I wondered what happened to Dan. Hope his book does well. We all have to reinvent ourselves, from time to time. It is healthy, even if not totally sincere. I never knew he was a nuclear war planner...Well, you learn something new everyday. Sometimes two somethings.

So. I did not read the book. Don't plan to, now or ever. In view of what is happening now, it seems to me that morality and ethics are antiquated concepts, in spite of the fact they are still topical for argument's sake. The world has not pulled together well in the face of plague, and no amount of diplomatic jawboning would have brought that about. A ruthless dictator is prepared to wage regional war, or worse, to regain a failed empire. There are renewed arguments over the tired notion of war crimes and what constitutes just warfare. What ineffable twaddle. There was no coordinated effort to stop the invasion.,in the first place; no credible deterrent. Invaders only respect superior numbers, attitude and preparation. For the current tragedy and many previous ones, this inadequacy has been repeated. Refusal to invest never earns dividends; only encourages losses. We only get what we pay for...or less. I am unmoved by the continued narrative on morals and ethics. It is useless.

I date myself in this post by saying I didn’t see the Will Smith slap coming, and neither did Chris Rock. He just stood there. So it goes.

I point out my naivete in saying that I never thought Russia would attack Ukraine in the same way they did Georgia and Chechnya and Syria and Afghanistan. The scale, I thought, was too grand, a nation of 40 million.

I fool myself by saying American policy has been significantly different from Russia in Afghanistan and Syria, Iraq, Panama, and Grenada.

Like Will Smith, like Vladimir Putin, you can have it all, like most of the hundreds of billionaires in the American West. Suppose you lose perspective and rationality, well then, in short measure that defines you.

Instead of taking 9/11 on the chin and fixing the injustice of the fossil fuel industry that ultimately spawned the climate disaster, as well as most of the conflicts of our day, instead of rationally taking the benefits of our injustice, people, countries, and the world with them, are willing to throw it all away for empty pride. It is a miracle nuclear winter hasn’t already overtaken our lives.

In the Ukraine, limited use of Nuclear weapons is likely if we give too much aid to the blameless Ukrainian people. There are worse leaders than the geriatrics on whom we currently place our bets who could instead be in power.

I don’t see any path in Ellsberg’s book or in this show to disarm the machine realistically. The fact that the Ukrainians disarmed and are suffering the consequence is enough to destroy any hope of detente with North Korea or Iran.

There can be all sorts of moral justifications for threatening nuclear holocaust. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t just let every country have the capacity to ensure their survival. Allowing just a few hasn’t made me feel less anxious.

The most realistic path forward is to hold back our slaps, swallow our pride, use our power to celebrate the stories that matter. Social justice needs to be at the forefront of national policy. Environmental realism needs to be restored (lead and plastic remediation prioritized as well as climate realism.) Finally, we need to invest in the command and control of our military to ensure that despite our best efforts, it doesn’t all go for naught.

What a great show this was. Ellsberg is a human being for celebration and thought.

Well. I missed it. Just as glad I did. Don't especially care. about either man. Or their successes. Or failures.

Pictographic self identity-indicators comply only formal conceptual obligations, and do not therefore affect the content-independence of what's indicated. That's another way of saying that it's the same argument whether it's made by a cactus or a fern. You've explained your position very clearly: The potential destruction as general which currently threatens is due to a factional dispute within the ruling class. These are the Dad faction, which on your account represents right-wing symbolic efficiency of executant verisimilitude, and the Mom faction, which is represented by left-wing reliability of verifiable claim-content correspondence. It's the character of the conflict between these which generates the threat to all classes generally. Do I have this right? The remedy you propose in the post of April 4, 2022 - 8:49 am, seems to me a little unfair to both the Dad and Mom factions; for you've described an institutional form which determines the range of possible action, the transmigration from which would only preclude effectual agency without affecting the undesirable characteristics of the institution itself, whether of industrial production or population-management by the state. If they didn't do it, someone else would; which could in theory result in an arrangement which might make the Dad/Mom factional dispute appear benign by comparison. Because therefore it's the institutional form which must be altered, I would argue against your position that internal factional disputes within prevailing elements of state authority in geopolitical context, and corporate authority in the context of international trade, must be resolved before the threat of general destruction can be removed. As long as certain groups successfully attain private control over the state, (multi-national wealth in our day), it remains unlikely that populations liberated from wholesale threats created by their state managers (who can use the asserted menace of the opposing state, nation, party or faction, to generate the ample material for), will some day soon stroll uncoerced into shared civic space, without regard to artificial borders or unattainable economic requirements.

Nice to hear you're working for the revolution, but your Greek is wrong. It should be "tetechnesai" -- second person singular, perfect indicative middle of deponent verb technaomai: to make by art, skill, or cunning. The noun "techne" doesn't even refer to something made at all, but the knowledge to do so.

Considering the points in reverse order, the second paragraph above describes your method of solving problems by blaming others for them so that they'll do something about it. In spite of the probable ineffectuality of such a practice, the worse thing about it to my mind is how you want to exclude any alternate methods; (cf. first sentence: "the only way [you] can"). Your second point in this paragraph I'm unable to comment on because you've mistaken me for another forum participant. I've never used the term "trolling" and do not know what it means. If your claim about "seeking wisdom" is genuine, however, the question begs to be asked: How would one recognize it when it comes along on the tracks of such an intellectually unenergetic method?

There is a point of some extra-pedestrian interest however in the first paragraph above: your vision of an approaching omelette. As the contents of this vision must be attributable to the power of the productive imagination, it has to have as its basis the idea of an omelette which, given positive ontological status ala Plato, would be the perfect omelette. For Plato, as you know, it's the perfect one that's the real one, imperfectly imitated by the slightly imperfect ones brought to a customer's table by waitstaff employees. In the spirit of the vision you've shared, then, my comment thereupon is that you may very well see a true omelette, but it's one you'll never have for breakfast.

Don't get yer tendrils in a twist there. That's some mighty good ideational interchange. And a damn good omelette. Is writing a poem a noun or verb or an omelette? Kisses, really, lots of them...thistle is a lover...