Abuse of empowerment
Lady Gaga is the best pop star ever. I cannot believe that just ten years ago we were collectively enamored of Britney Spears. Sure, ever’s a long time. But look:
Most striking to me is that G&B’s embrace of strength is not empowering, it’s brutal. They’re not throwing off the yoke–what yoke? Men have no power over them. They’re in the business of abuse. Witness killing spree followed by flight in the pussy wagon.
This video is something of a bellwether. Check out this article on the present and future of the femdomconomy. Sure, the glass ceiling is still there, but it’s about to get shattered like Berlin in ’45. And now, as then, the wrath of the triumphant conquerers will yield something that, though doubtless better than what came before, will share more in common with its predecessor than we would hope or expect.
No, I didn’t mean that. I just watched Der Untergang again, that’s all.
Watch for the men in coming years who don’t know how to deal with these assaults on their sense of masculinity, and invent new kinds of social unrest in response. Don’t you love how every time we solve a problem, it’s replaced by a new one, and we forget that the old one was worse?
Predators over Pakistan
A powerful piece about drone warfare in the early 21st century:
The first two C.I.A. air strikes of the Obama Administration took place on the morning of January 23rd—the President’s third day in office. Within hours, it was clear that the morning’s bombings, in Pakistan, had killed an estimated twenty people. In one strike, four Arabs, all likely affiliated with Al Qaeda, died. But in the second strike a drone targeted the wrong house, hitting the residence of a pro-government tribal leader six miles outside the town of Wana, in South Waziristan. The blast killed the tribal leader’s entire family, including three children, one of them five years old. In keeping with U.S. policy, there was no official acknowledgment of either strike.
Since then, the C.I.A. bombardments have continued at a rapid pace. According to a just completed study by the New America Foundation, the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President. During his first nine and a half months in office, he has authorized as many C.I.A. aerial attacks in Pakistan as George W. Bush did in his final three years in office…
It’s easy to understand the appeal of a “push-button” approach to fighting Al Qaeda, but the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. And, because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war. Should something go wrong in the C.I.A.’s program—last month, the Air Force lost control of a drone and had to shoot it down over Afghanistan—it’s unclear what the consequences would be.
I honestly don’t know what I think of all this. But I am disturbed that there has been little discussion about this program, I worry about its long-term consequences in Pakistan and in international law, and I fear what will happen when the costs of our Long War surpass its just cause. With war so sterile, secret, and unbounded, how would we know when that moment arrives? Could it have already?
Hat tip, TNC (a lot of him lately I know.)
Happy tens
Well, that’s it for the aughts. I’ll miss ‘em. The task now becomes naming the next decade. I propose we go with the “tens,” because “teens” means something else on the internet.
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