The Post-Partisan Emporium

The amorality of tech and the illusion of superiority Carlos Ramalhete Photo by  Specna Arms  on  Unsplash There is a nice book by Michael Crichton,  Timeline , in which some historians find themselves in the Middle Ages. (yes, I do love escapist fiction; I even  write some .) The best thing in the book is that the author managed to avoid the ugliest and most absurd cliché of time-travel fiction, and his characters are not somehow superior to people from that other moment in time. In fact, they find again and again that some black legends about that time were wrong. Of course, the  awful movie version  reverses it, to the point of having a character saying they had centuries of superiority over the guys chasing them. Ugly, indeed. But movies, like camels, are made by committees. Recently I read another time-travel book — in fact, a trilogy ( Island in the Sea of Time, by S. M. Stirling ) — in which a whole islandful of XXth-Century Yankees become the c...

war on everything including and especially you el gato malo we live in the age of the war machine. the purpose of the war machine is not to produce victory. the purpose of the war machine is to produce war. war unending. war on everything. permission to think the unthinkable and excuse to do that which is inexcusable. it is the triumph of the terrible and the tyrannical. the war on covid, poverty, injustice, drugs, terrorism: it’s all the same. war is the worst of humanity. it is the end of cooperation, the end of rationality, the abrogation of ethics. war is permission to “do what it takes to win” this cannot be the way. war is the end of good choices and the embrace of conflict, the end of citizens and the pursuit of subjugation. it is the end of humanity and the beginning of amoral destruction of the enemy. perfect for politicians. anathema to the free breath of we the people. this is jingo as justification. it’s the supplanting of rights by righteousness. and this war machine will ...