Wrote about Hegseth, Kilgore, and the difference between loving war and loving killing.

HE IS SO CUTE

Pete Hegseth as the "Dumb McNamara": "Just like his Vietnam War-era predecessor...Hegseth is so obsessed with metrics that 'prove' the US is winning that he cannot appreciate the larger strategic failure. But unlike McNamara, who was objectively brilliant, Hegseth is…patently not."

this was incredibly over-determined.

kilgore would never (also: ayfkm?)

Four-byline alert: 🚨 “.. A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter.” www.ft.com/content/744e...

That's right

As I have argued, the strikes in the Caribbean are not war. This goes some way to showing the contrast between the amoral warrior culture of the past and Hegseth’s malice: for the warrior, glory comes from the challenge. open.substack.com/pub/deadcarl...

This gets at the historical reality that “warrior” was often a class with attendant norms for how those within that class should be treated, even across cultures. Hegseth, meanwhile, merely wants to exercise power, which is why violence against the weak or helpless suits his needs.

If the war is still going on by the time I have a free spot to write it (just kidding, there will always be a war going on), I want to do a column analyzing Hegseth and his crew in the light of Full Metal Jacket and its prose novel sequel.

Pete Hegseth ordered a second strike on survivors clinging to wreckage in the water. Colonel Kilgore (kinda) gives a dying enemy his canteen. That's the TL;DR of my latest piece on the war in Iran and... APOCALYPSE NOW.

This was a military court. A very fucked up one, with multiple violations but there was a trial and a sentence. It was the State of Israel that executed him. It is interesting, in Israel he is typically mentioned when talking about those executed by the state, but apparently not in the Diaspora

this belongs in a museum about bluesky

what precisely does the NYT think that the J stands for

the assassination of rabin was the most consequential political assassination since franz ferdinand

here are the clear objectives of my recent math test: - not to get a D - not to get an F - to at least finish it - to at least get a C-

2019

it’s a nation of 350 million people and all you need is one john yoo. you’re always going to be able to find one john yoo. these academics are bad, and they should be shamed. not arguing with that. but also saying: the problem is the tzars on the court, not their tenured boyars.

this is one of the ways that they remind me more of late-USSR rather than real-deal midcentury fascists. the fascists couldn’t imagine their enemies didn’t think like judeo-bolsheviks - that their enemies weren’t as ideological as they were. end of era soviets were much more cynical/less ideological

given the united states’ complete insulation from the fluctuations of the global energy market this argument strikes me as a total slam-dunk and an act of unparalleled magnanimity.

Seems...especially relevant right now!

gender. hell of a thing.

What a sentence

I read the news the other day — oh, boy — and came across something that’s been nagging at me ever since…

Don’t go there

what a fun quippy headline! it reminds me of how people talk on sitcom! so irreverent!

"Do you know why a shark keeps moving?"

so tired of D apparatchiks who talk about the party like a ceo promising potential investors that their company is cutting costs and focusing on efficiency.

Trump’s aides say he’s “getting a little bored with Iran.” Not guilty. Not wrong. Bored. Dr. Melfi had a word for that.

Maybe you're selling Trump's puppetmasters short. No GOP, no Trump. They lied and cheated and moved heaven and earth to take over SCOTUS. Kochs, Murdochs, Federalist Society, the megachurches, Citizens United. He's their creature and could never have won in a free and fair election.

I feel like he didn’t want to win in 2016, didn’t want to lose in 2020, ran again in 2024 because he didn’t want to admit he lost, and hates every single minute of what is left of his life

This is a very, very good essay.

This whole piece is worth your time.

he’s basically John Coltrane

the artist, at work

also: the reason FDR called for it was he wanted *the other side to admit they lost.* that was the entire point to him. to get them to say "you won; we lost." trump has said *he* thinks he can unilaterally decide if iran has done so, regardless of what they say. it's the total opposite.

this also really triggered my inner nerd/FDR apologist because, like, no, it's not the same at all. FDR rarely warned people when he did stuff like this — and he knew, on a basic level, what he was doing. he thought he was avoiding the mistake wilson made in WWI. it's just not at all the same?

charles barkley on politics is always such a game of russian roulette

im beginning to suspect that this website doesn’t know what capitalism and neoliberalism means.

As a baseball fan of many years, I’ve never seen anything like this before. I love it. Normalize giving your fellow humans hugs.

"The better question is what it is about our lives — our politics, our society, our culture — that has us all so bored. What makes Donald Trump the president we may not want but that, on some deep level, we seem to think we deserve?" www.eliasisquith.com/p/the-presid...

this is hilarious. like any good millennial i have a handful of jay albums i adore but dude is beyond delusional