Hoist by Disown

They set the show last night visible (mostly) from my window. So I sat with the light off in my pajamas in my recliner and for once attended. In spirit. Guess I can make an exception for their big quarter-millennium bash. Can't say it reawakened any patriotic sensibilities in me. Mostly it dragged my mind back to the start of the nineties, and my other abandoned patriotism. With the Wall down, goods flowed quickly into the collapsed market, both in the form of large predators like Coca Cola or IBM and a general sprinkle of moral perils previously reserved for those with Party connections, fireworks among them.

 

Well, it was more fun than digging light bulbs out of trashpiles and smashing them against the pavement. Just as noisy but sneakier. Felt destructive. Felt powerful. Boom. When you're nine, that counts for a lot. Though fancier rockets were out of our reach, proudly brandished by our dads at New Year, street market stalls quickly flooded with firecrackers cheap enough to buy with pocket change. Tiny little matchstick ones. Even at that age you couldn't miss how derisively low-quality they looked: the flimsy, featureless, misaligned faded yellow paper casings, the lopsided caps, the one in ten or so that didn't light or go off. You heard the occasional horror story about some boy losing a finger, or at least a fingernail (those things were hella weak) but as it never happened within my schoolyard group, we never paid it any attention. Did get a little thrill whenever one popped half a second too early. Which was often.

 

Toss' em outside classroom windows to break up lessons. Toss 'em at stray dogs. Toss 'em into an underpass for a bonus echo. Make sure adults are out of sight first. Maybe get rewarded with some "you crazy kids" screaming from the geriatric contingent. For a couple of years, before kicking cars to set off those newfangled alarms came into vogue, those little yellow terrors dominated the soundtrack of city life. Later I belatedly realized (when hearing one go off still, occasionally) that I'd stopped thinking about them. I wanted a hand-held video game. Monochrome liquid crystal displays the size of your thumb had just hit the market. Tetris blew down instead of up. That was new.

 

Fireworks are a ridiculous holdover, aren't they? A relic of the gas lamp age, when the industrial production of noise and colour lingered just out of reach of the common man. When you needed Gandalf to stop by if you wanted a show more complicated than Bilbo's speeches. Now, your lawnmower can drown out their noise. Any video billboard cycles through more flash and pomp in five seconds than an entire fireworks display in fifteen minutes, and many of them in fact recreate such ritual displays of martial prowess symbolically. Your car's controls are more precision-engineered than the explosion pattern in the sky. For monetized noise, even boomboxes were obsoleted by earbuds. Your phone can treat you to infinitely more colorful displays. The LCDs are no longer monochrome.

 

Ritual is a weird, often offensive, concept.

 

Still, I will admit, I did sit and watch the ones last night.

AoW4 Factions, 20

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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When giants got introduced, I couldn't help playing up the comparison of my ruler to his subjects' size. And what could be funnier than a bunch of little frogs hippity-hopping around their dear leader? Making them evil and carelessly murderous would pair well with an imagined, slightly incompetent sibilance to their chanting, punctuated by random hops. I also wanted to try combining shadow's ice and necromancy with chaos' fire. It went... not great. Still, little frog mages hiding behind my legs blasting enemies with random temperature gradients were both amusing enough and aptly chaotic, and if it lacked synergy at least this odd couple pairing was flexible.

The Warm-Blooded Equations

"Now that we know for sure they're telling lies when they say

Noone gets hurt and therefore nobody dies

You know it's hard to believe anything that you hear

They say the world is round"

 

Garbage - Metal Heart

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"But when the Great Horde attacked our homeland in my grandfather's day, we moved into this region in force. We pushed the Vaegirs back, and made their fortresses our own.
Of course, you know how things go. My father's generation were hard warriors from the cold lands across the mountains, but this generation all has houses in the town and great estates and spend time as much trading as they do practicing archery. The next generation will grow soft on Velucan wine and will lose their lands to the next batch of illiterate hill-raiders to come over the mountains, just you watch. It's how things always were, and how things [will?] always be."

 

Baheshtur, one of your Tartar companions from Mount&Blade: Warband

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"Weary had a block of balsa wood which was supposed to be a foxhole pillow. He had a prophylactic kit containing two tough condoms 'For the Prevention of Disease Only!' He had a whistle he wasn't going to show anybody until he got promoted to corporal. He had a dirty picture of a woman attempting sexual intercourse with a Shetland pony. He had made Billy Pilgrim admire that picture several times.
[...]
The corporal found the dirty picture of the woman and the pony in Weary's hip pocket. 'What a lucky pony, eh?' he said. "Hmmmm? Hmmmm? Don't you wish you were that pony?' He handed the picture to the other old man. 'Spoils of war! It's all yours, you lucky lad.'
[...]
Billy was mildly curious as to what could possibly have been kept hidden in such a place. The clerk leered and showed him. It was a photograph of a woman and a Shetland pony. They were attempting to have sexual intercourse between two Doric columns, in front of velvet draperies which were fringed with deedlee-balls."

Pages 18, 24 and 90 of Slaughterhouse Five

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Once upon a time, there was a story. Actually, it was in the August 1954 issue of Astounding Magazine, to employ the more dignified precision befitting Scientifiction. But in getting an itch to re-read The Cold Equations now, I was unpleasantly surprised to find its Wikipedia article devoting all its commentary space to nothing but negative reviews and open attacks declaiming such things should not be said! Interestingly, for something published in '54 and considered a classic and added to the SFWA's best stories list in 1970, Wikipedia's critic reviews start in '77 and then jump straight to the '90s and 2010s. Back to why later, but mark that discrepancy. Moreover, the most valid point of critique makes no appearance: that it's poorly written.

 

Even by SF's lax wordsmithing standards as the no-frills genre of ideas, The Cold Equations is filled with dull, uninformative descriptions, unrealistic dialogue and repetitive restating of redundant rehashing. Oh, to have been an assistant editor at Astounding seventy years ago and taken a thesaurus and a pair of garden shears to that weedy typescript! But editing still saved it, its hard-hitting main point owing most to that magnificent bastard John W. Campbell's refusal to accept trite feel-good moralism. I'll leave you to read a synopsis, or better yet seek the story itself (come on, it's just 20 pages, you'll live!) and move spoilerly on to the unjustified criticism.

 

The standard bitching runs that nobody would engineer a spacecraft with zero margin of error in its fuel or other reserves so as to crash if it takes on an extra passenger. Very well, maybe it's not zero. Maybe you've got ten (or eight) kilograms of wiggle-room for your carry-on luggage. Make it twenty, keep the change. That still won't carry a teenage girl. Or, give it more leeway, maybe it can! Maybe the designers specifically feared some moron would march aboard and designed it with that many kilograms to spare... and then two extra morons march aboard. You'll still have to draw lots and space one. Or maybe it's just one really fat chick! Gonna start filleting her so the main bits can live? Or hey, maybe, maybe! -- the design couldn't even take one full-sized human and the pilot had to be a horse jockey who fasted for three days before embarking! Do you see how straining to move the goalposts absolutely misses the point? You will faceplant into an implacable physical law somewhere, and that's where the story is. One pilot and one stowaway make a good concise core cast.

 

So let's not pretend sincerity in those engineering quibbles. Fans would normally have no problem accepting that a frontier setting uses bare-bones equipment, Conestogas with no spare wheel, or that the shuttle is a purpose-built machine with a very limited scope, used in an emergency solely by trained personnel. Those D-Day landing craft don't look particularly sea-worthy to me either, but hey, they did their exact specific job well enough without worrying whether any divas wanted to take one cruising. Ay, there's the rub. The same audiences cheering openly or at least sighing in self-righteous approval for male sacrifices (remember the ending to Titanic? why didn't she make some room for him on that coldly equated raft?) revolt when the tables are flipped. Females' aristocratic privilege must be preserved. But an overentitled bimbo's hauteur is, to borrow an idiotic modern phrase for once in proper context "just a social construct" fed by her betters' willingness to bow to her demands until she believes trespassing signs don't apply to her, accustomed to smiling and giggling her way out of any trouble. Godwin and Campbell merely placed her in a situation where that illusion dissipated, and drove home the point with every repetition that had the stowaway been male, the pilot would have readily shot him without argument.

 

Here we come back to Wikipedia's critical summary, with opposition to The Cold Equations seeming to increase the more society has been feminized, the more that demented entitlement grew to dominate our social mores until even the fundamental truism that the laws of the universe do not bend to your whims (no, not even if you're cute and nice) became anathema to modern narcissism.

 

Well, if you don't like that, for the love of fainting couches stay away from one Cyril Kornbluth. And most of the public have. Though very much an honorable peer of golden age SF, his is not a name frequently mentioned among the field's greats. At least not these days. I had of course read The Marching Morons, but did not remember until picking up a short story collection now that he was also behind The Little Black Bag, loosely set in the same universe and a lauded classic in its own right. So I kept going. His writing is most obviously, most deeply marked by WWII, with questions of the application of power and violence, and the distaste and necessity for such, cropping up again and again, in more direct or more fanciful ways. If you'd like the more brusque culture shock version, sample Two Dooms, and keep that fainting couch handy.

 

Not that he was by any means a one-trick-pony. You could try The Silly Season for an immersive take on the mercenary mindset of journalism, even if much of its period jargon has fallen into disuse since the heyday of late-industrial "wire" networks. The Rocket of 1955 is a cynical couple-page flash-fiction smirk toward the chest-puffing can-do attitude of the early space race - one having regained its relevance with Musk/Bezos and the like's corporate parasitism of the space program. Shark Ship is an especially memorable, if slightly disjointed, musing on censorship, perversion and the potential of hijacking both instinct and civilizational values.

 

But there's a certain brand of Kornbluth yarn spun along The Marching Morons' spindle, which belies fantasies of human nobility, human progress and the virtue of naive benevolence, the type of SF apt to be written by bitter war veterans and perhaps most famously brought to the public's attention by Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. Try The Luckiest Man in Denv if you want military-industrial complex power fantasy human interest. Try The Adventurer if you want a classic plucky downtrodden rebel pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

 

But especially try The Only Thing We Learn, the tale of a mighty space empire celebrating its rich and noble cultural heritage. After the first few pages I thought I'd gotten the gist of the story, some ultraconservative, might makes right, macho glorification of ruthless warmongering, the only civilian, the only intellectual in the flashback being after all a fat, drunken boor. Lucky I didn't toss it aside. Turns out there's plenty reason to let yourself go and give up once you see clearly the arc of history leading your society to its demise. I found myself re-reading the set-up and conclusion. The "winners" are explicitly no better, no mightier or more deserving than their victims; conversely the rich and noble heritage is a gilded revisionist slant on the undeserving. *

The linking tragic flaw here is intellectual dishonesty, misapplying artificial, ossified ethics intended not to address problems but to maximize the speaker's grandstanding, to polish useless sidearms. Again, the civilized do not lose for weakness or fundamental incompetence, but for refusal to face reality. In The Cold Equations, that reality is hard vacuum and gravity. In Kornbluth's various stories it is more often the human animal. He acknowledges, occasionally (which is more often than most) that human behavior operates by animal rules, that it repeats itself unto stagnation and self-destruction, that we are not beautiful and unique snowflakes, that the vast bulk of the species is a subhuman herd of marching morons. That mentalities are physical properties of the physical world, not negotiable social niceties. And any workable solutions to whatever intrigue you find yourself plotting or plotted into will have to be based in observation of such reality, not well-wishes and prosocial platitudes. Crooks, liars, tyrants, slaves, parasites and marauders, all are no mere aberrations which can be stamped out by heroic opposition. They are logical outgrowths of animal nature and opportunity, and will continue arising until either the latter, or better yet the former, are eliminated as roots of the problem.

 

Boy, that's a tough sell these days!

The standard-bearers of modern fantasy sold to the past generations in their youths, the Nimonas and Wesleys and Harrys and the like, proclaim a far more upbeat message: act as stupid as you like because you're special and the universe will reshape itself to suit your tantrums, and social influence is everything. That insanity is itself a matter of physical science, of ape hormones and kin recognition instincts and codependence. You could've addressed it. The naked ape simply decided to look at its own navel instead of looking at itself in the mirror. When reality does hit, you may find yourself forced to reach all the way back to the greatest generation for a dose of smelling salts.

 

"I wish I wasn't flesh and blood

I would not be scared

Of bullets built with me in mind

Then I could be saved"

 

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* For a bonus, notice how closely the old rebels match anglophone ancestors. For another bonus, I'd bet someone at Games Workshop decades ago was a Kornbluth fan. The self-assured militaristic pomp of The Only Thing We Learn's armada matches too closely the 40K Imperium of Man, and the rebels pilot a fair suggestion of Orkish kludges.

There Wolf's Jalopy

Last week it occurred to me to look and see if Google Maps photographed my car parked in street view. Not that I haven't used street view extensively ever since they implemented it, and I've looked at my parents' house on it, travel destinations, my old grade schools (holy shit, so many massive metal bars on their windows now!) and other stuff. But I don't do vanity searches, and it sort of never occurred to me to indulge in this variant until now, either. But maybe I'm weird.

 

I almost "get" the concept of vanity searches now, seeing myself represented in this objective, disinterested compendium. Sure enough, there my ride sat, in my usual parking spot, jammed up against the curb as I usually park it subconsciously trying to avoid others in this as in all respects. There's a sort of validation in seeing my influence on physical reality thus captured. There, see? I really do exist!

A republic, if you can keep educating it

"When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."  But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township.  The United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly."

 

- the villain from Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here

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"And your body is a temple
And the temple is a prison
And the prison's overcrowded
And the inmates know it's flooding
And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute
And the media's not fake
It's just very

...

   ... 

inconvenient"

 

Amanda Palmer - Drowning in the Sound

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"they could have disposed of you as quietly as flushing a dead mouse down a toilet. But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew their boss didn’t really like for them to play that rough and if he became convinced that they had (whether in court or out), it would cost their jobs if not their necks.”
Jubal paused for a swig. “But consider. Those S.S. thugs are just a tool; they aren’t yet a Praetorian Guard that picks the new Caesar. Such being, whom do you really want for Caesar? Courthouse Joe whose basic indoctrination goes back to the days when this country was a nation and not just a satrapy in a polyglot empire of many traditions … Douglas, who really can’t stomach assassination? Or do you want to toss him out of office [...] and thereby put in a Secretary General from a land where life has always been cheap and political assassination a venerable tradition? If you do this, Ben - tell me what happens to the next snoopy newsman who is careless enough to walk down a dark alley?”

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

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Funny how "Trump Derangement Syndrome" has fallen into disuse compared to his first term, as our news cycle and talk shows both are saturated more than ever with his sickening presence. Which, for a consummate narcissist, is very much a case of throwing Br'er Rabbit into the briar patch. You might say our reporters, pundits and comedians are not merely trying to spite him but bringing his crimes to public consciousness, as is their role in society. But even his actual crimes are rarely emphasized for their worst harm caused. Does he hate illegally imported Mexicans? Bad, but you'd still have a government if that were the only issue. Realistically, you could fire every wetback over Rio Grande again out of a circus cannon and, some messy hedges and a severe strawberry shortage aside, both countries would survive just fine. But the methods employed by the Republican Party, the random hooded street thugs driving around in unmarked vans disappearing random pedestrians off American streets? The paramilitary abduction of minors from their beds in the dead of night and zip-cuffing them as leverage against their parents? When the government throws due process and equal protections out the window, then you're into banana republic dictatorship tactics. But then, the last couple of Democratic administrations were already gleefully ignoring any process in declaring the entire male half of the population criminals by birth and promoting the racist rhetoric of identity politics, so let's not pretend you weren't always headed in this direction.

 

But the media have certainly sped up the process, haven't they? Diverting attention. Throwing a fit and obsessing for days or weeks over every single one of the Trumps' distractions like renaming everything after themselves, staging bum fights on the White House lawn or hammering down the walls of what is, in an objective summation, a building, a propagandistic symbol, a Versailles, Forbidden Palace or Sublime Porte to glitz yokels, and not in itself the functional institution it should represent. But the tax he wastes on every single triumphal arch in his own nonexistent honor is peanuts compared to the billions destroyed every day by the corruption running rampant with the destruction of protections against corporate fraud, of public services, plus multiple industries' subversion by and open bribery of government officials, especially the Trump crime family itself, plus the warring for military contractor profits, and for a cherry on top the proposed tax-funded bankrolling of insurrectionists against his own government. You think he's given up on that?

 

Tell me, instead of frothing at the mouth about Epstein, of every competent professional thrown out of a government position to be replaced with some subliterate hick whose only virtue is taking marching orders from the "republican" cartel. Or every department budgeted into nonexistence, and the myriad ways I'll be getting poisoned, run over and thrown out of my home as a result of the government no longer governing. That's the stuff that'll kill you. Literally. Like, a bullet through your head from a knuckledragging thug handed license to kill in the name of establishing a theocratic dictatorship. And that's if you're lucky enough to find them in too much a hurry to have their fun with you. Pointing out where the murderous thugs are lurking? That would be relevant information.

 

But it'd be boring. Everyone knows nothing gets social media channel hits (or sells rap albums) like starting a feud, beef, inconsequential but highly visible slapfight. Preferably one that goes on forever, so both sides can keep posturing as heroes of their respective cause, rioting regardless of whether the home team wins or loses.

 

There was a sudden moment of clarity back around 2017-18 when newscasters discovered, en masse, that the best way to mock Trump is to let him speak for himself and merely repeat his mindless gibbering with the same dignified, deadpan seriousness they'd adopt in reporting a bus crash. "The President issued an official statement declaring the terrorists having recently murdered scores of innocents are... bad dudes, very bad dudes." I had assumed, somewhat naively, that this approach would generalize to our entire political discourse and at last drive into full consciousness the monstrous gulf between what a statesman should be and this overgrown babbling infant pointing a gun at our heads.

 

But it was already too late. The tribal virtue-signaling outrage machine was already in full swing and every criticism could only be voiced if it doubled as championing the privileges of those self-appointed superior breeds among us, the rich in melanin or poor in testosterone. Thus the media, from YouTubers with thirty followers to the biggest names in television, settled into a cozy, mutualistic relationship based on the old comedians' running gag that even if the wrong candidate wins, their profession also wins by being fed more material. Once the public lost all standards, it's all advertising. Once the public stopped caring that they're putting subhuman cretins in charge, insults are no longer inconvenient to those selfsame empowered cretins. So long as they're facile, so long as they merely reinforce the major players' ability to bleed their fanatical followers.

 

So feed the newsies easy headlines to blurb. Knock down a monument, insult a war veteran, grope a debutante, and they'll ignore you looting the public coffers. After all, since the country started electing movie stars, the presidency has been more and more of an entertainment product, a freak show distracting from the depredations of corporate investors. And media's sole remaining purpose is to sell tickets to the show.

 

I did not declare the '24 election the end of the world merely for one incompetent and crooked house-flipper's rise to power, but because it demonstrated his brand of capitalism is how the voters choose to do business. Lie for the hell of it, cheat at every opportunity, mug grannies, take bribes, hire thugs to murder anyone who stands in your way, then rush to church to have all your crimes washed clean for declaring belief in a fairytale. What does one charlatan matter after he's installed a million just like him in every position of power? Except, perhaps, more competent in their villainy.

AoW4 Factions, 19

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I wanted to make some bugs. I made some bugs. Other than the hive mentality I was weirdly uninspired by them. Imperialists, adept settlers, etc. made for explosive early expansion. Powerful, but not my style. Never played them again.

The Prince-and-Page Matched Set

"I need attention from someone I don't care about to keep caring about those who don't care about me!" 

Sluggy Freelance 1998/03/28 

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"Real niggas do what they wanna do
Bitch niggas do what they can"

 

2Pac - Staring through My Rear-View

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"Mother, did it have to be so tall?"

Pink Floyd - Mother

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Disney's old 1940 Fantasia is mostly remembered these days for Mickey's brief stint as Sorcerer's Apprentice, but a longer and more elaborate of its segments set an ancient Greco-Roman mythscape to Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. Unicorns, pegasi and fauns caper through technicolor meadows, leading up to a ball of centaurs and centaurides, headed by Bacchus and crashed by Zeus. It's a marginally more sexualized affair than you'd expect from Disney, animation not being yet relegated to pure child's play in the interwar period. While deprived of visible nipples or genitalia, the horseyboys and horseygals were very clearly naked, and this being a bacchanal, there's zero doubt we're leading up to a whole mess o' horsey-humpin'! First though, the alluring quadrupedal, hexapodal debutantes must be attended in their primping.

A male for every occasion

Many were apparently scandalized in subsequent decades by a centaur with stereotypical exaggerated old-timey negroid features acting as servant brushing a centauride's tail and carrying her train. Okay. But most of the work is done by flights of Cupids/cherubs applying make-up, providing hats and garlands and choreographing dramatic stage entrances for the gals to look as regal as possible... to their intended mates, the far more butch centaurs. And that part has apparently not scandalized anyone in the past 86yrs.

 

So here's my question: did anyone ask the cherubic attendants if they'd like to fuck?

 

Considering that one little cupid peeks between the curtains he's just helped close on a centaur couple gettin' intimate, I'd call the answer quite obvious. But it's funny how even if we've become sensitized to the unfairness of dark-skinned servility, no-one has ever bothered questioning the females' entitlement to be served by flights of castrated, easily-dismissed males for the express purpose of then throwing themselves at higher-ranking males. Were such distinctions presented in any other context, if the centaurides were splitting the populace into worthies and serviles based on racial or national markers, well... let's say Disney's had some editing to do on such topics over its history. But fabricating a eunuch caste for the use of females is as wholesome, as natural, as righteous a proposition as we can imagine.

 

It's a regular feature among the entertainment of modern, polite society to decry and demonize the various pick-up artists conning desperate men with promises of no longer being in the loser category and getting laid, or the various hyper-masculine social media superstars surrounded by bimbo brigades as emblematic of success. But their critics conspicuously refuse to acknowledge that such snake-oil salesmen only promise transition between the categories of loser and fucker. The categories themselves predate our media figures, enforced as always since before the dawn of the species by females as part of their own reproductive instinct, along with the requisite conflict.

 

If you'd like a taste of just how unquestioningly this degradation pervades our species' social mores, try yet another of Bill Maher's semi-regular segments bashing men in service to the Democratic Party's habitual, overt misandry. This time he took a swing at young men still living with their mothers, giving up on starting families. I won't comb the segment phrase by phrase for the endless double standards placing all responsibility on men and all entitlement in the hands of women, but do note, first off, living with their mothers is something women themselves have always taken for granted, including going back if they leave their husbands. I could cite example from traditional village life, and "I'm going back to mother" was a pretty standard female threat by the Flintstones era of television. Only for men has the social safety net always been rescinded at puberty.

 

More importantly, reverse the polarity on the scenarios Maher describes. Imagine hordes of women living with their single fathers into adulthood and middle age, to the exclusion of other inter-gender relationships except for the father's circle of friends, waiting table at their gatherings and keeping house for the father. Even the more repressive Muslim societies where such behavior is directed toward the husband would raise an eyebrow at a father keeping his daughter an old maid for such purposes, especially an unmarried father. In the West, we would reflexively assume an abusive relationship.

 

But the sons in such a situation are themselves blamed as though harming others instead of being victims of a lifetime of psychological abuse from mothers who have had decades to torture them into dependency, who have retained direct and unitary control from infancy, uninterrupted and unscrutinized, propped up by a legal system which glorifies single motherhood as morally superior based on the unchallenged dogma of feminist lobbying. Somehow when discussing older women and younger men it's not the adult in the relationship that's at fault, ever. And even when we deign to glance at this dynamic, the men are not viewed as deprived of living their own lives, but condemned as insufficiently servile toward women at large. The question of the man's own independence is not even raised; only his presumed duty to provide for and protect a wife presumed slightly more entitled to him as a servant than a mother might be.

 

Moreover, make no mistake, this is among other things a form of sexual abuse suited to female instinct. Women who divorce their husbands and wrest solitary control over their sons then construct a sexless marriage to this dependent, obedient animal over whose psyche she has secured unchallenged gaslighting privileges. A mock-husband who will never dare step out of line. A castrated, darling little cherub perpetually flitting about her, helping her primp and choreograph her self-aggrandizement. A male to be denied to make herself feel superior and in illusory control over her own unanalyzed instincts.

 

For peak perversity, consider how much of this state of affairs follows economically from the generations-long practices of denying men university scholarships or social aid in favor of women, and throwing them out of education and work on women's accusations of <SOMETHING SEXUAL> automatically and without recourse. Only to then have media channels like HBO lambaste you as a loser for it by every invective and scatological sputtering they can imagine.

 

All this is normal, Disney-safe, wholesome. Does not every woman deserve both a prince to fuck and a neutered cherub to carry her train?

 

Marrying? It's a wonder men will have anything at all to do with you sadistic cunts.

Here's lookin' at you lookin' at me, 9

I was walking home through a blizzard when I spotted this little guy scampering around the gutter.

Imagine my surprise when it actually started running at my leg. Then when I moved my foot slightly, it panicked and sprinted full-tilt in the other direction. It had probably just headed for the nearest heat source not realizing it was declaring war on King Kong. In a couple of seconds it had burrowed into the soft, shallow snow lining the gutter.

If it was that desperate and disoriented though, I doubt it lived much longer. A big downside of being a minuscule mammal with a hypercharged metabolism is your energy reserves being basically nil.

Fallout: New Vegas

"There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –"

 

Emily Dickinson

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Y'know, they had a saying back in the old days:

- but I don't remember it because we don't really remember all that much from back then. Who wants a history of plenty and gleaming safety when you're dodging shivs and stingers around every corner and hoping you haven't inhaled enough radioactive dust to make your skin slough off? But they also say Vegas was a big deal before the war. Still is. Money-pit back then. Still is. Crooked and run by crime families? Well, yeah. And maybe that's what everyone likes about the place. For all the monsters looking to chew our limbs off, for all the poisoned landscape and contaminated water, the xenophobic cults and sadistic tyrants looking to enslave us, for all the world's changes and our own mutations, everyone, and I mean everyone, can look to that idiotic cap-trap burning pointless electricity through every night and feel reassured, yes, reassured in this universal kinship, that we're all still the same dumbfucks that blew up the world in a pissing contest.

 

This message brought to you by Cram!

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After bashing my head against Bannerlord's Artificial Stupidity a couple of posts ago, I decided to switch to some other looting, roving, first-person RPG, and methought instead of Cyberpunkin', it's been a while since I've fallen out. Or in. Next stop: 2010's New Vegas, farmed out to Obsidian as soon as Fallout 3 demonstrated the 3D adaptation could turn a profit, presumably so Bethesda could focus on the then upcoming Skyrim instead. Could it be anything more than a cheesy cash-grab sequel easily tossed aside after a few hundred rat kills?

I initially started an early level play-by-play as I'd kept for #3, but soon realized their shared technology and interaction would force me to repeat myself on too many minor details. Then I kept expecting to suss out some through-line of incompetence in mechanics, atmosphere or writing which I could mock from beginning to end. To my dismay, then delight, I discovered I couldn't. The more I dove in, the more it drew me in. Though hampered a bit by bugs, clunky motion, industry-standard grindy resource stockpiling and a few terrible decisions (e.g. damage threshold, STR as must-have stat, Bethesda-standard terrible inventory timesink interface) overall New Vegas proves an impressively well-executed game.

 

Avoiding abusing the paid cheat items from the DLCs I heft my varmint rifle and stumble my way through the first few levels in my own ass-backward way, hitting Sloan's easier quests and then Primm (leaving the robot in charge, though, truth be tol', I got no time for any man (or bot) named Slim, 'less 'is last name be Pickens) and even the border outpost (where I have the dubious honor of being sent to kill ten rats or six ants, whichever comes first) before returning to newbietown's newbiequest. Then I spin out for some exploration and random violence: geckos, ghouls, goats, scorpions, coyote dens, a cave here, an irradiated valley there, a ridiculous ghoul rocketeer cult jetted off to anywhere-but-here.

 

By the time I sight the solar farm I find myself pausing every once in a while to admire the windblown dust. Something about this game is beginning to feel very... right. After the random nonsense of #s 2 and 3, the atmosphere seems to have found its footing again. The entire wasteland's not immediately crawling with super mutants. Characters stay in character, which doesn't exclude the occasional bit of in-character humor.

Desperate for desperados

Sure, sure, the theft/morality mechanics still make no sense even within the... let's say lax, limits of video game logic. While Powdering that gang at the hoosegow, how the hell is it still stealing to take any of the convicts' junk? I'm their sworn enemy, I've betrayed their trust and doomed them all, declared open war on them and I outright gain karma by hacking them to ribbons with my machete while they wail in agony, but taking a bottle of beer still costs me karma? Then you've got poor Boxcars who will never again kick a tumbleweed. My condolences. And also my morphine. Apparently feeding dope to a murderous bandit counts as a karmic gold mine. Hurray morals. Even the big supposedly two-sided conflict between Republic and Legion is played much too shallowly, but I'll have to revisit Caesar's Legion when I discuss villains.
 

A few little absurd moments had me rolling my eyes right from the opening cinematic. Headshots do not work that way, the couple of times my dialogue read "I'm not a delivery boy" had me wondering how else you define "courier" and I'm hoping the bottlecap quest won't wax Pythonish in its silliness. I've also been skipping any card/gambling minigames in the interest of time. Then you've got the more severe stumbling.

 

The overly-narrow inventory margin forces me into abusing teleportation just as in Fallout 3 despite having piled on three more strength points - sure, I could avoid picking up trash loot but look, I just assume I'll need thirty pounds of dog meat, four hundred empty bottles and fifteen toasters at some point in this campaign; this is an RPG after all. And, if anything, even my thirty years' worth of metagaming experience underestimated old Obsidian's dedication to making you pick up every piece of litter you run across. I've spent half my time checking the wiki for fear a junk item might have some obscure use, which it usually does. With a better interface, this could've been very entertaining. With Bethesda's gigantic linear list-scrolling timesink and zero tooltips, I'm leaning more toward annoyed. On a related note, as in Fallout 3 interior spaces often feel too "realistically" large and repetitive, but I'll spin that off into a separate topic.

 

It also has its share of more technical issues. The mottled dustbowl aesthetic's a mixed blessing. It allowed them to camouflage a large number of tripwires, land mines and other nasty surprises managing to reintegrate trap-disarming as an RPG staple after moving to FPS. On the flip-side it also turns many quests into pixel-hunting nightmares.

I don't care if you're Hawkeye himself, I simply will not believe you hunted those pixels without cheating and looking up the location on a wiki.
 

Also, entirely too many quests or rewards become unavailable if you clear a location before getting the corresponding marching order from some mook you never knew existed. Quest markers glitch out and mislead you, save files refuse to overwrite and the game still crashes and locks up on zone transitions. So I couldn't explain why none of those very real flaws put a dent in my drive to advance through Fallout: New Vegas' world and encounters until I finally set my mind to enter the city proper. I climbed a rise overlooking the Colorado River. Up ahead was a friendly camp. Might meet a giant mutant fly or two on the way. Farther in the distance was the dam. Nice detour on my way north, and a chance to skirt the bandit-infested ruins. My pack was still fairly light, so I might make it all the way to the city and advance the main quest. By a step, just a step. Plenty of mysteries to uncover on the way. Some dangerous, to be avoided. Others tantalizing. Progress to be made, but not an infinite power trip. Wealth to be gained, but not constantly. Colorful characters, but with interesting motivations.

 

Only then did I consciously articulate NewVegas' charm: it's honest work. Not the more cynically pandering, low-brow, condescending fluff like Fallout 3, Wasteland 2 or BG3, not focus-grouped to death; neither is it the self-indulgent posturing of fresh college graduates imagining themselves "disruptors" upending an entire industry by some sophomoric big idea. It neither strains to keep you mindlessly busy with constant action nor denies the necessity for same in moderation. It neither drags you everywhere by your nose-ring like a domesticated beast executing fixed orders, as Skyrim did, nor purposely punishes you with "rocks fall, everybody dies" GM omnipotence abuse. Nor did it outright settle for mediocrity.

It built on its premise.

 

Where in, say, Wrath of the Righteous or BG3 most NPC companions outright infuriated me by their infantilism, in this game from a decade prior I couldn't find even one I outright disliked. (Though their idiot combat AI had me gnashing my rotten fangs.) I'm enjoying the added immersion of the survival elements, chugging Nuka-Cola and irradiated water, stocking up on doctor's bags, planning on visiting the Doc for an anti-rad treatment, taking time for a good night's sleep. Persistent but not insistent implementation. Vegetation and resource spawns follow different biomes with smoother gradations than Skyrim. Even more importantly, NV downplays the MMO grind mechanics which plagued TES 4&5 and Fallout 3. It throws out level scaling (aside from a noticeable mid-game bump in mob types) in favor of reasonably tiered challenges, renewing that impression of monomythic escalation and distinct transition between the mundane and mystical which the original Fallout so perfectly captured, and which 2&3 threw out. It even dares to weaken the loot&scoot core loop. In contrast to Fallout 3 or Skyrim, you might spend highly variable durations away from Goodboing (or wherever you keep your stash) and some of the most interesting locations, like Vault 22, might not offer much in the way of loot at all.

 

But most important, it prizes its immersion and does not sell it out for cheap gags. NPCs learn your name and reward your past efforts. The wilds feel spot-on bleak and vaults perversely claustrophobic. Mobs cluster around dens and hideouts and other likely spots, not just interspersed statically over the landscape, and occasionally mount half-hearted attacks on civilization - and civilization responds in kind!

I made a lucrative scavenger trade early on when discovering I could follow caravans around and loot their targets as they defend themselves during travel. (Makes me wonder who's running around after my comitatus in Vagrus.) There's even a coherent sense of marching history to the collapse of tribal/raider culture in the face of larger, organized factions like the NCR and Legion, of civilization very gradually rebuilding after a now long-past nuclear war.

 

But I can't help noting all of NV's best features were Obsidian's departures from Bethesda's strict formula. Slight ones. Working within the series' limits. Eventually you feel that formula dragging you down again. I'd post a screenshot of my character's progress, but by level 31 you probably know how that goes. Most skills already at 80 points, a mountain of loot, a brewery's worth of bottle caps even after maxing out my implant quota. Grandmaster of every guild, as usual. Every quest pushing you toward a golden ending. Simplistic good vs. evil conflicts with obvious correct choices. Not much role to play.

 

Yet still. It's a world you don't want to leave. Boots scraping the sun-baked clay, an objective on the horizon, a glance between the foothills for interposed threats, a chug of sarsaparilla, a nod to your companion. Onward. NV falls into that second tier of classic games. It lacks the real oomph of a trendsetting Fallout 1, Morrowind, Starcraft or Half-Life, the artistic flair of a Bloodlines, Tyranny or Torment to fuel roleplaying memories. But, like Dragon Age: Origins or the first Pillars of Eternity, it stands out as a rare, self-respecting, dedicated project all around.

 

I grudgingly admitted Fallout 3 was less of a shit-show than it could've been. I'm wholeheartedly enjoying New Vegas.

 

 

 

____________________________________

 

P.S.: Kicking tumbleweeds around is weirdly fun...

Various bumblers

On goldenrod:

On a... what the hell are those white inflorescences anyway? I used to know. They're everywhere. 

Queen Anne's lace?

Eh, let's stick with thistles.

"Bumble on a thistle" is probably an entire photographic genre in itself. Worthy of a dramatic lens flare.

 

A Measure of Mud

Hey, guess what game I'll be talking about in a few days!

Trudging through that dust-bowl brought to mind an old Sylvester Stallone movie titled Lock Up that I caught a couple of times way back when, and which has seemingly faded from everyone's memory. Not unjustifiably, either. Ostensibly a prison movie, but without much to say about justice or prison life, but nonetheless overstating everything it didn't have to say, every damn minute of every damn scene. Dialogue sounds like placeholder for an actual script. It belabored each and every shot and even the soundtrack somehow managed to consistently mismatch its mood. Aside from that it's Stallone flexing his way through a litany of manly cliches in quintessential '80s fashion: power tools, car, tossing a ball, body-slamming, punching, protecting his mate, squaring off against a standard-issue less-manly-therefore-bad villain. If you want a highlights reel, keep in mind they're not lying when they say those are the movie's best scenes. The flick seems to have flopped, badly.

 

Yet somehow I always held a modest soft spot for it. Maybe just because I saw it when I was twelve or something and didn't know better. Maybe its the pretty decent fights with lots of unsophisticated, grunting violence, the sort of which you've seen too little in the post-Matrix decades. But looking at those few scenes now, I think Stallone got upstaged by the real star of the show: that muddy prison yard! It squelches. It stretches across the frame. It encompasses the men's own drab inmate duds and the dun concrete walls. Characters slip and fall in it. It spatters and clings and sits heavy and implacable. This is your world, creature of mud.

Such drab beigeness can be doubly fraught in an interactive medium. Where a movie director can force action in the mud, a game designer risks the player stopping and looking around to ask 'what the hell am I doing here' every minute of gameplay. Indeed, I've bashed a few titles here on the blog for just such hollow environments. But I've more often praised the ones that manage to pull it off. A good designer always has an answer in mind for what the hell you're doing there. As above, he dangles a monument off in the distance to grab your attention and let you get your bearings. Or slopes and sweeps the terrain to make you wonder what's over the next rise. Or supplies suggestive wind/water/traffic motion carrying your attention across the landscape. Even if your immediate surroundings feel empty, you are made to think of something beyond the nothing, made to value the steps you take.

 

The Shawshank Redemption for instance had opera and a library to offset the mud. Lock Up lacked them.

AoW4 Factions, 18

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

________________________________________________________________________________

I had a dragon aspect left over and wanted more nature/chaos interplay, so a bunch of happy-go-lucky halflings seemed about right. In practice though they ended up more brute-force oriented than I'd expected, getting a lot of use out of their Primal stacks. Elusiveness and quick reflexes combined with materium defense buffs but little nuking let fights drag out long enough for those stacks to come into play repeatedly. First-turn draconic vitality then runesmiths piling on the enchantments instead of nuking just drive the strat further in that direction. Strategically, a nice middle ground faction with a bit of everything, steady as she goes. Kinda love the concept too, can really picture the moment of wonder, glimpsing their new overlord through the brush, skittish little savages marveling at the possibilities.

Bah, NerdLord: From Seonon, an Empire!

"Ihr habt nichts zu verlieren doch
Gewinnen könnt ihr viel"

KMFDM - Hau Ruck

 

Dateline: Calradia, 1091. Beaten, bottled in, batty Battania battens down its bottom bastion!

Stalwart Battania, high-flung Battania, Mother Earth's favored flaxen-tressed daughter, land of a thousand pigs and several little ponies, land of... clay... hath been broughte lowe by its fowes. Yet (as such stories go) in the eleventh hour a hale and determined hero named Werwolfe rides to the gates of Marunath to pledge his service to his homeland; then discovers he can't because king Caladog himself languishes in a Vlandian dungeon and thus cannot accept an oath - though he's probably shouting quite a few.

 

Still you can get a fair bit done as a mere mercenary in Bannerlord, even if it mostly relies on Artificial Stupidity. The computer tends to operate with horse blinders on, so even though it'll run from stronger armies, the Battanian plateau's narrow terrain makes it easy to purposely let an enemy army advance past you then chase it into your other allies. Since all my side's remaining lords were concentrated around a single city, this became depressingly repetitive. The same vulnerability which probably dooms Battania when it's just algorithms against each other makes it easily defensible for a human player. Ath Cafal, the village just SW of Marunath, also happens to lie in a cul-de-sac, so enemies would repeatedly trap themselves either trying to raid it or chasing weaker armies in. Lather, rinse, repeat, and thus passed my first year of Battanian military service. All well and good until the king of the Norhern Empire himself parked a larger army than I could handle right outside the town gates.

Note than even though our combined forces (my 170 plus all the parties in Marunath) would easily have trounced King Lucon, they won't coordinate such an attack unless already in the field, and won't step onto the field because they're each individually programmed to stay safe indoors if outnumbered. Catch-22. Not only that, but even when they do the interface is endlessly vague as to which armies will help you or not based on proximity. Laddies and gentlegamers, I don't mind admitting I cheated my ass off at this point, crashing and reloading the game twenty times over until finally managing to bait Lucon away so my idiots would venture out, then looping back to hit him when enough were in range.

 

This would've been easier if I were a lord and could form armies, I thought, until discovering that even after Caladog's return and lordy-looing myself up, none of my peers can recruit enough troops from our meager remaining population to accept an army invitation. Realizing that if Battania is to have an army I must supply it myself, I spend the next year continuing to trap and imprison Vlandians until after grabbing Llanoc Hen Castle we agree to a hefty tribute for peace in Summer of 1092. Building my own Imperial Legion from the Western Empire and splitting it off to a couple of my own underlings, finally I throw my accumulated influence (in part from surrendering prisoners to my King's dungeon) into a desperate gambit to mass our entire force and recapture Seonon from the Northern Empire. It works!

I even have enough influence left over after the victory to squeak through on a 1% margin and claim it for myself. The politics, kid, that's what'll kill ya. 

Home sweet ramshackle, muddy home.

We manage to fight off the inevitable recapture attempt. By winter, with our raiders descending the plateau eastward into the lands about Epic Scrotea, the Northern Empire agrees to a truce. Thus, with a moment's peace and a homestead secured, a middle-aged man's fancy turns from battle-lust to booty-lust. Cue the romantic bagpipes, we're goin' a-courtin'!

 

Now, I'd originally found myself in a meet-cute with one lady Gawen, saving her a couple of times on the battlefield... but as she turned me down turned out to be a lesbian, I decided meet-cutes are dumb and fixed my eyes on a politically convenient marriage to Corein, daughter of king Caladog.

We look cute together. Regal too.

The real clincher was when I saw the good princess' flawless taste in battle-garb.

I'm in love!

We can borrow each other's wardrobe and wolf-whistle in both directions. Though during the war she'd turned me down as beneath her station, after the capture of Seonon it wasn't long before (a quick reload during a failed dialogue aside) she approved her father's approval of my approval of her fine lupine ass.

One wife, please. An' make 'er shaggy.

Technically she only rates 8295 denars, but what the hell, keep the fiver old man, my treat. *wink*

 

While courting and then while we busy ourselves cranking out a couple of heirs, I convince my incipient father-in-law to re-open hostilities with our Vlandian oppressors, having maxed out my underlings' armies until I start to lose money on upkeep. The war drags slowly over the next few years, with gradual, hard-won victories in castle sieges, and a welcome alliance with the Western Empire, the Vlandians' other major enemy. The biggest stroke of luck comes after the recapture of Pen Cannoc, Dunglanys having rebelled against Vlandian rule. Not only does it split their armies for easy field skirmishes, but sets up easy, predictable ambushes when they try to siege it.

Then, when they do retake it, a quick pounce to grab it on the rebound. Thus, seven and a half years after Battania's near-defeat, the latest peace treaty leaves us with far more hopeful borders.

Tho' Car Banseth yet languishes under accursed Vlandian misrule, much of our ancestral realm has now been reclaimed. We set our eyes beyond our borders, where glory and riches (surely) await.

 

So, how was this for an RPG plot? A wealthy merchant returns to save his homeland, outmaneuvers his foes by devious military tactics, seduces a princess (while wearing the same outfit as her (hey, some chicks are into it!)) and claims a title and fiefdom by hiring foreign legionnaires. It's got a plucky underdog angle, patriotic last stands and glorious marches, a courtroom drama scene, the comic relief that your new city's a little bit boggy, one town's heroic rebellion to join its free brethren, and even a love triangle! I've said before (and I'm far from the only one) that Bannerlord has suffered by losing the companion dialogue and small-party adventuring of M&B: Warband, lost some of its monomythic escalation, and sadly, that remains true. Nevertheless it remains a prime example of computer games' potential as creative medium.

 

When the topic is discussed, it's almost always in terms of writing quality, visuals, moral/sociopolitical themes or a really bangin' soundtrack. But all that, while certainly relevant, is unfair if it only treats a game as if it were a movie or a storybook. It's supposed to be interactive, this new electronic medium of the past half-century, it's supposed to be about what you, the player, can actually do. Lay out your own story. An often touted ideal, rarely achieved, yet still the medium's great claim to validity. This? Some AI incompetence aside, this was good roleplaying and good gaming.

 

Health and long life to The Swain of Seonon!

Shrooms

Come on, you can do it, you can do it!

You did it!

 

Bring the fam.

 

We have attained verticality! ...in a drunken sort of jumble.

 

More mycelium means more power.

The little ones are a different species... aren't they? I really don't know nearly enough about fungi but they do shapeshift between growth stages.
 

Tiny cups above tired caps:

Trumpeting their success 

...I have... ZERO freakin' clue here.

Some type of Auricularia?

What Is It Good for Me Lately?

"Death seed, blind man's greed
Poets' starving children bleed
Nothing he's got he really needs"

 

King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man

 

 

I'd always meant to comment more on Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but consistently found I could add nothing. The Russians themselves were expecting the two-week war I had originally predicted, demonstrated by their failure to arrange functional supply lines at the outset. Subsequent years' shift from traditional warfare toward automation and teleoperation is a historic landmark (and just one more apocalyptic nail in our species' coffin) but many, many others have commented more cogently on drone warfare.

 

But whatever its strategic, humanitarian and technological details, Russian expansionism is on a conceptual level so... boring. It lacks the ideological spice of faith and progress and subversion and societal goals colouring our discussion of, say, Middle-Eastern or African conflicts, or the old Cold War debate on economics. A sadistic, strutting strongman whipping a horde of frothing thugs and unwilling conscripts into throwing themselves into the meatgrinder for a naked land-grab is too redundantly medieval. Even Putin's sycophants claiming "de-nazification" or somesuch gave up on their transparent excuses several years ago and appear to have simply embraced the dictator's troglodytic aggression for its own sake. Same old routine.

 

Israel's expansionism on the other hand does offer ideological facets in spades, tribal/territorial, religious, humanitarian, utopian, you name it. But there's every reason to believe that Israel before October '23 took a page from the U.S. preceding 9/11 and deliberately ignored the oncoming raid, willfully let a couple thousand of its citizens be butchered to provide a pretext for invasion and solidifying domestic power for its current aspiring junta.

 

So is it ensuring safety, is it humanitarianism, is it religious fanaticism or is it a land grab? Did anyone bother keeping up the facade of being motivated by repatriating hostages, any more than Putin's "de-nazification", or is the point to secure some profitable real estate for Netanyahu's cronies to sell at a cozy profit margin to the very families of those of their own constituents whom they so cheerfully sacrificed to Judaic manifest destiny? Self-defense is one thing, social progress would be another if you did it honestly, but if you've been putting a hundred thousand now thoroughly de-fanged brainwashed primitives up against the wall 'cause it's a good gesheft? Whole other conversation.

 

Then there's the Israeli/U.S. bombing campaign against Iran, where issues of ideology, public good, terrorism, warmongering, what-have-you, all seem to fade before the sheer Stoogely, tragicomic farce of the whole affair. At least one of the supposed motivations goes beyond mere ideology to existential threat. If religious fanatics get nukes (or any other weapons of mass destruction) they will use them, some sooner than others and jihadists soonest of all. It's also true that a massive proportion of Iran's population is not only living under miserable theocratic oppression but in this case desperately wants out from under such rule, and has for decades.

 

But you can't honestly believe these pretexts are truly being followed by our leadership, that the sputtering clown car of drunks, ditzes and gutter swindlers that is the current U.S. government has either the intent or IQ to pursue any goal beyond extorting bribes for themselves as they've been doing for the past year and a half. From the start the war was greeted with utter confusion, by the public, by the press, by even the military ordered to prosecute a constantly shifting and nonsensical list of demands while their commander-in-chimp screeches random scatological street urchin threats across social media. If you'd like the key to the whole snafu though, pay attention to one particular sound bite constantly repeated from the start: the fear that the U.S. may be running out of bombs or interceptor missiles or drones or ships or planes or... something. Something requiring a heavily tax-subsidized, unscrutinized investment. Something explained ninety years ago:

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes twelve percent. But war-time profits — ah! that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent - the sky is the limit. All that traffic will bear.
[...]
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way.
[...]
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits.
[...]
Thus, having stuffed patriotism down their throats, it was decided to make them help pay for the war, too. So, we gave them the large salary of $30 a month.
[...]
Half of that wage (just a little more than a riveter in a shipyard or a laborer in a munitions factory safe at home made in a day) was promptly taken from him to support his dependents, so that they would not become a charge upon his community. Then we made him pay what amounted to accident insurance —- something the employer pays for in an enlightened state — and that cost him $6 a month. He had less than $9 a month left. Then, the most crowning insolence of all — he was virtually blackjacked into paying for his own ammunition, clothing, and food by being made to buy Liberty Bonds. Most soldiers got no money at all on pay days. We made them buy Liberty Bonds at $100 and then we bought them back - when they came back from the war and couldn't find work — at $84 and $86. And the soldiers bought about $2,000,000,000 worth of these bonds!"

 

That's from General Smedley Butler's War Is a Racket, published as an insider's retrospective on WWI and U.S. incursions into Central America in the early 20th century, over a decade before the phrase "military-industrial complex" rattled the airwaves. Those few commentators not driven by nationalist/religious fanaticism, capable of objective analysis, are always tempted to say that motivation does not matter so long as an objective goal is achieved. So what if a few profiteers wet their beaks, so long as a threat to the rest of us gets removed? But the point is exactly that motive shifts goals. Once Daddy Warbucks becomes your hero instead of a criminal to be eliminated from polite society, every war is a war against one's own populace, a pretext for enriching the rich at the sacrifice of the wage slaves and cannon fodder. Or does anyone imagine Russians in general are benefiting from the destruction of Ukraine? Or that the wasteful confusion of the Iranian war is not so by design, meant to destroy American property that the richest investors may justify further tax-subsidized replacement of military assets, with any destruction abroad merely an afterthought?

 

And has anyone noticed that even Trump's detractors in the media are mouthing the same ad copy about bomb shortages (no matter how the bombs are wasted, and no matter Trumpists refused expending those same bombs in defense of Ukraine) terrified of angering investors in military contractors?