#peaceniks

[flavoracle]

The Cold War ended just before I started grade school. The 9/11 terrorist attacks happened during my senior year of high school. That means that the vast majority of my childhood enjoyed a period of peace that the United States has not enjoyed since 2001.

When people talk about the optimism and subsequent disappointment that my generation has lived through, I think it has very little to do with “participation trophies,” and far more to do with the trajectory of the world we grew up in, compared to the world we entered as adults.

We believed we could save the planet through recycling and other tips we learned from Captain Planet. We thought “world peace” was totally attainable through international goodwill. We chatted with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, and we assumed online interactions would all be that friendly.

I’ve heard my generation called “Xellenials” or “The Oregon Trail Generation,” but personally I’d rather think of some kind of name that reflects the peace and optimism that defined our formative years. Because it’s difficult to overstate just how much that has defined us.

#random thoughts from dave #my generation #my childhood #growing up during peace #optimism #disappointment #peaceniks

[dclcq]

"Putin was wrong to invade, but Europe and US should negotiate peace instead of fueling warmongering Zelenskyy" - this is the message I've been getting almost every day. So I decided to respond with a thread.

First of all, dear peacemakers, do you have a clue what are Putin’s demands for peace? I will tell you: Russia is allowed to invade and control Ukraine’s government, resources, and legislation for an indefinite time.

Ukraine’s army must be demilitarized and almost destroyed. This means leaving no weapons, and no means to respond to any future threat from Russia. All damage Russia brought to Ukraine must be rebuilt by Ukrainians and Europeans.

All criminal accusations, all sanctions must be lifted. All crimes must stay unpunished. Territory, Russia took over by force, must stay under Russia no question. Russia does not agree to draw its forces out of Ukraine.

It still insists it is allowed to deport Ukrainians from their homeland and instead let Russians move in. Look at what is going on in Mariupol. This will be all of Ukraine.

At the same time each attack, each mass murder committed by Russians in Ukraine is blamed on Ukraine. Logic: Stop protecting yourselves, you are not allowed. We are allowed to shoot anti-ship missiles at your cities.

But it is you who’s guilty, bloody warmongers. Stop resisting. Let us turn you into the colony. Because we have the right, because we used to have you and want to have you back by force in 21st century.

Meanwhile, the ones, you call warmongers from EU and US: provide weapons on their own schedule, do not provide any means we can use to attack Russia or even Crimea. Strictly forbidden to use any of their weapons to bring war to Russia. Still are afraid of Russia losing

Agree to lift sanctions from Russian oligarchs, put Russian banks on Swift, buy Russian nuclear energy even at times Russians keep largest NPP in Europe hostage.

But let's think we agreed on Russia's peace terms after all it did to us. After it destroyed our cities, and industries, killed, raped, and kidnapped our people. Because "every war ends with negotiations", right?

NATO indeed got a boost because Russia attacked Ukraine. So they do have a plus. We got weapons to stand and retake our territory. Also a plus. But let's go into the "negotiations camp". Imagine this war ends on Russian terms, and that's the terms Russia agrees to negotiate.

What message do we send to the world: If you are a bigger power that wants to colonize neighboring countries, you can do it. You can come and kill the natives, destroy their houses, kidnap their kids, and turn them into your new citizens to replace those killed in war.

You can send natives to filtration camps, take away their property and send your own people from depressive regions to live in better conditions in the colonized country. and that is fine. You will still be at UN, still will be doing business as usual.

You might suffer from sanctions for a while, but you can always use loopholes or kill even more natives to pressure the world to lift the sanctions and let you continue your war. it will work. You will consolidate power at home, showing how strong you are.

You will use mindblowing propaganda efforts, mixing historical conflicts to get allies in modern times, making people previously colonized by others that now the sovereign state you still see as your breakaway colony, is somehow guilty for this war.

You dare to blame Ukraine, the West for this war, but not the one who actually has boots on the ground. not the one who destroys food destined maybe for your countries. This all because when you were suffering, nobody helped you. now you think it is fair for this to continue.

and the most mindblowing thing here is that if Putin's peace will happen, you will all remember us, like we now remember Syrians, Georgians, Chechens, and Afghanistan. World ignored all warnings, and kept business as usual, while one by one Russia was destroying us.

Now Putin, feeling the Ukraine fatigue and upcoming election year moods shits, feels blood and already reminds Poland that Stalin presented her lands. WEAK UP!!!!

The ones, who strip us of agency, because we need help fighting on our own with the largest army on the continent, please get a life. Read history. read about Ukraine. We have free and fair elections, even now there are openly pro-Russian lawmakers in parliament.

Yes, during the war we got a bit less democratic, but as did ANY OTHER COUNTRY during the war in history.

Our parliament still has heated debates about laws, we got rather strong institutions. We are older than Russia, we just had different names, like most of the countries in their history. Please read, and educate yourselves more. don't just write "independent thinker" in your bio

if you think that just letting Russia win will end this and it will be good, you should stop also in your daily life: standing for yourself or your loved one when someone's abusing him or her. Let bully at school to abuse your kid, and ask your kid what did he do to provoke it?

Stop writing quotes of great leaders about justice in your bios. Because you clearly are not ready to fight for justice, so be truthful. Write something about surrendering for the sake of peace. be honest to yourself. END.

Me, and many others like me probably will not survive to live in the new world, where surrendering to an aggressor who's murdering is right, cause you might get the chance that not all of you will be murdered, some might be enslaved and live happily ever after.

And honestly, I start thinking it is fine that I might not survive to live in this new "wonderful" world our place will turn if Russia is not defeated in Ukraine.

-- by Nika Melkozerova Source

#ukraine #russia #peaceniks #vatniks #appeasement #politics #twitter thread unroll #eastern europe #imperialism

[myrddin-wylt]

pspspsps, most of Ukraine is still without power, heating, and water. various NGOs and governments are doing all they can, but volunteer groups are always the ones who can help first and most directly - especially the volunteer paramedics and military corps, who are the guys helping people in active combat zones that the NGOs can’t go into. like I realize donating to military groups sounds weird, but given the complete lack of respect the Russian military has shown for peace corridors and basic rules of war, these guys are saving a lot more lives than they are ending them.

anyway here are a few groups I like in particular:

Come Back Alive, the big dick charity of them all

Ukrainian Association of Washington state: less familiar with them but they’re hosting Ruslan Gorovyi and motherfucker that’s all you have to say to me.

Hospitallers Medical Battalion are so fucking solid. they’re volunteer paramedics, so they’re the first ones going into combat zones to help civilians. I’m a little in love, honestly.

UAnimals has a patreon if you want to help animals and pets in Ukraine

All4Ukraine has a collection of individual fundraisers, so you can literally choose what you want to put your money to. a lot of them are actually cars, which may sound weird, but do not underestimate how utterly vital cars are for evacuations, ambulances, recon, etc etc, especially as winter begins. Ukraine is fucking cold, and it’s a huge country - getting people transportation is literally lifesaving rn.

#ukraine #russian invasion of ukraine #russo ukraine war #russo ukrainian war #slava ukraini #non-hetalia #fyi this blog shoots ruzzians and peaceniks on sight ty #russians and pacifists you're fine if you want to join #accidentally made a typeo re mr gorovyi's name #can also be transliterated horovyi

[themancorialist]

Corporation Street, Manchester.

#eh up #manchester #fleecewear #barnardos #dr barnardo #boots #v sign #flick the v #peace #peacenik #peace sign #warren peas #chug life #Eider

[rotzaprachim]

sitting here like I really hope I don’t get iced out of the community if anyone hears what I called our reps and senators to do

#Me loosing my trust in goyim and the community in real time #Realized I invoked not only my own name and suffering as a Jew but community #And it’s like oh wait #Nothing I called for was that radical - ceasefire and a pause on military funding until 2 state solution respected #But it’s like well with how the us gov is acting these days #I feel like I’ve seen people become way more conservative in real time idk. It’s awful #Some of them feel like the people who got killed were peaceniks asking for it or something

[odinsblog]

Okay… today was a lil bit rough on ya boy. Bad, but nothing too serious - if this was the worst that 2023 throws at me, I’m winning like a mf. Anyway I smiled when this happened…. I can’t access the “read more” function anymore, so y’all gon need to see the tags

#lgbt #lgbtq #military channel #lynette nusbacher #so this might come as a surprise to all but my very closest followers #but imma ex military grunt turned peacenik - ya know saw the sausages getting made up close and decided that peace is preferable to war #anyway - in a lot of ways the army is branded into my soul #i still wake up before 4am on most mornings #w/o an alarm clock #i still do *my* version of pt (mine has lap swimming yo) #and i still enjoy learning militarily history/strategy (far too much of it is propaganda unfortunately) #anyway - i like to listen to non controversial things as i drift off to sleep sometimes #and i *love* the history/military channel #but i havent really watched it in a good minute right? #so im drifting off to sleeping (today was unusually skressful but thats another whole ass post) #so im listening to the military channel and i hear a familiar voice #and immediately i think to myself - oh thats that british dude #but ……… when i briefly open my eyes to see him talking ……. #its *actually* ​( …wait for it…) lynette nusbacher! #and i saw her face and i was like damn odin you slippin son #ive watched the military channel so much i coulda sworn it was that dude speaking #so now im kinda half awake and im questioning myself right? like - i might forget names but i fuckn knowwww faces and voices #so they flash her name across the screen and i hit up wikipedia and boom! #lynette nusbacher is trans! and the mf military channel still has her on 🤯 #anyway - imma cis/het brutha but that made me happy for all my trans friends skrugglin out there #i didnt know

[oneheadtoanother]

It's very funny that John Lennon talked constantly about how he thought he'd get assassinated a la Gandhi or MLK because his peace rap was just too heavy for the system man, but in actuality he was killed by an ex-fan who hated his guts for becoming a posturing richie-rich phony.

#to be fair he was under FBI surveillance and Nixon did try to get him deported for his peacenik schtick #but he was very much killed by a guy who just thought he sucked

[ministerpeacefulpoetwordwitch]

Peaceniks helped the Women’s Liberation Movement make abortion legal and the Women’s Liberation Movement helped the peaceniks end the draft.  We both won.  If we’re going to win anything, we need to come together and work together.  We did before, we can do it again.

#roe vs wade #abortion #peacenik #women's liberation movement

[sarockradio]

"ROCK MOVES"

with Julie Reynolds

TUES & THURS 2PM

This Week:

ROSS WILSON & The Peaceniks - 50 Years Of Hits Tour!

From Daddy Cool to Mondo Rock and as a solo artist with no less than 26 ARIA Top 40 hits to his credit as a singer, songwriter and producer, Ross Wilson is one of Australia’s most awarded, respected and well-known artists.

With the legendary band Daddy Cool whose number one anthem Eagle Rock and debut album "Daddy Who?" smashed all previous sales records in Australia an astounding 50 years ago in

1971, to the 1977 formation of Mondo Rock.

Hits ‘Cool World’, ‘State of The Heart’, ‘Chemistry’, ‘No Time’, and ‘Come Said The Boy’ and into the 21st century as a solo performer, Wilson has never been out of the limelight.

Twice inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, Wilson’s live performances are legendary!

The Bridgeway Hotel (Pooraka, SA)

Saturday, 20 April 2024

7:30 PM

Tickets:

https://tickets.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/2698a4cc-850d-4fc6-9181-9759332d5bfb

Join us!

"ROCK MOVES"

with Julie Reynolds

TUES & THURS 2PM

LISTEN LIVE @

WWW.SAROCK.COM.AU

#sarockradio #internet radio #radio #interview #music #julie reynolds #ross wilson #mondo rock #daddy cool #Ross Wilson and the peaceniks

[medicinemane]

Clearly one of the major things Ukraine needs more of is anti air

They make good use of what they have, but clearly it isn't enough and we need to give more

Also preferably planes so they can get air superiority. I understand why NATO didn't want to impose a no fly zone, but in that case we need to give Ukraine the tools to do it themselves

It really is clear that this is the only way to keep civilians safe, since they're honestly russia's main target most of the time

#once again; I may not like how much we spend on the military; but if we've already spent it let's send it where it'll do some good #it's become very clear that Ukraine is an incredible ally of the US and we need to give them our full support #and once again; I don't like war; I'm overall kind of a peacenik but you can't ask people to roll over and die #if nothing else give them weapons to defend themselves with #people'll talk about using lethal force on home invaders; well I sure hope you support Ukraine #cause this is that on a nation sized scale; and there's no question if the invader is here to kill or not #they've shown they want to do that and so much worse

[gusty-wind]

“It does not actually articulate or force the articulation of a strategy for how to end the conflict to begin with. So you basically have a blank check — or a near blank check — for a strategy that’s completely gone off the rails.”

Lee called out his Republican colleagues for sending aid to Ukraine at the expense of America’s own interests.

“By voting yes and passing this bill now, it empowers drug cartels, it dissolves our borders, it spends insane amounts of money that we don’t have on the priorities of foreign countries all at the same time,” he said.

Lee also slammed the bills’ proponents for defeating an effort led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to increase accountability and oversight of the aid to the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian government through appointment of an inspector general.

“These are not choir boys,” Lee said. “These are not Boy Scouts. These are not Girl Scouts. These are people who have really set world records for corruption. It’s an art form over there.”

Vance laid out the arguments from Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for rushing the aid through without further accountability measures.

“The basic argument is that we have to rush resources to Ukraine immediately, or they’re liable to fall to Russian aggression,” he said. “And it’s all basically an argument made under the gun that unless you approve this appropriation of resources and weapons, then you will allow Russia to win. So it’s a kind of moral blackmail.”

Supporters of yet more aid to Ukraine can not admit the reality that the war is not winnable for Ukraine, Vance continued. “They can’t admit that this isn’t going well because if they admitted that, it would cause too much psychological harm, and they’d have to cut bait.”

Johnson added that proponents argue that it is in politicians’ naked political interests to support the aid because “it’s helping build our industrial base, and so it’s creating jobs in your state. And I call that a depraved justification.”

Musk, who noted his contributions to Ukraine’s war efforts, echoed the assessment of the trio of senators that the war is ultimately not winnable and that a peace deal is in their best interests.

Ukraine is “losing people every day,” he said. “And if you’re going to spend lives, it must be for a purpose.”

Musk continued:

There is no way in hell that Putin is going to lose. If he would back off, he would be assassinated. And for those who want regime change in Russia, they should think about: Who is the person that could take out Putin? And is that person likely to be a peacenik? Probably not. They’re probably gonna be even harder, even more hardcore than Putin if they took him out.  Ramaswamy detailed additional “unacceptable” risks to American and global interests from continued “endless funding” of the fighting in Ukraine, arguing that Americans see “daily strengthening of the military alliance between Russia and China, which, when combined, is the single greatest increase for the risk of World War III that we’ve seen in the post-World War II era.”

If the foreign aid passes the Senate, as is expected, the House must still act. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) would likely face a rebellion from members of the Republican conference if he brought the bill to the floor.

Monday night, after the conclusion of the X Space, Johnson seemed to throw cold water on the Senate’s package, echoing earlier statements that Congress must address American border security first.

“In the absence of having received any single border policy change from the Senate, the House will have to continue to work its own will on these important matters,” a Johnson statement read. “America deserves better than the Senate’s status quo.”

The timing before Monday night’s vote is important, sending the message to any on-the-fence Republican senators that a vote on the unpopular aid package would imperil their political standing for legislation that will not become law.

Some Democrats have insisted they will use all the parliamentary tools at their disposal to bring the bill to the floor, although a path forward for the legislation in the House is unclear.

Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.

#the great awakening #war is real #ncswic #treason

[myrddin-wylt]

Speaking of the Russia-Ukraine conflict let me share a personal experience:

Russia stans are weird. No, I’m not judging anyone who has Russia as their favorite character, because I used to be one of those people some time ago. I’m talking about the breed of people who are batshit unhinged about him, who treat him like a helpless baby and similar. About some years ago, I shared a server with someone who was one of those babyfiers. It was whisplash seeing a big state like Russia being treated like a toddler in a daycare. They also tried to shift almost any conversation to be about Russia and threw a fit if they were ignored

And this gets worse, this gets way worse. They apparently disliked Ukraine. In a convo they implied Russia should have access to the Black Sea, and that Ukraine “wasn’t a saint either” They never talked about her, instead preferring to talk about Russia and Russia alone. And before you think they were a teen, they were in their mid 20s

Of course he isn’t the only one to have weird fans. This fandom has a tendency to turn big empires who did shit like Spain and Rome into “uwu baby boy” and proceed to justify that they did nothing wrong. All I wanna say its okay to like someone who is flawed and did shit in the past, but as long as you acknowledge their flaws. Don’t try to justify and treat like a baby omfg

Anyway I hope that person realized who was the real victim now that things exploded

this is actually really really interesting because these HWS Russia fans are a unique intersection of 'clueless, ignorant, insensitive fandom idiot' and 'another casualty to the extremely effective years-long Russian propaganda campaign.'

like I'm used to opposition from 1) tankies and supporters of Putin's regime, 2) supposedly well-meaning Westerners (I refer to them as peaceniks) who think Ukraine should just surrender for the sake of peace and somehow think the fault of this war is shared between Russia and Ukraine (and frequently NATO), and 3) fandom idiots obsessed with their uwu blorbo. but all three in one? fuck, I want to see this specimen, this absolute creature. you should send them my way sometime, I love a good fight every now and then.

I highly doubt the war has changed their mind. I mean, it hasn't changed the minds of peaceniks who don't even have any emotional investment in the whole thing. my personal guess is that they've doubled down, if not outright joined the tankie/Putin faction.

#ask #anon #hetalia meta #i love love LOVE fighting ''well-meaning'' Western peaceniks #it's so easy and fun I can't help myself #my personal favorite instance was someone on tumblr condemning ukraine for drafting all men to fight #their reasoning was that no one should be made to fight against their will and a government who forces you to fight is evil #I pointed out the government forcing them to fight is Russia and also what the fuck do you think a state/government even exists for? #that's it that's the point of a state it's just a collective defense/war machine #anyway they blocked me and i was incredibly smug about it

[eretzyisrael]

by Brendan O'Neill

How quickly the ‘Ceasefire Now!’ lobby turned into frothing warmongers. No sooner had Iran began its criminal bombardment of Israel than these phoney peaceniks were leaping up and down with delight. This is ‘true solidarity’, said one ‘pro-Palestine’ group in response to Iran’s raining down of missiles on the Jewish State. We can now glimpse the truth behind their fake pacifism. We can see their yearning for war on Israel that they cynically dress up as a campaign for peace in Palestine. It’s not a ceasefire woke Westerners want – it’s the humiliation and taming of the Jewish nation.

Iran launched its felonious assault on Saturday night. It fired hundreds of cruise missiles and aerial drones at Israel. Mercifully, Israel, with the help of Britain, America and Jordan, was able to intercept the murderous fusillade, meaning very little damage was done. But that should not detract from the seriousness of this act of war. This is the first time Iran has attacked Israel directly. Normally, the theocratic tyrants do their Israelophobic bidding through proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. That Tehran has now turned its own war machine in Israel’s direction is profoundly concerning.

And what are our self-styled radicals saying? The kind of people who’ve been clogging up the streets of LA, New York, London and Berlin these past six months to wring their hands over war? They’re not saying ‘Ceasefire Now!’, that’s for sure. In fact, some are saying ‘War Now!’, or at least are making craven excuses for Iran’s attack. A member of the International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America went so far as to offer ‘full solidarity with Iran as it retaliates against the Zionist entity’. From solidarity with Palestine to solidarity with warmongering Islamists: it’s so clearly hate for Israel, not love for peace, that motors these people.

Asa Winstanley, the oddball who runs Electronic Intifada, described Iran’s attack as a ‘humanitarian intervention’ – it’s like Blairism with a Marxian veneer – and said ‘THANK YOU IRAN’. The Palestinian Youth Movement praised Iran for daring ‘to take action to bring an end to genocide [sic]’. The Palestine Solidarity Alliance at Hunter College in New York City offered Iran ‘solidarity’. A professor at California State University said ‘Iran did what all Arabs could not do’ – that is, teach uppity Israel a stern lesson. The cry for peace has morphed into sympathy for war – if it’s war on the ‘Zionist entity’, that is.

#israel #ceasfire now #iran #woke left #the woke left #solidarity

[simon-roy]

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

#sciencefiction #science fiction #book recommendations #jack vance #larry niven #jerry pournelle #simon roy #griz grobus #charles stross #dragon masters #william gibson #bruce sterling

[digitaldiscipline]

2am thoughts, re: what the conservative, reactionary fucks have called folks who aren't bootlicking capitalism and the patriarchy and were instead agitating for *checks notes* those people to be less fucking awful:

1950's: Communists

1960's: Dirty Hippies

1970's: Peaceniks

1980's: Pinkos

1990's: Bleeding-Heart Liberals

2000's: Politically Correct

2010's: Social Justice Warriors

2020's: Woke

It's almost like they only have one drum to bang, and as soon as it falls out of favor, they rebrand and continue being shitheads.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Ruth Wisse

Hamas recently beat the competition with a demonstration of savagery unlike the earlier improvised pogroms in Europe to which it has been compared. October’s slaughters were plotted with crucial input from Gazans employed in Israeli homes they had scouted and mapped for the purpose, making this the first military campaign designed to culminate in acts of beheading, torture, and rape of predetermined victims. As attempts to destroy Israel through conventional warfare had only made Israel militarily stronger, the new tactics aimed at destroying the Jews’ will to remain among antagonists sworn never to leave them in peace. More than to intimidate, these attacks were made to demoralize.

Survivor-witnesses describe new refinements of psychological warfare. Hamas murdered parents and children in each other’s presence so as to sharpen the survivors’ agony. They took hostages—not, as others do, for eventual exchange—but to taunt the country with images of prisoners’ suffering, and fear that many would never be returned. Every Jewish value—respect for women, honoring the human being who was made in the image of God—was gleefully defiled.

As for the Jews living in nearby Gaza, many of them self-described Jewish “peaceniks,” they had prided themselves on the medical help and hospitality they extended to their Gazan neighbors, persuaded that cooperation was obviously to everyone’s benefit. The terrorists exploited the Jews’ desire for peace as a means of entrapment and further opportunity for torment. By attacking on a Jewish holiday and a secular festival, they intended to destroy the Israelis’ joy in life. Anyone reading Dan Senor and Saul Singer’s exhilarating book about the collective strengths that constitute The Genius of Israel will recognize how Hamas turned precisely those virtues into weapons of torture to tear the Jewish people apart.

October’s slaughters were plotted with crucial input from Gazans employed in Israeli homes they had scouted and mapped for the purpose, making this the first military campaign designed to culminate in acts of beheading, torture, and rape of predetermined victims.

Nor does this exhaust their inventiveness. The Arabs’ strategy of martyring generations of their own people in the cause of eliminating Israel dates back to the 1947 refusal of Arab leaders to accept the partition of Palestine into two states—in order to keep Arabs perpetually homeless. Arabs were to remain permanently displaced as evidence of Israel’s “occupation” while Israel integrated the over 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands and granted participatory citizenship to over 2 million Arabs who chose to remain in its boundaries.

Taking this tactic of martyring their fellow Arabs to a new level, Hamas turned Gaza into suicide central. Above ground, residents were allowed to conduct a quasi-normal life, knowing that, below ground, every school, every hospital, and many private homes were booby-trapped for the Israelis whom their leaders would lure into their cities. The IDF continues to uncover a tremendous amount of infrastructure built over years, confirming Hamas’ intention of invading and killing Israelis en masse. In the words of one of its soldiers “[It] is clear they expected us to arrive and laid plans to exact a cost in the form of IDF casualties.” The attack of Oct. 7 had to be monstrous enough to provoke Israel into full-scale war in the hope of rescuing the hostages and destroying the terrorists—a plan that would also ensure the collateral death of as many Gazans as possible to attract Western sympathy.

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