When I was in high school, I was one of the founders of the “Military History Club” – which meant: “the nerdy guys who play Diplomacy and Jutland and Dungeons & Dragons all day. We had a small room in the attic of the school where we could leave our game-boards down and nobody would mess with them.
If you’re talking to someone and they bring up how the government doesn’t have enough money to X for any given X, you can dismiss them as not serious if they are not putting ‘defense’ spending on the chopping block.
I’m going to engage in some mild “whatabout”ism regarding our (my?) reaction to the fire in Paris.
One of the basic skills of philosophy is to try to combat your own cognitive biases by flipping situations around, i.e.: “putting yourself in the other guys’ shoes” or whatever you want to call it. It’s a skill Americans don’t seem to learn in school, which is why (I believe) we have a population that is ripe for turning into imperialists and believers in various forms of exceptionalism.
It must be great times for the pentagon: a blockhead in the white house who’ll spend any amount on “defensive” weaponry, and law-makers from both parties that will sign any check so long as it’s for wars. Shopaholic heaven!
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is not a book I have read. Naturally, parts of it have leaked into my consciousness from various sources – it’s a remarkably pervasive fountain of memes.
The loathsome John Bolton is too easy to point at as an example of everything that is wrong with US Middle Eastern foreign policy.
The US Air Force made a bizarre tweet-post on New Years, of a bomber and the observation that they can drop bombs anywhere.
Anyone who heard about the night raids in Afghanistan should have been worried: it marks a shift from trying to engage an enemy on clear ground to hitting them where they live. As someone who grew up during the war in Vietnam, it’s hard not to think of “Search and Destroy” missions and the Phoenix Program.
US citizen Otto Warmbier died after 17 months in North Korea, during which he was abused, ignored, exposed to cold and not fed.