If You Oppose Fires, Why Aren't You a Firefighter?

Confessions of a chickenhawk

Anyone Remember LGF?

The title is my weak paraphrase of a comment I read in 2004 on Little Green Footballs when it was neoCON central.¹ When I was a neoCON.

Back then we keyboard cheerleaders were accused of being chickenhawks. Cheyney Ryan’s The Chickenhawk Syndrome (2009) didn’t exist at the time, but of course its topic did:

If our country goes to war for reasons we endorse, what is our responsibility to share in its sacrifices? Does supporting a war mean serving in it? Does it mean encouraging our children to do so? Such questions have been posed by the so-called 'chickenhawk' phenomenon: pro-war leaders and their pro-war children who call on Americans to assume the burden of war and its sacrifices, but avoid those sacrifices themselves. President Bush and other architects of the Iraq conflict were the most prominent chickenhawks. Cheyney C. Ryan argues that the chickenhawk issue is not just a matter of personalities_it will remain with us for a long time even though the Bush administration has left office. Ryan poses fundamental questions of war and personal sacrifice, pointing to the basic disconnection in American politics generally between the support for war and the willingness to assume its costs, which he calls 'Alienated War.'

Some commenter at LGF countered the chickenhawk accusation by saying something like my post title, followed by a mock counteraccusation - anyone who didn’t want fires but didn’t firefight themselves was a “swivel-chair firefighter” (not the exact words).

In 2004 I thought that was rilly clever and funny.

But now? After I’ve learned what the war did to those who did fight? To people in my own circle? Obviously the war killed far more people and ruined far more lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, but all that is abstract to me. Like almost all humans, I am a prisoner of scale. I can’t truly grasp big numbers. I can grok personal anecdotes.

I can admit I’m glad I didn’t sign up to be maimed or killed for nothing.

I can also admit I was WRONG in all caps about the war.

And that the firefighter analogy doesn’t hold up. We keyboard cheerleaders were vicariously living through our American ‘heroes’ in the ‘sandbox’. There is no firefighting equivalent. I doubt there is a blogging subculture glorifying firefighters.² Moreover, firefighting is a universal virtue, unless one belongs to a let-it-burn culture - does such a culture exist? Firefighting is not as debatable as the USSA’s post-9/11 invasions. Firefighting also lacks the memetic baggage of those invasions: e.g., American nationalism, Islamophobia, the Dubya personality cult³, and a wish for revenge after 9/11.

I failed to see the differences between firefighting and invading because I was looking for an excuse for my inaction. If I had really believed OMG muh country is in danger, wouldn’t I have been doing something other than typing harder?

I was a lazier, evil version of the protesters I wrote about yesterday:

At least they demonstrated in public. And they had a fundraiser. But did the money they raised make a difference? Maybe that money was enough to pay for something that saved a Ukrainian soldier’s life. I don’t know.

Did we keyboard cheerleaders make a difference? Monetarily, no. I don’t remember any fundraisers. We were writing for free - or at least the vast majority were. (A couple in hindsight strike me now as govplants. I’ll never know if others were govpaid behind the scenes.) The one site with a paywall that I recall was only neoCON-adjacent. There were no ads then. No upvotes. A very different ecosystem.

Or was it?

The Revolution Illusion

The firefighter duh-fense of chickenhawks brought to mind my favorite

Innomen

post.

My Argument with Caitlin Johnstone

I used to read Johnstone and her imitators. Until I read this:

The ONLY solution short of full revolt is a general strike but no one is willing to give up income to spare Palestinian babies from being roasted alive with white phosphorus. End of story, and all you do is talk and collect a check selling the illusion of being genuinely opposed to all your gainfully employed tax paying patrons. There will be no revolution, but there will be pay checks for collaborators. The illusion you sell helps as much as tax dollars. If you were saying anything dangerous your own fascist regime would freeze your stripe account. Seriously, your heart is in the right place but don't try to pitch me on the revolution illusion.

Those last words are the key: The revolution illusion.

Two decades ago, we WAnons - who trusted Dubya’s plan - were trapped in our own version of the revolution illusion. By typing rilly hard at home, we were rebelling against the LIE-bruls controlling the MSM and facilitating the revolution in Iraq that would transform it into a modern secular state, a “model” for the Middle East!

More like delusion than illusion in our case. Utterly insane. Worse yet, our hearts were in the wrong place.

We were wicked wackos. Worse than useless. Total failures at achieving our alleged goals. The MSM is still deep blue in spite of the ‘patriots’ in pajamas. Iraq is a disaster.

The humanitarian crisis in Iraq remains one of the largest and most volatile in the world.

What would have changed if we hadn’t typed? My conscience would be clearer, but Stephen Colbert would still be on the air, and “the single worst foreign policy decision in the last half-century” would still have been executed, despite “the largest anti-war rallies in human history, with some 14 million people protesting in almost 800 cities around the world.”

If 14 million couldn’t stop Dubya, how could these marchers in Waikiki stop Netanyahu 8,900 miles (14,000 km) away?

The March First Movement

I am reminded of the March First Movement in Korea under Japanese occupation a little more than a century ago:

Statistics on the protest are uncertain; there were around 1,500 to 1,800 protests with a total of around 0.8 to 2 million participants. The total population of Korea at the time was around 16 to 17 million.

Source

I never believe any numbers given for large events. But I’ll be generous and go with two million protesters out of sixteen million. One out of eight Koreans.

Imagine one out of eight Americans - forty-three million - protesting. The combined populations of Florida and New York. More than the population of California, the most populous state (thirty-nine million).

Would they get their way? Or would they have ended up like the Koreans who would continue to be ruled by the Japanese until the end of World War II?

Yes, the Japanese did slightly loosen their grip on Korea, but they didn’t let go until they were forced to. Atomically forced. By bombings louder than the protests.

Source

An Army by Another Name

Rurik Skywalker

observes that

[…] protests are a show of potential force.

Their success depends largely on whether or not the people being protested against believe that there is any teeth to the threat that the protesters are issuing. If they believe that they are nothing more than hot air, then they can be safely ignored or even brutally put down. If there are no consequences for bad behavior, the rules written on fancy slips of paper from centuries ago won’t spare you or your movement from the wrath of a coppers’ riot shield and baton.

Imagine a protest then as a mustering of men to show your enemies that if push comes to shove, you can raise and field an army that can be used to physically eliminate them.

But, does anybody believe that Americans will ever raise an army capable of putting heads on pikes and erecting guillotines in city centers for unrepentant elites? That they’re willing to fight and to spill blood to effect their agenda?

I. Uprising - A Civic Tradition

Two million Koreans vastly outnumbered the Japanese colonial police - and yet the Japanese did not feel threatened enough to make more than a few concessions.

Today’s Surrogate Armies

The Koreans printed twenty-one thousand copies of a declaration of independence from Japan.

Source

Do these handwritten “demands” by a hundred protesters on the University of Hawaii campus make Netanyahu feel threatened?

Photograph by George F. Lee, 3 May 2024

Of course not. Rurik writes,

The reason why all the old civic traditions don’t work anymore is because no one fears the consequences of not playing by the rules and of not honoring these ritualized displays of force. Usually, if the rules are not followed, this leads to bloodletting and so, there is a very good reason to follow the rules and observe political decorum. But because the powers that be think that Westerners are disorganized, diabetic dunces, they know that they can do anything and that the Westerners will take it.

The “disorganized, diabetic dunces” of the Waste are not going to take to the streets, and those few who do are not a potential army like the one Rurik describes:

The political protest is essentially the equivalent of a gorilla beating its chest or a bear standing on its two legs and roaring at its competitor.

In other words, the whole point of a protest is to show one’s political and potential martial strength. You gather an army around yourself and show that you have more committed people and more organizational power than your opponents.

By doing so, you do away with the need to engage in bloodshed because you have demonstrated your strength, and thereby coerced the government into offering redress for your concerns. So, it used to be that one political faction or other would show up in force in the capital with demands like, such as, that their chosen champion be recognized as the legitimate leader of the nation and, having demonstrated potential military strength, the government would acquiesce to the demands of the people who showed up at their doorstep with an army at their backs.

Does this look like an army? “A gorilla beating its chest”? “A bear standing on its two legs and roaring”?

Obviously those protesters at the University of Hawaii aren’t wearing uniforms or carrying weapons. They don’t need to. There are other ways to show “potential martial strength”.

Masks “to protect [their] comrades from illness” project weakness, not strength.

Not that Netanyahu will ever see their masked faces. Maybe some sayan on campus did. There may have been 16,000 sayanim in the USSA in 1998 - perhaps two for every Mossad agent. I bet that number went up after 9/11. Surely at least one sayan and/or one bodel⁴ is on this island - and reported back to Godland that there was no threat.

Now imagine what the Shin Bet agents in this Tel Aviv crowd were reporting back to headquarters.

At a protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday [16 December 2023], relatives of hostages gathered to plead with the government for a deal.

"Take us into consideration and come up with a plan now (for negotiation)," said Noam Perry, daughter of hostage Haim Perry, at the protest.

Source

Also without uniforms and arms, but more serious.

What’s the Point of a Sign No One Understands?

Did you notice the Israelis’ signs in English?

Contrast with the University of Hawaii protester’s sign in Hawaiian: “Ea no Palekekine” (Independence⁵ for Palestine⁶) lettered atop a drawing of a … watermelon?

In Hawaii, we are all supposed to pretend that Hawaiian LIVES!!, but the reality is that almost nobody uses it as an everyday language. When it is not a school subject, it is a political symbol.

I get the implied message here - made explicit by an unnamed university faculty member:

Our main message is there needs to be a ceasefire and the University of Hawaii needs to cut its ties with companies and other countries that are engaged in genocide - we feel very strongly this is part of our Kuleana [responsibility]⁷ as Kanaka [(native) people]⁸, as allies who are also experiencing a belligerent occupation who live under a regime of settler colonialism

I completely agree, and it would be nice if the world knew that … but the world doesn’t read Hawaiian!

The world reads English. Yes, English is racistimperialistcolonialist, but until Esperanto replaces it (don’t hold your breath⁹), it is the international language of protest. Protesters everywhere use it, hoping to be seen and heard abroad.

Intelligibility is a form of strength.

An incomprehensible sign is a weapon no one recognizes.

I know I’m making a big deal out of one sign. It’s not as if all the signs at that University of Hawaii protest were in Hawaiian. But that sign is the perfect symbol of the theatrical, impractical nature of the protest.

“The Palestinian Struggle Is Being Advanced In Hawaii”

It must feel good to write that at Hipsta Pravda, but feeling good is not the same as actually yadvancing, and does it really make sense to advance it here when people are being killed 8,900 miles (14,000 km) away?

Is the real audience of the protest the Godland and USSA governments, or is it the protesters themselves?

University of Hawaii professor Ibrahim Aoude, a Palestinian refugee, promotes the cause on Island Connections, a local TV show on cable channel 355.

Source

I never heard of the show or the channel¹⁰ until just now. How many people watch the show? I hope more than the number of people who work on the show!

Whatever the number may be, if the show were cancelled, almost no one would notice.

I do not doubt Prof. Aoude’s sincerity. I do doubt the efficacy of an obscure TV show. That makes me a bad person in a world where people are judged by intentions. I’m ‘wrong’ to ask about results.

What Does the Absence of Results Tell Us?

Rurik’s answer:

If the protest isn’t working it is because the government or the other side doesn’t believe that you and yours will ever physically and very literally, start fighting back. And the real reason that no one is seriously considering fighting back is because they don’t think they can defeat the coercive repressive might of Washington. Sure they have guns, but everyone knows that those guns will never be used, only surrendered when the 2nd Amendment is finally overturned.

With the threat of retaliation gone, the government and the other political groups have a green light to trample on the citizenry.

Is the government even worried about the general strike that Innomen proposes?

Koreans went on strike in the years leading up to the March First Movement:

In 1916, there were 6 strikes with 362 participants. In 1917, there were 8 strikes with 1,128, and by 1918 there were 50 strikes with 4,442.

Where is the Native Hawaiian strike against USSA colonial rule?

Strikes used to rock Hawaii - a story for another day. But they’re ancient history now. I vaguely recall Rice and Roses, a local show covering them in my youth.¹¹ How many children today are aware of the strikes?

Effective protests have been replaced by performances that pose no threat to the Regime.

Let me put it this way: Would real threats to the system be government university employees?

Let me quote

Sotiris Rex

:

Let me repeat what Innomen wrote:

You may be thinking, well, then, AMRX Mark II, by that standard you’re not saying anything dangerous either, since you’re not banned from Substack.

I was blocked last year from viewing Notes and commenting. Close enough? Nah …

I don’t think the Regime is going to do anything to me unless I have real reach. And I never will.

Substack Is a Trap

Devon Brewer writes:

Substack engineers its platform to inhibit search engine indexing. Why would it do that? Consistent with Fast Eddy and others' thoughts, I suspect that it serves to make Substack a ghetto. Readers are forced to "live" within the Substack ecosystem to learn what information is in it. And outsiders remain ignorant of the content within Substack through its invisibility in search engines.

Substack’s own internal search engine leaves much to be desired. I can’t search for Notes or comments. And when I try to search Sage Hana’s posts, almost all results are paywalled, even though what I’m looking for is also in free posts.

Absolute PROOF that Substack is controlled by the Ministry of Truth

Fast Eddy:

The goal of Substack is to herd the anti-vaxxer community into a pen where they can be controlled and convinced that they are winning.

The same may be true of the pro-Palestine community. I’ve seen claims like “Everyone knows the truth about Israel now!” ORILLY? It may seem that way if you read Caitlin Johnstone and her clones all day, but that corner of Substack is not the real world - it is, as Innomen put it, a “revolution illusion”. If I quizzed my neighbors about Gaza, I wouldn’t be surprised if almost nobody understood what I was talking about. Most people in Hawaii are too busy working to even pretend to care about Palestine.

Substack is like X:

When Musk later acquired Twitter, he set out to make the platform the central hub for public debate—akin to the famous Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London—going even so far as to label himself a ‘free speech absolutist’. At Speakers’ Corner, anyone can stand up and voice their opinions, with the public free to listen. But imagine the scenario where, as soon as someone begins to speak a controversial opinion, the police suddenly arrive and force the audience to disperse. The speaker remains free to talk, yet without listeners, their words have little impact. And this, very much, is the essence of Musk’s ‘free speech not reach’ policy, which appears curiously in alignment with the Broadband Commission recommendations from 2021.

Under this new regime, Twitter still appears to allow every user to express their opinions. However, the platform’s internal algorithms and monetisation strategies are geared towards boosting certain views while throttling others.

[…]

By halting the growth of alternative platforms and steering public debate on Twitter, Musk has effectively created a clearinghouse for public discourse where reach is as crucial as the right to speak. His method of silencing some accounts while rewarding others with monetisation ultimately align with the concept of a social credit system—subtly determining who is granted a broad audience and financial rewards based on conformity to certain views.

The Public Discourse Clearinghouse

I often find myself being the only person liking posts and comments with “certain views”. You know, the eeeevil ones. Substack is happy to show me things I’m likely to agree with. Its feed almost exclusively consists of people I already subscribe to. It ‘knows’ me. It’s got me trapped in a comfortable bubble. Will anyone outside that bubble see me? In most cases, no.

I just realize why my Gene Hackman post is an outlier that got attention outside the bubble.

Why the Hackmans' Deaths Matter

Because he’s an approved topic. His death was in local media. In Edge, which I had to use because Brave wouldn’t let me open pages. (I’ve switched to Vivaldi now. Thanks, ikaruga!) At Daily Wire. We’re supposed to talk about him.

Pick a Path to Slavery

Here’s another example of stuff we’re supposed to talk about. Vivaldi doesn’t know my Google account info, so when I went to YouTube for the first time in Vivaldi, I saw this:

China bad good! Jesus good! ELON GREAT!!

I confess I thought the first video was going to be anti-China, but apparently it’s quite the opposite (I opened the link but didn’t play the video). I guess it was recommended because it has ten million views. If the USSA ever attacks China, it’ll be hidden.

On the side of the “This Is China” video is this link:

We are given ‘alternatives’ that all have a common denominator.

Submit to China.

Submit to Jesus.

Submit to Elon.

SUBMIT!!

Why have one big global pen when you can herd everyone into little pens where they are ‘free’ to follow varying scripts all leading to the same ending: the final slave control system (SCS)?

The Endgame Ain’t Gonna Be like an Avengers Movie

I see human history as a progress toward that SCS. Toward a planet of billions of mindless fleshbots obeying masters who believe themselves to be gods. Compared to the sooooper genius of Peter Thiel (or whoever his puppet master is), we are nothing.

I recall being told that Startpage is the good search engine, but I have my doubts after seeing this ad at the top when I searched for “peter thiel”.

What protest is going to stop Palantir before it can easily stop us?

As an example of the evil nature of Palantir’s work, it appears that Palantir has been working with the Israeli military in so-called ‘targeted killings’. Reports have suggested such that these murders, probably in the thousands or tens of thousands, utilised social media information and cellphone tracking. According to a range of sources, over 150 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza and in numerous cases they appear to have been directly targeted. Using social media information to murder journalists using drone strikes is already dystopic, but this is likely to just be the beginning of the evil Palantir will facilitate.

[…]

Prior to its role in murders and massacres in Palestine, the most recent issue that drew attention to how dangerous the company is, is that it was given a contract to manage the data of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.

[…]

Given this kind of data and what Palantir’s focus and loyalties are, it seems very likely it will find ways to use biometric, health and DNA data to kill both individuals and groups using autonomous drones.

Palantir: the world's most evil company

I found that post easily with Startpage but not with Substack’s own search engine.

Palantir is just one head of the USSA hydra (emphasis mine):

I have no optimistic take on this: the kinds of people in the United States in charge of such developments are quite evidently psychopathic (just watch excerpts of Karp’s recent statements above and past statements by the likes of Thiel) and at this stage there is nothing to restrain this psychopathy, which is crudely and unconvincingly dressed up as a passion for freedom and democracy. Other countries will inevitably have to follow suit if the USA is going down this road and it has become clear that China will not struggle to do so technologically. But with its imperialist tendencies, vast control over the internet and social media, big tech companies, sprawling military and intelligence operations across the globe, the USA is looking the most likely to envelope the world in a horrific future.

What can we do to sever even just one head of the hydra?

Source

1. According to Wikipedia, LGF has changed considerably since I quit reading it in 2004:

After eight years of being a leading right wing blog, LGF started condemning racism and the far-right (especially the Belgian party Vlaams Belang). After that, the site abruptly switched sides and now “LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right.” During the transition period, Johnson deleted many of his more extreme past entries on the site, deleted entire comment sections, and banned many of the former right wing commentators from the site.

[…]

On November 30, 2009, Johnson blogged that he was disassociating himself with "the right," writing: “The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff. I won't be going over the cliff with them.” He has been heavily critical of conservatives and libertarians since then.

I looked at the site for the first time in ages. Now it looks like a hybrid of a music site (Johnson is a musician) and generic TDS site: e.g., it cites that great economist Stephen Colbert.

I wonder how many people pay $59.95 for a year of ad-free LGF.

I also wonder how many LGF fans from the neoCON era are still there. My guess is almost none - Johnson never developed much of a cult of personality, and much of the attraction of the site for me was its community. Assembled for a horrific purpose, yet so appealing to me when I craved companionship. Now it’s appalling. And I’d rather be alone than sucked into another cult. Johnson just switched cults. I’ve put them all behind me. Or so I tell myself.

2. There seems to be at least one example of everything online, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there are creepy firefighter groupies in cyberspace. I would, however, be surprised if they get as much traffic as Little Green Footballs did in 2004 or even now.

3. The only unambiguously good thing I can say about my neoCON years is that I never liked Dubya and never bought into his cult. I supported the war in spite of him, never because of him.

4. Strange that the Simple English Wikipedia has an entry for bodel (“a young Israeli, often a student, engaged as a gofer by the Mossad after a thorough check and confirmation of his Jewish parentage and background”) but the main English Wikipedia doesn’t.

I bet there is a bodel at the University of Hawaii which has students from Israel and around the world. Probably at least one agent from the PRC too. Lots of PRC students here. Somebody has to police them for Xi.

5. The Hawaiian word ea has a wide yet mostly interrelated range of meanings: ‘to rise’, ‘life’, 'and ‘independence’. (ea ‘to smell’ is an unrelated homophone.) To be erect is to be alive, and to be independent is to stand alone. (In East Asia, ‘independence’ is a Chinese-based compound 獨立 ‘alone-stand’: dúlì in Mandarin, dokuritsu in Japanese, tongnip in Korean, and dộc lập in Vietnamese.)

6. ‘Palestine’ is Palekekine in Hawaiian because no variety of Hawaiian has S, and standard Hawaiian has no T. K is used as a substitute for several consonants absent in Hawaiian such as S and T. Vowels are added to avoid consonant clusters and a final consonant which are forbidden in Hawaiian.

7. An example of how Hawaiian words are thrown around for emotional manipulation. If you hear someone speaking of kuleana instead of “responsibility”, brace yourself for propaganda.

8. Kānaka (the news story left out the macron) is the generic word for ‘people’ in Hawaiian, but the capitalization and the context make it clear the speaker is referring to kānaka maoli ‘real people’: i.e., Native Hawaiians. Maoli ‘real’ (and by extension ‘native’) is cognate to Māori.

9. I can now look forward to the green star people getting rilly mad at me. Yay. Imagine the fury of the green star Gene Hackman fans. I could rant about Esperanto being Eurocentric, but I don’t need more rage aimed at me.

10. The channel is called TEC. I don’t know what the acronym stands for. The Education Channel? It seems to show University of Hawaii nonathletic programming.

11. I confess I ignored the show because I was more interested in Mao and Pol Pot at the time. The history of Hawaii was not taught during my school years. At all. Why not? I have ideas …