Eventually I will stop making fun of the “tactical” gear mindset. But for now, since I’m stuck in an airport, I’m going to continue to trawl through the justifications in hope of understanding.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Eventually I will stop making fun of the “tactical” gear mindset. But for now, since I’m stuck in an airport, I’m going to continue to trawl through the justifications in hope of understanding.
When the US invaded Iraq and overthrew the government, we heard a bit about “nation-building” until the establishment discovered it no longer knew how to do that, and/or wasn’t willing to pay the price that it paid rebuilding Germany, Japan, and South Korea. [Read more…]
My posting about the paradox of “self defense” triggered much more response than I expected. [stderr]
Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
Warning: War, Death
Administrative note: I made an error attributing the movie and confused a different movie with a release of the same film under a different name. Explanation is [here] – in order to reduce confusion, I have done an edit-pass. If you see comments about how I am talking about the wrong movie, they are correct with respect to the initial version of this posting. Sorry about the confusion!
I don’t know if I have the necessary skill to convey how upsetting this topic is. I wish I could borrow the skills of Orpheus from somewhere, and get other people to watch it, get angry and scared, and – do something. I don’t even know what we can do, trapped as we are in the reality of nationalism and out-of-control militarism.
Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.
If you don’t like spoilers, don’t read any further. But there’s really nothing to spoil. You already know roughly what happens.
Warning: War, death, violence
I just finished reading Mark Bowden’s Huế, 1968. Since it’s history, I won’t warn you of any spoilers.
Whenever we read an account of the beginning of WWI it’s necessary for the historian to first lay out the landscape of interlocking defense treaties that turned Europe into a sort of Venn diagram of fantasy militarism. To me, it’s a reminder of the great Avalon Hill game Diplomacy which we played in my high school Military History Club (AKA: D&D club) – everyone secretly negotiating with everyone else against everyone else. For Europe, the results were grim, and I needn’t go into them.
I think that the chart is probably conservative; there are a lot of undeclared conflicts that look a lot like war to the victims but aren’t because it’s not convenient to use the W-word.
The CIA regularly deals with nasty people. Probably, it’s got something to do with the fact that they are nasty people, too.
Apparently Stanislav Petrov died in May, but the news simply didn’t get around.