Wannabe Apparatchik

race also follows the same dynamic—people not actively being racist and judging them for being racist is just as much of an existential threat to their social order as men who don’t hate women are

/where a massive portion of society is comprised of people to whom these old values are not “the normal” but in fact seen as actively awful, which poses an existential threat to the future of their entire value system, because we will, some day, suppress their traditions in the name of freedom.

in order to free the individual we have had to, very limitedly relative to what must be done, chip away at the oldest tyrant of all, the Father-Husband, the closest thing we have ever made to God. this destabilizes everything, it allows people to break the cycle, and we’ve hit a critical point/

a lot of this has always existed—it was simply that many less people had been broken free, so nothing was visibly wrong since everyone was in. the way of life was not under threat, so solidarity, community, were possible while defending the order. the fulfillment of liberalism has broken this

they know, deep down, that the only way to maintain the unbroken chain of nightmare that they have been raised to perpetuate is to prevent anyone from ever standing outside of it and looking back.

they care about pushing their horrific lifestyle as the One True Way because they understand the power of judgement. they know that whenever we lift the veil on their traditions we find only abuse and misery, and they have to ask themselves, every time, if we are right. this is worse than death.

more than that, the reason they cannot stand this is because they cannot stand the idea of being judged. the thing that makes them feel oppressed is the fact that we are free to dislike them.

it is not remarked upon enough that these guys just genuinely and sincerely hate america and hate americans

yes sir we've found a perfect candidate, but first I should tell you, he's a duck, which obviously presents some qualification issues, but he makes an incredible milkshake

please god can Omaha and KC et al go off like blueberry thermonuclear weapons

Just as a complete aside, it is always very funny to me that the US government calls the department that manufactures nuclear weapons “the Department of energy”, like that is an incredible bit

The right has correctly identified the professional-managerial class as the class with the most revolutionary potential in the current period and have directed all their energies to destroy it before it becomes aware of itself and its own power

the real horror of foreign policy is realizing that the people involved actually do believe in things after all

anyways, barring positive documentary evidence, the oil thesis remains entirely speculative and unsupported.

willing and eager to put his oil on the international market, and global oil companies were happy to purchase it without a war.

Moreover, Iraq's major oil contracts after the war went to America's strategic rivals, not US companies. Real brilliant plan if the war was about oil.

This is an incredibly tenacious myth about the Iraq War, pushed relentlessly by the Jacobin-y left.

But there's no evidence for it. No evidence that policy-makers had oil as even a secondary or tertiary motive for invading.

And it would make zero sense to do this, as Saddam was perfectly/

absolutely hallucinatory man they really memory-holed her entire campaign

The first 3: definitely not about oil.

The story of civil rights is that African Americans were integrated into existing democratic urban machine politics and then took over/created their own machines over time

Mentioned this before, but I often wonder how much conservative gender-anxiety is just aversion to complexity and if maybe they’d be totally fine with like six different gender identifies if they were clearly defined and harshly policed. Real gender centrism has never been tried.

the soviet union’s great power was that they had an economy that wasn’t a ponzi scheme. the nazi myth is that they were doing “human waves” and just sacrificing troops uselessly because “asiatic hordes”. this is false, they used their superiority effectively and strategically to win.

the ussr did field more troops than the axis, and more tanks, and more guns, they did this because they were better resourced and better at procuring shit (including from the us) that was “good enough” rather than having 10 slightly different versions of the same tank

So it is not great that we're going to lose four entire years preparing for this new reality because the SecDef is a TV host who has never moved beyond the one war he knows but does not understand (the GWOT) and does not have the mental acuity to remotely encompass the scope of his own job.

But *fundamentally* Big Boy War is won with spreadsheets, it is won with production, it is won with research and development.

Troop training and fitness matter, but on the margins. In WWII, we buried the better men in steel; the USSR buried them in just more men.

Spreadsheets win wars.

Over three administrations now (Trump, Biden, Trump) the consensus has been that Big Boy War Is Back. But none of these administrations - nor the DoD - has been willing to face down what that actually *means* because the changes would be uncomfortable.

So we say BBW is back, but pretend it isn't.

Russia burned off more than 4,000 tanks, 8,000 IFVs, 300 manned aircraft (fixed and rotor), more than 2,000 self-propelled heavy systems (art, rocket, AA, etc) fighting a defiant, brave, doughty but fundamentally third-string power in Ukraine.

A Big Boy War would be Bigger. Much Bigger.

"If you want a picture of the future of war, imagine a guy jumping through a flaming hoop to assuage the masculinity-anxiety of his boss - forever."

side point but the idea that if you make a human grade robot intellect it will do whatever you say without protest seems underexamined

the thing we don't see about the "are we the baddies" Mitchell & Webb sketch is when that Nazi realizes that, since he's the baddie, he needs to fight extra hard because the people on the other side *definitely* know he's the baddie

the thing that really stands out to me about the right right now is that they're *scared* because they actually understand that if they fail to dehumanize all the groups they hate, they will be driven out of society. they're completely right that they're hated, and they know they deserve it.