Cite your sources

I get that this sort of thing has become so utterly bog-standard from the GQP/wingnut Right that the rest of us have gotten to the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ phase and just kind of elide wingnuts and wingnut pols saying it;

Okay, so.

I've made it pretty clear where I stand on the whole business of theocracy. It's a bad idea, and - believe it or not - not just for those on the theocratic-outside. 

It's bad for religion and especially bad for whichever sect gets the whip hand. The whole sorry history of the European Wars of Religion make that clear. Becoming the state religion of Rome (and its successor states) was bad for the Roman Church.

But here's the part that I think we don't talk enough about.

One of the most troublesome aspects of theocracy (or any political system that depends on an unquestioned, received creed - Nazi-style fascism and Soviet-style and Mao-style Communism were others) is that they rely on the fundamental truth of the received narrative.

In other words, for Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism to "work" enough of the fundamental tenets of the creed, from Kapital through the diktats of Stalin, have to be "true". They have to reflect some fundamental political (and economic and social) reality that can be applied to the messy business of daily life.

If the fundamentals don' t work - if they're not really grounded in reality or something close to reality - then the chances of that theocracy of working IRL become significantly more difficult.

We saw that with Marxism.

The fuzzy guy had some interesting ideas. But it turned out that they were really difficult to turn into practice that didn't involve a whole lot of human misery.

Turns out that a LOT of Marxism was a sort of 19th Century political version of Scientology, and it turned out that running a civil society on them was really difficult to turn into anything that wasn't pretty punitive.

So.

What this led me back to was something I got to thinking about when I went and re-read my old battles piece on First Panipat.

When I wrote the original I hadn't gotten to the point of checking the original source materials. I did the usual "I did the research" thing on the Internet where I peeked at the first dozen Google hits and wrote based on what came up.

But the deeper I dug into the sources - especially for the events that occurred prior to widespread literacy and the printing press - the more I discovered that one of the biggest problems with the "accepted narrative" of these ancient events is that it is often 1) culled from a tiny handful of accounts that are often 2) lost in the original form and exist only as multiple-generations-removed from the original, and 3) afflicted with one or more "unreliable narrator" issues (where there are more than one contemporary source the sources contradict each other, sources state as facts things that we know from physical evidence are untrue, are written by authors that are unfamiliar with the physical realities of ancient or medieval warfare, i.e. monks writing military history...).

So, as it turns out, a lot of what we "know" about these past events - actual events we know really happened - turns out to be either untrue, or partially true, or (more often) simply impossible to accurately pin down.

And these are simple events! We're not talking about using them to set up a political system!

Which got me thinking about theocracy, and specifically Christian theocracy; what do we actually know about the actual events, people, places, and things that have been codified over centuries into the "Judeo-Christian ethic" that a lot of theocratic or theo-friendly politicians, pundits, and other authorities like to cite as the best form of human government.

Here's a little chart that displays the historians who wrote about the world of the Mediterranean littoral (including, obviously, what was then the Roman province of Judea) during the period that we interpret from the books of the New Testament that discuss it was the time of Jesus Christ:

As discussed above; this is perforce only a partial list of the people who may have written histories of this time. This is just those whose accounts remain to us!

As noted in the picture, though; none of these authors mention any of the things that are stated in the Gospels (and Acts) that you'd expect to have come to the attention of a diligent historian.

Many cultures around the 1st Century BCE/CE tended to place great import on astrological signs and symbols. Something like the "Christmas Star"? SOMEbody should have said something. Nope.

The "Massacre of the Innocents"; Herod I's supposed ratissage of newborn Messiahs? You'd think someone - particularly Josephus, who was pretty tuned into events in Judea - would have mentioned that. Nope.

The events surrounding the crucifixion - the darkening sky, the earthquake - should have caught the notice of someone writing from somewhere close enough (like Alexandria or Damascus) to have heard, felt, or seen them.

Nope.

I don't know if the whole basis of Christianity is as sketchy as Joseph Smith and his golden plates.

But if I was researching some event in ancient warfare?

I'd be utterly hesitant to place any confidence in that event - what happened, how it happened, even if it actually happened at all - if all the contemporary sources save one ignored it as if it had never existed.

If you want to govern me based on your love of Christian scripture...okay. That's your call.

But to insist that I accept that's any more of an inescapable "truth" than governance based on the events of the Twilight novels or the philosophy expressed in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?

Sorry. That's not just a bad idea. It's a bad idea based on complete and utter bullshit.

And the fact that We the People don't laugh it out of the public square is...not a good sign.

On the nightstand...

 ...is my palate-cleanser from the turgid prose of Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming; perhaps the most peculiar, wonderful, bizarre, and intriguing train-wreck of a manga adaptation of an anime I've ever come across: Gate: Where The JSDF Fought.

I dunno, but this may possibly be the most manga-y manga I've every read.

(And to out myself as an otaku, I kinda love manga; I've read every tankobon volume of Kimetsu no Yaiba (鬼滅の刃) and everything from the hardcore old-school mecha stories like Shin Seki Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ) to fluffy romances like Our Teachers Are Dating...)

But this one is...reeeeeally special.

Start with the worked-out premise of an interdimensional gate between worlds.

But then add a bizarre mashup of Tolkiensque fantasy - dragons and trolls? - with Romans (sorta...) and a buxom imperial princess called - I shit you not - "Pina Co Lada". 

Have these mooks invade Tokyo and tear the living hell out of a bunch of innocent Japanese civilians...

(Don't forget to pitch in a whole bunch of gratuitous violence and nudity...)

 ...and then respond to all this with a sort of Japanese Army (sorry..."Self Defense Force") fanservice where the JGSDF proceeds to send an expeditionary force into this fantasy world so we can enjoy antitank weapons against fire-breathing dragons and Japanese recon infantry against Roman legionaries and the boys and girls of the Rikujō Jieitai as heroes...

...plus Rory Mercury, who is so beyond the rest of this weird shit that I leave you to the mercy of Wikipedia.

The whole thing is an absolute hoot, and I hope the outfit that's publishing this thing will continue to put out these in tankobon formate all the way to the end of the original anime run.

If only Atkinson had found a way to write in a loli-goth death goddess into the Battle of Long Island his stuff might work better. I'm just gonna have to call that a serious failure of imagination.

Die Straße frei den braunen Bataillonen

 So I came across this the other day and it was so odd that I've been fiddling with it ever since.

The grinning MAGAt there is one Ashli Babbitt, the only one of the treasonous mob shot dead on January 6, 2021 in the failed attempt to putsch Tubby off his golden throne and back into the chair behind the Resolute desk.

At the time if just seemed like just another freakish event in perhaps one of the most freakish days in the political history of the United States.

Since then, however, the wingnut Right - meaning the entire GQP - led by Tubby himself has beavered away to make the woman some sort ot True Christian Martyr cut down in the flower of her youth by communism, immigrants, Antifa, George Soros, or some combination of all the above.

In case you're not a student of Nazi iconography, the title of the post is from Die Fahne hoch, also known as the Horst-Wessel-Leid, the official theme song of the original NSDAP, supposedly written by the original Ashli Babbitt, a fightin' Sturmabteilung street brawler who was given a fatal injection of external lead by his Red Front street brawler enemies. So we've kinda been here, seen that. It's now dangerous and scary because it's Nazis; it's dangerous and scary because it's worked in the past.

Anyway, that's not really the point of this post.

It's that part of the emerging Babbitt the Martyr legend is that she was a veteran of the US Air Force.

Tubby himself has been banging that drum. Dead Ashli was "An innocent, wonderful, incredible woman, a military woman...” according to the President quondam ex futuris. 

Given the tidal level of tongue-bathing the U.S. public gives veterans of any stripe that's not a bad propaganda ploy. Brand your people as Real American Heroes and suddenly any and everything they do is American and Heroic, right?

So I've been kind of following the whole Dead Ashli Saga with a curious and jaundiced eye for a while now but only just this past week came across these two little related items.

1) Babbit had a total of 12 years time-in-service; four active USAF (2004-2008), two AF Reserve (2008-2010), and six in the ANG (2010-2016), all as a "security" specialist, meaning one of the air cops that pull gate guard and provide perimeter security for USAF installations among other things.

2) Babbitt got out as a Senior Airman (E-4), the equivalent of an Army Specialist.

That is intensely weird to me.

I know that it takes longer - it used to take much longer - to make rank in the USAF than the Army. In the 1980s, when I came in the Army if you weren't at least E-4(P) - meaning on the promotable list for buck sergeant -  by the end of your first term you were a total spud. After a dozen years in? A decently competent troop should have been at least an E-5 and probably an E-6 - Sergeant or Staff Sergeant in the Army, Staff Sergeant or Technical Sergeant in the USAF.

To still be an E-4 after a dozen years in?

That seems pretty shocking. You'd have to have been either passed over repeatedly - meaning that your unit commander would have to find some pretty big reasons for not just 86ing your ass the next time your re-up date came around - or you had to have been promoted and then busted...also not a good reason to keep you hanging around the dayroom.

The endless Wars on Terror have forced the services to body-snatch pretty hard, though, so it's possible that Warm Body Ashli was better than a hole in the MTO&E, so there's that.

Still.

I find it intriguing in a not-good-way that the Wingnut Wessel of 1/6 turns out to have been - as a "military women" - kind of a pretty poor sort of "military woman". 

But, then again...why not? She clearly missed the part in the words she swore every time she re-upped where she was supposed to "...support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and became, instead, one of those enemies herself and got killed as such.

But the big picture seems to me that, like Tubby himself, wingnut world seems to find some of the sketchiest human beings on the planet to make into heroes. It's taking a street brawling thug and turing him into one heroic martyr, or taking a sad act air force cop and making her into another.

I wonder whether that says more about the heroes, or the sorts of people who make up Wingnut World..?

Acting 1SG Lawes reads the morning formation announcements

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

At ease.

Okay just one thing today, so listen up.

Had a chat with Chief Schrum down at the TMC today. Based on this I understand that there's a hard nut of you GI Joe Real American heroes that have been passing on this Plague vaccination. 

Chief says that y'all got a shit-ton of reasons why y'all ain't gonna get a teeny-weeny little prick and no, Private Black, that is not a personal observation and I see no reason for you to give me that look. You and me, after this formation.

Notregardless, here's the straight dope, gentlemen.

There's a minefield out there.

Now on the one hand, seeing as you know that said minefield is out there but have no way of telling where it is, or how fucked up it is, or whether or when one or more of you might wander into it, you can do it one way. Let's call it...let's see...oh, yeah, let's call it the "Dumb Fucking Way".

You can just bumblefuck around until you get into it.

And once therein you will discover you have fucked around and found out. Some of you will wander out again just fine. 

Some of you won't.

Or.

There's another way. Let's call this one the "Let's Not Just Wander Into The Fucking Minefield" way.

You can accept the issue of things that will give you a better chance in case you find yourselfs in the minefield. Things like this little paper mask thing that makes you look all sexy like the girls in the Candy Striper movie that I found S&T Platoon watching on the dayroom TV again having already reminded you that said TV is in a location accessible to family members including minor dependents and their mommies and no, Specialist Gutierrez, "that's how you make children" is not sufficient justification for the three days of phone calls I got after that particular incident thankyewverymuch.

You can get the vaccination which is kind of like those big ol' EOD suits that keep you from being blown into small independent republics if the mine does go off.

These fucking things are there not just to help you but to help the people around you who can't use them, like little kiddos and your aged granny who's on chemo for the third time because she's hooked on Swisher Sweets.

And here's the thing.

Knowing all this, if you refuse to take advantage of all these useful items and get stuck in the minefield, hopefully it will not surprise you if those of the rest of us who have are a trifle unsympathetic to your ass. 

"Freedom", gentlemen, is not "license". "Freedom" is a combination of rights and responsibilities that we as citizens agree to in order to form a more perfect fucking union.

You do not have the freedom to go prancing out into the minefield and bring back a mine to the mess hall which reminds me to discuss that stuff you had the utter gall enough to describe as "vegetarian lasagne", Mess Section, at some point between now and dinner chow.

So quit dicking around, people. Get the goddamn shot.

Because ain't nobody here going into the minefield after you if you don't.

Any questions?

I didn't think so.

Comp-ney, Atten-shun!

Platoon sergeants, take charge.

Tuesday morning, 4am

 

Me: Well, the hell with it. I'm awake. You want some coffee?

Little Cat: WTF? Are you tweaking or something?

M: No, just can't sleep again. Imma make a pot of coffee. You want anything.

LC: Ragganafraggana...OK, fine. I'll take some of that "beef-like mystery meat substance" only with extra gravy this time.

M: K; coffee and mystery meat coming up.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY, goddamn it! You wake me at four, I get extra fucking gravy or imma do that thing where I bite your ankle when you walk past.

M: Not if you want extra gravy, furbag.

LC:

M:

LC:

M: OK, I'm on it. You gonna wait in the bed or come with?

LC: Oh, Christ. Fine. I'm coming. Extra gravy!

M: Careful or I'll give you that "fish and shrimp" shit instead.

LC: Ohhellno. You gotta hurry up and get off your dead ass and get back to doing the marketing. (sotto voce) That mate of yours has the taste buds of some sort of shelter dog.

M: (halfway to kitchen) I heard that! Big talk from someone who cleans her butthole with her tongue.

LC: EXTRA GRAVY! Goddamn.

Laid up in the Plague House

Two weeks ago today my Bride rolled me up to the big south doors at the Providence hospital out by the Banfield where in slightly less than three hours an orthopedic surgeon and his straphangers proceeded to hack open my left knee, part out all the worn-out bits, slam in some aftermarket replacement parts, zip me up and roll me on my way.

Since then all I've been able to do is lie around with one leg in the air, prodigiously bored, and try and distract myself from the results of someone hacking my knee open and replacing all the parts.

The distractions, unfortunately, largely consist of watching the news as the horde of diseased C.H.U.D.s fills places like Providence with sickly COVID patients and try and desperately find something to read.

(So far I've re-read Naomi Novik's His Majesty's Dragon - which was good fun the second time around - and slog through Rick Atkinson's The British Are Coming, his first volume of a general history of the army in the Revolution. So far Atkinson has been desperately disappointing; decently researched on the military history side, but marred by 1) Atkinson's fanboi pash for the rebels - the Americans are all stalwart, noble, and heroic, the British stodgy, foolish, and faintly ridiculous, and 2) writing at an almost embarrassingly low YA level. Did you know that CPT Prescott, the commander of the redoubt on Breed's Hill, was "azure-eyed"? Ugh.)

I was warned going in that knees are an order of magnitude worse than hips, so it's not so much that I didn't anticipate the long recovery time. It's that I didn't expect the way I feel; weak and sick, like a bad flu, all over - not just an achy leg. I feel utterly whipped most of the time, and it doesn't help that I have to lie in bed with my leg up all day to try and get the post-op swelling down.

The Little Cat has taken it on herself to be my constant companion, which has proved less irking than I'd thought. She doesn't ramble - much, tho when she does her little claws are a hazard - and she's fairly quiet - for her, who is a chatty, meow-y kitty generally - and mostly picks a vacant part of the bed.

But that's the boundary of my world, at least at the moment. My poor Bride is doing the work of a hero AND sleeping on the couch while I loll about in the big bed like some sort of Roman sybarite.

Supposedly the third week post-op is when things improve.

Let's hope so. This is only a fortnight and it's already REALLY old.

Except for the cats. But, then, cats...

Update 8/24: So I'm on my third week post-op and so far the various anecdotes I've heard about this procedure have been pretty much correct. 

The pain is manageable now, other than the nighttime. 

And even that's not really "unmanageable"; it's just that the discomfort level is just barely too high to sleep easily. I've been trying a combination of pain meds and a sleeping pill (technically it's an antihistamine, but it's basically a sleeping pill...) but that hasn't been particularly successful. So the only real issues at this point are 1) sleep, and 2) books, in that I'm still looking for something readable. Tried a usually-decent potboiler (one of the later Jim Butcher Harry Dresden series) and was as grossly disappointed as I have been with the recent ones - dude, you should have stopped before Ghost Story - although the latest in Lois Bujold's Penric and Desdemona series (The Assassins of Thasalon, in case you're interested...) was an all-too-brief treat. I'm still struggling with Atkinson, who is improving now that we've gotten past the Siege of Boston, but is still just not well written (and I should note that I enjoyed his WW2 series immensely; the history was solid and the writing was...well, not this purple.)

I get my first physical therapy today. We'll see how that goes; the damn thing is still really puffy and resists bending - I can do it, but it's a real fight - and I'm gonna bet I'll be sore as a boil tonight.