Memo to self: when writing postings about a person, check to make sure they are not still alive and making news. Normally, when dealing with historical figures (e.g.: Lyudmila Pavlichenko [stderr]) we can safely assume they are not making more news. But …
It’s hard to estimate the impact of movies that slant our way of seeing things. I think I was 15 or so when I saw Z the first time.
Are you scared?
In an earlier posting about “operators” (special forces/CIA) in Libya,[stderr] I posted a picture that I had saved from early in the rebellion there.
It’ll be another 50 years before we know the degree to which the CIA and other intelligence services were involved in the destruction of Libya. There are fingerprints all over the scene, but for now many people are still pretending it was entirely self-inflicted, like Syria.
This is from a 1947 film made by the War Department, to teach people how to detect and avoid fascism.
It’s hard to understand the bizzaro-world where authoritarians live. As a skeptical person, I tend to think about what authority figures say, and question their motives and whether what they’re saying even makes any sense at all.
As I mentioned [stderr]: Fuck his highness Vajiralongkorn of Thailand.
I know it’s all the fashion, in some circles, to belittle the “mainstream media” for being hard on Donald Trump – but I think the media ought to be more direct and less cautious in its wording.
One of the crucial failures of leadership during the Vietnam War was the way the pentagon managed to reduce a complex political/military/logistical situation down to a discussion about head-count. That allowed the military to focus discussion about the war into a question of head-count: how many dead Vietcong heads did you collect today? How many shiny new American heads did you ship over? How many came back?