deathmtn

If you are a progressive, says Van Jones (a progressive), you should be offended by various policies of Iran’s government, and therefore you should accept the need to drop bombs on Iran. At no point on this smoothly paved highway to hell does Van Jones stop to marvel at his own mental transition between a nation’s people and its government. Nor does he stop to ask himself whether the proposition, “If a nation’s government and some of its people hold ideas that you disagree with, you should go to war with them” may be flawed. Nor does he end this speech by volunteering to have his own home blown up by Iranian soldiers as penance for the various detestable beliefs of the Trump administration. Odd.

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War, as people experience it through the news, is a matter of proper strategy, a video game, a chess match between governments to be followed from afar, and critiqued tactically.

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The way that war is covered, the way that we are all asked to ignore the most important things about it and focus solely on far more frivolous distractions, is like watching Hurricane Katrina drown New Orleans and saying, “We’re going to have nonstop coverage of how this will affect the NFL’s upcoming season.” If someone attacks you in the street and breaks your legs and puts you in the hospital and your friend hears the news and says, “Let’s talk about how this will affect Tuesday’s mayoral primary,” they would not be your friend very long. This is the media’s approach to war.

I’m sorry for writing a too-simple thing today.

When they say "elites" they mean the people who are authorities, both in the sense that they are authorities on topics of mastery, and also in the sense that what they say goes.

Because what all these sorts of people have in common is that they are arbiters of truth. The scientist tells us the truth of nature. The philosopher tells us the truth of philosophy. The historian tells us the truth of history. The journalist tells us the truth of current events. The artist tells us the truth of the human condition. The teacher tells us the truth of the topics they teach, and the librarian hands out books full of truths in all topics imaginable.

And they do not like the truths that these parties tell them very much, and they have come to bitterly resent that those parties get to tell them what the truth is.

That resentment has a name: anti-intellectualism.

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In other times and places, the set of people designated intellectuals has been drawn much broader, such that it included, well, whomever it was convenient or appealing for it to contain.

Take for example during Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was originally persecuted by the "Red Guards". The Red Guards were predominantly middle schoolers. You know: tweens. Also high school students. They kicked things off by beating to death their teachers.

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In other times and places, the set of people designated intellectuals has been drawn much broader, such that it included, well, whomever it was convenient or appealing for it to contain.

Take for example during Mao's Cultural Revolution. It was originally persecuted by the "Red Guards". The Red Guards were predominantly middle schoolers. You know: tweens. Also high school students. They kicked things off by beating to death their teachers.

This has always been the intention of AI, and where its connection to the intelligence-rankers of years past is cruelly apparent: if those in power cannot prove that a great many people are already inferior then they will bring that inferiority about by forcing them to use a tool that diminishes their intellectual and creative capacity.

Harvard’s Kseniia Petrova is one of causes at a protest of Trump administration policies April 12 at the university in Cambridge.

Harvard’s Kseniia Petrova was back in court Wednesday for a probable cause hearing to determine whether a criminal complaint against her should be dismissed.

The government’s one witness at the hearing, special agent Brian Goldsworthy, was unable to explain the meaning of “biological material” despite using it in his sworn affidavit supporting the criminal complaint. He was also unable to explain the meaning of “merchandise” when the crime Petrova is charged with, smuggling under 18 USC §545, criminalizes the introduction into the country of “any merchandise which should have been invoiced.”

2008-01-18 02:21:30

Hey! Guess what? I'm finally in shape! By which I mean I have a level of conditioning that satisfies me. Tonight at judo, I did five rounds of tachiwaza randori and five five rounds of tachiwaza randori and five rounds of newaza randori, with about one and a half breaks. That's fifty minutes of sparring, broken up by seven minutes of break! It wasn't necessarily tournament-level fight for-your-life randori, and plenty of people have done more, but for me, that's a personal endurance best. There have been times when I've had trouble going two-in-row.

Americans have long been fixated on the idea of the short, decisive war. At the start of the American Civil War, Washington gentry traveled to watch the First Battle of Bull Run—to partake of a spectacle they presumed would soon end. In 1898, U.S. Secretary of State John Hay expected the Spanish-American War to be a “splendid little war,” culminating in a quick victory for the newly emerging global power. As U.S. troops neared the Yalu River in November 1950 during the Korean War, Gen. Douglas MacArthur promised that his soldiers would “eat Christmas dinner at home.” In 2003, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted that the Iraq war “certainly isn’t going to last any longer than [five months].” Multiple administrations underestimated the timeline of the war in Afghanistan.

A similar obsession with short wars colors the coverage of the Ukraine war today. In 2022, as it became clear Russia was about to invade Ukraine, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley, the U.S. intelligence community, and most outside experts predicted a Russian victory in a matter of days. As the Russian advance sagged, a handful of commentators then predicted a speedy Ukrainian victory. Many more have judged the war unwinnable and called for a quick end through negotiations. The media, for its part, has labeled the war a stalemate during just about every lull in fighting.
History has not been kind to any of these predictions. The Civil War lasted four years and remains one of the bloodiest conflicts in U.S. history. The Spanish-American War devolved into a yearslong insurgency in the Philippines. MacArthur’s push towards the Yalu triggered Chinese intervention, which prolonged the conflict by years, not months. The Iraq War lasted an order of magnitude longer than Rumsfeld predicted, and Afghanistan turned into Washington’s longest war. Today, the war in Ukraine has not resulted in a quick win for either side—but it is not a stalemate, either, as the battlefield continues to evolve.