*a link; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archive of miscellany or notrehta posts
updated 2022-02-28 with the latest PDF
A small child can run around and play happily with a stick or a leaf, because children are stupid and they don’t yet know how to stare at their phones tensely waiting for a stranger on social media to respond to your clever comment telling them why their opinion is wrong.
Children are too naive to know anything about opinions and ideas. They need us to teach them how to move their interest and attention away from the things that are happening around them and focus instead upon the thoughts in their heads, until the outer world loses its color and they can live without distraction in the inner world of mental noise.
Grown-ups are much better and smarter than children, because we know all the different words for things, and we also know the opposites of those words, and we also know how to make the words and their opposites fight with each other in our heads while we push salty starchfat into our mouths and watch talk shows.
Children don’t even know anything about politics. They are too small and simplistic to understand that we live in a country that is run by a Good Party and a Bad Party, and the Bad Party does bad things and the Good Party also does bad things but only because the Bad Party made them do it.
We have to teach children about the Good Party and the Bad Party, and teach them how to hate the Bad Party because they don’t yet know that there are different kinds of people and that you’re supposed to hate some of them. Children don’t even know how to hate until we teach them, that’s how stupid they are.
When you try to teach children about war they always cry like little bitches. Like pansies. They act like sending large groups of people in our country to go kill other groups of people in another country is crazy and disordered, when obviously it is they who are crazy and disordered. We need to teach children how to be sane and normal by any means necessary, including hitting them.
One time my child wanted some food and I told him we don’t have enough money for food, and he said we should just go to the “money making machine” and get some money. He was talking about an ATM, the imbecile. I laughed in his face. I laughed and laughed and laughed because he didn’t understand how money works. I tried to teach him how people don’t get to eat unless they have the right kind of numbers in their bank accounts, but he kept looking at me like I was saying something strange. Then we just laid around thinking about how hungry we were until we fell asleep.
It’s hard work being a parent. You get this weird little baby critter who doesn’t know how to do anything, and then you have to spend years of your life teaching them how to think, how to want, how to hate, how to fight, how to take, and how to stop sitting around all blissed out like a dumbass stoner all the time. You have to teach them and shape them so that they can take part in this wonderful society that we grown-ups built for them, and they don’t even understand what a gift you’re giving them, they just cry about it like ungrateful little jerks.
In the end though it’s just what you’ve got to do in order to mold children into smart and sensible grown-ups, like us.
*a link – see a note on notes and links
*a link – see a note on notes and links
"Do not underestimate the destructive power of lies ... do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse." Lessons from a Holocaust survivor to our generation, published in 2018 but every bit as relevant. https://t.co/O0wcbp1Nv2
— Julie Vitkovskaya (@Julie_Vit) February 10, 2020
“Finally, do not ever imagine that your world cannot collapse …
Perhaps it is because I was only a child that I did not notice the storm clouds that were gathering, but I believe that many who were older and wiser than me at that time also shared my childlike state.
If disaster comes, you will find that all the myths you once cherished are of no use to you. You will see what it is like to live in a society where morality has collapsed, causing all your assumptions and prejudices to crumble before your eyes. And after it’s all over, you will watch as, slowly but surely, these harshest of lessons are forgotten as the witnesses pass on and new myths take their place.*
*a link – see a note on notes and links
archived*From blondies to quesadillas, Tim Dowling's feature covers breakfast, lunch and dinner ideas with peanut butter, not forgetting yummy snacks. Some great suggestions here. No wonder peanut butter sales are soaring in the UK. https://t.co/8TcFpC06p4
— APC London (@USA_peanuts_UK) July 8, 2020
*a link – see a note on notes and links
1/n Re-upping post, on two levels:
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) June 30, 2020
-Back in 2004 I did Atlantic piece called “Blind Into Baghdad” https://t.co/rC3zwPeVgr
Its point was that risks, consequences, and blowback of US "victory" in Iraq were not just foreseeable but had been foreseen, in detail, by military planners
November 2002:
Over the past few months I interviewed several dozen people about what could be expected in Iraq after the United States dislodged Saddam Hussein. …
Merely itemizing the foreseeable effects of a war with Iraq suggests reverberations that would be felt for decades. If we can judge from past wars, the effects we can't imagine when the fighting begins will prove to be the ones that matter most.
—James Fallows, archived*
1/n Re-upping post, on two levels:
-Back in 2004 I did Atlantic piece called “Blind Into Baghdad”
Its point was that risks, consequences, and blowback of US "victory" in Iraq were not just foreseeable but had been foreseen, in detail, by military planners2/n
US Army War College, in particular, had laid out a detailed timeline of what was most likely to go wrong (eg, riots and looting as soon as Hussein was overthrown) and how to anticipate and minimize it. And biggest mistakes to avoid (eg, don't disband the Iraqi army.)3/n
Reading those pre-war assessments of what *not* to do, was eerily and nauseatingly parallel to reading post-war accounts of what US actually did, to disastrous effect.
US debacle in Iraq all the worse because US leaders had been warned...4/n
--but Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bremer, et al wouldn't bother to listen or learn. "Stuff happens!" in Rummy's deathless phrase.5/n
The new article I have in the Atlantic is essentially that same story about our current debacle, the pandemic.
*a link – see a note on notes and links
1/ “Coping with a pandemic is one of the most complex challenges a society can face,” @JamesFallows writes. “It is a challenge that the United States did not meet.”
— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) June 30, 2020
What went wrong? To answer that question, Fallows turned to his background in aviation. https://t.co/k4Kf7MQ57x
For what it’s worth, this is completely irrelevant.
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) July 2, 2020
The US government knew enough, early enough, to help contain the disease *within* China, despite the Chinese govt’s coverups.
Details here:https://t.co/VfRorRZ8IG https://t.co/vcKMFyVcO0
*a link – see a note on notes and links
*a link – see a note on notes and links
“I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian.”
— George Atherton (@notrehta) June 28, 2020
—Freeman Dyson https://t.co/GOfqISQDOm / quote not in BI but cited here: https://t.co/XVJ912vPpK
I am myself a Christian, a member of a community that preserves an ancient heritage of great literature and great music, provides help and counsel to young and old when they are in trouble, educates children in moral responsibility, and worships God in its own fashion. But I find Polkinghorne’s theology altogether too narrow for my taste. I have no use for a theology that claims to know the answers to deep questions but bases its arguments on the beliefs of a single tribe. I am a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian. To me, to worship God means to recognize that mind and intelligence are woven into the fabric of our universe in a way that altogether surpasses our comprehension.
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.source: Freeman Dyson in the same piece as above*
*a link – see a note on notes and links