Content Warning: Nipple
This time I’m going to go a bit far afield. I want to look back at media reaction to a stupid event that happened in 2004. I was on a consulting gig in some town or other and happened to turn on the TV in my hotel room for background noise, and saw the whole thing, live, and did not care very much one way or another.
The topic of self-defense in this ridiculously over-armed culture is a fraught one, with many contradictions. On one hand, there are the people who insist that “good guys with guns are needed to stop bad guys with guns” and on the other they implicitly assume that the police cannot be relied upon to be the “good guys” – thereby supporting the notion of armed vigilantism, e.g.: Bernie Goetz or (maybe) Kyle Rittenhouse, George Zimmerman, and many others.
My mind plays tricks on me: I originally started to write about how Kyle Rittenhouse is “the new Walter Mitty” except then I realized that I had the name wrong; what I meant was “Bernie Goetz.”
When I start hearing the old trope about plucky rebels attempting to overthrow a vicious government, my first reaction is to check and see if the story is being carried by The New York Times and, if it is, I search for “${region} CIA involvement”. I’m sad that we live in such a cynical world, but that’s what it is.
For the last couple of days I’ve been doing some self-education about the current state of nuclear energy systems and deployment. I’m a bit grumpy about this topic, now, because I feel like I’ve been played: I made a good faith attempt to see what kind of great new, efficient, safe, stuff has been coming down the pike and I was disappointed to find out there’s a lot of aspirational press releases and a great deal of ongoing research. It’s impossible for me not to see the situation as similar to fusion energy or generalized artificial intelligence: we need more money and more time but we’re gonna kick this thing’s ass in 30 years. Assuming we still have a technological civilization in 30 years.
Gosh, the people in Washington sure do like to lie. And the supine media (who want to think of themselves as “watchdogs”) (more like “watch chinchillas”) report what they are given in “talking points” memos.
In case you’ve been dead and buried for the last couple of months, the current big kerfuffle in Washington is a bunch of play-acting about how we haven’t got enough money for this or that useful social program. And, as always, there’s another social program that goes unmentioned: the defense budget. It’s a social program, right? It’s just oriented toward destroying societies.
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.
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.