Greatestgargadon - Hello.

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

sapphic saturday

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?

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.

Patriarchy

Child is born. Child grows up among family, cared for by family. Child reaches puberty. If child is female, child stays among family and continues to be cared for. In lower status families girl will probably be put to work. If child is male and lower status, he most often leaves family and works to live. Sometimes he leaves voluntarily, sometimes he is pushed out. If male child is higher status, he continues to be cared for by family as he pursues his ambitions in society. He will be married off to a high status female to continue the family line.

Patriarchy is both the uplifting of the high status males and the casting out of the low status males. Neoliberal ideology tells these low status males they can gain status through the market. Patriarchy keeps women at home and disempowered but generally more in community than men. Isolated women are especially vulnerable. Patriarchy tries to erase people who don't fit into the binary gender system.

and how many petulant letters embedded in well-designed structures?

This is the exact sort of passive-aggressive Rich Old Man Grumpiness I can get behind

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

In 1971 Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Jimmy Carter assumed office during some of the economic and geopolitical turmoil that followed. Reagan took office, radically changed tax policy to benefit wealthy people, and ushered in a boom era in the economy. He handed off power to his vice president Bush, then Clinton took over during the Internet boom of the 1990s. Bush 2 started the Iraq War, ushering in an era of heavy US military involvement in the Middle East. All US administrations from Truman onward involved themselves in affairs of that part of the world. Obama inherited and continued that era, his main domestic accomplishment being a health insurance for all system that expanded and subsidized the private health insurance market.

Trump came to power and held it until the Covid-19 pandemic. His administration lowered taxes on rich people, disrupted US international agreements, and appointed a large number of judges. The murder by police of George Floyd sparked a wave of protests that occupied major cities for months leading up to the 2020 election. Joe Biden won with a tenuous legislative majority and governed the country during four years of adaptation and recovery from the pandemic and the nation's response to it. The democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 elections.

Donald Trump won the election of 2024 with a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. He invited Elon Musk into the White House and cabinet meetings, and gave Musk unprecedented access to data systems across the federal government through the newly created DOGE. DOGE began directing the firings of masses of government workers, actions that were challenged in the court system.