🧵 Happy Sunday THREAD about the fragility of modern civilisation.
I've been feeling shivery and feverish since Friday night (better now) so I decided to watch Band of Brothers again. It's a wonderfully produced, directed, scripted and acted series, and it's must watch for...1/n
I've been feeling shivery and feverish since Friday night (better now) so I decided to watch Band of Brothers again. It's a wonderfully produced, directed, scripted and acted series, and it's must watch for...1/n
...anybody who hasn't seen it. I had to turn it off, though. It wasn't the horror of the battle scenes -- the death, the jaws ripped open by shrapnel, or the amputations by 105mm mortar round -- that got me. It was the liberation of Eindhoven. It shows in that scene the...2/n
...rank moral degeneration war causes on all sides, much of which is tragically necessary for military operations, but a lot of which is forced on populations who must survive through it. In Western Europe, we have been lucky for the last 80 years that we haven't seen any...3/n
...serious war. For 45 of those years, we were frozen in peace, because war between the two superpowers was too unthinkable to ever happen, and until the late eighties, we were largely ruled by a governing elite who had been tempered by total war, or at least their fathers'...4/n
...experiences of it. Well, not anymore. I don't think we'll have a war, but the blasé way in which the Western Intelligentsia treats war is sickening: throwing us into the Middle East as if it was a trifle; blunderbussing around Eastern Europe as though the people who have...5/n
...real, serious and centuries long security interests in that part of the world -- and have rather formidable martial capacity -- might not feel alarmed by it all. We've known that Russia was nervous about our policy there for two decades and, for at least the last eight...6/n
...of those years, that they had the military wherewithal to do something about it. But did we engage to find a stable settlement? No. We were too busy telling ourselves and everybody else how Right we were. And now we're whipping ourselves into a hysterical frenzy because...7/n
...they've concluded that they will never get us to the negotiation table without credible threats.
We knew for at least a decade we would likely see a global pandemic, but were we well prepared? Nope. We were lucky that it was COVID. We also know that we'll see another...8/n
We knew for at least a decade we would likely see a global pandemic, but were we well prepared? Nope. We were lucky that it was COVID. We also know that we'll see another...8/n
...Carrington Event; but how much hardening of the grid and electricity supply have we done? I'll bet hardly any. So when one hits, and we lose electricity for a significant number of months (years?), what will happen to society? The Band of Brothers scenes that show...9/n
...liberated and German cities offer a glimpse. It's not pretty. Given how fragile our comfortable civilisation is (which we wantonly shroud, lest we have to think about it), it's easy to look at our incompetent, massively conceited ruling class and worry. A lot.
Happy Sunday
Happy Sunday
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