Quotulatiousness

September 2, 2024

“Queering Nuclear Weapons” … no, don’t laugh because it isn’t funny

Filed under: Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter looks into what at first seemed like a less-than-brilliant headline from The Babylon Bee, but is actually a much more serious concern:

Nuclear security is, I’m sure you do not need to be convinced, a deeply serious matter. Ever since we cracked the atom over Hiroshima our civilization has been walking a tightrope over an abyss. A single misstep could mean annihilation – hundreds of millions dead within minutes, billions within days. Doubtless there would be some survivors, but it’s doubtful that industrial civilization would survive. We’ve come within a hair’s breadth of this a few times, not only in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but on other occasions, when radar mulfunctions or computer glitches left launch officers in the USA and the former USSR unsure whether or not to press the big red buttons they were entrusted with. Fortunately for everyone, they didn’t. If they had, none of us would be here.

Nuclear power plants can be almost equally dangerous. We saw the consequences of mismanagement in the 80s, with Chernobyl. Political officers who had no idea what they were doing covered up one screw-up after another. The results horrified a continent and poisoned the good name of the nuclear energy to this day.

Nuclear security, of civilian infrastructure and especially of the strategic weapons reserve, is the kind of thing that you want deeply serious men in charge of. The kinds of guys who wear impeccable grey suits, didn’t laugh because they don’t think your joke is funny, and have multiple degrees in military history and nuclear physics.

[…]

And now, here we are again. The Department of Energy’s new Special Assistant for National Nuclear Security Administration, one Sneha Nair, is also the author of an article titled Queering nuclear weapons: How LGBTQ+ inclusion strengthens security and reshapes disarmament.

The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous alphabet agency responsible, as its name implies, for maintaining the security and efficacy of the USA’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Its remit also includes preventing the proliferation of WMDs, overseeing the provision of nuclear propulsion for the US Navy, and responding to radiological emergencies.

These are not small things to be responsible for, and one of their newly appointed senior administrators is apparently obsessed with painting rainbows on the warheads.

Let’s have a look at her.

Unlike Brinton, Nair doesn’t obviously look like a spiteful mutant. No aposematic hair colouring, no facial piercings, no obvious tattoos, nor any other obvious signs of mental illness. Her Xitter account doesn’t even proclaim her pronouns.

So unlike Brinton, there’s no obvious evidence that she’s a sexual deviant. By all appearances, she’s merely another overly earnest head girl, looking to burnish her virtue via demonstrative allyship.

Most of the media coverage was just lol’ing at the woke absurdity of the title of Nair’s article – what could adult diapers, dildos, bugchasing, and Monkeypox possibly have to do with preventing the fiery nuclear annihilation of the human species? Aside, that is, from keeping the observably mentally ill as far from the big red button as possible? What fresh madness is this? But we’re all inured to the regime’s infinite absurdity, these days, so after having a sensibly cynical chuckle we all moved on. I shrugged and moved on myself, until a few days ago when Stelios Panagiotou of Podcast of the Lotus Eaters took the time to actually read Nair’s work. What he found wasn’t lolcow fodder. It was deeply sinister.

There’s no limit to how progressive politicians want to control your life

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post a couple of days ago, Carson Jerema provided many examples of how the Canadian federal government — despite failing and fumbling so many of its existing responsibilities — still wants to increase control over the daily lives of Canadians:

After a decade or so, progressives are on the defensive in Canada and elsewhere because regular people, as in those who are not activist weirdos, are tired of the agenda to control every aspect of our lives. Point this out to a progressive, and they will deny that anyone’s life is being interfered with and claim only some far-right monster would think otherwise. They can’t believe there are people out there who share a different view. They don’t understand how this could be.

But progressive governments are trying to control our lives in ways big and small, and in ways that range from subtle to a punch in the face.

In Canada, the federal government’s environmental policies are the most obvious example of this interference. The Liberals have banned plastic straws and plastic bags; even compostable bags are banned in grocery stores because they resemble plastic. Such bans are pointless irritants that make shopping more expensive, and life slightly less enjoyable as paper straws dissolve in one’s drink. People might dismiss these concerns as simply minor inconveniences, but this is how most people experience government policy, by being forced to replace their bag of plastic bags that they were already reusing, with more expensive, less useful options.

Next up, the Liberals are exploring options to bring in environmental regulations for clothing. The cost of clothes has actually gone down in recent years, so leave it to Ottawa to look for ways to bring the cost back up and to limit options.

There is also the plan to essentially force Canadians to purchase electric vehicles, that nobody would otherwise want, through government mandates to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.

On a larger scale, the government is attempting to restrict the kind of work people do, specifically work in the oil and gas industry, through steep emissions targets, which will close off lucrative job opportunities in western oilfields. It will also limit the kinds of fuels people will be able to use to heat their homes.

There are also policies that the Canadian government hasn’t implemented, but which green activists have endorsed, such as the banning of gas stoves and the ludicrous suggestion from some academics that “climate lockdowns” be implemented to help cut emissions.

It is possible to be supportive of all these policies, despite their paternalistic and job-killing nature, but pretending that no one is trying to, or that no one wants to, interfere with our liberty is not a credible position to take.

Roman auxiliaries – what was their role in the Imperial Roman army?

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published May 8, 2024

The non citizen soldiers of the Roman Auxilia served alongside the Roman citizens of the legions. In the second and third centuries AD, there were at least as many auxiliaries as there were legionaries — probably more. Some were cavalry or archers, so served in roles that complemented the close order infantry of the legions. Yet the majority were infantrymen, wearing helmet and body armour. They looked different from the legionaries, but was their tactical role and style of fighting also different. Today we look at the tactical role of Roman auxiliaries.

Extra reading:

I mention M. Bishop & J. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment which is one of the best starting places. Mike Bishop’s Osprey books on specific types of Roman army equipment are also excellent. Peter Connolly’s books, notably Greece and Rome at War, also remain well worthwhile.

QotD: Yes, yes, but does it work in theory?

Filed under: Asia, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For Smart people, it’s all about the process. As we’ve discussed before, there’s some mysterious Hegelian alchemy happening in the minds of the Left, whereby process somehow becomes achievement. I’ll give you an example from academia, because that puts us firmly in the realm of “stuff that can’t possibly matter”. Stick with me:

I told y’all a while back about a friend of mine in grad school, who did his dissertation on an aspect of the Vietnam War. I’m making some of this up, of course, to protect various anonymities, but it’s at least as “fake but accurate” as the Rather Memo. Anyway, he had a long section on how Colonel So-and-So’s actions while attached to MACV-SOG only made sense in the light of his belief that his ARVN counterpart, Maj. Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator.

To my buddy, this appeared to be a completely unproblematic assertion. After all, he had reams of paperwork from Col. So-and-So, asserting his categorical belief that Long Duc Dong was a communist. Please note that it was absolutely irrelevant, for dissertation purposes, if Long Duc Dong actually was a Communist. It only matters that Col. So-and-So thought he was, and acted accordingly — which was a 100% true fact, about as “proven” as anything gets in the Liberal Arts. It’s actually extremely rare in the History Biz to find someone saying something like “I, Colonel So-and-So, believe X, with all my heart and soul, and I’m staking my entire professional reputation, not to mention the very lives of my soldiers, on this belief,” but that’s what my buddy had.

One particular prof on my buddy’s defense committee had a problem with this section. Oh, the evidence was fine, and the conclusions reasonable, and well written, and all that jazz. It was just that my buddy didn’t have enough Theory. That’s how it came back through the mark-up process: “Needs more Theory”.

This is where you need to understand academia’s weird argot, as it’s a window into the Smart People’s world. Normal folks would be scratching their heads at this point. Didn’t my buddy already have a theory, a really robust one? “Col. So-and-So only did thus-and-such because he thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist.” My buddy unearthed literal reams of evidence pointing to exactly that. QED, time to move on dot org …

… but that’s not how “Theory” works in academia. I’ve been very careful to capitalize it, because to them, it’s nothing so grubby as “a hypothesis which can be verified or rejected on the basis of evidence”. No, “Theory” is that highfalutin’ Frog shit. What my buddy really needed was an analysis of Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or “subalterity”, despite years in grad school I’m still not sure which one is “correct”) vis a vis Col. So-and-So, an examination of the colonial and postcolonial discourses of power between the two of them, a long explication of the Colonel’s hegemony and Dong’s resistance. In other words, a shitload of buzzwords, simply for the sake of having buzzwords.1

That‘s how Smart People operate. The real world of actions and consequences, real people doing real things, is completely irrelevant. If you can’t fit it into Gayatri Spivak’s work on “strategic essentialism”, it doesn’t matter.

That’s why Smart People’s decisions seem so randomly stupid, yet planned, simultaneously. They’re not interested in examining actual facts in the real world. Most of the time, they’re not dealing with what we’d recognize to be “facts” at all. Regarding Long Duc Dong’s “subalternity”, or “subalterity”, or whatever, normal people’s normal response is: Who gives a shit? He himself surely didn’t, not having his PhD in Grievance Studies, and neither did Col. So-and-So. Those dumbasses, being so very very NOT-Smart, were only concerned with irrelevancies like “staying alive” and “winning the war”.

But to the Smart, Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or whatever) isn’t just a real thing, it’s the only thing. When they’re forced to confront actual facts in the real world, they will put all their mental energy into shoehorning those facts into their paradigm, their “Theory”. Hence, Afghanistan. Did the Totally Legit Joe administration really believe that handing a list of our people to the Taliban was a good idea? Did they really think the Taliban would help them get to the airport, rather than marking them down on their rapidly-growing kill list?

You’re damn right they did. Despite all evidence, despite all reason, because the Afghans are “the subaltern” in the Smart People’s Theory — they have to act in thus-and-such way, because Postcolonial Theory insists they can do no other.

Really. I know it’s mind-boggling, but it’s nonetheless true.

Severian, “Mail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-27.

    1. After talking my buddy down from the ledge — he had, after all, spent years on this, including several trips to frickin’ Hanoi — we got blind drunk together and had great fun writing the “Theory” section of that chapter. My friends, you’ve never seen such incomprehensible polysyllabic buffoonery. The Postmodern Essay Generator itself couldn’t have done better. To this day I have no idea what any of that shit meant — not one word — but it sailed through committee, and my buddy now has tenure at Big State. When he went to publish his diss as his first book, even the editors — no mean SJWs themselves — confessed to being baffled by it, and suggested taking it out.

Powered by WordPress