You probably already have heard of this; if you haven’t, I’m sorry.
The DoD is planning on executing the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Hassan, on livestream TV.
In case you were thinking that the country is going to turn around and stop its dive into the abyss, it’s probably time to abandon hope.
What can we do? I’m going to write a letter to the EU Parliament recommending that the EU no longer accept extradition requests by the US for anything. It’s not much but at this moment, it’s all I can think of. In my fantasies, some other nation that has good cyberwarriors [redacted] could interfere with the broadcast, but the problem is not the broadcast, so much as the idea of the broadcast. The Marquis De Sade would not be disgusted by this – he’d be excited – but not because of the cruelty, rather because of the way it exposes the violence of the state. De Sade was an anti-aristocrat and anti-theist, as well as the other stuff, and I bring him into the discussion because for all his other faults, he knew his way around propaganda warfare. Of course, who we really need is Voltaire and Mark Twain. Instead, we have state-controlled media that would have disgusted Stalin.
Meanwhile, in other interesting stuff, I’d like to recommend the most recent episode of the Martyr Made podcast. Darryl seems to be trying to do something that I think will be very difficult – he’s trying to explain why Europe and particularly Germany, Austria, and Poland got their anti-jew hatred on so hard in the inter-war years.
Usually, we are treated to some tale about Hitler’s rise that runs along the lines of “there was a sense that Germany was betrayed at the end of WW1, and amoral opportunists like Hitler blamed the jews as a convenient scapegoat.” But as Darryl tells it, it’s way more complicated than that – the association between jews and communism, and European anti-communism also had a leavening effect for the whole massive, nasty, cake. It’s long; I’m only part way through, but it’s certainly making me think dour thoughts.
How can a civilized nation revert to barbarism? Well, it seems to me that the barbarism has to be right there below the surface and it takes a pied piper to bring it out with the evilest of tunes. Blaming the whole thing on a charismatic leader means we have to ignore the fact that the economy was also ruined, a war was lost horribly badly, and a proud population was reduced to starvation. I think also of the French revolution (the big one) which was largely triggered by inept leadership that caused bread riots. When I think of some of the things the French monarchy did, it’s as though they wanted to topple their own empire, or something. This is the result of what I consider to be “the bad human tendency to put our worst people in charge of things.” We also cannot ignore that capitalism has gotten worse, far worse, than it was under the Bourbons, at placing the controls of civilization in the hands of greedy, rapacious, nonentities. From where I sit, here, I would have to flip a coin if you asked me “which is worse, capitalism or hereditary aristocracy?” because they are coming to share so much DNA.
If you really want something to cheer yourself up (and by cheer yourself up, I mean contemplate suicide), Peter Ziehan has a really interesting book out that describes some of the potential cascading failures that may make the living envy the dead, without even a nuclear war. The End of The World is Just The Beginning [zie] [I have just added this to my list of recommended books, and my money-back guarantee applies] explores how capitalism and ruthless geopolitics have built a world that he sees as ready to collapse at a hair-trigger moment, just as Barbara Tuchman described Europe when Gavrilo Princip shot some useless aristocrat – the web of dependencies and treaties made everything blow apart under its own pressure. From the sound of it, he’s surprised that the completely pointless war in the Persian Gulf Gulf of Trump hasn’t triggered it, but it’s still early stages.
I wake up every day relieved that I will not live through too much of the crap, and I ponder daily whether there is any point in trying to reflect some of the suffering back onto its perpetrators, and how. As I write this, I just learned that ICE shot a man in New York, who was in his car with his kid and didn’t surrender fast enough, or something pointless. I’m glad the New Yorkers are dealing with the tragedy swiftly and judiciously, but I admit I wish there was some spirit from revolutionary France to go “aux barricades!” and decorate all of the trees in Central Park with festively dangling ICE agents. I guess that won’t happen until after the republicans try to steal the midterms. If you think they won’t try, well, bless your heart. But it’s obvious to me that they are “all in” on this hand – they know that they are going to wind up in prison or driven out of power, and they’re willing to sacrifice anyone’s life to keep that from happening. Where’s Sulla when you need him? Good god, did I just write that?
probably hegseth couldn’t get it up for looping kirk’s necksplosion anymore and felt the need for new spank material. forcing the world to watch is his equivalent of wearing nothing but a trenchcoat down to the playground.
i’m feeling like the only political satisfaction i’ll experience for the rest of my life is watching fascists kill each other.
You just know that there are people at Polymarket and Kalshi right now trying to figure out if there’s some way they can run a book on it…
“From where I sit, here, I would have to flip a coin if you asked me “which is worse, capitalism or hereditary aristocracy?” because they are coming to share so much DNA.”
IMO, the goal of capitalists was always to replace the aristocrats with a different mob, not to change how things worked. They never really pulled that off because society changed around them, but there’s still a lot of people who’s problem with 17th century France was they weren’t in charge
If you allow unlimited intergenerational transfers of wealth, and the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of growth of the economy in general, then capitalism will inevitably turn into hereditary aristocracy, simply as a matter of arithmetic.
@4 Dunc
Ah, so you’ve read Piketty as well. ;-)
If I had to reduce Capital in the Twenty-First Century into a single sentence, that would be the sentence.
We got lots more shit where that came from.
jimf @5, I don’t know how Dunc came to his accurate conclusion, but I didn’t need to read Piketty to come to it. I don’t say that in any ‘aren’t I clever’ sort of way, just that sixty odd years of paying attention to what’s going on made it very obvious. It sounds as if reading Piketty would just depress me further.
Dunc@#4:
If you allow unlimited intergenerational transfers of wealth, and the rate of return on capital is greater than the rate of growth of the economy in general, then capitalism will inevitably turn into hereditary aristocracy, simply as a matter of arithmetic.
Yes, and that’s why, I tried in my series on Badgeria, to hypothesize a social contract in which a citizen’s assets reverted to the state on death, rather descendants than through inheritance. I think that it would actually be fairly plausible, but of course the rich would disapprove and their disapproval counts 3/2 as much as yours and mine. As long as money and power are interchangeable, that is.
the victim they’re lining up so powerfully puts the lie to the idea of this as dissuasion. a mass shooter almost definitionally does not care if they live or die, and is fully prepared to be shot. the best way to prevent a shooter like him is to stop treating the first half of full metal jacket as aspirational.
I just want to see if someone has the clever idea of telling whiskey Pete, “you shoot him.”
Bébé Mélange@#9:
the victim they’re lining up so powerfully puts the lie to the idea of this as dissuasion
Agreed. It’s the worst move possible. The guy wants to be a martyr so, hey, lets do that.
The US will never decide if its justice system is retributive, rehabilitative, deterrent, or bubble gum. I think bubble gum makes the most sense.
@7 Jazzlet,
Hence the winking smiley. I’m sure that a great many people, like you and perhaps Dunc, have come to that conclusion without reading Piketty, but Piketty brought the receipts (tons of them) to bolster our suspicions. I wasn’t so much depressed after reading Capital… as I was pissed off. You realize that it doesn’t have to be this way and that there are fairly obvious means of reversing the situation, but the people who benefit massively from it have done and are continuing to do everything they can to maintain and normalize it. And a major part of that anger is the circular nature of it all- they have the power to get more power, and the more power they get, the more difficult it becomes to create change.
@12 jimf Circular, but also inherently unstable. At some point too much concentration of power and wealth in a small number of people leads to a collapse of some kind – whether revolution or economic.
Demonizing the immigrant community is SOP for fascists. Crusaders regularly terrorized European Jewish communities in between their attempts to conquer Jerusalem for Christians. Targeting the Jewish population with pogroms was happening in Bessarabia before the Russian Revolution.
My German anabaptist/communist ancestors had mostly already fled to America and Canada by 1903. They were evicted from their homesteads due to the same anti-immigrant mentality, but alas, deporting all the farmers who grew the food didn’t help the Czar’s popularity at all.
Some humans are shitty asshole examples of their species, particularly if there is profit in it. Plenty of the people who became obscenely wealthy via the trans-Atlantic slave trade have obscenely wealthy modern day descendants.
I can’t say I’m surprised that the latest examples of shitty humans are claiming that they are going to hold public executions, but it’s just increasingly desperate attempts to hold onto power.
It will be quite an interesting next few weeks before maga gets its ass kicked off. Kegsbreath might get his wish to have a firing squad of his very own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kishinev_pogrom
jimf @ #5: I haven’t actually read Piketty myself, but his ideas have been fairly widely distributed and I’ve encountered them in various guises. I suspect I’ve always had the general sense of it, but the specific observation of r > g is one of those things that seems blindingly obvious once you see it written down like that, but I doubt I would have been able to express it so clearly without Piketty doing it first.