Tulsi Gabbard fired about a hundred spies because they used a secure NSA service to make explicit, sexytimes comments to each other. She offered up the predictable reasons: they weren’t professional, it’s a danger to security, unsurprising stuff. In particular, though, the chatrooms were queer-friendly and it can be contextualized as an anti-DEI move.
Continue reading Tulsi Gabbard fires spies to the joy of Russia and China
I just finished End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin. The book has a fascinating premise that I’d never heard so clearly said: social unrest arises because unhappy populations are subjected to countries with political infighting. Which, well, that’s not necessarily news. What is news is that he identifies why the political infighting occurs, which is a surplus of wannabe elites, the elite aspirants.
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I asked a question on Bluesky, and I’ll repeat it here: what happens to US superheroes when the US is obviously in imperial decline? (And, moving forward, I am only talking about mainstream superheroes, almost exclusively the ones owned by Marvel and DC. Indie comics are a wild and wonderful woolly world of weirdness and likely to remain so forever.) The response I got on Bluesky, since I used Captain America as an example, is that now and then, Cap will leave the role to someone else, such as during the Watergate Era. But my question wasn’t what would superheroes do when the US made a mistake but about American superheroes in an age of imperial decline (and despite a few instances when they do something, most of the time they are silent; Cap has yet to opine on an insurrectionist rapist being in the Oval Office currying favor with tyrants over democratically elected leaders being invaded by those tyrants… if Cap quit over a bit of light spying by Nixon, you’d think he’d quit over that, but times have changed.) I think it’s a question worth looking at, given the cache that superheroes have had on the global scene with the rise of the MCU.
Continue reading Superheroism in the Decline of the American Empire
Here’s a fnord for you all: the US is positioning European nations as rivals while demanding an increase in their military budgets. Think about it. What happens when countries like Germany, in a post-NATO world, start boosting their military budgets? Is… is the US happy when China increases it’s military budget? Does it leap for joy when Iran or North Korea spends more on missiles? Any increase in the military capacity of any country is contrary to the nationalistic and imperial interests of the Trump regime. The more European countries grow their militaries, the less powerful the US will be, contrary to the very foreign policy that the Trump regime is creating.
Continue reading Today’s Fnord: MAGA’s Foreign Policy in Europe is Contradictory Even to MAGA
When I was a younger man, I was interested in conspiracy theories. I didn’t believe in them, but I was interested in them and the people who did believe in them. This was pre-Internet. While there were some big-name conspiracies – “who shot JFK” and “alien autopsies in Area 51” stuff – most of it was in the dark corners of the world: a few nutjobs with pirate radio stations rambling into the desert ether, mimeographed newsletters full of rambling purple prose, and badly edited and barely readable books. I was fascinated both by the horror and credulity of conspiracy theorists. They combined a totalizing belief in a nightmarish fantasy with a profound level of intentional ignorance that I found – and find – chilling.
Today’s conspiracy theorists are out in the open, often in high office. But how did it happen? How did we get here? I believe I have the answer, and the answer is social media.
Continue reading Killing Conspiracy Theories is Killing Social Media
I’m not a liberal or, really, a Democrat (though during the Trump years, I registered with the Democratic Party because I understood his unique threat to the country.) (Edit: I’m a leftist, usually identifying as a red-green.) So, yeah, I went to Bluesky because fuck Facebook and X, and it’s very liberal over there. Given the times, there’s a lot of stress about Trump’s regime, and a lot of people are going, “How could this have happened?” They aren’t lifting a mirror to themselves, so I will.
A lot of what’s happening has been coming for a long time, and much of it has been abetted by the Democratic Party and its liberals.
I dislike the saying “the wrong side of history.” History doesn’t have a side. It’s the study of the past, that’s it.
Granted, some historical narratives can seem like historians are choosing sides, but they aren’t. So, yes, I fully expect that the historical consensus on Trump will one day be, “The Trump administration weakened the foreign policy of the US by attacking traditional allies with strong democracies and siding with authoritarian leaders in Russia, China, and other places. His policies at home drove dissent, worsened inequality, sparked civil conflict, and saw a reduction in the US standard of living. He was also responsible for stalling global action about climate change which had disastrous consequences while worsening wars all over the world.”
So… there’s a good chance that NATO – the pillar of global peace in the post-World War II era – is a spent force. Trump has probably broken NATO by saying that if Russia starts a war with European nations over Ukraine, they’re on their own, including the US’s NATO allies. It looks like the US is working on a pro-Russia peace settlement and forcing it on Ukraine without input from anyone else. Regardless of what happens in Ukraine, the message is loud and clear: The US is more on the side of Russia than its NATO allies in Europe.
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There’s an article in The Atlantic, “How Progressives Froze the American Dream,” by Yoni Appelbaum. Beyond the point that there’s much to criticize about the article in terms of fact (such as physical mobility being uniquely American – tell that to, say, medieval Mongols or ancient Greeks,) but I want to focus on Appelbaum’s critique of progressiveness. To Appelbaum, somehow, the problem is that those darn progressives value equality! Not the generations during which fundamentalists have gutted American education, particularly in poor states. Nope. Not THAT. Not that! Not the deindustrialization of the US that gutted the middle class through the Rust Belt. Not that, either. Not greedy capitalist land developers or the lack of political will to make affordable housing in urban areas. Nope. Not them.
This video by a Danish military expert, Anders Puck Nielsen, talks about social media and how to improve it. What he suggests is typical of most well-meaning people who want to improve social media, but all of them are at least slightly bizarre because we all know that won’t happen without government regulation.
While watching Nielsen’s post, I saw some fnords. First, Nielsen starts by suggesting an unbiased algorithm. He’s talking about right-wing versus left-wing. He ignores – as do most people – that the biggest and most significant bias in social media algorithms is the one that creates profitability for their owners. I’d say that most of social media’s problems for society have this as their root: they are designed to make their owners fabulous amounts of cash and give them enormous power, and they’re highly successful in that goal, and everything else flows from the “make money and grow powerful” imperative.
