is: will that halt is a controlled braking action, or a collision with reality's brick wall?

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/27/use-your-mentality/#face-up-to-reality

Image: Lee Haywood (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/leehaywood/4659575229/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[thafreedomwall]

[opfors]

A girl looks with distrust at an American soldier patrolling the streets on March 3, 2005 in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

[professionalnooneatall]

Walz could be like Square Jaw McBangBang Gruntington Du KnuckleDragger K-Barius IV, A Green Beret with all four 18-series MOS's with 20 years in COMBAT alone and he'd still be getting dragged because he's on the democratic ticket.

[oriental-sea-witch]

"The Invasion"

At the start of the Iraq war, my father was an old man by Marine standards. An aging Gunnery Sergeant at the end of his 20 year career who "celebrated" his 38th birthday in the combat zone during his six month deployment. The lead-up to the war had been shrouded in secrecy, my father being one of the select few NCO's briefed on the upcoming invasion as early as April of 2002. On March 20th, 2003, he and the other men of CSSB-12 of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force out of Camp Pendleton, California, were amongst the first American servicemen to cross from Kuwait into Iraq as the US launched a lightning campaign to decapitate the Ba'athist regime. The invasion moved with such speed and ferocity that my father was awake for three days straight at the start of the war.

My father would first encounter enemy fire during the Battle of Nasiriyah. He vividly remembers driving passed the burnt, mangled remains of the Marine AAV destroyed in the now infamous friendly-fire incident by USAF A-10's. He crossed paths with another Marine detachment, MWSS-372, exiting the city, whom he described as "all shot to hell." It was here where the highly-mobile CSSB-12 would link up with LAV's and additional infantry as they began the grueling, weeks-long journey out of Nasariyah through Al-Shatrah, An-Nu'mānīyah, and Al-Kut as their unit pushed further into Iraq, encountering armed resistance from both the Iraqi Army and Fedayeen Saddam units along the way. Luckily, most Iraqi units they encountered were heavily demoralized, and wisely chose to surrender without a fight.

It was at Al-Shatrah where my father would see intense combat and lead Marines under fire when a mix of Fedayeen and civilian irregulars ambushed them at close-range, close enough where his M9 service pistol was deployed, and several magazines emptied. My father doesn't like to go into detail, but he does say this: "They had every chance to give up, but they didn't. Those guys that tried to whack us? None of them are still breathing." It took him over 18 years to tell me the story behind his combat action ribbon.

[walkingthroughthisworld]

For the past 2 years, I’ve tweeted out the names of the fallen from the American war in Afghanistan. The 1st time was around the fall of Kabul. The 2nd around Memorial Day. I will start again on Friday at 5 pm ET. Many attach personals stories and photos.

[thafreedomwall]

Even more rare than the Daniel Defense handguard for the HK416, it's the Remington RAHG, just like the DD, it was briefly put to the test by DEVGRU before fading out into obscurity in favour of the Geissele SMR. Interesting enough, there are some claims that the HK416 that took UBL sported a RAHG rail.

[houseclouds]

[masonjarhead]

[alpine6news]

The anniversary of the United States’ invasion of Iraq during the ongoing Global War on Terror is right around the corner. And, while the Iraq war may be a distant memory for many Americans, especially with more modern conflicts in the news to be upset about, one die hard patriot is holding firm to his “pro-America, screw everyone else” mentality by still referring to French fries as Freedom Fries.

[thafreedomwall]

[tentacion3099]

[kineticpenguin]

If I was an Israeli going to call the US hypocrites because they've killed civilians, I would not cite a source that says that over 20 years and 3+ wars, they have only maybe managed to kill as many civilians as Israel has in half a year

[ronthedunedain]

Reading old Bush and Clinton-era forum posts are always interesting. They're universally a self-selecting group of people, due to how access to the internet was spreading, but the branch of US-centric pseudo-compassionate liberalism that they preached has reached an evolutionary dead end. Wonder if a bunch of them voted for Romney.

A very sobering timecapsule of that epoch is the metafilter page discussing 9/11 as it was happening:

Spacebattles isn’t worth talking about on its own as politically impactful, but it is very telling as a snapshot of the Median “Informed” American Voter throughout the 21st century