#they really like doing this about the Iraq war in particular

[kineticpenguin]

One of the dumbest things in online debates is when conservatives are like "ah, but Democrats voted for my guy's policy that you hate! checkmate libtard"

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #6 – Exordia by Seth Dickinson

This is a book I have been looking forward to for quite literally years, from someone who is easily one of my favourite working authors. I also read the short story the book was expanded out from before I even knew it was going to be a book, and so went in spoiled on the broad strokes of what turned out to be the climax of the whole thing. All to say my opinion on this is unlikely to match that of the typical reader, I guess.

Anyway, Exordia is a glorious spectacular mess that has no right to cohere anywhere near as well as it does. It’s target audience is small, but I’m certainly somewhere in it. Please ignore all the marketing it’s so bad you have to wonder if someone at Tor just has it out for the author.

Exordia is a, well, a profoundly difficult book to give any sort of plot summary for. The first act involves Anna, a 30-something survivor of the Anfal Genocide now living a rather unimpressive life in New York City, until one day in the early 2010s she sees an alien eating the turtles in Central Park. Then there’s a cat-and-mouse hunt between terrifying alien snake-centaurs for the future of free will in the galaxy, and the plot jumping to kurdistan, and six more POV characters from as many different nations, and nuclear weapons, and oh so many people dying messily. The first act is an oddly domestic and endearing piece of table setting, the second is (to borrow the idiom of the book’s own marketing) Tom Clancy meets Jeff Vandermeer or Roadside Picnic, and the third is basically impossible to describe without a multipage synopsis, but mostly concerned with ethical dilemmas and moral injuries. It’s to the book’s credit that it never bats an eye at shifting focus and scale, but it does make coming to grips with it difficult.

This is, as they say, a thematically dense book, but it’s especially interested in the fallout of imperialism. The Obama-era ‘don’t do stupid shit’ precise and sterile form of it in particular – the book’s a period piece for a reason, after all. The ethics of complicity – of being offered the choice of murdering and betraying those around you or having an alien power with vastly superior destructive powers inflict an order of magnitude more misery to you, them, and everyone in the same general vicinity to punish you for the inconvenience – is one that gets a lot of wordcount. It is not an accident that the man most willing and able to collaborate with the overwhelming powerful alien empire in hopes of bargaining some future for humanity is the National Security Council ghoul who came out of organizing surveillance information for the drone wars. It’s also not a coincidence that the main (if only by a hair) protagonist is someone with a lot of bitter memories over how the US encouraged Iraq’s kurdish population to rebel in the ‘90s and then just washed their hands and let them be massacred (the book couldn’t actually ship with a historical primer on modern kurdish history, so it’s woven into the story in chunks with varying amount of grace. But it is in fact pretty thematically key here).

Speaking of complicity, the book’s other overriding preoccupation in (in the broadest sense) Trolley Problems. Is it better to directly kill a small number of people or, through your inaction, allow a larger number to die? Does it matter is the small number is your countrymen and the larger foreigners, or vice versa? What about humans and aliens? Does it matter whether the choice is submitting to subjugation or killing innocents as a means to resist it? What about letting people around you die to learn the fundamental truth of the cosmos? Does the calculus change when you learn that immortal souls (and hell) are real? This is the bone the story is really built around chewing on.

All that probably makes the text seem incredibly didactic, or at least like a philosophical dialogue disguised as a novel. Which really isn’t the case! The book definitely has opinions, but none of the characters are clear author-avatars, and all perspectives are given enough time and weight to come across as seriously considered and not just as cardboard cutouts to jeer at. Okay, with the exception of one of the two aliens who you get the very strong sense is hamming it up as a cartoon villain just for the of it (he spends much of the book speaking entirely in all caps). There definitely are a couple points where it feels like the books turning and lecturing directly at the reader, but they’re both few and fairly short.

The characters themselves are interesting. They’re all very flawed, but more than that they’re all very...embodied, I guess? Distracted with how hot someone is, concerned with what they ate that morning or the smell of something disgusting, still not over an ex from years ago. Several of them are also sincerely religious in a way that’s very true to life to actual people but you rarely see in books. The result is that basically comes as being far more like actual humans than I’m at all used to in most fiction (of course, a lot of those very human qualities get annoying or eye-roll inducing fairly quickly. But hey, that’s life). Though that’s all mostly the case at the start of the book – the fact that the main cast are slowly turning into caricatures of themselves as they’re exposed to the alien soul manipulation technology is actually a major plot point, which I’m like fifty/fifty on being commentary on what happens to the image and legacy of people as they’re caught up in grand narratives versus just being extended setup for a joke about male leads in technothrillers being fanfic shipbait.

Part of the characters seeming very human is that some (though by no means all) of the POVs are just incredibly funny, in that objectively fucked up and tasteless way that people get when coping with overwhelming shock or trauma. It’s specifically because the jokes are so in-your-face awful that they fit, I think? It manages to avoid the usual bathetic trap a lot of works mixing in humour with drama fall into, anyway.

Speaking of alien soul manipulation technology – okay, you know how above I said that the points where the book directly lectured the reader were few and far between. This is true for lectures about politics or morality. All the freed up space in this 530 page tome is instead used for technobabble about theoretical math. Also cellular biology, cryptography, entropics, the organization of the American security state, how black holes work, and a few dozen other things. This book was edited for accuracy by either a doctoral student from every physical science and an award winning mathematician, or else just by one spectacularly confident bullshitter with several hundred hours on wikipedia. Probably both, really. I did very much enjoy this book, but that is absolutely predicated on the fact that when I knew when to let my eyes glaze over and start skimming past the proper nouns.

The book has a fairly complete narrative arc in its own right, but the ending also screams out for a sequel, and quite a lot of the weight and meaning of the book’s climax does depend on followthrough and resolution in some future sequel. Problematically, the end of the book also includes a massive increase in scale, and any sequel would require a whole new setting and most of a new cast of characters, so I’m mildly worried how long it will be before we get it (if ever).

The book is also just very...I’m not sure flabby is the right word, but it is doing many many different things, and I found some of them far more interesting than others. I’m not sure whether Dickinson just isn’t great at extended action scenes or if I am just universally bored by drawn out Tom Clancy fantasies, but either way there were several dozen pages too many of them. The extended cultural digressions about the upbringing and backstories of each of the seven POVs were meanwhile very interesting! (Mostly, I got bored of the whole Erik-Clayton-Rosamaria love triangle Madonna complex thing about a tenth of the way into the book but it just kept going.) It did however leave the book very full of extended tangents and digressions, even beyond what the technobabble did. Anna herself, ostensibly the main protagonist, is both utterly thematically loadbearing but very often feels entirely vestigial to the actual, like, plot, brought along for the ride because she’s an alien terrorist’s favourite of our whole species of incest-monkeys. The end result is, if not necessarily unfocused, then at least incredibly messy, flitting back and forth across a dozen topics that on occasion mostly just seem unified by having caught the author’s interest as they wrote.

It’s interesting to compare the book to Anna Saves It All, the short story it was based on – quite a lot changed! But that’s beyond the scope of this already overlong review. So I guess I’ll just say make sure to read the book first, if you’re going to.

[tanadrin]

[epistemic status: a bunch of semi-related thoughts I am trying to work out aloud] It has been noted countless times that reactionary politics rely on a feeling of threat: our enemies are strong and we are weak (but we are virtuous and they are not, which is why they’re our enemies!); we must defend ourselves, we must not be afraid of doing what needs to be done; we must not shie away from power generally, and violence specifically.

And there are lots of contexts--like when talking about the appeal of reactionary politics in the US before and at the beginning of Trump’s rise to prominence, or when talking about hard-on-crime policies that are a springboard to police militarization, or (the central example of all this in the 21st century) the post 9/11 PATRIOT-act terrorism paranoia that was a boon to authoritarians everywhere, and spurred a massive expansion of both control and surveillance in everyday life--where critics of reactionary rhetoric are chastised for their failure to appeal to the other side, because they come off as callous towards their concerns and their real fears and anxieties.

And while this might not be strategically correct, frankly, I think there’s a sense in which it is justified to be callous towards those concerns. Because those concerns are lies. They may be lies borne out of a seed of real experience (9/11 did happen, of course), but the way that seed is cultivated by focused paranoia, by contempt toward cultivating any sense of proportionality or any honest comparison of risk, the way it is dragooned into the service of completely orthogonal political goals (”the CIA/NSA/FBI must be able to monitor all private communications everywhere in the world, just in case it might prevent another 9/11″) chokes off any possible sympathy I might otherwise feel. American paranoia about another couple thousand lives being lost in a 9/11 like event resulted in a number of deaths literally multiple orders of magnitude larger in Iraq and Afghanistan. During the former, some years Iraq was suffering the equivalent of six or seven 9/11s a year.

So, any fear-driven policy must not (for example) say “to prevent disaster X happening again, we’re going to make it happen 270 times over to someone else.” That’s not reasonable. And “fear is a bad basis for crafting policy” is not exactly a revolutionary observation. There’s that probably-apocryphal story of a Chinese professor responding to Blackstone’s Ratio--you know, “better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person suffer”--with “better for whom?” Which is supposed to be this trenchant and penetrating question that makes you reexamine your assumptions. But it’s always struck me as idiotic. Better for society! For everyone! Because the law only functions well if it is seen as a source of order and justice, not as an authoritarian cudgel; because a society in which anxiety drives policymaking and legal responses to social ills is one that is in the process of actively devouring itself; because flooding the public discourse with language that dehumanizes criminals and makes it easy to separate the individual from universal principles like civil rights is an acid that destroys the social fabric.

Fear as a germ of reactionary politics manifests itself in lots of ways outside of both historical examples, like fascism, or more recent examples, like US foreign policy during the war on terror. Fear and its link to purity-attitudes, with a low level of scientific literacy in general, drives stuff like the organized anti-vaccine movement. In the Hertzsprung-Russel diagram of political tendencies, I’d argue it’s a big factor in the wellness-to-Qanon track. It’s a big part of tough-on-crime rhetoric, which in the American instance in particular also draws on an especially racialized form (cf. the “Willie Horton” ad). Fear and purity and anti-contamination anxieties are even big in opposition to nuclear power, because most of the public just has a really bad sense of what the comparative dangers of nuclear vs fossil fuel are; and because the former has been culturally salient since 1945 in a way the latter hasn’t, nuclear contamination feels much more threatening than fossil fuel waste, despite by any measurable harm the latter causing far worse problems, even before you factor in any risks from climate change.

I would like to argue in particular that true crime as an entertainment genre, and wellness culture, and fears about child abuse all contribute to reactionary politics--they are in themselves major reactionary political currents--in a way that cuts across the political spectrum because they are not strongly marked for political factionalism. A lot of the rhetoric both from and around true crime entertainment promotes the idea that violent crime exists, or at least can flourish, because of an insufficiently punitive attitude toward crime; one that can only be fixed by centering victims’ desire (or putative desire) for retribution in the legal process, by eroding the civil rights of the accused, and by giving the police and prosecutors more power. Obviously, this is just 80s and 90s tough on crime rhetoric repackaged for millennials; it centers individual experience a bit more and deemphasizes the racial component that made the “Willie Horton” ad so successful, but it posits that there is only one cause for crime, a spontaneous choice by criminals that has no causal relationship with the rest of the world, and only one solution, which is authoritarianism.

Wellness culture leverages purity concerns and scientific illiteracy in ways which are so grifty and so transparently stupid that it’s by far the least interesting thing on this list to me; its most direct harm is in giving an environment for the anti-vaccine movement to flourish, and I’m always incredibly annoyed when people talk about how the medical establishment needs to do more to reassure the public about vaccines’ safety and efficacy. Again, strategically, this may be correct; people dying of preventable disease is really bad. But doctors as a body didn’t promote Andrew Wakefield’s nonsense; doctors as a body didn’t run breathless article after breathless article about vaccines maybe causing autism; doctors as a body didn’t scare the bejezus out of folks in the 90s and then act all surprised when preventable childhood diseases started breaking out all over the place.

Although outside the whole anti-vax thing, I think there are lots of other harms that wellness culture creates. It tends to be fairly antiscientific; in order to sell people nonsense (because as a subculture it exists almost exclusively to sell people things) it has to discredit anything that might point out that it is selling nonsense. Whether the anti-intellectualism that flourishes in these quarters is a result of intentional deceit or just a kind of natural rhetorical evolution probably varies. But it is an important component of wellness culture to be able to play a shell game between “big pharma doesn’t have your best interests at heart,” “you don’t need your anti-depressants,” and “laetrile cures cancer.”

The way in which fears of child abuse are turned into a reactionary political cudgel probably actually annoys me the most; whether it’s Wayfair conspiracy theories, conservatives trying to turn “groomer” into an anti-queer slur, or just antis on tumblr, the portrayal of sadistic sexual threat aimed at children from an outside malevolent force is compelling only because the vast majority of child abuse and CSA comes from within families and within culturally privileged structures of authority like churches, and this fact makes everyone really uncomfortable, and no one wants to talk about it. I remember getting really annoyed during the Obama years when the White House wanted to talk about bullying and anti-LGBT bullying in particular, while studiously avoiding blaming parents and teachers in any way for it, despite the fact that all the coming out horror stories I know are from people’s parents turning on them.

Now, very conservative politics have always opposed dilution of a kind of privilege for the family structure; they envision a family structure which is patriarchal, and so dilution of this privilege is dilution of the status of patriarch. Very insular communities which cannot survive their members having many options or alternative viewpoints available to them, including controlling religions but also just abusive parents who want to retain control over their kids, also bristle at the idea of any kind of general society-wide capacity for people to notice how parents treat their children. But beyond that, I think our society still treats parents as having a right of possession over their children and their children’s identities, especially when they’re young, and bolsters that idea with an idea that the purity of children is constantly under threat from the outside world, and it is the parents’ job to safeguard that purity. The result is the nuclear family as a kind of sacred structure which the rest of society has no right to observe or pry open; and this is a massive engine of enabling the abuse of children. To no other relationship in our society do we apply this idea, that it should be free from “interference” (read: basic accountability) from the rest of society.

Moreover, the idea of childhood as a time of purity and innocence, which not only must be protected from but during which children must be actively lied to about major aspects of how the world works, is one of the last ways remaining to an increasingly secular culture to justify censorious and puritanical Victorian morality. It is hard to advocate for censorship to protect the Morals of the Christian Public, when nobody believes in the Morals of the Christian Public anymore; but “think of the children!” still works as a rallying cry, because of this nagging sense we have that age-appropriate conversations with children about adult topics will cause them to melt or explode.

In many ways, these anxieties on behalf of theoretical children are the ones I am most contemptuous of. Not because child abuse isn’t a serious problem--it is--but because the vector imagined for it is almost entirely opposite the one it actually tends to occur along. People who pretend that the primary danger to children is from strangers are usually woefully misinformed; people who pretend it is from media are either idiots or liars seeking a cover for their craving for censorship.

In conclusion: while it’s not possible to exorcise all our neuroses from our politics, anymore than we will ever exercise all our neuroses from our aesthetics, there are some we should be especially on guard against. A sense of threat, and anxieties which tie into concerns about purity and fears of contamination, are two big ones. These produce policies that are not only badly correlated with the outcomes they ostensibly want, but actually and severely destructive to them, in the same way that invading Iraq was actively destructive to any notion of preventing terrorism, saving American or Iraqi lives, or promoting political stability in the Middle East. And we should hold in healthy suspicion anybody whose politics seem to be driven by similar neuroses. Some merely believe very harmful things. Some are actually actively deceptive. None will achieve any of the higher aims they claim as justification for their beliefs.

[specialagentartemis]

anyway. sorry. I try to be productive and not so vent-y here. And Palestine is one issue of many in the world. And when I get upset about it I genuinely do not want to imply that I think The Jews Are All Killing Palestinians or anything, because that’s not the case and I make my wording very specific of “the people who make/reblog Israel Is Doing Nothing Wrong type posts” which are hardly unique to Jewish tumblr users and I don’t want to give the impression I think they are. (The one I was just vaguing about for example was not made by a Jewish person.) There are so, so many Christians and atheists blasé about death in Gaza because it’s an American/Western problem of seeing some people as Really People and some people as not, and especially for American interests, Israelis count as people not out of a particular concern for Jews as people (certainly the American Jews are not treated well either by the kind of pro-Israel Republican most fervent about war in Gaza) but out of an interest in having an American ally in the Middle East. And God knows as a Catholic I do not want to encourage judging anybody for what an institution who claims to represent everyone in the religion in a country across the world says or does.

But. It feels bitter that it’s literally 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq all over again. Hamas tunnels are the new WMD. Free speech zones. If you oppose the war that means you want the terrorists to win. And especially now when it’s going to get even worse why are we still acting like Palestinians Deserve What They’re Getting.

[submalevolentgrace]

"We Americans have been at war now since October 7th, 2001. That was when our military first launched air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to al-Qaeda’s September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That’s 22 years and counting. The “war on terror” that began then would forever change what it meant to be an Arab-American here at home, while ending the lives of more than 400,000 civilians [4.5 million total dead when including indirect deaths] — and still counting! — in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In the days after those September 11th attacks, the U.S. would enjoy the goodwill and support of countries around the world. Only in March 2003, with our invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, would much of the world begin to regard us as aggressors. Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned. Many Americans now see the destruction and suffering in Gaza and Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as the crises of the day and I agree. [...] But if war deaths among people of color in particular are really that much of a concern to Americans, especially on the political left, then there are significant gaps in our attention. Look at what’s happening in the 85 countries where the U.S. is currently engaged in “counterterrorism” efforts of one sort or another, where we fight alongside local troops, train or equip them, and conduct intelligence operations or even air strikes, all of it in an extension of those first responses to 9/11. Ask yourself if you’ve paid attention to that lately or if you were even aware that it was still happening. Do you have any idea, for instance, that our country’s military continues to pursue its war on terror across significant parts of Africa? [...] Our own October 7th and its seemingly never-ending consequences suggest that something more sinister may be at play in shaping what violence we choose to focus on and condemn, and what violence we choose to overlook."

[philia95]

I just finished watching the anime Pluto (Naoki Urasawa, 2023) and it was amazing. Watching the story unfold is like being hooked up to an Empathy Box from Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep. It makes you feel so deeply for all the characters despite most of them not even being human. It was uncomfortable at times thinking about the ethics of how the robots, who are so human-like in every way, are used and treated. It really highlights our very human tendencies to empathise with things that aren't even "living".

But by far the most uncomfortable aspect was the uncanny depiction of war. It was heartbreaking how similar the main conflict was to real life events, past and present. In particular it reminded me of the US/UK-Iraq war (2003). The portrayal of how devastating war is to every single person it reaches (soldiers, civilians etc) was done so powerfully by showing the long lasting effects it has on its survivors. One particular scene *SPOILERS* in which a soldier robot repeatedly washes it's hands after the conflict really got to me.

Overall I highly recommend this Sci-fi, Anti war, anti hate anime. It's only 8 episodes long and personally I found the ending to be very satisfying. Gesicht has one of the best character arcs I've ever seen and is 100% MVP. Also I would die for North No. 2.

10/10 Go watch it!

[inglourious-imagines]

Through Trouble and Iraq (Walt Hasser x GN!Corpsman!Reader)

Requested by: @order-of-river-phoenix (hi!! love to see you back, first of all. i’d love to see you write a little something for my boy Walt Hasser with prompt 30, if you could. thank you <3) - anything for you ;))

Prompt: 30 – I was so stupid to make the mistake of falling in love with my best friend.

Summary: You are a Corpsman with the Marines and Walt just seems to go out of his way to find trouble so you could find him. Not that you mind. (Reader is part of Brad’s team and is in the seat instead of Reporter.)

Warnings: some f words, implied sex

A/N: First Gen Kill fic yaaay, so insecure but hope u like it.

.

.

.

You did not mean to fall in love with Walt Hasser. But like many things, it has slowly crept on you, until one day, when you were laughing your ass off with him somewhere in the middle of the Iraqi dessert and he put his hand on your shoulder like he’s done so many times before, something changed.

You did not mean to fall in love with your best friend. Until you just did.

***

Ever since that little incident you’ve been a little too nervous around Walt and the fact that he’s been running to you with even the most ridiculous (non)injuries, really doesn’t help your cause. Because when he looks up at you with those eyes, with that innocent look of his, you would do anything he asked you to do.

For example, one time you were chatting about possible medical aid to the locals with doc Bryan and your team, more specifically Ray and Walt, was brewing some coffee as Ray more than excitedly announced to every single person, including probably even the Iraqis on the other side of the town. Bryan seemed more at ease that day and you love talking medical stuff with him, when suddenly you heard your name being called. You rolled your eyes, but smiled nonetheless because you would recognize that voice anytime and anywhere.

And when Bryan said: “I believe you got this one.” with a wink, you were blushing like a teenager as well. You still have no idea when Doc figured out you have it bad for Walt – and you intended for the matter to remain unknown to everyone for at least till the war is over, but Bryan found out despite your best efforts to hide your feelings.

To everyone else, Walt Hasser is your best friend, he’s always been and that’s what you have always said (to everyone, yourself included) but lately the word ‘friend’ has been more like a nightmare than a comfort to you.

You ran to your Humvee where Ray seconds ago had been brewing the espresso. Walt could be seen sitting just next to, holding his hand, looking at nothing in particular, and all red in face.

You smiled, as you kneeled in front of him. “What do we have here this time?”

“Oh, you know,” he started, avoiding your gaze, clearly a bit embarrassed by the whole situation, “I burnt my hand.”

You bit your lip to prevent yourself from laughing, but Ray laughing in the driver's seat certainly wasn’t helping. “C’mon, I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

He extended his hand to you to show you the damage done and this time you let out an amused chuckle. “Walt,” you laughed softly, “there’s barely anything on your skin. It’s just a bit red.”

He blushed at your words, looking you in the eye for the first time. “Alright, just wanted it get it checked by you, that’s all."

“That’s not the only thing he wanted checked out.” Ray laughed in the Humvee that made the man in front of you blush even harder than before and downright disappear from your sight.

That wasn’t the first time Ray has made a comment about Walt and you with a certain subtext but every single time when you pushed him about it, he just laughed it off. Of course, there was a time when you let yourself believe that perhaps, you might be the luckiest person on this entire planet because the person you are in love with is also in love with you, but then you let your intrusive thoughts won again and threw the whole ridiculous notion behind.

***

It is a hot day, not that any day in the dessert hasn’t been hot, but you somehow manage to ignore the weather. Your hands are sweating nonetheless as you’re gripping your weapon, your eyes squinting, looking out into your sector. Ray is humming some melody you don’t recognize – he is not off tune as he normally is but you’re not in the mood today for his signing because you know once he starts humming, a solo is coming too.

“Hey Ray, if you could do one thing in the world, what would you do?” you say. It’s the most ridiculous save but it’s the only one you can think of so you’re going with it.

Ray doesn’t even need a second to ponder. “J.Lo.”

Trombley bursts out laughing, and you just know Brad is smiling.

“Should have seen that one coming,” you say, chuckling.

“And you?” Brad surprisingly joins on the hypothetical conversation, “who would you do?”

You’re only taking a breath when Ray casually, as if it’s a common knowledge, answers for you: “That’s fucking easy. Our Walt here.”

The laughter dies in your throat. His comment surprises you so much that your mind is left blank, and you have absolutely no comeback to shoot back at him. Only after a few seconds you manage to get out of yourself a poor “What the fuck, Person?”.

You’re very much aware how Walt is awfully quiet up on the roof but you don’t blame him.

“Oh, relax!” Ray says, his voice full of pure joy and excitement, “Walt would most definitely do you too.”

That finishes you off.

“I’ll be damned,” Brad chuckles in the front, shaking his head, “and I thought you’re one blind motherfucker. But look how they’re both quiet.”

“They should at least fucking thank me. I saved them a lot of time.”

You manage to lean into a position from which you can see Walt’s face and you find him already looking at you. His cheeks are bright red and he’s smiling and he’s beautiful. You can feel the smile forming on your lips.

“Thanks, Ray,” you hear yourself say without breaking eye contact and Walt laughs and you could swear it is the most precious thing in the world.

“No problem, but me and the band? We’re getting back together just for your fucking wedding!”

[nicklloydnow]

“For the generation of Americans who came of age in the shadow of the September 11 attacks, the world America had made came with a question mark. Their formative experiences were the ones in which American power had been used for ill, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Middle East more broadly, and for much longer, the United States had built a security architecture around some of the world’s most repressive regimes. For those on the left, this was nothing new, and it was all too obvious. I spent my college years reading Noam Chomsky and other leftist critics of U.S. foreign policy, and they weren’t entirely wrong. On balance, the U.S. may have been a force for good, but in particular regions and at particular times, it had been anything but.

Blaming America first became all too easy. After September 11, U.S. power was as overwhelming as it was uncontested. That it was squandered on two endless wars made it convenient to focus on America’s sins, while underplaying Russia’s and China’s growing ambitions.

(…)

Russia’s unprovoked attack on a sovereign nation, in Europe no less, has put matters back in their proper framing. The question of whether the United States is a uniquely malevolent force in global politics has been resolved. In the span of a few days, skeptics of American power have gotten a taste of what a world where America grows weak and Russia grows strong looks like. Of course, there are still holdouts who insist on seeing the United States as the provocateur. In its only public statement on Ukraine, the Democratic Socialists of America condemned Russia’s invasion but also called for “the U.S. to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict.” This is an odd statement considering that Russia, rather than the United States, has been the world’s most unabashedly imperialist force for the past three decades. But many on the anti-imperialist left aren’t really anti-imperialist; they just have an instinctive aversion to American power.

America’s low opinion of its own capacity for good — and the resulting desire to retreat or disengage — hasn’t just been a preoccupation of the far left. The crisis of confidence has been pervasive, spreading to the halls of power and even President Barack Obama, whose memorable mantra was “Don’t do stupid sh*t.” Instead of thinking about what we could do, or what we could do better, Obama was more interested in a self-limiting principle. For their part, European powers — content to bask under their U.S. security umbrella — could afford to believe in fantasies of perpetual peace. Europe’s gentleness and lethargy — coaxing Germany to commit even 2% of its GDP to defense seemed impossible — became something of a joke. One popular Twitter account, @ISEUConcerned, devoted itself to mocking the European Union’s propensity to express “concern,” but do little else, whenever something bad happened.

(…)

The coming weeks, months, and years are likely to be as fascinating as they are terrifying. In a sense, we knew that a great confrontation was coming, even if we hadn’t quite envisioned its precise contours. At the start of his presidency, Joe Biden declared that the battle between democracies and autocracies would be the defining struggle of our time. This was grandiose rhetoric, but was it more than that? What does it actually mean to fight such a battle?

In any number of ways, Russia’s aggression has underscored why Biden was right and why authoritarians — and the authoritarian idea itself — are such a threat to peace and stability. Russia invaded Ukraine, a democracy, because of the recklessness and domination of one man, Vladimir Putin. The countries that have rallied most enthusiastically behind Ukraine have almost uniformly been democracies, chief among them the United States. America is lousy, disappointing, and maddeningly hypocritical in its conduct abroad, but the notion of any moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia has been rendered laughable. And if there is such a thing as a better world, then anti-imperialists may find themselves in the odd position of hoping and praying for the health and longevity of not just the West but of Western power.”

“The “rules-based world order” is a system of norms and values that describe how the world ought to work, not how it actually works. This aspirational order is rooted in the idealistic aftermath of the Second World War, when it was transcribed into a series of documents: the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Genocide Convention, and the Geneva Conventions on the laws of war, among others. In the more than seven decades since they were written, these documents have frequently been ignored. The UN Genocide Convention did not prevent genocide in Rwanda. The Geneva Conventions did not stop the Vietnamese from torturing American prisoners of war, did not prevent Americans at Abu Ghraib from torturing Iraqi prisoners of war, and do not prevent Russians from torturing Ukrainian prisoners of war today. Signatories of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights include known violators of human rights, among them China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela. The UN Commission on Human Rights deteriorated into parody long ago.

Nevertheless, these documents have influenced real behavior in the real world. Soviet dissidents used to embarrass their government by pointing to human-rights language in treaties the Kremlin had signed and did not respect. Even when fighting brutal or colonial wars, countries that had signed treaties on the laws of war either tried to abide by them—avoiding civilian casualties, for example—or at least felt remorseful when they failed to do so. Americans who mistreated Iraqi prisoners of war were court-martialed, convicted, and sentenced to time in military prisons. The British still agonize over the past behavior of their soldiers in Northern Ireland, and the French over theirs in Algeria.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israeli civilians are both blatant rejections of that rules-based world order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all. Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations. Although terrorist tactics are usually associated with small revolutionary movements or clandestine groups, terrorism is now simply part of the way Russia fights wars. Although a sovereign state and a permanent member of the UN Security Council, Russia first began deliberately hitting civilian targets in Syria in 2015, including power stations, water plants, and above all hospitals and medical facilities, 25 of which were hit in a single month in 2019. These attacks were unquestionably war crimes, and those who chose the targets knew they were war crimes. Some of the hospitals had shared their coordinates with the UN to avoid being hit. Instead, Russian and Syrian government forces may have used that information to find them.

(…)

The Hamas terrorists paid no attention to any modern laws of war, or any norms of any kind: Like the Russians, Hamas and its Iranian backers (who are also Russian allies) run nihilistic regimes whose goal is to undo whatever remains of the rules-based world order, and to put anarchy in its place. They did not hide their war crimes. Instead, they filmed them and circulated the videos online. Their goal was not to gain territory or engage an army, but rather to create misery and anger. Which they have—and not only in Israel. Hamas had to have anticipated a massive retaliation in Gaza, and indeed that retaliation has begun. As a result, hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians will now be victims too.

To explain why one permanent member of the UN Security Council and one quasi-state have adopted this kind of behavior, it is best to start with the nature of their own totalitarian regimes. But there is plenty more blame to go around, because the rules-based order, always pretty tenuous, has actually been dying for a long time. Autocracies, led by China, have been seeking to undermine or remove language about human rights and the rule of law from international forums for years, replacing it with the language of “sovereignty.” Not that this is just a matter of language: The Chinese have carried out atrocities against their Uyghur minority for years, so far with impunity, and openly conducted a successful assault on the rights of the population of Hong Kong. They, and others, have also indulged in deliberately provocative behavior, designed to mock the rule of law outside their own borders. Belarus got away with forcing an Irish-owned airplane to land in Minsk and then kidnapping one of its citizens who was onboard. Russia has organized murders of its citizens in London, Washington, and Berlin.

(…)

During its lifetime, the aspirational rules-based world order and the international community that supported it were frequently mocked, and rightly so. The crocodile tears of the statesmen who expressed “profound concern” when their unenforced rules were broken were often unbearable. Their hypocrisy, as they opined on distant conflicts, was intolerable. On Saturday, Russia’s deputy defense minister parodied this kind of talk when he called for “peace” between Israel and Hamas based on “recognized agreements,” as if Russia accepted any “recognized agreements” as a basis for “peace” in Ukraine.

But like the equally outdated Pax Americana that accompanied the rules-based world order—the expectation that the U.S. plays some role in the resolution of every conflict—we might miss the Geneva Conventions when they are gone. Open brutality has again become celebrated in international conflicts, and a long time may pass before anything else replaces it.”

“The history of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh was ended in the old manner of conflict resolution: siege, conquest, expulsion. After a 10-month blockade, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Sept. 19, claiming the enclave in a day and causing nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population to flee. Give war a chance, as the saying goes.

For Armenians, a classic relic ethnic minority whose Christianity and peculiar alphabet date to the epic struggles between the Romans and the Parthians, it was another genocide. For the Azerbaijanis, Turkic in language and historically Shia Muslim, a great triumph. Yet despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.

(…)

In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.

In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.

Iran is not happy with Azerbaijan’s victory. As openly as the Iranians ever do, they’ve threatened to use force against any changes to the borders of Armenia. Iran, a millenniums-old civilization central to a whole continent, cannot tolerate being walled off behind a chain of Turkish dependencies. India, similarly, is on Armenia’s side and has been sending a regular supply of weapons. One spur for such support, no doubt, is Pakistan’s joining the Azeri-Turkish alliance. In the jargon of American lawyers, this opens a whole new can of worms.

Then there’s Russia, whose absence from the denouement in Nagorno-Karabakh was striking. Even after the 1990s, Moscow still remained by far the biggest supplier of weapons to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Their economies and societies, above all the elites and their corruption networks, were until very recently molded together. What we are seeing now, as both nations slip out of Russia’s orbit, might be the second round of Soviet collapse.

(…)

That brought nearly all the perimeter of the former Soviet Union into Russia’s sphere of influence. Rebellious Belarus, its dictator dependent on Russian support, was in hand; so too the war-torn Caucasus. The large and oil-rich Kazakhstan itself requested Russian peacekeepers during a bewildering bout of street violence in January 2022. Strangely, the elite Russian troops soon departed from Kazakhstan. A month later, the whole world realized that they had been dispatched to Ukraine, the last sizable piece of Mr. Putin’s post-Soviet gambit. And there his plan broke down.

History has a habit of serving the same lessons with changed variables. In 1988, it was the dreamer Gorbachev stumbling over Nagorno-Karabakh that unwittingly shattered the world order. Today, Mr. Putin could become the second, much darker incarnation of the Kremlin aggrandizer going awry on all fronts. The consequences — from emboldening international aggression to reanimating the West under the banner of NATO — will be profound. As events in Nagorno-Karabakh show, the fragile post-Cold War order is giving way to something else entirely.

The Caucasus might seem strange and distant. Yet it might prove the wedge that turns the fortunes of world order. Trieste, Smyrna, Sarajevo, Danzig and Crimea were all such places. Let us not have to relearn history at the cost of yet another ethnic cleansing.”

[mariacallous]

As the new House Republican majority stumbles into power, with all the chaotic, embittered bumbling of a rich man’s son who can only seem to fail upwards, another, peculiar kind of political transition is taking place: Nancy Pelosi, 82, is leaving the House speakership, almost certainly for the last time.

Perhaps no individual has come to symbolize the Democrats more to the people who do not like the party. To Republicans, Pelosi has long taken on a kind of mythic malice. To the Fox-watching white male, Pelosi symbolizes liberal elitism, a vague but totalizing specter of corruption, and that particular kind of liberal decadence that can be evoked by the name of the city that makes up nearly all of her longtime congressional district: San Francisco. She’s a woman in power, and she’s long been supportive of gay rights, and she opposed the Iraq war. She’s been a reliable opponent of conservatives’ favorite culture war crusades: she supports gun control and opposes Confederate statues. In an association facilitated by misogyny, her very face is a shorthand for liberal extremism, a visual code that denotes secularism, taxation and frightening new pronouns.

Which was always a bit of a stretch, because the fact of the matter is that the American left tends to hate Pelosi, too. To them, her two terms as speaker – first from 2007 to 2011, and then again from 2019 until this coming January – were eras of strictly enforced centrism. Under Pelosi’s tenure, the congressional agenda was kept well to the right of the base’s preferences, and leftist stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were needlessly sidelined.

Pelosi has taken positions that frustrate and disappoint the Democratic rank and file. She allegedly knew about waterboarding during the war on terror, and she didn’t object to it; she has backed Israel even in its most flagrant violations of Palestinian rights. And for all the fear and hatred she provokes in Republicans, some Democrats found her insufficiently willing to attack them. Under her leadership, the House impeached Donald Trump twice. But the Rubicon of impeachment was crossed only belatedly, in the face of Pelosi’s long, obstinate resistance. Many Democrats felt that the impeachments – along with other congressional oversight efforts against the Trump administration – were too tepid, and came too late.

Neither of these understandings of Pelosi really capture the most striking aspect of her career – which has been characterized, above all, by an almost preternatural ability to discipline her caucus. Perhaps no speaker has been so successful at securing votes and cultivating the loyalties of her members; in interviews, Democratic House members speak of her with awe, like she’s something between a charismatic high school teacher and an emotionally withholding mom. This charisma is carefully cultivated: she famously tells no one her secrets, but has a long memory – both for past favors and past grievances. Some members seem to be eagerly seeking her approval. None seem willing to cross her. She has a natural’s instinct for politics, able to anticipate what will persuade someone to do what she wants them to do before they often know themselves.

Pelosi cultivated this talent from a young age. At the beginning of her political career, Pelosi painted herself as a mom and housewife, the devoted spouse to Paul, an obscenely wealthy financier, and the doting mother of five. But this pretended humility was always a rather flimsy facade. In reality, Pelosi is the scion of an influential Democratic political family from Maryland: her father was a congressman, and both her dad and brother served as mayors of Baltimore. Her job as speaker was one she had been training for since infancy, or at least since she attended her first presidential inauguration, at 12.

After she and her husband moved to San Francisco, Pelosi swiftly rose in the ranks of the California Democratic party, in part because Nancy, with her comfort among elites and the almost coercive power of her charm, was very good at raising money. She was elected to Congress in 1986, and never looked back; she quickly stood out as a charismatic voice in public and an aggressive negotiator in private. Pelosi became the leader of the House Democrats in 2003, and ascended to become the first – and so far, the only – woman to serve as speaker, in 2007.

Under Pelosi’s tenure, the House Democrats have achieved some herculean tasks of political maneuvering. Everything that the Democrats have accomplished legislatively since 2007, they have accomplished thanks to Pelosi’s control of her caucus. She forced through the Dodd-Frank campaign finance reform bill in the face of the kind of fearsome opposition that a politician of weaker will would have balked at. She managed to pass the massive Affordable Care Act, expanding healthcare coverage to millions, in a show of persuasion and strength that could terrify grown men, and did.

These are the kinds of bruising political battles that would end a different congressperson’s career, but Pelosi’s district is among the safest blue seats in the country. She has never faced a real challenger for her spot; during her election years, she doesn’t even engage in debates. Her re-election campaigns are little more than formalities: everyone, in San Francisco and elsewhere, knows that seat belongs to Nancy Pelosi for as long as she wants it. This safety is what allowed Pelosi to turn to her bigger, more national ambitions. Her real constituency has long been the whole country – or at least, the whole of the Democratic party.

But recent years have taken the shine off of Pelosi. She stood in the way when Democrats wanted to pass ethics reforms that would have forbidden members of Congress from trading individual stocks; this past summer, she made the dangerous choice to travel alone to Taiwan, in a show of defiance against Xi Jinping. And the constant attacks on her personally from the right have begun to take a grim toll. This fall, a crazed man, deluded by rightwing media, broke into her California home with a hammer, and attacked Pelosi’s elderly husband, fracturing his skull; the intruder was there looking for Pelosi.

Perhaps the quintessential moment of this part of Pelosi’s career came during the January 6 hearings, when footage of the speaker taken during the Capitol attack emerged. In the hidden location where the House members had been taken, she makes brisk phone calls, searching for a way to clear the Capitol. Her calm competence, contrasted with her extreme physical frailty, made for a portrait of integrity, endurance, courage. But even then, Pelosi seemed out of place. In the video, her institutionalism, and her faith in the legal process, shines through. You get the sense that she feels strongly that everything will be all right, if only she can make the right phone call. As the mob stormed the Capitol, and Trump orchestrated them on Twitter like a symphony conductor, Pelosi’s technocratic proceduralism could not have stood in starker contrast. She looked, perhaps for the first time, like a figure from a lost era.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

I feel like this is a failure of curriculum. The problem with school is it simultaneously takes up too much of your life, and yet doesn’t have enough to teach you everything, which is why I’ve always believed school should strictly teach the basic requirements to function in society as an adult, including reading, writing, basic math, basic computer skills, basic health, and basic history and basic life skills like doing your taxes, changing a tire, etc. Any extra time, should there be any, should be dedicated to providing at least a small selection of courses for students to take based on their own interests.

The problem with school is that to a lot of students, all it’s doing is wasting their time. Not everyone needs to know the intricacies of the human body, they just need to know how to tell if they’re sick and whether they can deal with it at home or if they need to go see a doctor. Not everyone needs to know the periodic table of elements, or the inner workings of the planet, or what people on the Oregon Trail ate for breakfast. School is a glorified course catalog that runs you through various free sample courses to see which pique your interest so that you can see about continuing your education on that subject after you graduate. The problem lies in the fact that, for some reason, we grade these kids on those sample courses, even if they have zero interest in them. Grading students on reading, writing and math makes total sense because those are very important fundamental skills that everyone should have, but grading them on random unimportant information that they will never use in their future is ridiculous.

Regarding history, since that’s the subject of the OP, history really only serves one, maybe two purposes (personally, I think these two are combined, but w/e): to provide perspective and to serve as a warning to future generations. It’s important to learn about the big events, like major wars, or large-scale terrorist attacks, or particularly challenging times in our nation’s history. It’s important to learn what bad things happened, why specifically they happened, what beliefs were held, and what actions were taken by those involved. But I think it’s also important not to dwell on this too much. A lot of the posts I see saying “why didn’t I learn this in school!?” are usually about topics that honestly aren’t important to a general understanding of history, and yes, I’m being blunt about this. There are many large-scale tragedies that ultimately do not matter to an individual’s fundamental learning. I’m not saying we should forget about these events entirely, I’m just saying that it’s not actually important to front-load a bunch of what is essentially pointless trivia information onto young kids.

It’s a lot more complicated than that though, of course. What history is “the right history” to teach? I can’t entirely answer that. I guess I’ll say plainly what I’m kind of trying to dance around saying: a lot of history is just the same shit with different paint. The point of learning about things like war, genocide, discrimination, etc. is not necessarily to learn about very specific events, but instead to learn about the concepts of those things so that we can try to avoid repeating them in the future. The further you go back, the less the specific events really matter. On the contrary, the closer you get to modern times is when the specific events are more important because they provide the context one needs to understand why the world is in the current state that it’s in. Presently, that would be things like 9/11, or the Iraq War, or the ‘08 Recession, etc.

I feel it’s worth mentioning that I’m not arguing for the censoring of any particular history, or any history for that matter. I’m just saying that, like with most classes you’re forced to take in school, they actually try to cram a lot more than what you really need in the short period of time they have you for. If they cut back to just the basics, as that should be the primary goal of school, then I think things would be a lot better.

As someone who’s living with a middle school social studies teacher, all the posts along the lines of “why did we never learn about this historical event in school” just make me go “because your teacher was supposed to cover all of US history in one year, and they didn’t get to the Revolutionary War until Halloween because they were urged to slow down the progression of the lessons because a more senior teacher was running behind, and they didn’t get to the Civil War until Valentine’s Day because the school kept scheduling every special event during social studies because there’s no end-of-grade testing for that subject, and they didn’t get to WWI until May because they were sick for a few days and the substitute couldn’t do much more than babysit, and now they’re having to do the entire Cold War in two days, so that’s why you didn’t hear about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut. They would have loved to tell you about the lesbian inventor of the circus peanut!”

[soaog]

Soggy reads: Ganz, John - When the Clock Broke (2024)

Subtitle: 'Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s'

"We shall repeal the twentieth century."

In 2002, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder won re-election by the slimmest imaginable margin: 6,000 votes. He did it partially by distancing himself as far as possible from the impending invasion of Iraq by the United States and its Coalition of the Willing. Not having been personally wronged on September 11, 2001 but very much so by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he consigned Germany and France to "Old Europe"¹, anywhere between 70-80% of the German public were opposed to the war, and Schröder managed to make the 2002 election a referendum on whether Germany ought to follow America into Iraq or not.

The invasion caused a precipitious decline in Germans' appraisal of the United States as a country and as an ally that would not be reversed until the election of Barack Obama. Since then at least there has been a reliable pattern to German public opinion on the U.S.: They're good when a Democrat is President and bad when a Republican is. Against the odds, the Germans reliably manage to land on the common-sensical position on the topic.

Although America has been Germany's primary benefactor during the 20th century, they do so mostly without being particularly well-informed about their uncle Sam. German foreign correspondents seem content to mostly regurgitate what they see on cable news one or two days after the fact. Annika Brockschmidt's 2021 Amerikas Gotteskrieger became a minor politicum in itself when Germany's reflexively transatlantic conservatives tried to smear it as "an obvious caricature"².

I suspect their thinking might go a little something like this: If the Germans knew, really knew, what America was actually like beyond a certain estrangement about the difference in our health care systems or our implementations of freedom of speech or the gun thing, the socio-cultural foundation for the transatlantic alliance may very well disappear. Purely on its merits as an economic bloc, Europe and America already rejected one another in the shape of TTIP. On the merits as a political and military alliance, well, see above. What keeps this joint together is a basic, unquestioned understanding of a vague similarity. After all, yes, Wilson took away their Sauerkraut, but isn't a plurality of Americans originally from Germany in one way or another?

Perhaps in a few years time, they may not need fret anymore. The political culture of all developed, in fact, of all countries, is rapidly converging onto the same set of cleavages that the United States have been familiar with for quite a while now: Urban/rural, old/young, educated/uneducated, majority/minority. I've thus long held that it's fruitful to look toward America for a rough outline of things to come. If you squint, you can see a little bit of Barack Obama in Olaf Scholz, if not in his personality then at least in the trajectory of his tenure. As Obama was dogged by the Tea Party, the debt ceiling and regular government shutdowns, so Scholz is dogged by the Free Democrats, the debt brake and regular revisions to the federal budget. And potential Trumps abound in contemporary Germany's political scene: Merz, Spahn, Weidel, Höcke - take your pick.

But when did everything go so wrong in that shining city on a hill? According to John Ganz, in 1992. Okay, that's not quite what he's arguing, but Ganz situates his portrait of an America cracking up to the backdrop of the 1992 presidential election. And it is a backdrop, the election is context, not the actual protagonist. It's almost as if Ganz lets on that it didn't matter whether Bush (that's H.W.), Clinton or Perot won because confronted with the end of the Cold War, the end of a particular economic model and the end of an implied cultural understanding, they all had more or less the same things to offer to replace them: Culture war, free trade and deficit hawkery.

And so the three candidates are joined as co-protagonists by a number of men who and events which also broke the clock: David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, Pat Buchanan, Randy Weaver, Daryl Gates, the 1992 L.A. race riots and the "Rooftop Koreans", Waco, the paleo- and the neo-conservatives locked into a civil war over the future of the Republican Party and the United States, John Gotti ...

The 1992 election cycle, the events that informed it and its immediate aftermath makes for a sturdy frame within a number of people, independently of one another at first but as time went on increasingly in dialogue with one another collectively sketched the contours of American and by extension world politics for decades to come: Conspiracism, white supremacy, foreign wars, the dang deficit, outsourcing, organized crime. Following contemporary American politics even a little bit you'd be surprised at how much stuff was apparently prefigured 20-30 years prior. I first realized Ganz was on to something when he revealed to me that Dinesh d'Souza, known to me as a right-wing faux-investigative journalist and failed filmmaker first made a splash writing a tract about "the politics of race and sex on campus" in 1991 and we're basically still forced to talk about that sh*t three decades later.

This book divides its roughly 370 pages into 13 individually easily digested episodes. None of them overstay their welcome, nothing feels superfluous. It doesn't have an epilogue: We're living in it.

¹An expression that would go on to become "Worst Word" of its respective year in Germany.

²https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-pivot-from-america/

[harrison-abbott]

on something else

The minute I regained consciousness there were spurs of bad mood in me. I thought about how I was going to be kicked out of my room in about six months. And how I had little power to stop it. And I got up and went through to the bathroom to urinate. My reflection always seemed ugliest in the morning. Back in my bedroom I tried to rest for a while but, when I wake up I usually can’t switch my mind off again.

I played a couple of videogames on the retro TV. I was really good at the football game, with a controller, and really shit at the actual sport in real life. And I remember those rain sodden fields when I was wee, running about a field somewhere in Edinburgh, when my Dad courageously came to see our team get beat every weekend.

After the games I thought I should do something useful. So I read a novel from the 19th century. I liked the language, and I realised that it was good. It’s just that it was hard to concentrate on.

I was all fucked up with memories, that connected with me being annexed from the very room wherein I was reading. The memory of the pair of people who were doing the annexation. And how they had changed very little in the decades that I’d known them. It was crazy how people could apologise for historical crimes and that instead of feeling sore about them, instead of acting on the guilt, they just did the same things, said the same words. They couldn’t see what they were actually like.

Then again, there was one character in this classic novel who was exactly like that too. The theme gave you something to write about.

The last 30 hours or so, it had rained a month’s worth of rain. And the street, with the emerging daylight, was steaming and sluicing, the trees across the wall drenched and teeming, and even the birds weren’t as berserk as they usually were.

When I was a kid it didn’t rain as much and the seasons weren’t as interchangeable with wacky weather, and the odd thing was that I was only 31 years old. And, yet, I still couldn’t figure out whether that was young, or not, anymore.

I turned my laptop on and looked through the news and the UK government had decided to call a surprise General Election. Out of fear and panic, I suppose … and the papers were all abloom with headlines, carted along with the names of these middle aged men who were supposed to be in charge of 67 million people. It was astonishing how fickle topics like politics were. And you remembered what had happened for the last few decades. There was the Iraq War when you were a kid. Which was basically mass genocide that nobody was ever tried and sentenced for. And then there was Brexit, which was about the biggest geopolitical fuck up of all time. And you, personally, didn’t have anything to do with those things.

My dog was barking downstairs.

She was going senile because she was a border collie who had lost the pace of her legs and she often got confused. So I went down into the kitchen to calm her down. I let her out into the back garden so she could pee and shit. Despite being old and dotty, she was still a very beautiful animal. I often wondered whether it would be easier to be a dog than a human, mentally. Maybe.

I thought I’d make a sandwich. Humous, tomatoes, cucumber, onion.

As I was chopping I noticed a scar on my left hand, as I was holding an onion bulb … and I didn’t remember how I got that particular scar.

There were two other scars on the palm of the same hand, which I’d had since I was a boy, and I couldn’t remember how they ever got there: and I asked my parents about them before, but they still can’t locate what caused those two white streaks of scars either. … And, on my right hand there remain two scars that I got from working in restaurant jobs, with wet skin, knives, and broken glass. … And there were lots of scars all over my body that I don’t really want to explain how they got there.

I took the sandwich upstairs. Would eat it before I went to sleep.

My friend had recommended a movie to me. It was by a director I liked. But, when I watched it, it didn’t seem like a movie that was made by the same director. It was kinda a sex-comedy [is that a genre?] and it seemed a bit tacky and not as smart as his other flicks. It wasn’t bad, by any means, I just wasn’t in the mood for it.

I wrote a few poems and stories and posted them on Tumblr. For the last few years I thought I may as well show people what I write, even though I’ve never met them and they live in different parts of the planet, and even though I still have no clue if I have any talent as a writer. I suppose that you just have to try, as an artist: because if you don’t, then self doubt hollows you out and you end up loathing consciousness, you end up wishing that you didn’t have to think so intensely, all the time. With writing, it can be a away to escape, and make other tiny worlds. Even if not everybody digs your stuff. Or, very few people do.

The morning was changing into afternoon. And, it had actually stopped raining.

On the news forecast there was one of those jagged orange lightning bolts over a puffy grey cloud, signalled for the next night. Good, I thought. I always thought thunderstorms were cool.

The weather would only worsen anyway.

My mind started to get all clogged up with bad memories again. So I did some further writing, to try and concentrate on something else.

[heavenforblog1111]

American Idiot is the title track of the album 'American Idiot' by the rock band Green Day. The album was released on 21st September 2004. In 2000, Green Day had released the album 'The Warning' which came off as a disappointment in terms of commercial success. The band then decided to take a break before they came up with the next album which was supposed to be 'Cigarettes and Valentines'. The album was discontinued when the master tapes were stolen. Instead of recreating the album again, the band decided to start from scratch and tried to produce a new album which ended up being 'American Idiot'. Rob Cavallo, the band's long time producer wasn't sure if the band could produce the album because the band members were all living their seperate lives and he wasn't sure if the chemistry was still going to be there. The truth is, when they started making American Idiot, they were each living their own separate lives, and no one was really sure how the chemistry was going to be, They all had to deal with a lot of personal stuff before they could be great again. And when they first came to me and said, 'Let's get the band back together and make the best rock record we can,' I wasn't totally sure they could do it. Rob Cavallo Song Meaning https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee_uujKuJMI The album tells the story of Jesus of Suburbia who is an adolescent belonging to a lower middle class American background. He is considered to be an anti hero who hates his family, friends and home. The theme of the album is rage and love as we can see in the poster depicting a heart in shape of a grenade held tightly in the hand. Jesus of Suburbia is the living embodiment of these emotions. Billie felt inspired to write the song after listening to a Lynyrd Skynyrd song being played on his car radio, while he was driving to the studio. The song was a pro redneck agenda song and this got Billie riled up. On reaching the studio, he penned down his thoughts. It was like, I'm proud to be a redneck and I was like, Oh my God, why would you be proud of something like that? This is exactly what I'm against. I looked at the guys like, 'Do you mind that I'm saying this?' And they were like, No, we agree with you. And it started the ball rolling. Billy Joe Armstrong The song American Idiot is about politics, media and represents the situation of America in 2004. Billie Joe through this song was stating his opposition to the 'Redneck Agenda'. George W. Bush had led America to a war with Iraq following the 9/11 attack. Billie Joe felt that the media had gone overboard with news and reality shows depicting violent scenes. They had all these Geraldo-like journalists in the tanks with the soldiers, getting the play-by-play. Billie Joe Armstrong The song talks about the news media being controlled and not representing the actual things occurring. Televisions showcase a reality that is fake and promises dreams that are not supposed to come true. The masses are blinded by the false propagandas of the media and form beliefs that are opposite of what goes on in reality, meanwhile promoting tension, hysteria and paranoia through their coverage. The song urges people to think in the right way and not follow agendas blindly. The song was written under George W. Bush's presidency, however Billie stated that he did not think of the song as an opposition to George W. Bush in particular. I would never think of American Idiot as being about the Bush administration specifically. It’s about the confusion of where we’re at right now. Billie Joe Armstrong The world’s in a confused state. I’m pissed off, and I’m angry, and I feel like I’m not fully represented. Mike Dirnt In the music video, the band is playing in what seems like a warehouse against a green flag with 48 stars (thought to be symbolic of the US National Flag). The green color is probably a reference to the band. Eventually the stripes of the flag melt and flow down and a green liquid is sprayed from the amplifiers.

The band later put down their instruments and leave once they are finished playing the music.

[macrotiis]

They probably did say that, but I'm inclined to believe it's bullshit bc of course, a game about fighting wars is going to have some political implications.

Plus like, CoD wasn't rly doing the Iraq war in the early post 9/11 days. It was mostly WWII & the Cold War.

The US military was set to provide funding to the production of Call of Duty games, as well as sponsors to esports tournaments & popular twitch streamers in efforts to grow a positive attitude among the GenZ crowd towards recruitment.

The only thing that rly put a stop to this was the sexual harassment lawsuit against ActivisionBlizzard. It was also because of this lawsuit it became pretty wide knowledge that Frances Townsend, former Homeland Security Advisor to President Bush in 2004 to 2007, was the chief compliance officer overseeing government affairs working at ActivisionBlizzard from 2021 to 2022. This information is pretty easy to find just by searching her name.

That's a short-term, but it does say that the US government has a vested interest in how games about war portray the US military & that the figure heads from the post 9/11 era still hold a lot of structural power over our entertainment.

As of right now, it isn't really known how much control the military has on video games, but considering the hold it has over Hollywood, I wouldn't be surprised if it's a similar situation. The Guardian did an article about this way back in 2014 which is pretty interesting also, not even just bc of this but the way CoD kinda predicted the information war happening today.

Also I wanna say, this response isn't at all meant as like a dunk or attack on you. I'm just a really autistic media & design student who cares a lot about the impact the media we create & consume has on us socially. This subject in particular is something I'm especially interested in as I want to be game developer myself 😅

I rly hate the Satanic Panic & the moral panic surrounding violence in video games in the 90s, coz it's now impossible to talk about the social implications of violent video games in a realistic sense.

No, violence in video games does not create serial killers in the way most people imagine it would.

However, it's very important to notice how after 9/11, a lot of violent video games pivoted their content from silly gratuitous cartoon gore to more realistic military shooters set in the Levant from a US American lens. It's also important to notice the connection of these games & their toxic online multi-player voice chats to Gamer Gate in 2014.

It's obviously not as black & white as it was presented in the 80s & 90s, I dont think everyone who played early Call of Duty games is a white supremacist who wants to join the military to kill people in the middle east, but I think it's dangerous to pretend like video games or any media can't have an impact on the way people think about violence.

I think what makes all the difference here is how that violence is portrayed, what the message behind it is, what the motives are behind the people who crafted that message, who the victims of that violence are, how they are portrayed & the greater cultural context that surrounds it.

[sakebytheriver]

It is really interesting the way my dad and my politics differ from each other, because for the most part we agree on basically everything at the surface level and on a solution level as well and so our disagreements are extremely semantic in truthfully unhelpful ways

For example in the first week of the Gazan genocide our disagreement was not on the horrfic nature of the event itself or what should be done, but on whether it could be called a genocide, he's very particular on which words to use and what to say and felt like I was being overly flippant and just throwing the word around without being careful about the historical context of the term and the groups of people who suffered from it and how he thinks the word cannot be applied until a certain threshold and my argument back at him was to stress that I am absolutely not throwing the word around carelessly and that experts agree with me and how the term genocide cannot be used only after it's already happened and that we must ascribe the term when we see the warning signs etc. etc.

Anyways, just something I think about a lot, with how I hear people talk to their parents who don't watch the news or who are educated on the opposite political spectrum whereas my dad and I have basically all the same political beliefs in the broad sense so our disagreements always happen at a more semantic level, I've never had to convince my dad to be on the side of queer rights, when I went home for the first time after the blowup against trans rights he was the one who brought up how ridiculous it all was, my dad was one of the only people in his life who was agains the Iraq war and the Patriot Act at the time when the propaganda was at its highest, he even happily admits that capitalism is a broken system. But of course at the same time I can't get him to ascribe to a different system, he doesn't think anything but regulated capitalism will work, sometimes he has the most neo lib takes I have ever heard, our political discussions are not constantly filled with agreement, but I do find it nice that I can engage my dad on a political level that is leagues above the kind of "human beings deserve rights, actually" level so many of my peers have to go through with their conservative parents, like I can actually engage my father like the adult he is and thats a privilege not many have

[theveteranside]

 I know I'm already a few stories into this, but I want to apologize to you right now. I'm apologizing for my fucked up non-linear thinking. I'm not sure if I have always been this scatter-brained or if it came after the deployment. I can't say that I remember either. I guess the purpose of this particular blog is to give you an insight to how our brains work now, why we are assholes, and why we take the risks we do. Among many other things. So, Ill try and articulate that as much as I can. This blog will not follow a timeline because it was all flashes then and it's all flashes now. Enjoy the ride, it's our daily lives. Mine anyway.

You know, once our unit was done with the deployment to Iraq, we got redeployed back to Germany. We went from one-hundred-thirty degree weather to thirty degree weather, in twelve hours. That's how it was. We can go from one extreme to another, no problem. Ah, but the only problem is that we still do that. We do that because that is all we know. Here's the only catch, we never really left that war. Sure, we came back home (some of us), we are physically here. But in all honesty, we never left that war, we are still in it. We fight it every day. We look around us and see our battle buddies fucking killing themselves at alarming rates, twenty-two a day. Remember that. 

Have you ever noticed that we are like magnets? We can find other veterans, especially those that were in the same campaigns, and we form a bond instantly. We form that bond because, right off the bat, we know that if shit came down to it, we got each other's back.....to the death. Everyone I fought beside had that mentality, we still do. Even twenty years later, across continents, I know who I can trust. 

People ask me why I never really talk about my time in Iraq. Sure, I say things here and there. I had some good experiences. But what I saw there, I wouldn't ever want my children to see. Shit, I don't want YOU to see it. But after years of stuffing it down, I have come to the conclusion that if I let it out, I just might be able to move on from it. Either way, a big part of me is still out there in that god damn desert. You'll see how and why we have our fucked up sense of humor, it's how we got through those times. It's still how we get through shit.

I could keep going in this jumbled mess that is my brain but I think, for organizational purposes, Ill try and break up all these experiences into these little stories. Sand. Weapons. Gear. Our lovely tans. Whatever I feel to focus on for that particular memory, I guess.