Greatestgargadon - Hello.

Happy 4th anniversary of the Ever Given Suez Canal Obstruction, to those who celebrate

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

Honestly the only slur I ever get called is 'gay' or 'homo', people here just aren't very creative with their slurs anymore

if you've ever used the London Underground you might have noticed that it often gets uncomfortably hot. the reason for this is actually that its builders dug too greedily & too deep and as a result the trains are very close to the fires of hell. hope that helps.

The age of machines sneaked up on us. Steadily over the past century, the world has been increasingly shaped to the needs of machines. Farmland is designed for the tractor, millions of miles of road and acres of parking lots designed for cars, plus airports, shipping ports, distribution centers, factories, server farms... Everywhere we find spaces hostile to humans but welcoming to machines. Human beings relegate themselves mostly to apartment buildings, offices, and houses. We spend large amounts of time and energy powering and operating machinery. Meanwhile all over the planet the land, ocean, and sky is dominated by billions of metal and plastic amalgamations animated and set loose by human beings.

Our age of machines is not the classic Terminator apocalypse scenario, where an AI script gets out of control and destroys humanity. These machines are still physically operated by people, who are taking orders from other people. But it's pretty clear that the world is more welcoming to a person in a machine than one walking free on their own feet.

Rome in its Republican period was undoubtedly the predominant military force of its time. Something about its religious and military practices, combined with its republican form of government, made the Romans do war unlike anyone else. For this post, the most important point I want to make is that Rome conquered most of its territory as a republic. In its imperial period, Roman territory did grow some, but ultimately the Empire was unstable and fractured into multiple autocratic states.

In 1789 the Estates General met in France. Called by the king and then elected by the people of France, this body rejected their monarchical mandate to address the state deficit and instead wrote a new constitution for France, establishing a democratic order on the European continent. The kingdoms around France reacted to this affront to monarchical power by bringing troops to French borders. Fired by nationalism and democratic enfranchisement, the new French state mustered an army exponentially larger than any of its neighbors. The wars that dominated the next twenty(ish) years of European history would see the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte and a large expansion of French territory.

During World War II the United States mobilized to an enormous degree to fight European fascist states and the empire of Japan. Huge numbers of young men were conscripted to fight, entire industries were devoted to military production, and all over the nation families rationed food in order to support the war effort. This just twenty years after women were granted the right to vote. At this point the United States was the oldest democratically elected national government in the world, invoking its national fervor for the cause of mass violence. In the half century after and then some, the United States dominated the world economically and militarily.

All this to say that for a very long time democracy and military power have been bound together. The most democratic nations have been the ones able to muster the largest armies, engage the most industrial production, demand the most sacrifice from their populations. On a geopolitical scale, democracy has meant power.

But here's the twist, and what terrifies me about the current moment: with the rise of machines and machine learning, and the consolidation of server ownership into the hands of just a few oligarchs, it's unclear whether that power dynamic still holds. Drones and other remote, even autonomous, technology have made both factories and battlefields less human. The human crowds that filled Roman or Parisian plazas can be atomized and identified by automated surveillance networks. Mao says that political power flows from the barrel of a gun. What happens when the guns aren't in human hands?

What are the ethics of advocating violence against machines?

Eyes on the future, the past is fuel

Dig deeper, burn hotter, run faster

Don't think about what was here yesterday

Don't think about what won't be here tomorrow

Kinda feels like George Washington's main leadership traits were tall, charismatic, and handsome. That said, here are some other things he did (and didn't do):

He supported his lifestyle by enslaving dozens of people, claiming to own them and forcing them to work on his plantation.

He got a bunch of people inoculated against smallpox

He released all his slaves only on his and his wife's deaths

He kept together a defensive army for several years without wrecking the landscape or alienating the populace

He was given executive power and ceded it to a democratic(ish) process

He never figured out how to live without enslaving people

He never had a child

He raised up Alexander Hamilton and let him build a banking system

He led a militia force against US citizens in the whisky rebellion

He ordered a 3-year colonial war against native Americans in the Great Lakes region