So, this morning I’ll be tottling down to the polling place to cast my vote; a vote which we all recognize lies somewhere between a part of democracy, and an opinion poll. It’s mostly a waste of time, I think, but I live in a swing-state and I loathe Trump, and I’m casting my vote as a “twittergram to the donald” more than anything else.
In my recent post “Nationalism Is A Lie” there was so much horror behind what I wrote, that I was either going to have to write a textbook-length incoherent screed,* or leave a lot on the table. So I thought that rather than diverticulating into asides, I’d post this piece separately.
Trigger warning: really horrible people doing really horrible things, with a walk-on by the Roman Catholic Church
Jean Meslier
By metaphysics, God is made a pure spirit, but has modern theology advanced one step further than the theology of the barbarians?
The first poem I learned by heart was Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” (here)
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,And towards our distant rest began to trudge.Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hootsOf gas-shells dropping softly behind.
If any question why we died,Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Florian smiled around the edge of his beer and said, wryly, “We Swiss are not pacifists because we are weak; it’s because we were rental soldiers in the dark age and renaissance. Fighting for your own selfish reasons is bad marketing.”
About a decade ago, I did a series of talks at various conferences entitled “cyberwar is bullshit” – the problem, I felt, was that the US was talking about being deeply afraid of cyberattack from Eurasia (or was it Eastasia?) but there was considerable irresponsible talk about “weapons of mass destruction-like capability.” Industry insiders like myself wound up divided as to whether it was likely/practical, or good marketing/a chance to make a fast buck. There were a lot of fast bucks made.
This is what it looks like out here, this time of year. There’s a house up the street that has a yellow tree like this, and a red one, close together. Some years they both go colors at the same time, and it’s eye-bending.
They say that Marcus Brutus, before he killed himself, pronounced these words: “O Virtue! I believed that you were a real thing, but you are nothing but a vain phantom!…”
In 1987 or so, I was working for Welch Medical Library at the early stages of the human gene-mapping project. We had funding from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Library of Medicine, and had a small lab of programmers and researchers thinking hard about medical informatics and retrieval systems.
I’ve always been suspicious of power.* One of the warning signs I’m especially alert to is when I see language being bent or waterboarded in the interest of obscuring facts, rather than clarifying them. When a new word suddenly begins to take on a heavily-freighted meaning, e.g: “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide” I immediately ask myself “why that word, and not the other perfectly useable words?” The sudden promotion of or carpet-bombing with a new term is often an indicator that someone has decided to start using a new word with a subtly different definition – basically, lying by redefining the truth.