This is an important story, that the news media tried to just sort of … slip past, without dwelling on it. But it’s an important indicator of how and why our political media has become such a mess. Of course I believe it has always been a mess – for example, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded a newspaper [wik] as a self-propaganda arm against the federalists, and it has just gone downhill from there.
In my recent post about government’s manifest failure in the face of climate change, GerrardOfTitanServer naturally cropped up and started banging the “Nuclear is our only option” drum. I got so annoyed – he has pulled several comment threads into the weeds in the past – with him that I implied that maybe he could fuck off a little bit.
I regret that. The philosophical ideal would be to not be King Thag of This Blog, and fall back on my authority – which is real as far as bits in this corner of the internet go – I should have had the patience to engage, instead. So, I thought about GerrardOfTitanServer’s arguments for, oh, 5 minutes, and noticed a few gigantic, glaring holes in them. This posting is about that, and I welcome and invite anyone who wants to argue with GerrardOfTitanServer to go ahead.
This can be the GerrardOfTitanServer thread and, note to GerrardOfTitanServer: do not continue to drag other comment threads into endless text-walls of argumentation or I’ll shut you down. You’ve got your thread, now, here you go, this is it.
Lacking a better term for it, I mentally think of my deep suspicion regarding civilization as “anti-social” because it is, literally, a distrust of society verging on the belief that maybe civilization will turn out to be a bad idea in the long run. In my darker moments I think that civilization may be a great big hack that was perpetrated by the power-hungry, and those seeking luxurious lives. It’s as if they invented the idea of “lets be a ‘people’ so that they could be king of ‘a people’ instead of just layabout greedy thugs.
Mario Savio:
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels … upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
I stumbled across this on the internets, forwarded it around to a few of my knife-making buddies, and everyone had a good laugh and a snark and then got quiet. The only way to deal with it is to assume it’s a set-up.
I am contemptuous of the stupidity of anti-vaxxers; anyone who studies the merest whiff of epidemiology and virology is going to understand that vaccines are a really good thing. All you have to do is ask anyone you know who has suffered from smallpox. Oh, you don’t know anyone who has had smallpox? End of discussion.
From the “nobody should be surprised but everyone should be shocked” department, Israel has apparently decided that it’s going to keep the Golan heights.
This scared the shit out of me. And, worse, I subsequently figured out a better way to do what I was trying to do, anyway.
The game of tax avoidance is one of the corrupt scandals of the US’ ridiculous regime.
The Father of the Pakistani h-bomb has died, apparently from long-term complications from COVID-19.