Allow me to play Devil's advocate here by endorsing the Trident nuclear weapons replacement system, with only the following proviso - that it entirely replaces the rest of our conventional forces.
I know it's a controversial stance, but I've mulled this one over and a comparison in the cost-effectiveness of nuclear and conventional weapons in the last fifty years throws up some shocking results.
An example - in the last five decades or so, from the Cyprus Emergency to the occupation of Afghanistan, Britain has lost somewhere around five thousand military personnel in conventional wars. In the same period, exactly zero British soldiers have been killed in wars in which ourselves or the enemy deployed nuclear weapons. Pretty stark stuff there, I'm sure you'll agree.
And not only have we not taken casualties, but we haven't inflicted them on the enemy's civilians either. While the bodycount has racked up from the northwestern tip of Europe to southern Iraq and the near-arse-end of Antarctica, there's been not one single instance of collateral damage from a British nuke. Even compared to our most pinpoint accurate smart missiles, that's some peace 'n' love warmaking, there.
But the cost, I hear you cry, and I must admit that at £130 billion, new nukes do sound a tad pricey.
Consider, though - the UK spends circa £60 billion per year on armed forces that rarely win wars. Iraq? An expensive and disastrous bust. Afghanistan? A clown-shoes debacle. Libya? Kosovo? Sierra Leone? Minor successes against weak opposition, or ambiguous results.
Yet the single declared purpose of the UK's nuclear weapons programme was to deter Soviet aggression. How do the nukes score on effectiveness?
One war, one victory. A 100% record of unblemished success.
And not only that, but I guarantee with absolute certainty that the Trident replacement system will deter Soviet aggression not only in the near future, but for all of human history. A bargain, at the price.
The counter-argument for nukes always runs like this, though - a pricey weapon that you can't use isn't even a weapon, but merely an expensive waste.
Well, after two multi-bajillion-pound disaster wars in just one decade, I put it to you that the track record of unusable weapons has proven beyond doubt to be vastly superior to the performance of the ones that we actually can deploy.
Paradoxically, it's the very fact that we can't use nukes that makes them so effective. No deranged future Prime Minister is going to start spunking gigaton warheads at blighted, landlocked Asian nations to "help" their beleaguered citizens, and no Parliament is going to vote for nuclear "precision strikes" on major cities to assist the local gangbangers. If we'd only had nukes since 1989, our current win-loss ratio would be one win for no defeats, rather than our current woeful score.
It seems counterintuitive at first but once you come round to my way of thinking, you'll see that pound for pound, the good old British nuke is by far the best weapon in our arsenal. Let's get that chequebook out and buy, buy, buy, and wave bye-bye-bye to miserable squaddies sitting in a ton of soon-to-be shrapnel APC.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Caveat Emptor
I think the weirdest thing about the last week has been the aggressive sales job for freedom of speech.
Perhaps I'm getting cynical as I get older, but I'm always suspicious when people give me the hard sell for products that I supposedly already own. Being British, I imagine most of us probably have a good idea that when people knock on our doors to sell us e.g. "freedom" with big smiles and handshakes, it's probably time to check your pockets for your wallet.
Good products always have a way of selling themselves, I tend to find. You never see any adverts for shagging, for example, but there's plenty of it going on everywhere. Nobody advertises drugs but the trade roars ever onwards.
Theoretically at least, we're already free to say whatever we like, threats excepted. Three armed twats with grudges can hardly rip our freedom away from all of us, and a few idiots with blogs and newspaper columns aren't going to wipe it out with snotty comments, no matter how hard people are trying to convince us otherwise.
The only people who have the power to seriously fuck with free speech are the people we elect, and it looks to me like the folk who are currently issuing the loudest hosannas for freedom rarely pay much attention to what those jokers are up to, or actively run PR for their bright ideas.
So you know, the hard sell is a bit bizarre to see. Caveat emptor and all that.
Perhaps I'm getting cynical as I get older, but I'm always suspicious when people give me the hard sell for products that I supposedly already own. Being British, I imagine most of us probably have a good idea that when people knock on our doors to sell us e.g. "freedom" with big smiles and handshakes, it's probably time to check your pockets for your wallet.
Good products always have a way of selling themselves, I tend to find. You never see any adverts for shagging, for example, but there's plenty of it going on everywhere. Nobody advertises drugs but the trade roars ever onwards.
Theoretically at least, we're already free to say whatever we like, threats excepted. Three armed twats with grudges can hardly rip our freedom away from all of us, and a few idiots with blogs and newspaper columns aren't going to wipe it out with snotty comments, no matter how hard people are trying to convince us otherwise.
The only people who have the power to seriously fuck with free speech are the people we elect, and it looks to me like the folk who are currently issuing the loudest hosannas for freedom rarely pay much attention to what those jokers are up to, or actively run PR for their bright ideas.
So you know, the hard sell is a bit bizarre to see. Caveat emptor and all that.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
This Week In Panic-Stricken Commentary
Let's start with the usual inane rattle from Nick, who appears to have convinced himself that a few French malcontents armed with 1940s weaponry are a "powerful" force to whom we must all speak truth in the precise terms that he demands. He even helpfully includes the exact words he wants to hear us say - "We loathe the murderers who enforce their taboos with Kalashnikovs".
His target, as ever, is a particular section of the UK press and a nebulous, non-specific "liberalism", neither of which have spent the week falling over themselves to heap praise upon the Paris killers and have, if anything, been really quite down on them.
As is ever the case with Nick though, a closer reading reveals that simply being against religious nutters killing people for insane reasons is insufficient for his purposes. His entire schtick this last ten years or so has been to hold hoops ever higher and demand that everyone jump through them on command, so we find yet again that even the strongest condemnation will not save us from denunciation. For Nick, refusing to publish images of Mohammed is "cowardice", making the British "the world's worst cowards".
(Nick himself has a personal blog that's currently quite untainted by images of any centuries-dead Arabian prophets, but we'll charitably assume that he's been far too busy calling out other people's cowardice to update it).
Some other goodies: Nick acknowledges that radical Islamists want to "create a civil war" and "encourage the white far-right so that ordinary co-existence becomes impossible", but doesn't then ask himself whether e.g. re-publishing the cartoons in question will help or hinder said Islamists in fostering chaos.
I'll answer that one by saying that this would probably help radical Islamists to stir up further grief and violence between Muslims and others, because it looks a lot like Nick doesn't intend to answer that question.
He also invites European liberals to question their attitudes towards Islam generally because the Saudi dictatorship are horrible and repressive, which is fun. There are certainly people in the UK who are overly soft on the Sauds, but I suspect it's not the liberals who are at fault here.
Anyway, some other observations on the week's awful events:
- The Paris killers' long-term goal was no doubt intimidation against criticism of Islam, and to set an example to like-minded fuckwits by doing so, but their immediate aim was to commit atrocities, then get their stupid faces on television to frighten the entire continent.
24 hour news, being what it is, immediately obliged, plastering their faces all over TV and newspapers under headlines screaming - These Terrifying Badasses Are Terrorising Us All.
During one particular exchange on Friday, a BBC presenter asked a guest what these terrorists actually wanted. Mystifyingly, the guest didn't point out that grown men who put on ridiculous special forces ninja outfits then run around killing people in broad daylight probably want television journalists to treat them like they're the second coming of Dillinger or something, and instead proceeded to treat them like they were Dillinger.
- In fact, the idea that these guys are just some poxy, small-minded little twats with big guns and ludicrous views was pretty much absent from coverage.
This continent has managed to survive the Mongol Horde, Nazi invasion and Soviet occupation, so I'd say it'll probably manage to endure a murder spree by a small gang of revanchist throwbacks. That being the case, it'd probably be a good idea if we all said so a bit more often.
- One way to avoid giving terrorists the perception that "they have won" is to not wave your arms and scream about how We must do (x) or the terrorists have won.
Because it didn't take long for this kind of thing to rear its head - essentially, calls for everyone to shut up and bend over for infinite intimate cavity searches by the security services, forever.
There's a lot of this Everyone who is not a belligerent, bellowing bell-end like me must now be silent stuff around, and it doesn't usually take us to good places.
By Friday night, I'd say that I'd seen somewhere around two hundred times as many screechy, handbag-clutching comments about the theoretical opinions of imaginary relativists and apologists than I'd actually seen daft comments by real people. The actual existence of such comments is clearly less important than demands that anything resembling them be immediately hunted down and exterminated, to prevent contamination of our fragile eggshell minds.
Let's just note that these pre-emptive strikes upon disagreement and anguished demands for absolute unanimity are always a feature of major terrorism stories. If there's a particularly nasty whiff of 2003 about their current volume and intensity, that's only because it's the same people pushing them, and because some folk are congenitally incapable of changing or learning lessons.
- Demands for unanimity also betray an utter lack of understanding of who we are and who the enemy is.
The fact that everyone disagrees about everything and that lots of us are basically idiots, is one of the defining characteristics of western societies*.
Meanwhile, there's a certain loopy misreading of reality in the idea that our own lack of singular purpose makes us weak, while the Islamist nutters' certainties make them strong.
You'd think that most people would've spotted that crazy, violent Islamists aren't exactly rocking all before them at the moment. Isis have spent months trying to capture one town on the Turkish border and have made a spectacular cock of the job, even though it's only protected by civilian militias.
Elsewhere, crazy militant Islam is failing utterly to convince even a sizeable minority of the world's billion-strong Muslim population. You might have spotted the massive intra-faith conflict going on in Syria and Iraq, for instance, and concluded that such things do not usually betoken unified collectives of like-minded thinkers. One wonders how it's managed to pass so many other people by.
- In the end, despite the hundreds of opinion pieces claiming that the Paris killings show the failings of, say, liberalism or multi-culturalism or whatever, they actually show us that two things are failing quite badly - Islamic radicalism itself, which has now been reduced to taking potshots at cartoonists rather than its stated goal of establishing a global empire of doom, and the idea of security through surveillance.
But then, neither of those ideas sell papers or butter any parsnips for wars, so they're not likely to be headlined.
But they are, you know, true.
*And societies in general, although nastier countries take steps to keep any public objections to a minimum.
His target, as ever, is a particular section of the UK press and a nebulous, non-specific "liberalism", neither of which have spent the week falling over themselves to heap praise upon the Paris killers and have, if anything, been really quite down on them.
As is ever the case with Nick though, a closer reading reveals that simply being against religious nutters killing people for insane reasons is insufficient for his purposes. His entire schtick this last ten years or so has been to hold hoops ever higher and demand that everyone jump through them on command, so we find yet again that even the strongest condemnation will not save us from denunciation. For Nick, refusing to publish images of Mohammed is "cowardice", making the British "the world's worst cowards".
(Nick himself has a personal blog that's currently quite untainted by images of any centuries-dead Arabian prophets, but we'll charitably assume that he's been far too busy calling out other people's cowardice to update it).
Some other goodies: Nick acknowledges that radical Islamists want to "create a civil war" and "encourage the white far-right so that ordinary co-existence becomes impossible", but doesn't then ask himself whether e.g. re-publishing the cartoons in question will help or hinder said Islamists in fostering chaos.
I'll answer that one by saying that this would probably help radical Islamists to stir up further grief and violence between Muslims and others, because it looks a lot like Nick doesn't intend to answer that question.
He also invites European liberals to question their attitudes towards Islam generally because the Saudi dictatorship are horrible and repressive, which is fun. There are certainly people in the UK who are overly soft on the Sauds, but I suspect it's not the liberals who are at fault here.
Anyway, some other observations on the week's awful events:
- The Paris killers' long-term goal was no doubt intimidation against criticism of Islam, and to set an example to like-minded fuckwits by doing so, but their immediate aim was to commit atrocities, then get their stupid faces on television to frighten the entire continent.
24 hour news, being what it is, immediately obliged, plastering their faces all over TV and newspapers under headlines screaming - These Terrifying Badasses Are Terrorising Us All.
During one particular exchange on Friday, a BBC presenter asked a guest what these terrorists actually wanted. Mystifyingly, the guest didn't point out that grown men who put on ridiculous special forces ninja outfits then run around killing people in broad daylight probably want television journalists to treat them like they're the second coming of Dillinger or something, and instead proceeded to treat them like they were Dillinger.
- In fact, the idea that these guys are just some poxy, small-minded little twats with big guns and ludicrous views was pretty much absent from coverage.
This continent has managed to survive the Mongol Horde, Nazi invasion and Soviet occupation, so I'd say it'll probably manage to endure a murder spree by a small gang of revanchist throwbacks. That being the case, it'd probably be a good idea if we all said so a bit more often.
- One way to avoid giving terrorists the perception that "they have won" is to not wave your arms and scream about how We must do (x) or the terrorists have won.
Because it didn't take long for this kind of thing to rear its head - essentially, calls for everyone to shut up and bend over for infinite intimate cavity searches by the security services, forever.
There's a lot of this Everyone who is not a belligerent, bellowing bell-end like me must now be silent stuff around, and it doesn't usually take us to good places.
By Friday night, I'd say that I'd seen somewhere around two hundred times as many screechy, handbag-clutching comments about the theoretical opinions of imaginary relativists and apologists than I'd actually seen daft comments by real people. The actual existence of such comments is clearly less important than demands that anything resembling them be immediately hunted down and exterminated, to prevent contamination of our fragile eggshell minds.
Let's just note that these pre-emptive strikes upon disagreement and anguished demands for absolute unanimity are always a feature of major terrorism stories. If there's a particularly nasty whiff of 2003 about their current volume and intensity, that's only because it's the same people pushing them, and because some folk are congenitally incapable of changing or learning lessons.
- Demands for unanimity also betray an utter lack of understanding of who we are and who the enemy is.
The fact that everyone disagrees about everything and that lots of us are basically idiots, is one of the defining characteristics of western societies*.
Meanwhile, there's a certain loopy misreading of reality in the idea that our own lack of singular purpose makes us weak, while the Islamist nutters' certainties make them strong.
You'd think that most people would've spotted that crazy, violent Islamists aren't exactly rocking all before them at the moment. Isis have spent months trying to capture one town on the Turkish border and have made a spectacular cock of the job, even though it's only protected by civilian militias.
Elsewhere, crazy militant Islam is failing utterly to convince even a sizeable minority of the world's billion-strong Muslim population. You might have spotted the massive intra-faith conflict going on in Syria and Iraq, for instance, and concluded that such things do not usually betoken unified collectives of like-minded thinkers. One wonders how it's managed to pass so many other people by.
- In the end, despite the hundreds of opinion pieces claiming that the Paris killings show the failings of, say, liberalism or multi-culturalism or whatever, they actually show us that two things are failing quite badly - Islamic radicalism itself, which has now been reduced to taking potshots at cartoonists rather than its stated goal of establishing a global empire of doom, and the idea of security through surveillance.
But then, neither of those ideas sell papers or butter any parsnips for wars, so they're not likely to be headlined.
But they are, you know, true.
*And societies in general, although nastier countries take steps to keep any public objections to a minimum.
Wednesday, January 07, 2015
The Faces Of Evil #1,445,592
Well, let's observe for the billionth time that it's a bizarrely puny God that requires His followers to murder those who take up crayons against Him.
An omnipotent deity reigning in eternity with the power of life and death over all, who yet needs defending from, like, watercolours.
I'm actually aware that it's the multitude of ideas behind the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that enrage the headbangers, but that's no less idiotic. And yet, this is the type of infantile nonsense that's caused much of the planet to collapse in flames, this past couple of decades. It's this that prompts grown men to dress up in ludicrous action-movie space-ninja outfits and charge around murdering unarmed people. It's outrageous and disgusting, and also strangely pathetic.
Anyway, you won't have to go far to find angry demands for every publication to reprint the cartoons on free speech grounds, or calls for us all to work together in times of crisis and so on. You'll be hard-pushed to miss them, in fact.
A different issue was raised by a work colleague of mine today, and it's one that usually gets less attention at times like these - what do Al Qaeda want?*
The specific question was, "Don't Al Qaeda realise that killing people like this will increase hatred towards Muslims and lead inevitably to more violence against them?"
To which the answer is, Of course they do. That's exactly why they kill people like this in the first place.
Maybe I'm reading the wrong papers and speaking to the wrong people, but it's incredible to me that we can be fourteen years into a supposed war on terrorism, and it still doesn't seem to be common knowledge that Al Qaeda et al desperately want us all to fear, hate and fight each other as much as possible.
They want us infidels to repress and attack Muslims, in the hope that this will convert as many as possible to Al Qaeda's dipshit philosophy. They want their co-religionists to join them in blowing shit up and committing atrocities, in the hope that it'll create a death spiral of tit-for-tat lunacy that will somehow result in a new order built in their own idiotic image.
It's not like the various Jihadist groups have kept this quiet. Al Qaeda in particular have been very, very vocal about wanting a huge war of Us vs Them, and the dirtier and more violent the better. They're terrorists, after all - they thrive on fear and hate.
It's really very strange, that this isn't better known than it is. It may be true that they hate us for our freedom, amongst a gaggle of other excuses that may be wackier or less so, but when it comes down to it, they just plain want us all to fight.
Anyway, I don't have a moral lesson here, nor any grand strategic suggestions. What I will say is this.
Whose interests are better served if we all now have a massive pissfight over, say, cartoons depicting Mohammed? A really nasty one, with papers and social media and workplaces filling with seething rage and bitterness and sweeping generalisations?
Does that help us, or does it help them?
*"Al Qaeda", since these zoomers apparently identified themselves as the Yemeni variant thereof. There's a remarkable homogeneity in the thinking of certain strains of glowering Islamist disapprover that allows us to play fast and loose with our definitions here, I think.
An omnipotent deity reigning in eternity with the power of life and death over all, who yet needs defending from, like, watercolours.
I'm actually aware that it's the multitude of ideas behind the Charlie Hebdo cartoons that enrage the headbangers, but that's no less idiotic. And yet, this is the type of infantile nonsense that's caused much of the planet to collapse in flames, this past couple of decades. It's this that prompts grown men to dress up in ludicrous action-movie space-ninja outfits and charge around murdering unarmed people. It's outrageous and disgusting, and also strangely pathetic.
Anyway, you won't have to go far to find angry demands for every publication to reprint the cartoons on free speech grounds, or calls for us all to work together in times of crisis and so on. You'll be hard-pushed to miss them, in fact.
A different issue was raised by a work colleague of mine today, and it's one that usually gets less attention at times like these - what do Al Qaeda want?*
The specific question was, "Don't Al Qaeda realise that killing people like this will increase hatred towards Muslims and lead inevitably to more violence against them?"
To which the answer is, Of course they do. That's exactly why they kill people like this in the first place.
Maybe I'm reading the wrong papers and speaking to the wrong people, but it's incredible to me that we can be fourteen years into a supposed war on terrorism, and it still doesn't seem to be common knowledge that Al Qaeda et al desperately want us all to fear, hate and fight each other as much as possible.
They want us infidels to repress and attack Muslims, in the hope that this will convert as many as possible to Al Qaeda's dipshit philosophy. They want their co-religionists to join them in blowing shit up and committing atrocities, in the hope that it'll create a death spiral of tit-for-tat lunacy that will somehow result in a new order built in their own idiotic image.
It's not like the various Jihadist groups have kept this quiet. Al Qaeda in particular have been very, very vocal about wanting a huge war of Us vs Them, and the dirtier and more violent the better. They're terrorists, after all - they thrive on fear and hate.
It's really very strange, that this isn't better known than it is. It may be true that they hate us for our freedom, amongst a gaggle of other excuses that may be wackier or less so, but when it comes down to it, they just plain want us all to fight.
Anyway, I don't have a moral lesson here, nor any grand strategic suggestions. What I will say is this.
Whose interests are better served if we all now have a massive pissfight over, say, cartoons depicting Mohammed? A really nasty one, with papers and social media and workplaces filling with seething rage and bitterness and sweeping generalisations?
Does that help us, or does it help them?
*"Al Qaeda", since these zoomers apparently identified themselves as the Yemeni variant thereof. There's a remarkable homogeneity in the thinking of certain strains of glowering Islamist disapprover that allows us to play fast and loose with our definitions here, I think.
Monday, December 29, 2014
The Withdrawal Method
I can't recall whether, back in late 2001, I made any smart-arsed comparisons between the imminent invasion of Afghanistan and the failure of the Soviet Union's occupation of that nation. It's precisely the kind of dick thing that I would do, so I imagine that I did.
Anyway, I was halfway through writing a line-by-line comparison of the two wars, to mark the purported end of theAmerican occupation of Afghanistan Nato security mission, when I concluded that it'd be quicker and easier simply to list the differences between them rather than the similarities.
The inital stages of both invasions seem to have been quite different, for instance. The Soviet Union was asked to intervene by an illegitimate government of incompetent local proxies whom it then spent the war propping up, while also repressing resistence by a bunch of poorly-armed militiamen and cave-dwelling terrorists on the thin pretext of ending Afghanistan's civil war.
The US, meanwhile, invaded on the thin pretext of chasing a bunch of poorly-armed militiamen and cave-dwelling terrorists, before installing and propping up a thoroughly legitimate government of incompetent local proxies and making it ask the US to intervene, while also attempting to repress a vicious insurgency.
Additionally, it's worth noting that the Soviets attempted to impose a half-arsed version of their own communist political system upon Afghanistan, instituting huge economic and social programmes that directly caused many of the Afghan people to rise in open rebellion against the occupation.
The US on the other hand opened up the Afghan economy, assisted in the creation of a half-arsed variation upon Jeffersonian democracy, and helped institute huge economic and social changes that were violently opposed by Afghan murderers and criminals.
The Soviets responded to Afghan resistence with mass incarceration, executions, torture and massive bombing campaigns. The US responded to terrorist atrocities by arresting thousands of people suspected of involvement in criminal activities and subjecting them to enhanced interrogation, and with surgical airstrikes on suspected extremist strongholds and wedding parties.
Domestically, the Soviets' system of state repression was able to suppress any kind of anti-war opposition of consequence by forbidding a free press and public demonstrations of dissent. The people of the USSR were only ever told that their government's cause was right and just, and that their enemies were motivated by evil.
No such oppressive systems were necessary in the free capitalist world, where private and public news sources are permitted to publish such materials as they choose without restraint. Thus the people of the United States were told that their government's cause was right and just, and the evil motivations of their enemies were detailed by a free press, with the end result that no anti-war opposition of consequence ever emerged.
In the USSR, military casualties were hushed up. In the free world, military casualties were given widespread press attention, provided they had owned a cute dog or been married to a hot woman. The USSR prevented dissent by hiding the war's casualties away in crumbling medical facilities. The free world put injured soldiers on prime-time television and launched charity drives to help pay for their medical care.
In the end, the USSR ended its needless aggression against Afghanistan after being driven out by people who hated them and everything that they stood for, and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to rid their nation of foreign occupiers.
The US now theoretically withdraws from its vitally important security operation having been prevented from achieving many of its laudible goals by murderers, yet still feeling intense pride at its many achievements.
Like I say, I can't recall whether I ever predicted a repeat of the USSR's Afghan follies but if I ever did, I hereby apologise for my foolishness.
----
On a side note - I've been playing a bit of the strategy computer game Rome: Total War recently. Having become Emperor and conquered most of the known world, I sent an army deep into Scythia on a whim - there's nothing worth attacking up there but I did it anyway, for want of anything better to do.
The Scythians aren't particularly good warriors but my army, far from reinforcement or resupply, was slowly ground down by repeated assaults. With little hope of achieving anything of note and growing bored with the enterprise, I disbanded the army and turned my computer off.
I'm not sure why that anecdote sprung to mind in the context of the ISAF occupation of Afghanistan but it did, so here it is.
Anyway, I was halfway through writing a line-by-line comparison of the two wars, to mark the purported end of the
The inital stages of both invasions seem to have been quite different, for instance. The Soviet Union was asked to intervene by an illegitimate government of incompetent local proxies whom it then spent the war propping up, while also repressing resistence by a bunch of poorly-armed militiamen and cave-dwelling terrorists on the thin pretext of ending Afghanistan's civil war.
The US, meanwhile, invaded on the thin pretext of chasing a bunch of poorly-armed militiamen and cave-dwelling terrorists, before installing and propping up a thoroughly legitimate government of incompetent local proxies and making it ask the US to intervene, while also attempting to repress a vicious insurgency.
Additionally, it's worth noting that the Soviets attempted to impose a half-arsed version of their own communist political system upon Afghanistan, instituting huge economic and social programmes that directly caused many of the Afghan people to rise in open rebellion against the occupation.
The US on the other hand opened up the Afghan economy, assisted in the creation of a half-arsed variation upon Jeffersonian democracy, and helped institute huge economic and social changes that were violently opposed by Afghan murderers and criminals.
The Soviets responded to Afghan resistence with mass incarceration, executions, torture and massive bombing campaigns. The US responded to terrorist atrocities by arresting thousands of people suspected of involvement in criminal activities and subjecting them to enhanced interrogation, and with surgical airstrikes on suspected extremist strongholds and wedding parties.
Domestically, the Soviets' system of state repression was able to suppress any kind of anti-war opposition of consequence by forbidding a free press and public demonstrations of dissent. The people of the USSR were only ever told that their government's cause was right and just, and that their enemies were motivated by evil.
No such oppressive systems were necessary in the free capitalist world, where private and public news sources are permitted to publish such materials as they choose without restraint. Thus the people of the United States were told that their government's cause was right and just, and the evil motivations of their enemies were detailed by a free press, with the end result that no anti-war opposition of consequence ever emerged.
In the USSR, military casualties were hushed up. In the free world, military casualties were given widespread press attention, provided they had owned a cute dog or been married to a hot woman. The USSR prevented dissent by hiding the war's casualties away in crumbling medical facilities. The free world put injured soldiers on prime-time television and launched charity drives to help pay for their medical care.
In the end, the USSR ended its needless aggression against Afghanistan after being driven out by people who hated them and everything that they stood for, and were willing to sacrifice scads of their own lives to rid their nation of foreign occupiers.
The US now theoretically withdraws from its vitally important security operation having been prevented from achieving many of its laudible goals by murderers, yet still feeling intense pride at its many achievements.
Like I say, I can't recall whether I ever predicted a repeat of the USSR's Afghan follies but if I ever did, I hereby apologise for my foolishness.
----
On a side note - I've been playing a bit of the strategy computer game Rome: Total War recently. Having become Emperor and conquered most of the known world, I sent an army deep into Scythia on a whim - there's nothing worth attacking up there but I did it anyway, for want of anything better to do.
The Scythians aren't particularly good warriors but my army, far from reinforcement or resupply, was slowly ground down by repeated assaults. With little hope of achieving anything of note and growing bored with the enterprise, I disbanded the army and turned my computer off.
I'm not sure why that anecdote sprung to mind in the context of the ISAF occupation of Afghanistan but it did, so here it is.
Wednesday, December 24, 2014
Look What We Made Sony Do Now
Bulworth: "The funny thing is how... lousy most of your stuff is. You know, you make violent films and you make dirty films and you make family films, and most of them aren't very good, are they?"
Now I find the idea that Hollywood is on the frontline of a global battle against censorship as hilarious as the next guy does, but even I can see why Tinseltown finds the notion appealing. The top-grossing movie last year was Transformers 4, for Christ's sake, and that particular cinematic turd made over a billion dollars, so it's probably quite flattering to such people to consider themselves as something other than manure salesmen.
The film industry generally, and Hollywood in particular, is in the making money business, rather than the making-brave-stands-for-freedom trade. The most controversial film of the last couple of years was 12 Years a Slave, which received grumbles and grousing for having the temerity to say that holding millions of people in brutalising slavery was, you know, bad.
This is a business where you can make a laudatory, whooping, air-punching movie about killing Osama Bin Laden, pack it out with scenes of the heroes torturing the shit out of people in dungeons, and it'll be so controversial that it grosses bajillions and picks up Oscar nominations. You can make a film where the main message is We're such good guys that we don't even shoot civilians on sight when they deserve it and not worry overmuch about audience quibbles.
If there's a lesson in this ridiculous North Korea incident, it's that Sony would rather blow a whole field full of donkeys than expose their shareholders to the slightest risk, however ludicrous an actual threat is. And you know, that sucks, but I'm inclined to say that the moral here is Sony are dicks, and we can store that one right next to the Kims are murderous dicks without leaping onto our hobby-horses and riding them around town telling everyone how very brave we are for, like, saying things that don't expose us to any actual danger.
Nonetheless, let's stop and gaze with wonder at the awe-inspiring idea that, when the news channels are full of coppers mowing down black kids in hails of gunfire and governments slashing services while giving their financial backers the full Knee-Pad Nymphos 9 treatment, our most urgent concern should be... Providing Sony with free advertising for yet another bromance comedy, under the thin pretence of principle.
I love how, every time some corporation somewhere pulls the plug on a controversial film or employee out of fear for their bottom line, thick people rush to tell us how this shows not that big business is cowardly and utterly fixated on nothing more than money, but that liberals are terrible, man. As a symbol of how utterly fucked up some folk's priorities are, I'd say that this is pretty much perfect.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
The Rat, December 2014
The Rat
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Porn Bill to ban depictions of “squiffing, thrasping, ball-snurgling, facial glopping, George-Michaeling, tit enemas, love-trumpeting, turkey-twizzling, rectal truncheons and cock-fisting”, mortified MP announces
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The Rat says: We congratulate President Obama for his administration’s impressive work in expanding the number of unjailable Americans.
It’s always been the case that policemen could murder US citizens with absolute impunity from prosecution but before Barack Obama entered the White House, it was inconceivable that anyone could engage in torture, or in multi-billion dollar frauds, without facing the most severe criminal sanctions.
Thanks to President Obama, America is now a land where wealthy and powerful people enjoy absolute freedom to kill and steal without fear of prosecution, while poor and unemployed people will continue to be imprisoned in record-breaking numbers for the most minor of offences.
The Rat says to the President: Well done, sir. Truly you are a titan of the progressive cause.
|  Murphy elected Supreme Emperor Dalek of Scottish Labour, vows to exterminate poverty |
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