ketchupandlightning-blog - Tumblr blog

ketchupandlightning-blog · 7 years

Link

The interesting thing here is how the guy seemed completely surprised by how things went down. His apparent refusal to vacate his seat voluntarily, to the point where it was obvious that he would be physically removed by armed men, and then his scream of surprise when they actually laid hands on him. That scream of surprise is the weird thing, like he genuinely did not know what was about to happen. Now, this might be a function of privilege - he's never had armed men threaten violence on him, or whatever. But most of us, privileged or not, have been kicked out of some place or another, if only as kids, and we generally recognize that a demand to leave will be backed up by force if we refuse. In any case, his scream was the scream of a person who did not expect to face down the pointy end of a police state.

Which makes me think about David Graeber's writing on how suffused our everyday life is with the common knowledge that stepping outside the bounds will be met with armed force. We grow up with it, and we get used to it. Graeber describes direct action as “acting as if you are already free”. This case seems to be an innocent ignorance of social realities, but a more cultivated, deliberate ignorance of social realities would serve us well.

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 7 years

Text

Rassenkrieg: The Edge

The Pepes had us surrounded. You ever heard of the battle of Alesia? Caesar in Gaul, a couple years before he returned and killed the Republic. Caesar was besieging a Gallic town, had them surrounded, but then a relief army arrived and the Romans, in turn, got surrounded. So you had a two-level siege, Gauls inside and Romans in the inner ring and Gauls again on the outside. Strawberry Hill in Golden Gate Park was like that, except with land and water. Golden Gate Park is mostly land, as it would have to be to support barbecues, dog walkers, drug users, the standard denizens of San Francisco. But in the middle of it there is an annular lake, and the center of that lake is an island called Strawberry Hill. We were on the hill, and the Pepes were on the other side of the moat, and maybe the rest of San Francisco could be convinced to surround the Pepes.

Pepes in San Francisco!? Pepes in San Francisco. I don't know what kind of image you have of San Francisco, but it probably ain't true anymore. They hadn't exactly announced themselves as Pepes, at least not until it came down to brass tacks, but they were there. @jack recruited them by the dozen, and Peter Thiel donned the Frog as soon as SHTF, and although San Francisco was deep blue in the electoral sense, a lot of the residents had nicely arranged front "yards" with lovely succulents, and, well, the Hammer and Sickle didn't really appeal to them so much, ya know? It was a confused situation, as everywhere else in America in the Year of Our Lord Zero. Mostly they stayed out of it, content to walk their dogs as the militias fought it out in the streets.

The fog was rolling in overhead, orange against the the city lights, and the cypress trees rustled in the wind. I lit a joint and looked over at Turtle Hill, now the primary Asian OP out there in the Sunset District. They were our best hope. The Sunset and the Richmond had fallen out over various sectarian/national disputes, and the defacto state was to leave the park as a neutral zone, to avoid stepping on each others' toes. That had left it open for us to occupy, but it also meant that there was as yet no help from our fractious comrades, and so when the Pepes took the Haight and advanced up the Panhandle, we had to take refuge.

We had sent a courier, slipped across the lake and into the Inner Sunset, to try to make contact and convince the Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese coalition to light up the fucking incel white nationalists mucking up the park. That was 10 hours ago. Maybe he got caught. Maybe he deserted, took the next ferry across the Bay, back to civilization. Or maybe he was filling himself with pho at Kevin's, the fucking bastard. I hadn't had Kevin's since before the war. We'll see, I guess.

"Captain!"

'Good evening, lieutenant. What is it?'

"Beg to report, the, uh, scout has returned sir."

'Excellent! Send him up.'

"Yes sir!"

He snapped a salute and jogged back down the hill. I took another puff and looked over at the remnants of the bridge's South Tower, with a ragged red banner fluttering in the wind.

Sergeant Ang had been at Yelp. Front-end, Angular specialist. Joined up after the Stripe acquisition, no beef with the new masters but he cashed out some options and heard The Call. A tad materialistic, his belt-shoes-watch were always on point, but heart was in the right place. After he got his girl set up with a Bay view he promptly came down to the recruitment office. Smart, savvy. Probably destined for the upper echelons of the intelligence service, if he stuck with it. Damn good scout. The Chinese who dominated the high command would like him, would listen to what he had to say.

"What's that I smell?" He sauntered up, got a bit closer. Took a big sniff. "That's dank, Cap. Seriously dank. Where'd you get that shit, you order a drone from the fishtank over on Shattuck?"

'You sound thirsty, Sergeant.' I passed him the j. He took a big hit. Then another. He exhaled, and I looked him in the eye. He took another, a half hit, not enough for me to justifiably get upset about, although I flipped a fuckin table in my chest cavity. He stuck his hand out.

"It took a long time, dude. First off, the Pepes are patrolling in those fucking swans, so I had to cross over under the lake. Got myself a bamboo reed and creeped across the bed - it's only four feet deep, you know? - had to sit and think about my life choices as the fuckin Nazi waterfowl glided overhead."

My anger bedgrudgingly subsided and I handed him back the joint.

"But heck, they're fucking idiots anyway, I got down to the strip and basically cleaned Sheng Kee's out of their purple bean buns."

'Didn't happen to bring any back, did you?'

His face fell. "Oh shit, man. Yeah, I totally packed you some pork bulgogi."

A beat.

"But, like, the negotiation took pretty long, and they wouldn't let me leave until I had satisfactorily demonstrated that I wasn't a MAGA chud spy."

"And, like, they had a microwave there in the basement."

I flicked the roach with great force down the hill to the water, hoping it would light one of their fucking hats on fire.

'Jesus dude. Do you at least have good news for the reinforcements?'

"Yes! General Hu was very receptive. He and General Park are, shall we say, on strained interpersonal terms. He wants to demonstrate some aggressiveness and convince the West Side that General Park is a fucking cuck."

'Is General Park a fucking cuck?'

"I don't know man, he's got his hands full with the bridge situation, I don't think he pays much attention to us. He might be RP'd as shit as far as I know."

'So Hu's down?'

"No one's down, sir, as far as I know, we're at full strength."

'No, goddamnit, I mean is General Hu willing to relieve us?'

"Yes sir! He said he'll gather his forces together in the next few days and move on the transverse."

'And you belive him?'

"Yeah, I think so. They haven't had much action out here, even the rank and file are itching to see the elephant, as it were. Want to count some coup, make their granddads proud."

I exhaled. 'Well alright then. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.'

"So what, you got another joint, Cap?"

'Come ON, Ang, you didn't score ANYTHING on the other side?'

He guffawed, reached down and pulled a pair of medicine vials out of his pocket. "Hahaha, Cap. Your fuckin eyes damn near popped out of your head."

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 7 years

Text

Draining the swamp

To Trumpists, "drain the swamp" means "purge the civil service of liberals". They subscribe to the Cathedral theory, that the media, the universities, and the civil service - the organs of public opinion, who control the American mind and thus America herself - are fully in the hands of communists.

Actual communists understand that this is not true, that those institutions are in the hands of liberals, who oddly overplay their hand by not playing it hard enough. Liberals engage in activities that could be part of a transformational project without seeing their role as transformational at all. In some ways, racism is entirely natural. Egalitarianism and diversity very much run up against simple, homegrown values such as "people who look like me are good and trustworthy, and people who do not look like me are bad and untrustworthy". Building communism is *hard*. Fighting the status quo is hard, and any successful attempt to transform society must acknowledge this head-on. But liberals fail to do this - liberals act as if their egalitarian ideals are already in place, and are obvious and obviously correct, and that anyone who deviates from them must be punished. So people who have not been truly sold on equality must hide their real opinions and live in fear of being discovered.

This halfhearted project of social transformation has backfired, and now we must survive and fight off the counterattack. We'll be on defense for a while, but in the future our offensive moves must be recognized as such. We must recognize that tearing racism out of the American mind is a difficult and dangerous and slow project, that we cannot simply declare victory and proceed as if the declaration has made it so.

And ultimately we must focus on base rather than superstructure. Racism by and large cannot be torn out of a mind, it cannot be argued away, it cannot be ostracized away. The best way to fight racism is to ensure that it never takes hold to begin with. Positive depictions in media and Obama on television were surely helpful, but these are shallow things and we now see how easily it can be washed away. Millions of liberals think that a black president is entirely natural, while spending their days in establishments with all white customers and all black workers and thinking that this also is entirely natural. Racism will wither to the degree that material differences wither. Building black wealth and black power are the keys to changing the white mind.

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 7 years

Text

Sources of bullshit jobs

1. management is not incentivized to cut costs - e.g. medical tests 2. management is unaware of fat to be cut 2b. management is aware, but wants to preserve the jobs, maximizing subordinates, or just because they don't want to fire people 2a. management is aware and wants to cut, but cannot because of unions, etc 3. people being kept in reserve for peak times, but kept busy to prevent them from causing trouble 4. zero sum games, advertising, fighting for market share 5. low-quality entertainment or products that would be unnecessary if people had fulfilling lives 6. deferred automation - cash registers, order takers, etc 7. status symbols 8. planned obsolescence 9. stuck in local maxima - commute times and all problems with cars that could be solved by public transportation, all the health insurance paperwork that would be swept away by medicare for all 10. the military-industrial complex 11. police, prisons, security 12. solutions for a lack of leisure time - a second-order effect 13. duplicate solutions - hurts most in information industries where copy cost is zero, but also in trade secrets. of course, independent efforts can be good for innovation

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 7 years

Text

Rassenkrieg: Bat Country

Out in the high desert the lines of control were less clear. The big cities like Vegas and Phoenix had their fractured neighborhoods just like New York, where the no-man's land might be a wide dusty street and the trenches the forlorn strip mall storefronts on either side. The Mexicans held holes 3, 4, and 7 on the Wynn Las Vegas Resort Golf Course, with the Doms controlling the remainder, dug in between the greenside traps and the lake. But out in the sticks it was village by village, with convoys of F-150's raiding or taking territory hither and yon. The Native position in Monument Valley was regarded as pretty much impregnable. Dom fighter-bombers had chipped away at West Mitten, but there were always more tunnels in the interior, and approaching the great towers of rock from open desert was, of course, suicidal.

The Sub government of Los Angeles, facing mutiny from autonomous EastLos, had finally decided to send a relief column to the beleagured Mexicans holed up the South Strip. Despite its libertine reputation, Vegas was a hotbed of the fash - the moguls had proclaimed themselves princes and defenders of the faith, and the bespectaled 17 year olds manning the drones didn't much care whether the Roman ruins they were blowing up were real or fake. All desert looks the same from a water-cooled rig. Still, Sin City had a sizable Hispanic population and they had good positions in pyramids and towers and control of the airport.

I hitched a ride on a technical heading out from Palmdale. The .50-gunner was a young actor from WeHo via Inglewood, who had been frustrated by his token roles and enlisted, hoping to project a tougher image when he returned. I sat with him in the bed and ate shrooms and fired rounds at passing cacti.

'So, you ever been to Vegas?'

"I danced at the Stallion a few times" the gunner shouted through the roar of the air and the cartidges. "Had to pay the rent when the work dried up."

'How much you make?'

"Oh, $500, sometimes $1000. Bunch of assholes. Hope I see some of their leathery Dom asses, I'll light those fuckers up."

He sawed off the left arm of a saguaro with a tight burst.

'Haha, always the worst 'phobes, amirite? Bet they have second thoughts about this shit sometimes. Tough to lead a double life in a theocracy.'

"Right on, man. Yo, you think Daddy's gay?"

'I'm pretty sure Daddy sexually identifies as a bullet.'

"This war's such a fuckin mess, man. I had some ancestors fight in the first civil war. That war was so, like, *organized*. Battles and lines of soldiers and formations and shit."

'Plus they actually made progress, ha.'

"Yeah dude, why do we suck so bad compared to the Union? We've been fighting for months and haven't won more than a few ratty burbs."

'Different times, different split. The Mississippi River. See, North America is a unified whole - the Mississippi Basin in the largest, most fertile agricultural basin in the world that's drained by a single river. It's like China that way - China splits into warring states every few hundred years, but then a new dynasty always is able to unite the country. The United States is pretty young compared to China, so for a while we didn't realize that this would happen, that America was destined to break into warring states every few hundred years. But anyway, China always reforms under a new dynasty. And that's because the heart of China is a single big agricultural plain. It gets conquered or lost as a whole. Europe was different, see - Europe has mountain ranges and rivers that form natural boundaries between states. So after the Romans melted away, the next thousand years was a slow process of building states around those natural boundaries. This caused endless conflict and diversity of approaches with tactics and technology. And crucially, it meant that could be no single European policy. China had big galleons too, but a royal decree stopped the voyages, so they never made it to North America. But there were a bunch of European states who competed to colonize the Western Hemisphere, and the rest of the world for that matter. Anyway, that difference in geography is hypothesized to cause the difference in cultures and outcomes. The United States is like China. Rule the Mississippi, rule the continent. Well, the interior at least. The old North-South divide split the basin in two, and the Union had naval superiority and used the river system to invade the South. The Confederacy collapsed in the West from the get go.'

'So a North-South split was inherently unstable, but now, a coast-interior split is lot more stable. The Rockies and Appalachians form natural borders - the Appalachians were the border between the English and French territory before the French and Indian War, remember. So the Doms hold the whole river basin, we hold the coasts, and we face each other down across the mountains.'

"Stable split, except for like a thousand enclaves and this fuckin desert."

'Well, yeah.'

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 8 years

Text

A fascinating take on the question of when life begins

http://www.metafilter.com/155074/The-New-Ugly-Surge-in-Violence-and-Threats-Against-Abortion-Providers#6300938

The concept of logocentrism has crystalized my thinking in a number of areas. The Great Man Theory is basically about logocentrism. Meaning, for something to get done you must decide what is to be done and then do it. The Right tends to emphasize those who decide what is to be done, to the detriment of those who do. And some on the Left have a habit of dismissing those who decide, and attribute all wealth to those who do. And I think both of those are wrong if you go too far. You see the Left bias in action when people dismiss Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I think it's clearly false to think that the iPhone or SpaceX would have been as successful without either Jobs or Musk. And in the case of rockets, we have a nominally democratically managed space agency that builds rockets too. And they went to the Moon, but they also made a cobbled-together rocket that was expensive and buggy. The outcome of democratic control in the case of the Shuttle was not a better-performing rocket, but a guarantee that every state and congressional district got a piece of the contract money. There was also the attempt to shoehorn both military and civilian use within the same vehicle, which led to the same sort of compromises that are currently hobbling the F-35. But whatever. Maybe spreading the contracts around is the price of funding to the tune of $15 billion/year, which no private space company can possibly achieve. The Shuttle is a classic case of designed by committee, and having a single person in charge is a way to avoid that particular pitfall (at the cost of risking other pitfalls, like the risk that the monarch will be evil, crazy, or delay treatment for pancreatic cancer in the hope that a vegan diet will cure it).

0 notes

ketchupandlightning-blog · 8 years

Text

The bottomless pit of security

The problem is that there is no ceiling on the demand for security. Because security doesn't satisfy an immediate need, it satisfies a potential need. And the potential is limited only by your imagination. So, if most of your other needs are met, you can always plow more resources into security. And that's what we've been doing in America. There are several sectors that all add up to security spending: all military spending, all spending on police, all spending on prisons, all spending on private security. This adds up to millions of people working in the security industry, broadly construed.

And the problem is that all security ultimately means weapons pointed at someone else. And if they're pointed, there's a risk of being used. We've worried about nuclear weapons being used again for 70 years. As long as we have an Air Force (and Navy, which is the world's second largest air force), there is a temptation to use it, as we've seen over the past 4 years in Syria. Every new crisis, and many will say "well, we have the airpower, why not use it?". As long as we have armored vehicles, we'll face the pressure to use them. And hey, if the military can't use them, maybe the local police force can. And once you get to the decentralized local level, the potential for use gets statistically smoothed out into a rate of actual use.

It's not a question of whether the police will unjustly kill someone. There are over 15,000 police forces in this country and about 500,000 police officers. Almost all of them are armed. With that much force, and the discretion to use that force, so widely distributed, innocent people will die. The only question is how many. And of course the same can be said of the population at large. There are 300 million civilian guns in America, and that is converted to a rate of 10000 people killed by a gun every year, which is about 30 per day.

Obama faces pressure to bomb ISIS. Police face pressure to shoot suspects they feel are dangerous. Prosecuters face pressure to put people in prison. Drug dealers face pressure to shoot rivals. About once a day, someone in America cracks and tries to go out and take as many humans with them as they can. All of these weapons, all of the pressure to use them.

America has a ridiculous amount of creative energy. We can produce anything that can be produced, in vast quantities if we so choose. Around 1940, we started producing weapons at a mass scale. And we never stopped. The creative energy is being converted into destructive energy, pointed both outward and inward. It will rip us apart.

0 notes