The Neolithic Flex

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday was two yeas since we saw the the tribal neolithic way of war on full display, reaching for us out of the brutal and horrific past. And now we see our own left gleefully fall into it and thinking it’s an amazing flex that will give them everything they want.

To explain, for those who aren’t aware of what the neolithic way of war: for almost (or more than) a century anthropologists, more out of wishful thinking and ideology than anything else, maintained that there was no war before history. But people who are sane and have met humans have instead started pushing back on this nonsense with the truth.

We know exactly what war in pre-history was like, not only from horrendous anthropological finds, but also from our civilization having met neolithic tribesmen in the recent past, where they lived isolated in Africa and the Americas and definitely Australia.

No, barbarians didn’t march in serried ranks, and they certainly didn’t have military organization and discipline, at least for anything above small tribes. (And unlikely, since the ethos of Personal Bravery is against military discipline.)

Instead they had attacks that we would call arrant and horrible terrorism. It was all “War by war crimes.” Instead of rational objectives or working to conquer ground or strategical resources (whatever they are for the time) their means of war were to descend on civilians and commit horrific atrocities.

I have talked about this in the past, because having read about the first encounters with African and Amerindian tribes, I’ve figured out that atrocities were a RATIONAL way to prevent encroaching on their territory or attacks on themselves.

Look, these were small bands and tribes. Of course they didn’t have borders and couldn’t defend those borders. Instead, they had vast territories, through which they largely wandered in the way of hunter gatherers.

If finding another people, potentially (almost surely) hostile given the time, their best bet was to attack and make their attack so horrible that however big the group that wandered in will run back out and as far away from them as possible.

Sure, if they could without or with little risk, they killed all the intruders. But this wasn’t needed and of course, warriors fought back. So, by preference they attacked groups of unaccompanied women and children and committed horrible acts upon them, not only killing them but making their deaths horrible and mistreating their remains.

This sent the message of “Your women and children aren’t safe here.”

This worked great — and so kept being done — until they ran up against modern, western civilization, where humans by and large recognize the humanity of other people. I.e. we identify with other humans worldwide, not just with our tiny little family. And we’re a bigger, more connected group than the neolithic mind can comprehend.

This means that their big showy horrors and attacks that were supposed to scare the enemy instead turned the vast majority of humanity against them and destroyed them.

I want to emphasize this is always the end of tribal attacks on humans who recognize themselves as more than a tribe. Every single time.

The horrendous attack by Hamass on Israel was exactly this type of attack: an attack on the unsuspecting and those who would not fight back. Something from the deep memory of mankind, the kind of memory we hoped was long buried in the past. The atrocities they committed were a sign of utter and complete rebarbarization. Which, before the usual suspects talk about the Palestinians horrible oppression or claim a genocide that GREW palestinian population is in fact a sign of mistreatment. They are being mistreated by their Hamass overlords, who use them to farm international aid. They export nothing but misery and made up stories of oppression, while living on hatred, breathing hatred and feeding off hatred.

This has brought them to the level of cavemen with modern weaponry, and they are a horror and a reproach on the face of the left that adores them and the international Islamo-fascists who use them. Anyone who can and will say they support Palestinians and Palestine and PARTICULARLY Hamas after the horrors of 10/7 is no longer human but someone who was possessed by a demon of hatred and can no longer think.

Of course most of the people “supporting” them are kids and the oldsters who have never seen or heard of the real atrocities committed by these savages and are instead running on a script of “pity the poor noble savages” because that’s what they were taught. We must stop teaching Rousseaunian nonsense to the young. There are noble people and there are savages. The best you can say for savages is that they’re not inherently bad. Sometimes they are simply in dire need and living with a broken culture. But there is nothing noble about cruelty and dire need. Stop teaching kids that.

As for being victims, well, you can be good and be a victim. You can be bad and be a victim. Victimhood does not grant moral high status. It is an injury and you may be deserving the support of men and women of good will to stop being a victim. But it in no way makes you a hero or wonderful.

Hamass has tried to avoid the backlash that is the due of barbarians and their atrocities by claiming they are the real victims and hiding in the niches of modern minds that believe no one should ever be punished for their crimes, or that perhaps the vast majority of Palestinians are innocent. (Innocent they might be. They are also deeply indoctrinated into hatred, which makes them dangerous instruments. And we do not know how to minister to a culture diseased. Thought uncorking the sun on them seems to have fixed Japan. Alas not permissible in tight confines of the Middle East.)

But in the long run, the “demonstrations” in their favor and the people trying to defend them are a tiny, if excessively vocal minority, amplified by the leftists in the media who think this might help them bring down the west.

What they did and what they planned and celebrated as though it were a great achievement, exactly like primitives at the dawn of history, was so atrocious, so horrific, such a violation of all decency and morals that the rest of us who live in the 21st century saw the face of their movement for the monster it is. And you can’t come back from that. You just can’t.

Curiously, over here antifa and the other dead end — poisonous — tail of the dying communist dragon have decided that this type of war is the way to destroy human civilization.

Part of it is, as Eric S. Raymond pointed out that they are running the script of previous communist revolutions and since they live in a context free world and don’t study history (because history runs up against Marxist technology that they can’t question or their entire mental map falls apart,) they don’t realize that the conditions and countries under which these terror attacks worked are very different from our connected, ease of communication, largely socially flat world (by comparison to the past.)

Which means that they like the barbarians of Hamass are providing cold buckets of water to the dormant and self-satisfied modern mind. Reminding us of the things that howl in the night and that cannot be negotiated with, compounded with and must never, ever be pitied.

They won’t like the results.

Every time savages doing war the barbaric way meet with modern humans they lose. The only question is if they lose before making civilized people commit acts that scar them and which they’ll forever regret.

With the understanding that again we’re dealing with a tiny minority — not even a rump movement, but a pimple on the ass of the already dead rump movement — let’s hope that in America at least — I’m not making predictions for the rest of the world — we manage to once more walk the knife’s edge over the abyss without falling in.

Until then, be careful in crowds.

And keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.

203 thoughts on “The Neolithic Flex”

  1. When humans first developed agriculture and animal husbandry they could afford to stay in one place.

    And they immediately built walls around their settlements. Walls work.

    Build a wall. Put the ferals on the other side of it. Maybe add a moat too. Problem solved.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Problem deferred … perhaps … for a time … but solving it takes far more than a two-state (sane vs. savage) solution. If we can’t talk or drag them into civilization, we need to march them there.

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    2. Well, as long as you can wall in enough ground to grow 100% of your food supplies inside the walls too. Otherwise, you will have to send out foraging parties / farmers… and protect them.

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      1. Which is why the farmers invented cavalry. :D

        Of course the ferals then also learned about cavalry, and it got complicated.

        We’re now up to hypersonic missiles, space weapons and nukes.

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      1. My question is when is Israel going to get a clue and do away with the target rich environment? The enclaves that survived were the ones who could fight back for themselves and sometimes their neighbors. Why the US 2nd amendment is so critical.

        It is notable that the US local idiots, also known as Antifa, gangs in Chicago, etc., don’t generally step outside their self walled communities. Why any country with half a brain (okay, there might be one that stupid, hope not) do not directly attack the US. Hawaii might be inviting a problem. There are states that might be inviting a problem. Invaders problem? Except for Hawaii, the neighboring states aren’t idiots even if one presumes that the prior to the idiocy status, all the firearms were voluntarily surrendered (anyone thinks that I have a non-existent bridge to sell them, honest).

        Liked by 2 people

        2. IIRC, Israel started relaxing its gun control laws immediately after 10/7. Still not as much as they should relax them. But it’s easier now for certain classes of people to own a gun than it was two and a half years ago.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Israel has not relaxed gun control enough. As Sarah pointed out, everyone 10 and over should be concealed carrying. Enough that the idiots do not know who is carrying.

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            1. Twenty precent of the citizens of Israel are not Jewish. A fraction of that 20% want Israel extinguished. (arguably, a small fraction of the 80% seem to agree.) Some portion of that 20% are rather open about it. Thus Israel will -never- have a “constitutional carry” / “everyone carry” option.

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        3. Antifa usually stays in the city, but the arson fires of September 2020 serve as a warning that it is not always the case. OTOH, judging by the minimal followup, a certain amount of FAFO got applied to enough of the perps pour enrourager les autres.

          Protip: starting fires in lands that (partly) belong to a tribe that was willing to go to war is not a good strategy. In short, don’t tick off the Modocs. Or the Klamath, or the Yahooskins, and so on.

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          1. 😬

            Sorry, I couldn’t find an emoji for Feral Kzinti Grin*. This was as close as I could come . . .

            Eyes narrowed in intense predatory focus, teeth bared in preparation for ripping someone’s throat out.

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          2. PTB are trying to blame lightening or power companies for Detroit and Holiday 2020 fires. Not going over well with those burnt out (let alone the **power companies). Not close enough to any local to remotely determine whether FAFO was applied or not.

            2025 fire year they could have gotten away with lightening sources. Oregon had enough strikes. Lightening does create smoldering strikes that blow up when it dries out, add wind, and off it goes. The 2003 fire on the hwy 126 summit started with one of those. Smoldered for 5 days before blowing up. But you know this. My thought was “too bad (so sad) that the undergrowth from the 2020 fires hasn’t *recovered enough for someone to take advantage of the lightening situation. There is enough dead standing and fallen from the last fire to make it bad. Not enough new ground fuel to get and keep fire going.” Evil that way. Eastern Oregon recovery would be faster that the Douglas Fir/High Fir mountain timber and underbrush.

            Even the LA fires. While they’ve arrested one person for arson, there were reports of multiple start sources, not just one. The person arrested is only responsible for one source.

            (*) Recovering. Just not dense enough. That’ll take decades. Kind of how it works. They got one shot. Which is why actual logging stops huge wildfires. A lot of YouTube/Instagram videos of private timber pointing that out. Where the 2020 wildfires went around managed stands. Managed stands, lack of fuel, and luck (always that involved). Not always, Weyerhouser had a lot of land burned, which they went in and harvested. Changed their harvest plans, lost little to nothing.

            (**) Almost get a sense that PTB told the power companies “take the blame quietly, or else”.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. The 7/2021 Bootleg fire (400,000 acres, top 5 in Oregon) was officially listed as a lightning smolder, though it would have been a few weeks. I’m not entirely convinced. OTOH, in my brief stint as a rural firefighter, there was a fire that apparently had been smoldering in duff for a few months. Given the right conditions, over-winter smoldering can occur here. Need a low moisture snow cover–not what we had last year, nor what’s forecast this year. I’m happy, since I’m way behind in getting pine needles out of harm’s way. 4 feet of really wet snow (in a week’s worth of storms) wasn’t a total disaster, though it came close for a lot of people.

              The Sept 2020 242 fire was obviously arson; AFAIK witnesses spotted the van and the perps doing it, though I think they got away. Did in a lot of land belonging to tribal members, as well as part of the state historical park and the fish hatchery.

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    5. Unfortunately, modern technology has provided inexpensive ways of getting over walls if your goal is to spread mayhem on the other side. There was evidence before that attack that Hamas was prepping some of those things. But the Israeli intelligence agencies chose to disregard it.

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    6. Neil Smith (in “Pallas”) described why the emergence of agriculture naturally gives rise to the emergence of a ruling class. The short answer is that hunters, necessarily, have deadly weapons, those are their tools. But farmers don’t; the most dangerous object they use is probably a hoe. And they can’t move away from their crops, so they are sitting ducks, rather defenseless, in the face of bandits. So it’s natural for some people to take up the role of their defenders, and since those defense specialists are the ones who do own weapons it isn’t surprising that they use them to rule over the farmers.

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      1. He was wrong. This was a theory back then. The hunter gatherers also had a ruling class and weapons reserved for the rulers. It was all more brutal and raw, but it was there. See hammers and maces as symbols of kingship. They go back before agriculture.

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        1. Which really should be obvious to anyone who has had to do things in a group.

          Which humans, unless they’ve got amazingly high levels of resources to include youth and health, have to do.

          Somebody ends up making choices.

          The healthy options just make it so that the choices have buy-in from the whole group.

          Liked by 1 person

      2. :blinks in farm kid:

        That is… amazingly creative reasoning.

        Starting with the idea that farmers don’t deal with deadly threats that aren’t humans, going to that farming implements aren’t deadly, and ending with the sincerely creative notion that defense specialists are the rulers.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Plus shepherds. David got his experience slinging at lions and bears.

            Not to mention pitchforks, scythes, pruniscythe, and so forth.

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        2. Yes, farmers do have to deal with nonhuman threats to life, crop, and livestock, some potentially more deadly than others, and even more so in older days. Like bears, cougars, wolves, coyotes, foxes, birds (geese, ducks blackbirds, the passenger pigeon in thousands eating crops). Even the woods bison was known to shake down a log cabin by rubbing on a corner of it in shedding season.

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          1. When Japan “gave up the gun” they would “lend” guns to farmers to use against pests. Such loans could last for decades.

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        3. One of the guys in my National Guard unit back in the early ’80s who had served in the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam informed us that the Entrenching Tool (short folding shovel/mattock) was the most devastating close combat weapon devised by the mind of man. He did not share what caused him to come to that opinion . . .

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          1. Probably grew up playing with them like I did, those things are awesome for taking out snakes, and large chunks of … pretty much anything short of rock.

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            1. Possibly, but –

              The 173rd Airborne was involved in some of the most intense engagements of the US’s foray into that conflict. I suspect there was/were some hands-on experience/s which prompted the comment.

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          2. Rusty and Co. frequently features long discussions in the comments about the effectiveness of Madeline’s farm implement weapons.

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      1. Walls/barriers are essential. They delineate a FAFO line, that someone cares, etc. They require maintenance and upkeep. They should be covered 100% with observation. Ideally, they are also 100% covered with direct and indirect fires, pre-ranged. Mines help.

        The absence of barrier is an invitation to Evil.

        The bypass of barrier is evidence of Evil.

        Liked by 1 person

  2. The connection between the Neolithic (it may have been old in the Paleolithic, too) strategy of “hurt them so bad they’ll tremble at the thought of us” atrocity, and the Hamas attack and the Leftist idealization of violence, is even on display in the current races for high state office in Virginia. Their D-party candidate for attorney general didn’t only fantasize about murdering his opponent and his family, he texted / called another opposite-party person to “explain” all this, confirming it multiple times, and finished by essentially saying it would take some pain for the other side to adopt the “right” policies.

    Not one (D) candidate has withdrawn endorsement. The perpetrator has ‘apologized’ essentially by claiming ‘of course I didn’t mean it’ as if that somehow undid the glimpse into his deep desires, and his doubling / tripling down in the original conversation (which he initiated and continued).

    The consequences of a top elected law-enforcement official serving a term with roughly half the state’s population convinced he’d love to, basically, October-7th them ‘pour encourages les autres’ into proper Leftist thought is… interesting. Rather terrifying, but interesting. (May it remain fiction!)

    Liked by 5 people

    3. My enmity against those who would support (even rhetorically) murdering children to force their parents into some kind of acquiescence is fierce, and burns with the fury of ten-thousand sons.

      One of the things that really startled me upon becoming a mother — was the intensity of my own feelings. Try and hurt my baby … oh, you would die – and I’d do the deed with my bare hands, if necessary, and sleep like an infant myself, afterwards.

      Kipling, again. The fury of a female, defending her offspring.

      Liked by 8 people

      2. I vividly remember that shortly after #1 son was born, hubby turned to me at dinner and said, ” If there was a fire or burglary or something, I’d wouldn’t save you first anymore. I’d save baby junior. But I’d try to save you both. But I would protect him first.”

        I was like, “WHAT? What are you TALKING about?”

        It was a very weird and out of the blue comment. But I was also strangely comforted when I considered for a minute and realized I felt the same way. Except for saving hubby. It never occurred to me HE would ever need saving. I’d take baby and run. Hubby would be the rear guard.

        I didn’t know at the time that men will run various scenarios in their heads about such happenings and make plans accordingly.

        Liked by 7 people

        1. There’s a good reason for “women and children” first. Heinlein covered that very well. When it comes down to individual immediate family, that gets a little more complicated. Plenty of RL stories of parents dying just to save one or more of their children. And given a binary decision to save my child or my wife, I’m most likely to save my kid. You want to know just how messed up I am, the choice changes based on which child we’re talking about today. Both my boys are adults. One is transgendered, one is about to get married to a nice gal. With the first, I’d save my wife. With the other, I’d save him. Like I said, life is complicated.

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          1. Yes. Its complicated.

            Kids are a adults now. The boys would definitely be on their own. But I’d bet good money he’d try to rescue the daughters. And our boys would help. After they saved their own kids, of course.

            Then again, grandpa would most likely defend grandkids first of all.

            Liked by 1 person

    4. Not even just any state official. The candidate for ATTORNEY GENERAL. The top law enforcement official in the Commonwealth.

      (BTW, Virginia only has three statewide offices elected–Governor, Lt. Governor, AG. No Secretary of anything else gets elected, they’re all appointed.)

      Liked by 3 people

    5. Abby Normal, the donkey candidate for governor here in the Commonwealth, hasn’t disavowed him. Separately she has urged her supporters ‘let your rage fuel you’ multipletimes. She also hasn’t disavowed the school board member who cheered Charlie Kirks murder with ‘I thought that killing Nazis was okay’. Said school board member was a key endorser of Abby. Despite all this the donks are odds on favorites to take the executive branch here. The Reader is considering a move to a more favorable locale if that happens.

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  3. “As for being victims, well, you can be good and be a victim. You can be bad and be a victim. Victimhood does not grant moral high status. It is an injury and you may be deserving the support of men and women of good will to stop being a victim. But it in no way makes you a hero or wonderful.”

    See Floyd, George.

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    1. The only person who victimized St. George de Fentanyl was St. George de Fentanyl. “Most clear case of suicide we ever saw.”

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    2. I will not be a good victim. Or at least victim choice. I do not intend to go gently into the good night if/when it comes, even if the end of that journey unites me with Him.

      There is a time for peace and a time for war.

      Prepare my hands for war, teach my fingers to fight. Even if those fingers are just hunting & pecking on a keyboard.

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      1. Don’t poke at the enemy with random fingers. Smash him with your clenched fist. (Some German general, so badthink)

        Doesn’t -quite- work for keyboard warriors. (grin)

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  5. It does strike me that ‘uncorking the sun’ is also the most extreme form of the reprisal raids possible.

    The bombs were what finally convinced Imperial Japan that we could and absolutely would destroy them utterly.

    Liked by 4 people

    2. And it could not have been the casualties, as the Tokyo firebombing raid killed more Japanese than the atomic bombings did. And even the first bomb taking out Hiroshima on August 6th did not convince sufficiently, though unclear initial reports and the fog of war meant the government were not sure at all right away what had really happened.

      But then three days later on August 9th, there went Nagasaki.

      It was that apparent ease – “two bombs, two cities” instead of thousand-plane-raids – which implied that the Americans could proceed to remove cities every so often indefinitely, with apparently minimal effort.

      That meant no requirement for a costly invasion exposing the Americans to the scale of casualties experienced to date in the Pacific island campaign, and no invasion fleet at which to throw kamikazi waves and kill yet more Americans. This apparent ease of killing cities from an unreachable distance put an end to the Japanese government’s last forlorn hope, to shock the American public into peace negotiations with massive casualties, which is fairly Neolithic if you think about it.

      Only that apparent ease of destruction in the end convinced Emperor Hirohito to turn away from the fanatical Army war faction. After the attempted coup (which was not as keystone cops as it’s made out to be now) failed, they surrendered unconditionally on the 15th.

      Note that the Americans did not in fact have any more devices ready to go right away after the August 9th Nagasaki raid, but they were in the pipeline. The “Third Shot” device, another Fat Man plutonium implosion bomb, was planned to be ready to go ten-ish days later. So after August 18th I presume they would have targeted Kokura, which had been the original target of B-29 “Bock’s Car” which had to divert and instead bomb Nagasaki due to weather. I’ve not seen a further target list, but I assume it would be something along the lines of “the rest of the cities”.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Assisted by the way they tortured an American pilot until he invented knowledge for them, about how they had dozens of such bombs and Kyoto and Tokyo on the target list.

        Liked by 3 people

        1. I’d never heard of this. That’s enough to search the Intertubes:

          First lieutenant Marcus Elmo McDilda (December 15, 1921 – August 16, 1998) was an American fighter pilot who was shot down over Japan during World War II. Under interrogation, he gave false information to the Japanese regarding the atomic bomb.

          Thanks!

          Liked by 3 people

          1. If he’s the guy I’m thinking of, he’d apparently overheard enough about the actual bombs to string together some technical terms for his interrogators. They handed him over to researchers who immediately realized he was clueless, and the researchers apparently had a laugh over how he’d fooled the interrogators.

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            1. “BamBoozle Bomb”

              Good thing he didn’t disclose the ultrasecret hush-a-boom. Or, worse, UpsiDasium.

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        2. It’s been a long time since I’ve read Richard Rhode’s book, but I thought he had listed Kyoto as a possible target. My history library is semi-inaccessible right now, but when it is so, I have a couple of books that may shed some sunlight on the subject. (For values of sunlight, artificial or natural…)

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          2. Kyoto had been a possible target but tradition has it that Sec State Stimson asked that it be removed from the targeting list due to its ancient structures. Kokura was the original target for the August 9 Fat Man/Mk 3 weapon but was saved by heavy cloud cover.

            Apparently Imperial Japan had a fairly advanced Atomic weapon group but they had realized that they were going to need to separate U235 from U238 (not having created Plutonium). They viewed that separation as possible, but so complex that it would take years to make more than a few weapons worth for even an industrial giant like the US. Honestly for the enriched uranium weapon they were right, we had only one set of cores for little boy/Mk 1 weapons and did not start using lots of Enriched uranium in weapon cores until much later. So McDilda’s information looked like nonsense to them. I wonder if their tone changed after Nagasaki and it was clear there was another principal in use to make that weapon. Not clear if they could tell that from the fallout, though it seems likely as the fallout would have different byproducts. I’m just not sure if vintage 1945 analytical chemistry could do that before those fission byproducts decayed.

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            1. Rhodes(? possibly another source. Protip: don’t shelve books in a ladder-only space when your knees are going kaput) said one Japanese flight entered the (Hiroshima?) mushroom cloud. No idea if they got samples, but the two men on the plane had the expected lifespan afterwards.

              I’d doubt that the local military would be well prepared to do much investigation. Deliberately collecting samples would be a stretch, in my guesstimation.

              Imagined dialog:
              Junior pilot: “What was that!?”
              Midlevel officer: “Let’s go up and check out the strange cloud.”
              J.O. “Yessir”
              Medical officer” “Oh chit! They’re dying.”

              Liked by 1 person

            2. The decay products include enough long-lived items to make the two types quite distinctive at multi-year time spans.

              Plus, only a small fraction of the stuff actually fissions, so there is original material residue all over the place, and chemically they are quite different. Also their emissions are distinct. To any researcher in-field, the two types are immediately distinctive, even if the second material is unknown.

              We “wasted” a great deal of effort in electromagnetic separation, before we hit upon the gas centrifuge process and perfected it. Most of our silver reserve became wire to wind the big magnets, since copper was so desperately needed for conventional ammunition. We did get some use out of that monstrous magnet machine helping to purify material in the gas process.

              As we developed the fusion based weapons, the industrial bottleneck of neutrons became “Pu or H3?” Every neutron that became Tritium for the upper stage wasn’t becoming PU for pit. And since Tritium decays rather rapidly, versus Plutonium that is essentially stable from our time frame, the budget for H3 was -huge- until we hit upon Lithium as a fuel. (and oh Castle Bravo did we hit it….)

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              1. I think even the fallout from the blast would have the distinctive decay products. My main concern was the level of analytical chemistry needed to determine their presence. The Japanese were not backward in the sciences but had very skilled chemists and physicists. But the detailed chemistry of Plutonium was NOT published in the second world war (surprise surprise), nor would the likely decay products have been published. You could see that what you had was NOT an HEU based weapons output. And the existence of Plutonium was known circa 1939, but no one (short the US much later) had had quantities sufficient for any chemical testing. As it was, it handed the US Manhattan Project several jokers, including the fact that when you make Pu-239 you also get Pu-240. Pu-240 has a MUCH larger capture cross section, meaning it is FAR easier to fission. This made the MK2/ Thin Man Plutonium variant of the MK1/Little Boy weapon impossible, you couldn’t merge the subcritical pieces of PU fast enough with any known explosive to send the mass supercritical. You’d just get a horrid mess of radioactive leftovers (no boom today, well no BIG boom today). The other fun one was that one of the phases in liquid PU gets MORE dense. This means you can create a critical mass density just by melting the material to form it if you don’t make sure the quantity is small or spread out enough. The chemists luckily caught this while studying milligram/microgram quantities of PU.

                As for the plane we did that sending P-80/F-80 jet fighters through many of the early Pacific tests. They DID skirt the edges and gather particles. I am curious what the radiation would be in the center of the cloud(though not curious enough to have that search in my google history :-) ). Was it 100 Rem (pardon me .1 Gray)/Hr, 1000? 10000? A 1 min exposure to the 100 rem/hr yields 16.7 rem, probably not enough for radiation sickness, but I’m betting deeply increased cancer rates. The 1000 rem/hr yields 167 Rem, likely mild to moderate radiation sickeness, and all sorts of nasty long term side effects. 10000 yields 1667 Rem about 2x what is usually considered the lethal dose. Oh, and I presume there was serious filtration of the air intake for the pilot. If not, you might be inhaling Alpha or Beta emitters and get much higher doses, AND even at low doses have a hugely increased likelihood of lung cancer. Not sure what the exposure standards were in the early 1950’s but likely 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than we consider safe.

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                1. #2 was obviously another “atomic” weapon.

                  They didnt find much Uranium residue, but what they did find was a bunch of hot isotope traces and some U238. But only traces. But #1 was filthy with it. “Thats funny”.

                  They would also find a crapton of other radioactives. Including the jackpot “thats funny” Plutonium. There would have been a similar amount of odd stuff as U at site 1. In the neighborhood / same order of magnitude.

                  All the “funny stuff” is radioactive.

                  All of it is an obvious neutron source.

                  And if they were doing any neutron bombardment tests of natural Uranium, they already had samples of Plutonium, even if not previously noticed.

                  They had some rather brilliant folks working on the field, so putting it all together post August 6-9th might have been the work of days.

                  We had no idea what was possible, and no samples from “success”. They had pair of hugely glaring examples of “it works” and all sorts of fingerprint isotopes to point back to the correct answer of how.

                  Only the first weapon requires “Manhattan Project” Everyone else is duplicating the engineering they already -know- works. It does narrow things down, tremendously. The isotope ratios then give away the paths followed by the reactions.

                  Tell and company were convinced Lithium7 was inert in a thermonuclear event. After Castle Bravo went 2.5x the predicted yield, the isotopes pointed to Li7 being rather reactive indeed, at the far end of probability. Trouble is, once it starts reacting, the extras raise the probability quite fast. IE it is a fuel. The isotopes also said “Hello Captain Obvious” once they had the direction pointed. Subsequent weapons did not require purification of Li6, saving much time and effort.

                  We have subsequently developed isotope analysis to such a degree as we can tell in a reactor of type X and where in the core the nuclear fuel of a weapon was made, by the traces of the fallout after the fact. if we have any emissions or samples from a reactor, we can rapidly identify any weapons made from it. With very high certainty. Its one of the reasons folks with clandestine reactors try so very hard to prevent the inspections. Simply walking around with sticky soled shoes can yield the signature needed. Ditto the “radiation exposure badges” that will be worn.

                  Had some acquaintances involved in nuclear energy. Fascinating lunchtime discussions. For some reason, our Air Force ordinance vet would walk away every time the topic came up. Heh.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. Right the modern technique is very detailed Mass spectroscopy from a machine the size of a large microwave and drawing about the same power. with some nice computer analysis it spits out all the elements (and masses) it can find. In 1945 a very good physicist/chemist MIGHT use a really crude mass spec like instrument. For metals lab chemistry with various reagents to identify metals would be more common, and then you need to use scintillation and early geiger counters to figure out decay rates. All of this while some of your subjects are happily decaying into other things on their way to being lead.

                    And yeah I understand the ordinance guy walking away. Having had a clearance related to far less momentous matters there are discussions I won’t enter into lest I say something stupid and honestly I didn’t know that may things that were classified.

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      2. The US had been specifically not bombing certain cities so that there would be something for the atomic bombs to demolish. They also wanted to avoid bombing Tokyo, as they didn’t want to accidentally eliminate the people who were needed in order to issue a surrender.

        Liked by 1 person

    3. And in this connection, I repost one of my very early vignettes, from May 2018:

      The lady with the long dark hair watched the radiant echo of a dying star fade from her beautiful eight-sided scrying mirror. With much regret, but no remorse. Every wise warrior knew some wounds must be cauterized, every skillful healer knew some ills might yield only to the knife or the hot iron. Shrinking from such necessity was mere cowardice.

      When the clear-sighted Frenchman had first prophesied it, she’d hoped and wished it need not come; when the need and opportunity arose, she’d whispered quietly and nudged gently to help bring his cure about. And now she’d seen his “great fire in the land of the rising sun” rise twice.

      She knew the Americans, her Americans, beginners at this deep and violent art of coaxing the collected long-cold funeral-pyre ashes of a brilliant Sun back to life, had no A-bombs left to drop.
      She could only wish them the wisdom to use what they’d learned, and trust in the integrity of her own Son of Heaven himself to carry this heavy burden the rest of the way home to its destination.
      Though between the Emperor her hammer and the foreigners her anvil, she might yet re-forge the nation back into a straight and true blade.

      Amaterasu, Lady of the Sun, leaned back against the wall of her cave, closed her eyes, and sighed. Some times like these, for all the light she’d seen come and gone by now, she felt like a beginner herself.

      (And here back in 2025, I note that the Imperial line of the “Sons of Heaven” indeed traces back into Japanese legendary history to Amaterasu herself. Pephaps the incoming Prime Minsiter, protege of Shinzo Abe and fancier of Margaret Thatcher, might extend the restoration implied here in a gaijin’s mere vignette..?)

      https://accordingtohoyt.com/2018/05/13/buy-your-mom-a-book-and-psa-by-sarah-vignettes-by-luke-mary-catelli-and-nother-mike/#comment-532095

      Liked by 4 people

    4. Slight modification: we could and would destroy them utterly—and they wouldn’t even have a chance to fight back! There would be no glorious deaths in battle as the Samurai went against the evil invaders. Just a great flash of light, then the end.

      I think that’s what really scared them. I don’t think they had any real hope of winning, but they wanted to die like warriors, taking out as many of the enemy as possible, so they’d be sung of and feared in the minds of their enemies. The smart ones realized the nuke ended that possibility.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. We amassed a staggeringly huge stockpile of defoliants and war gasses for the final defeat of Japan. The basic plan was blockade all shipping, defoliate the rice crop, and bomb to rubble any remaining distribution network. In six months, the invasion faces half as many troops. In a year, a 20th. The war gasses have obvious utility in the usual horrid way.

        They had absolutely no idea what was coming. Nukes were a mercy.

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        1. Yowza, and people thought the Nukes were harsh. But given Allied casualties were expected in the hundreds of thousands with fatalities in the high tens of thousands we probably would have gone there. That kind of attack would have left large parts of Japan VERY toxic for long periods. Period Chem warfare (mustard gas, maybe Sarin if we got the info from the Germans) were very persistent, and if anything vintage 1945 defoliants aren’t any more biodegradable.

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          1. From the Germans? We were making Sarin in WW1. it is easy to copy. “Gas B” (thus the symbol GB) is one step removed from the “Gas A” that became “Raid” and similar roach spray. Its Nineteen Teen technology. And not complex at all. Any idiot can whomp it up in a college lab. (This is what we call a Bad Idea.)

            We didnt come up with VX and similar stuff until the 1950s, but for ww2 we had Sarin and its near cousins, HC and related blood agents, mustard, nitrogen mustard, Phosgene, Lewisite, and a bunch of other nasty stuff I have forgotten.

            Plenty of humanicide sprays for a true hellscape.

            I learned -way- way too much about this crap. If you have the technology of “make petrochemicals” and “make household bug spray”, you can be in the WMD business by Next Friday. The actually hard part is making binary agent delivery devices. -Much- more challenging. But simple gas weapons? 1918 tech for very very bad stuff indeed.

            And as to predicted casualties for Olympic, Summer of 1945 the military took delivery of five-hundred thousand Purple Heart medals. (PH is for wounds, including fatal ones, from combat.) That was just to get us through the initial invasion phase. More would have been needed. Each year.

            Last I checked, we are still issuing from that batch.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. This https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin#History tracks the invention of Sarin to IG Farben in about 1938. It’s wikipedia so take it with a large grain of salt. It is an organophosphate so in the same family as bunch of insecticides. which is what IG Farben was looking for.

              Indeed we even had Mustard gas available in WWII for the invasion of Italy. One of the freighters carrying it was hit and it contaminated an Italian island used as a sanatorium for cancer patients. Amazingly some of the patients with blood cancers actually got better. One of the first chemotherapy drugs is derived from Mustard gas.

              And yes I believe they finally had to start issuing new manufactured Purple hearts recently although there is still some of the old stock. Olympic and Downfall were going to be BAD in no uncertain terms. and casualties/fatalities for Japan were expected to be 5-10x ours based on Iwo Jima and other islands the Japanese held that we took in the island hopping.

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              1. The A-bombs are the reason I’m here. My dad was a tech sergeant in a motor pool on Leyte in August 1945 (never saw combat) and they’d already told him that because of manpower needs, they were going to pull him out and hand him a Garand for the invasion of Japan.

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    5. We never did convince the Japanese people or the Japanese military to surrender.

      We convinced -Emperor Hirohito- to -order- them to surrender. -Big- difference. Yuge.

      And they almost thinked the unthinkable, in that a bunch of them tried rather hard to overthrow him to prevent that order being delivered.

      Liked by 2 people

    1. …that can take off from the heartland of America, fly halfway around the world to deliver their cargo of whoop-ass, and then return home so their flight crews can sleep in their own beds after their mission.

      Liked by 1 person

  7. …attacks that were supposed to scare the enemy instead turned the vast majority of humanity against them and destroyed them.

    This even goes back to a recently-discussed other October 7 anniversary — not this two-year anniversary of the Hamas-ite warfare-by-atrocity, but the 245th anniversary of the Battle of King’s Mountain of the Revolutionary War in 1780. (Especially by Nick Searcy, who’s had a screenplay ready to go to make a movie of this battle for years, but hasn’t yet found funding.)

    Patrick Ferguson (yes, the breechloading rifle guy) was leading a loyalist militia through the Carolinas, trying and mostly failing to recruit local Americans to that cause. The story goes he had basically threatened to burn out any local residents who didn’t join up, or especially who dared to oppose him. Instead a number of revolutionary militias joined together, attacked his camp, killed him as he tried to lead a rally, and largely destroyed his force (with the remnant retreating north).

    Of course, the poem wouldn’t yet be written until the War of 1812; but (assuming basic veracity of the accounts of his threats), the lines

    Thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand

    Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation

    could have been written expressly to cover such things. So when one reflects that Israel’s main international patron is America, and one ends up hijacking such an anniversary in a way that asks for more of the same (and for far worse by doing far worse)… how could that possibly ever sound like a way to win anything worth having?

    Oh, wait, neolithic “we’re the only humans in sight” tribal logic. Oops!

    (Some of us do still run on Neolithic logic; only it’s basically, “shoot the mad dog” end of story.)

    Liked by 5 people

    1. It’s worth noting that up until King’s Mountain, the Patriots had been getting a royal ass-kicking (pun intended) in the South. Lost Charleston, been chased across South Carolina, and then the Overmountain Men show up and a perfect ambush gets pulled off against Ferguson and his Loyalist militia. Then we started losing more until Guilford Court House and then Cowpens. People tend to forget just how badly the Patriots did in the South except for Kings Mountain until spring 1781.

      Liked by 5 people

    2. I’ve been doing a little research on the Cherry Valley massacre of November 11, 1878. The basic gist was this: the British employed Iroquois (mostly Seneca and Mohawk in that area) both as troops and independent raiders; in hope of ending the raids by the Iroquois, Continental troops raided some of the Iroquois villages, destroying property—mostly houses and food. When the British troops under Colonel John Butler attacked Cherry Valley, the Iroquois also destroyed property… which included women and children.

      There are strong accounts (including one that apparently went to court and won a conviction—a very early war crimes trial!—when the perpetrator was caught spying in a nearby area) that some of the British joined in or even instigated these terrors. Whichever direction it went, barbarism can be contagious.

      The story makes the brutality in The Patriot a lot less outlandish.

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      2. Continental troops raided some of the Iroquois villages, destroying property—mostly houses and food.

        Thus earning George Washington the name of “Town-burner” among the 5 Nations.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Ah yes, the Iroquois. Distant Kin. Successful largely because they exterminated any tribe that wouldn’t join up with them. It wasn’t until we ran into the Apache that we found a tribe that was more ultra-bloody-minded and much less restrained.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Which is why he made such an impression on them. He didn’t worry about whether they would love him, or call him names; he simply did what he needed to do to win and remove the threat.

            Like

      3. I once tried to convince a True Believer that all the atrocities were NOT on the side of the colonies. He insisted the British never did any of the things. I showed him evidence of the British burning colonists alive (notes of the trial after the fact), and he refused to hear it. If it did happen, obviously it was a one-off and no other atrocities…

        I’m afraid I rather scotched my friend’s attempts to have me date him.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. The trick is to use the other Facts(TM) he knows against him.

          “Did the English ever brutalize the natives in Africa or Asia?”

          “Of course! They were evil! Opium War, Zulu War, conquest of India, etc.”

          “So why do you think they didn’t do anything against native Americans?

          Blue Screen of Death.

          “After Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans, he became governor-general of India, after all.”

          Red Ring of Death.

          “Did he only become an evil native-hater on arriving in India?”

          Liked by 1 person

  8. But frenz, we have to understand what we did to ‘deserve’ this.

    Which was mostly to live our own lives, quietly and peacefully, seeking our own gain, and eating costs and restarting elsewhere when and where ever the left made things too inhospitable.

    The left celebration of the Hamass neolithic flex, was largely the same for them as the celebration of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Those who celebrated Kirk’s murder were largely Jew Haters, who identified as the education system, and supported Harris.

    Kirk was the only pushback they were aware of, so they invested in him totemic power as the leader of the problem for their theorist magic.

    The opposition is drunk on ideology and on theory, in a way that well predates the internet. a) Theorist magic, IE, the correctness of an idea is that it is stated by someone with the appropriate magical qualifications, not whether it can actually be verified by any rando using standard processes b) leader magic, IE, certain specific people have totemic power, and can accomplish greater things the more important the formal position they hold is c) consensus speech can dictate reality d) the bad people are witching us, and conspiring e) all tactics are justified, because the pay off in the future is infinite utopia. f) If you hurt or scare people, you can control them, or you can stop them from doing things.

    This is what academia has been promoting, especially internally, and the promotion was governmetn funded.

    Some specific academics have become savages (a universal category) and barbarians (relative to American culture), and have been slowly cooking for years or decades.

    They definitely thought the neolithic flexes would work on their behalf, partly because of the whole psychotic and evil framing of communist behavioral theories. Make an example of the dissenters, and the masses will meekly fall in line with their class interests. Because dissent or apostasy from communism is always a conspiracy by anti-communist leaders somewhere.

    But, basically, they are stressed, because they have had a run of weak horse leaders, and of shenanigans that were totally going to work for them until they failed.

    Revitalization movement, in times of stress double down on the magical acts that one was previously convinced had power and were effective.

    Well, for the past generation they have been doing a lot of very visible theater in public places. Plus being snide and cutting, plus being assholes, plus interpreting the racial politics stuff as a successful act of violent intimidation.

    We aren’t talking about people who were sane before Trump, but they were insane after, and even having Biden in office did not give them the fullest of confidence of being back in control. And, they had that flavor of Jew hating, and of racial war, before Trump.

    I think that basically we are already doing the needful things to defeat these savage barbarians.

    Liked by 7 people

              1. It’s hard to see the reflection of the muzzle blast in their eyes when all you can see is their wet, yellow and brown streaked legs as they’re running away as fast as they can.

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                1. Thus, the Bayonet is to be -shiny-.

                  Note the Rules for Rangers, of the 18th century, required the Hatchet to be scoured bright.

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    2. It is obviously DJT’s fault, not The Most Blessed Barry Sotoero and his relentless suppression of any potential challengers, that the Dem bench was so achingly empty that they had to run Autopen through the COVID magic basement ballot machine in 2020. If DJT had just let The Dowager Empress win like she was supposed to, HER autopen and a robust White House supply of wine boxes would have made certain everything was perfectly just fine.

      It really does seem like this timeline has the US getting a lot of the diving catch saves, doesn’t it? Did someone get the Ark of the Covenant back in US custody a few years ago or something? Maybe we got it back around 2014, then the bad guys stole it again from that warehouse in 2019, but Indy’s son with the blonde from the India movie found it and retrieved it in the early summer of 2024?

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      1. The irony is -Obama- critiquing Biden as a foul-up.

        A century of “Marching Through The Institutions” and Comrade Mierdas screwed it all up.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Yup the man that said “Do not estimate Joe’s ability to f**k up” was a foul up of epic proportions. Takes one to know one Obumbles.

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        2. And on that note, I must say I like the image of Saul Alinsky (d. 1972 per Wackypedia) screeching impotently from the Beyond at Barry the Light Bringer, “Noooo! Don’t upshift from first gear, you bumbling young fool, it’s a generational plan! Slow and steady wins the race, our long march is a marathon not a sprint. No, slow back down to a steady crawl, you fool!”

          Which only tends to reinforce Our Esteemed Blogmistress’ picture of B.H.O. as a Red Diaper Baby begotten of multiple generations of Drinking Their Own Ink.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. ” Those who celebrated Kirk’s murder were largely Jew Haters, who identified as the education system, and supported Harris.”

      Well, Jews supported Harris by a 71-26% margin (see https://www.jewishelectorateinstitute.org/p7846). If Jew-haters also supported her, seems to me she would have won.

      I don’t have numbers, but several Jews I know personally have said that because Kirk opposed gun control, he got what he asked for. Whether that constitutes “celebrating”, I’ll leave for others to decide.

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      1. Dude, they had to change the VP pick because the guy who was the best choice has a Jewish name. Instead they went with the guy who hit the “don’t let this guy be in a room with anybody unless there’s supervision” vibes.

        And “Jews”– which is both ancestry and practice– are about 2.5% of the US population. That is a rounding error, not a deciding factor.

        Do at least a slight reality check before you make stupid announcements to pick a fight.

        This is assuming, against all evidence, that some both accurately identify ‘Jewish’ and get accurate responses, which… oh, yes, I am totally going to believe that of some 2019 online marking group. Uh-huh. For sure.

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        1. Foxfier to this day I wonder if Gov. Shapiro didn’t get a good look at Kamala’s plans and predictions when he interviewed and said to himself, “You know I can be Governor of Pennsylvania until 2030, and perhaps I’ll just pass on this until 2028 or 2032. Beats being the scapegoat when this charlie foxtrot of a campaign collapses.”

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            1. No indeed they’ve been wearing antisemitism on their sleeve of late instead of hiding it politely leaving their deniable enforcers to proclaim it openly. I also think he knew if he was the VP candidate he would get the blame for the failure. He may not be a politician I want but he certainly seems fairly astute unlike Kamala.

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              1. I ran across one claiming that the LLM was “noticing” things about the Jews instead of parroting them.

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        2. There is a chance that Shapiro could have delivered Penn.

          OTOH, I did not see anything particularly creepy in what I saw of Walz. The caveats there are a) I very carefully saw very little of Harris or of Walz. I think I saw basically one video, and it was of Walz clips. b) Is that we would expect me to be extremely unable to perceive subtle nuances in body language.

          I definitely understand the selection of Walz over Shapiro as being an executive decision to prefer communism and to prefer Jew Hating.

          What I am unclear on is of whether the decision makers of the Democratic Party had any serious intention to win with Harris. I’m not sure that they planned to win with anyone this cycle, but I am pretty puzzled. Back in 2020, I figured that Biden was dead enough to be unclear what the purpose or goal was, besides ‘Not Trump’.

          Presumably Biden 2020 made sense to someone, but perhaps that someone was insane.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. The folks I know who had the “back away, keep eye contact, get out of the room” reaction were almost entirely parents or women. Usually both, especially if they had small kids.

            He came across like a creepy teacher you shouldn’t trust, even if you can’t ever find solid reasons for it.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Even if Shapiro could deliver Pennsylvania its not enough. It brings Trump down to 293 electoral votes still 23 greater than needed for victory.

            As for what the Democrats were thinking by putting up Harris, I think the answer is that in general they don’t think anymore, they feel. They had (as our hostess says) drunk their own ink with respect to the health of the Turnip in Chief as well as a strong Pauline Kael ostrich like head in the sand response to the electorate.

            Once they realized that if they ran Biden they were whitefish (schrod) they had to scramble. They had a deadline in early August before their convention for many states to get their ticket on the ballot ( forethought is NOT their Forte). If someone had told the Turnip he couldn’t run, or the message had gone out to the possible opponents to oppose Biden in the primaries, things might not have been so dire. Of course, once the Butler PA assassination attempt failed, you could have resurrected the shades of JFK and FDR and they would have gotten their backsides handed them by Trump (in addition to not being able to win the Democrat primaries for being to far to the right).

            As for who decided that Biden should run in 2020? We have to lean on the good old principal of Cui Bono, who benefits? I think someone convinced Biden this was a potential money maker of epic proportions. Having gotten the greedy idiot enlisted they then used him for 4 years as he rapidly declined. Who “they” are is not absolutely clear though Jill Biden, Hunter Biden, and some subset of the Obama flunkies are certainly in the mix and who is pulling the reins may have switched back and forth, given the bizarre, erratic behavior of the Biden Administration. The Biden behaviors make Teapot Dome look like a mere peccadillo. If any honest historians ever tackle 2008-2024, they are going to have a lot to say about the Obama/Biden axis and its brief interruption in the 2016-2020 period.

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            1. Who was in charge while the Biden-zombie occupied the White House? I doubt that was ever decided. More like a dozen ‘aides’ squabbling over whose turn it was to use the auto-pen.

              A vaudeville ventriloquist has several dummies. The Biden* D.C. clown show had one dummy and a bunch of ventriloquists. Maybe that was why Slow Joe seemed so schizophrenic.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. The sheer chaos of the Biden presidency suggests that there was an internal fight over control, which may have varied even from day to day. We are incredibly lucky that we did not have more damage than occurred (as if Ukraine and 10/7 weren’t enough, let alone large swarms of illegal aliens). Apparently, the Author really does protect drunks, children, and the USA.

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                1. “which may have varied even from day to day“

                  –

                  Which may have varied not only day to day, but varied within each hour.

                  FIFY

                  Not saying minute to minute, because while might be true, seems awfully fast for the Biden crew. Multiple times per hour? Not a stretch. Not at all.

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. And …

                    Agree 100% with the last sentence.

                    “the Author really does protect drunks, children, and the USA.“

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      2. a) polls suck, and anyone who treats political polling these days as a serious estimator is inherently of questionable credibility. 2016 demonstrated the suckage of polling, and honest people got out then, to wait or watch for the invention of an improved methodology. (Non-ergodicity had fucked phone polls as an estimator.) 2020 added credibility to the fraud hypothesis, and the hypothesis that political polling is basically one element of the information warfare around the fraud.

        b) There are how many Jews, period, in America? Of what fraction? That’s right, fewer than blacks.

        c) In general, the serious Jew haters may be fewer than the Jews, and the serious black haters may be fewer than the blacks.

        d) Okay, let’s revise counting theory, sets, and statistics.

        Suppose we have 99 marbles of identical weight and size, but the pigmentation is different. 33 of each marble are red, green, and blue. These are transparent marbles, but thirty three are paler, thirty three are medium, and thirty three are less pale, or more darker than the medium marbles. Distributations are even, and I am supposing 11 in each of the nine categories of subset. This is a small enough number to be counted, so we should be able to count 11 very pale blue, and 88 which are not very pale blue, etc.

        If we add another marble to that 99, we have a hundred, and we may be adding to one of those nine categories, or to a tenth.

        If we have too many marbles to count in an urn, and the marbles in the urn are well mixed, we can estimate the categories and distributions by withdrawing a sample, and estimating the population from the sample. This approach has problems if we do not have an honest sample, or if we clearly do not have a large enough sample to verify a rare event, or an unusual distribution.

        Ergodicity is an statistical assumption, that makes some predictions about subsets and distributes. It predicts even distributions across subsets, mainly. It can be valid for objects, which do not have a memory, and which cannot choose their response to a survey, or to other parameters of a study.

        Ergodicity is extremely questionable for humans and especially for human behaviors. Like, say, voting.

        e) What I claim describes four subsets. These subsets can be predicted to be rare. They are Harris supporters, Jew haters, Kirk murder celebrators, and people who identify with the education system. Harris supporters can be predicted to be rare on the basis of the vote, on the basis that Arizona, et al votes were clearly fraud, and on the basis of eighty one million my ass. Jew haters can be predicted to be rare. Education identifiers can be predicted to be rare, on the basis of look up the employment numbers on BLS. Kirk murder celebrators are rare, because otherwise it would be harder and slower for boycotts to work. The biggest category is probably the Harris supporters, and the smallest is almost certainly the Kirk murder celebrators.

        Education identifiers might well be higher than the number of Harris supporters. There may well be a significant number of people deeply invested in education, who liked and supported Charlie Kirk, and who voted for Trump.

        There are probably only a very small number of Kirk murder celebrators who were not Harris supporters, and that subset is almost certainty people who have psychiatric issues they should be institutionalized for.

        The most common reasons for supporting the Murder of Charlie Kirk would be dsihonest and evil motivations involving support of the apparent status quo of education. People who mindlessly want education and academic funding would also have been somewhat Harris aligned. This runs right through the intellectual bankruptcy of the academic mainstream of behavior models. The bankrupt model of critical theory naturally inspires people to hate Jews, and to want Charlie Kirk murdered. The choices to belong in each of these four subsets of the general public would be expected to be very correlated.

        f) Your anecdotes and your poll are extremely silly claims, if we look at all combinations of subsets. Again, Jews are rare, and Harris supporters may actually be pretty rare. Anecdotes have the problem of non-ergodicity of human behavior, and thus sampling for extremely unusual samples. One quarter to three quarters that samples well a small group that does not represent the total population? Meaningless as a predictor of the total population. 90% of population is not Jewish. Some Jew-haters are Jews, but looking at Jews is going to be a bad predictor for Jew haters if the distributions are in any way funky.

        g) Your choice of statistical claims basically does not predict that you are competent or honest enough that I must treat your anecdotes as any sort of estimator.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Points taken. I didn’t put it very well, but what I’m mainly skeptical about is that most Jew haters are Democrats. The ones I’ve come across online (can’t say I’ve ever met any in person) hate the Democratic party, and believe it’s controlled by Jews. Not 100%, but darn near.

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            1. The bigger thing, in my opinion, is overculture reaction. The Leftist overculture embraces Jew haters, while the Rightwing (US Verson) overculture rejects them utterly.

              Liked by 1 person

            1. Yeah, basically…

              In touch with mainstream US culture, and small o orthodox Christians means that one knows that American behavior is explained by Americans, and there is no reason for the special pleading of a Jewish conspiracy explanation.

              That leaves foreigners, and people who live in isolated insular subcultures. Isolated insular subcultures like Nation of Islamd. Isolated insular subcultures like academic wackadoodles.

              The serious Socialists who think they narrowly lost paradise are angry at everyone.

              Liked by 1 person

  9. Once upon a time about twenty or so years ago I was a student. I’d pissed off the English department, left the history department in disgust, told the psych professors to sod off in rather more colorful terms, finished all I was competent in with mathematics and chemistry, and washed up in anthropology for my last sojourn into the bowels of academia.

    So no shit there I was, standing before my advisor on my way to finishing my last hurrah. He was not pleased with my conclusions, and told me so, in no short words. I was less than pleased with his inability to search out his own southern fundament with all ten phalanges and a topographic map, in about the same. Since we were both well and truly fed up with each other, but needed to get this farce over with in order to get on with our day, he decided to end his wee little popinjay pipsqueak tirade with “and Palestinians have the most PhDs per capita in the world.”

    Let that sink in for a bit.

    Now, those with a passing knowledge of history and/or WWII buffs will recognize a bit here: the UN, created, staffed, and promoted by Communists throughout the world decided to create a bureaucracy (which was also staffed, funded, and employed to create more Communists). It has been funded, mainly by us, but also by pretty much every little tinpot dictator and euro weanie they could find. It looked ever so diverse and equitable, throwing money at the poor little oppressed brown people. And thus, there was a bureaucracy created for it.

    Every despot loves him a bureaucracy without question. It makes controlling people ever so much easier. Thus, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, or the UNRWA for short was born.

    Said edifice of paperwork, money, and corruption (but I repeat myself) did and does indeed fulfill the function of a teaching institution. But note well they follow, and I quote, “the curriculum of their host countries.” If you want to learn the basic theme of said teachings, there’s a running expo that pops up in the media on the regular. Managing media response would be a more on-the-nose title for HRCRT, I would say.

    Is there a PhD for terror? Asking for a friend. Say instead there is an indoctrination system that leads to it. From cradle to early grave, more or less. Yet a diploma, cap, and gown doth not make a primitive into a professor. You can slather on sophistication, but underneath is an ugly tribal mindset. One steeped in unthinking hate and sadism.

    The dehumanization of enemy peoples is a fundamental part of the culture. If your enemies are not people, all things are permissible. You may lie. You may cheat them, steal from them, murder them, enslave them, rape them, torture them, any and all of the above. All this, and you will be lauded for it. Your acts of terror are seen as depictions or courage, heroism, and the like.

    To such peoples, they are perpetually the underdogs. The beaten down, the weak that must use every scrap and tool at their disposal to strike out. Yet at the same time, they are the prophesized hero to their people. The martyr, should they die in the act.

    The thing to understand here is that these elements are resilient and dominant in the culture. They are not going away soon, or easily. They will remain violent little savages, no matter the credentials. This is why I have said, for years now, “push them into the sea.”

    The humanitarian seeming thing would be to make them other countries’ problem. Egypt, Syria, and so on, but nobody wants them. They are extremist problem children. They will cause trouble and no end of it wherever they are placed.

    I have said my piece on what would be effective before. Brutal, yes. Unconscionable, probably. Effective, without a single doubt. The savage, tribalist mindset is pernicious and tough. It will not be swayed by honeyed words or material enticements, not the core, fundamentalist types that rule with iron fists and terror towards their own peoples.

    In the end, I left that old professor to stew in his own ignorance. There was no audience to convince. He’d picked his poison. While I could have laid out my arguments with patience and meticulous citation, his beliefs were a matter of faith at the time. One does not argue a man about his religion like that. Even if said religion is strictly secular in nature.

    There are effective methods of dealing with filthy tribals. These methods are frowned upon, shunned, and avoided by the civilized folk of the world, in the main. Yet the facts remain that as long as we humans remain as we are, there will always be filthy f^cking tribals assailing the bastions of civilization wherever they exist, throughout the world. Civilization’s answer to tribals must be a sharp negation of their demands, entreaties, and threats. Protect our own. Sometimes that means showing the world what civilized man can do, when pushed too far.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. Over on X, the user who goes by Cynical Publius recently posted this (link will be posted after the quote):

      “I’m starting to realize that GWOT veterans have a non-obvious calling to speak to the American people.

      It’s up to us to explain the sheer evil of Sharia law and Islamic government to the American people.

      It’s come to my attention that many, many Americans simply do not believe in the existence of the horrific practices of Islamic society with respect to women, non-Muslim faithful, LGBTQ+, and the Third World workers they treat as literal slaves.

      Those stories are so horrible that many Americans cannot comprehend them–they assume they must be lies motivated by racism, hatred of a different faith, or just bad information.

      But it’s all true. We GWOT veterans KNOW it is all true because we have seen these horrors with our own eyes, over and over and over.

      Perhaps that is why God called us to war–not to conquer, but to gain first-hand knowledge of this pervasive evil that can be shared with the rest of America.

      I believe we have a duty to share our experiences as to what we all saw so it can never happen on US soil.”

      The neolithic barbarian is not limited to Hamass (as SAH so eloquently calls them), but is pervasive anywhere the culture is ruled by Sharia.

      https://x.com/CynicalPublius/status/1975948696039882827

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yes. See for example Afghanistan today, as in the past week or two.

        All education for females banned. Likewise all Internet access. All books by women banned, and likely to be burned.

        The entire country has been Internet-isolated for at least several hours at a time, once or maybe a few times.

        This is all due to the absolute theocracy, of top-down, border to border ‘Sharia’ law, and undiluted Islam admits no other acceptable possibility.

        Welcome to the new Dark Ages, brought to you by loyal followers of the Prophet.

        Like

      2. What rock has he been hiding under?

        We’ve been pointing it out. We’re going to keep doing it. Some people listen. Some people refuse.

        THE ENTIRE COPING MECHANISM IS THAT THEY ATTACK SAFE PEOPLE AND GENUFLECT TO THE DANGEROUS.

        We cannot make them listen.

        At most, we can try to identify those who encourage them to– for their own survival day to day now– ignore the deadly threats of ‘possible’ vs the destroy-your-life threats of right now.

        Notice the folks who do shunning, and attack them. Not the folks they target, that just makes you part of the enforcement mechanism.

        Kirk did this, a lot. Which is why he was a threat.

        Copy him.

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  10. Breaking news, Hamas has signed on to the Trump peace deal (at least the first parts of it)

    Now, we’ll see if they actually release the hostages, etc (I am hopeful, but won’t hold my breath, never mind the fact that some of the hostages are not in the direct control of Hamas)

    But this is very good news. This is a step beyond just negotiating

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Wait and see, indeed friend. Ham-ass has broken every word they’ve ever given. Playing the long game for losers, or dimwits with delusions of grandeur. Expect that they will have more attempts in the future. Should they survive.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Have not read an outline of the details, if those are even available at our level. But from what I got is should Hamas accept the deal and does not follow every dotted i to the t, then Israel has the US’s blessing “to finish the job”.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Question being, can Ham-ass keep their thumb on all the hotheads and would be Bubbas of their own? For the three years or so 47 is in the big chair? Me, I have my doubts.

          Eh. Should it happen the they get plowed but good, there’s still the expats all around the world. Expect there to be some shenanigans a-plotting by such ne’er do wells. We know the general steps to that dance, I suppose. Not my favorite by any stretch, but needs must.

          Playing whackamole with the threats to home and hearth, well, that’s just what it says on the tin when you serve. Helps when higher ain’t completely incompetent, though, I’ll say that much.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. I’d feel a bit more confident about the deal if it was the US, using B-52s and FAEs, that had the task of finishing the job. But we’ll see what happens.

          There’s definitely a sense lately that Trump has “had it up to here” with some of the people that he’s tried in good faith to bring to the negotiating table. First Putin, and now Hamas. I’m curious to see what he ultimately ends up doing.

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          1. On the Tsar Vlad the Shirtless front, while word has been circulating about selling Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine, with yet more blustering talk of “escalation” as response from Vlad, given Autopen’s neglect of military production we don’t really have a lot of Tomahawk missiles sitting around. Land-based Tomahawk launchers (the Typhon launcher) are a thing, but the issue is the number of missiles available to put in said launchers.

            Personally I think it might be faster to set up western production lines to build the Ukraine Flamingo design in quantity, since it’s as low tech as could possibly work.

            In either case it does seem like DJT has reached his tolerance limits.

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            1. I’ve heard (see Perun on YouTube) that the Flamingo is made of spare parts and baling wire. It works, so that’s fine, but they are the spare parts and baling wire available in Ukraine. It would probably be nearly impossible to build them here.

              There’s also the issue of sovereignty. If Ukraine builds them, they can do as the please with them (and 3Kkm range has lots of options). If the US builds them, they come with restrictions.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Well, it’s basically an airplane. Word is the engine they are using is a timed-out small jet engine, either the Ivchenko AI-25TL turbofan used in the ex-Soviet Albatross trainer (note the Ukrainians actually manufactured these) or any of a number of other similar-sized small business jets, which are available basically at scrap prices since past a certain point they cannot be economically refurbished and certified again. Ivchenko-Progress is a Ukrainian company, so they certainly have the expertise, though the main factory in Zaporizhia is a bit close to the front, so likely they’ve used the past few years to set up new dispersed and covert factories in the west of Ukraine.

                They refurbished and simplified these engines, reportedly including 3d printed parts, to “good enough to be reliable enough for one long flight”.

                The missile body is a simple composite tube, the wings are straight and manually bolted on before launch so no swing-out deployment mechanism is needed as with the tube-launched tomahawk, and the engine sits in it’s own nacelle up top, unlike the tomahawk which has to be inside to fit in the launcher tube..

                The electronics for a flight at low altitude via a series of waypoints to a known fixed point are not really that difficult, with any navigational backup to GPS/GLONASS to deal with jamming or spoofing the most tricky part, and they already had to solve this avionics problem for their converted-light-prop-plane long range attack drones. There are no reports of a seeker or imaging sensor for final attack targeting.

                Tomahawk uses much more sophisticated guidance, can be stored for a long time in the launch tube box while ready for instant use in a maritime environment, and is the result of the put-more-gold-plating-on-it US Defense Industry, and the production time and cost reflects that. It was also constrained by the size of that launch box tube, while the Flamingo just had to fit on a truck.

                If building assembled flamingo missiles would be too much, contract with factories in Europe for composite tubes, wing-shaped assemblies, electronics, and such. I bet even with spinning those up, that would still deliver more launchable rounds faster than selling them new-build tomahawks.

                Like

                1. Essentially, the “Flamingo” is a Bubba-V1 with modern electronics and a real turbofan versus pulse-jet.

                  And they can make them with almost any end-of-economic-life engine. of which there are probably a hundred thousand just sitting around in various places waiting scrapout.

                  For the “way-too-big” turbines, like from 747 or other super-heavy types, can you imagine the scaled up version? I dub thee “HippoBOOMAmus”

                  Liked by 1 person

                  1. The hippoboomamus would need a runway takeoff, but yeah. I imagine such could mothership a number of flamingoes, or a fair pile of small rocket-fast kinetic diplomacy devices, or a couple hundred quadcopter attack drones, quite a ways indeed.

                    Gee, just what the USN would need to disrupt the sleep of PLA air defense planners…

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                    1. We -need- to be studying this stuff. Not every weapon needs to be “super”. Quantity has a quality all its own. And no-one, anywhere, every, has out done the USA for “quantity” when we decide to start making something simple.

                      “A rifle behind every blade of grass” is not far off the truth of America, even if it is apocryphal. And a surprising number of folks can get reliable hits at 100 yards with ordinary handguns.

                      Liked by 1 person

              2. They pulled a crapton of decommissioned obsolete worn-out jet turbines out of -landfills- to build more “Flamingoes”.

                We are seeing the fusion of US Special Forces level Improvisation with Slavic levels of “Embrace the Suck – Dont Quit”.

                There is a crapton of old turbines in the US aviation “boneyard”. Just saying.

                We are also seeing the situational advantages of “retarded but stubborn” munitions versus “smart” or “brilliant”.

                We had best study carefully what is going on, and how to do this sort of “austere” war, as the next time we Thunder Run someone our methods might be a bit less successful.

                Like

  11. Breaking news, Hamas has signed on to the Trump peace deal (at least the first parts of it)

    Now, we’ll see if they actually release the hostages, etc (I am hopeful, but won’t hold my breath, never mind the fact that some of the hostages are not in the direct control of Hamas)

    But this is very good news. This is a step beyond just negotiating

    Liked by 1 person

    1. And if you did that without taking into account prevailing winds and geology, Hamas would hail you as a hero for killing more Jews, Druze, Christians, other non-Palestinians (Jordanians, etc.) than THEY did.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. You burn out batteries in your sarcasm detector almost as fast as I run through them. Here, have a spare.

        Like

    2. Amusing – I clicked on your profile and the usual empty WP page came up with the phrase “A bright idea, coming soon”. Yep, you are definitely glowing

      Liked by 1 person

  13. For perspective, Gaza (141 sq mi) is about four times the area of Manhattan Island (33.6 sq mi).

    If the IDF had wanted to kill every living thing on or under that strip of land, it would have taken them less than 12 hours from wheels up.

    That there are still *any* living residents of Gaza two years later is a testament to Israel’s restraint and determination to remain civilized no mater the provocation.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I still think that France should put their money where their mouth is and offer up their Southern and Antarctic Islands for a Palestinian Homeland. It’s 4 to 10 times bigger than Gaza, and far enough away from everyone to make avoid any nasty neighbor problems. And even closer to the equator than the Falkland Islands.

      Like

  14. The local franchise of the Church of the Holy Leftist (nominally ‘Baptist’ these past few decades) has for several weeks now prominently featured a roadside sign saying (among other things) LET GAZA LIVE!

    And every single time I’ve passed it, my reaction has been some variation of

    Let Gaza Live! Eradicate Hamas Tomorrow!

    Because in the long run, that’s the only scenario that can work.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. It’s weird seeing Brianna Wu siding with Trump…

    (in this case, a post copied on Instapundit in which Wu castigates Dems who have been screaming for the Gaza ceasefire, but don’t thank Trump for getting one signed).

    Liked by 2 people

    1. ”The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

      -some SDS radical commie thug in the hippie times of yore.

      Like

      1. Also the displaced anger from Abused Child PTSD works the same. Hitler was an abused child. Stalin. They took their abuse out on all of us. Here is something I wrote about Gaza.

        “Is Arab hatred for Israel a product of the child abuse normative in the Arab world?” American Thinker September 29, 2024

        Like

  16. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » PEOPLE TRYING THIS ARE LIKELY TO WIND UP DEAD:  The Neolithic Flex.

  17. The kind of barbarism exhibited is not ordinary. It is what abused children do. “Is Arab hatred for Israel a product of the child abuse normative in the Arab world?” American Thinker September 29, 2024

    Those kinds of Barbarians rule the world.
    “The Role of PTSD in History” by M. Simon December 18, 2023 blogspot

    Like

  18. I rather suspect that the goal of the “protesters,” or perhaps of those who call them out, is to create a situation where police or soldiers have to either (a) retreat or (b) shoot some of them and provoke public outrage at the resulting deaths, on the model of the Kent State shootings of long ago. It’s rather parallel to the phenomenon where the school bully can hit you, but if you hit back you get in trouble for fighting in school.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The problem with (b) is that so many people are getting tired of the “antics” of the Far Left, the primary response will be “FAFO, told ya so…“.

      Nobody cries about someone taking out the trash.

      Like

    2. what people forget about Kent State was it did spark more rioting on campuses….but now the NG was freed to defend themselves. The riots stopped and went away. The problem is they didnt hang or deport the instigators or rioters who then long marched.

      So there is now a target rich environment that we have to grit our teeth and wait it out.

      Like

      1. Heck, they didn’t even try and put a blot on the record of the rioters. Yep. Because it was much too late, and the communists had infiltrated all the institutions.

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    3. Standard Marxist doctrine for the Revolution. Force the regime to crack down, driving the resultant victims into Marxism and Revolution.

      Thus the BlackBloc types salted in otherwise peaceful crowds. They are to draw fire on the bystanders and radicalize them. (And for heavens sake don’t ever mention Ghandi -knowingly- sending his folks up against British machineguns. No, that isnt cricket.)

      The problem is, Americans think rather differently. If the Commies push some yokels into firing, the result is not widespread horror. Its going to be a bunch of widespread “about dang time.” The restrained ones will be saying “Wouldn’t simply beating them stupid with batons, or using firehoses (and maybe -soap-), have been enough?” It goes ugly -fast-.

      The word is “Jacksonian”.

      The Marxist calculus is wrong for anything US. But you cant teach a marxist Sneech. Well, you -can- but its kinda loud.

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      1. The Left are still trying to make a Bad Man out of Rittenhouse, and still flummoxed he is still a hero to many. “Don’t you understand? He -shot- three innocent protestors!”

        I can think of a half dozen personal acquaintances that would -easily- have racked up double digits waling the same walk. Which shows that our side is the not-very-violent ones. Else we would not be discussing the Left except as history.

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      2. It’s also the reason history rhymes.

        Too many do not learn the lessons of the last “trouble”

        “We’ll get it right next time because we are smarter and more evolved”! seems to be a conceit of our species.

        Liked by 1 person

      1. Well, they awarded it to a Venezuelan lady…who promptly tweeted her thanks and admiration of President Trump. <Grin>.

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        1. The process for awarding the Peace Price started before Trump was President.

          And of course, there have been plenty of “Middle-East Peace Plans” that have failed before.

          While it’s looking good so far, Hamas could still “fuck-it-up”.

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  22. I’m reminded of “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter” (Michael Moore, iirc). I don’t 100% agree, but it’s also not 100% wrong (which is common for Leftist dogma, but not my point).

    Guerilla/asymmetric warfare almost always has terrorist characteristics, even if one sticks to “legitimate” targets. See for example the Islamist (should I use the old-school “Mohammedan”?) dude who shot up the US Army base. “Sneak onto a base, blow shit up” is a legitimate tactic, imho. As opposed to attacking a music concert to kidnap and rape women, which is not.

    The entire point of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was to invoke that Neolithic terror. That doesn’t make it wrong.

    I find the entire concept of “war crime” (and rules of engagement) supremely odd. It’s OK to kill people via method X, but not under circumstance Y. Huh? The point of war is to WIN. If you need to do nasty stuff to get there, do nasty stuff. I include allying with warlords who have “man/boy Fridays” as “nasty stuff”.

    One should be sure your troops are on-board with it. There’s a reason the Air Force didn’t put me in a missile silo: I wouldn’t have turned the key. Given humans, it’s almost impossible to draw a line that no one will cross.

    That’s a bit scattered. I think my point is: You’re not wrong, but circumstance can – and should – override.

    Like

    1. The quote, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” was first written by Gerald Seymour in his book, “Harry’s Game,” in 1975.

      -various but specifically https://www.answers.com/authors/Who_said_one_man%27s_terrorist_is_another_man%27s_revolutionary

      …and in response there was Ronald Reagan, in a 1986 radio address (albeit rather overly optimistic):

      For too long, the world was paralyzed by the argument that terrorism could not be stopped until the grievances of terrorists were addressed. The complicated and heartrending issues that perplex mankind are no excuse for violent, inhumane attacks, nor do they excuse not taking aggressive action against those who deliberately slaughter innocent people.

      In our world there are innumerable groups and organizations with grievances, some justified, some not. Only a tiny fraction has been ruthless enough to try to achieve their ends through vicious and cowardly acts of violence upon unarmed victims. Perversely, it is often the terrorists themselves who prevent peacefully negotiated solutions. So, perhaps the first step in solving some of these fundamental challenges in getting to the root cause of conflict is to declare that terrorism is not an acceptable alternative and will not be tolerated.

      Effective antiterrorist action has also been thwarted by the claim that — as the quip goes — “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” That’s a catchy phrase, but also misleading. Freedom fighters do not need to terrorize a population into submission. Freedom fighters target the military forces and the organized instruments of repression keeping dictatorial regimes in power. Freedom fighters struggle to liberate their citizens from oppression and to establish a form of government that reflects the will of the people. Now, this is not to say that those who are fighting for freedom are perfect or that we should ignore problems arising from passion and conflict. Nevertheless, one has to be blind, ignorant, or simply unwilling to see the truth if he or she is unable to distinguish between those I just described and terrorists. Terrorists intentionally kill or maim unarmed civilians, often women and children, often third parties who are not in any way part of a dictatorial regime. Terrorists are always the enemies of democracy. Luckily, the world is shaking free from its lethargy and moving forward to stop the bloodshed.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. (should I use the old-school “Mohammedan”?)

      If you aren’t going to use their preferred designation of Muslim, Islamist is fine. Mohammadian isn’t fair as they don’t worship Mohammed, and unlike, say, Lutherans, they haven’t decided to claim the inappropriate title as their own.

      Hostis humani generis (Enemies of all mankind) is definitely appropriate but is a bit long. HHGs, maybe?

      Liked by 1 person

  23. What just hit me, just now, this has also been their media and part of how they keep people in line.

    Was just remembering the head explosion add the left did about global warming rejection and/or petroleum usage several years back.

    It was an add where basically anyone who didn’t believe in climate change or who even used anything made from oil had their heads messily explode, including one character at the end who was one of them and recording their adverts used something, I think makeup? and had her head explodes in to a messy red paste coating the sound booth window.

    It’s the same thing: threaten the out-tribe with the most sudden and graphic death imaginable, along with anyone who does not express sufficient hatred of the out group.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes, all this fits the profile quite closely.

      “They” (neo-tribalists? paleo-tribalists, perhaps?) not only see only their tribe as the only “real” humans, their own membership in their tribe (and their “real human” status) is always provisional and precarious. Their default is to not being human, in other words, despite concrete/genetic facts to the objective contrary; and also note their axiomatic assumption, one level down, that there can never be a shortage of them, that there will always be a plenty to spend.

      By contrast “we” (meta-tribalists? pan-humanists?) do recognize our own little tribes, but beyond that our “big” tribe, more-or-less everybody human. And our default is to extend that recognition, absent some specific reason to make an exception (see, Oct.7 atrocity massacres). We tend to value all human life — almost as if our far ancestors had faced a rather hard, often hostile and sometimes frankly fatal world — because more (friendly) humans could be our help or salvation.

      So when we are driven, at last, to see “them” as non-human, outside our meta-tribe, we tend to be rather thorough in our solutions. “To be dealt with as wolves are.” We don’t see people as dancing back and forth across that line from day to day, we move people across it at most once, usually.

      I.e., “the switch” as we’d call it.

      Suddenly I’m wondering if this distinction goes back a lot farther than the 1700s or the standards of Enlightenment / Renaissance “civilization” — it might even be as ancient as different strategies for “what to do when ‘we’ meet another tribe” (or smaller band within a tribe). As over-used cliche as game theory is by now, especially in its early 1960s form, there are different strategies possible and although “kill them all on sight, or hurt them bad to make them run” is certainly a realistic one it’s pretty clearly not unique. Mutual friendly competition — “don’t start none, won’t be none” or “will start nothing, will finish all” — also looks like it might have much to say for itself.

      Also note — if you kill/repel everyone you meet, your own genetic diversity is pretty much limited to “people we kidnapped as children and raised in our tribe” plus “women we gave to our men.” It’s not exactly a recipe for long-term success, in that one specific area.

      And bonus extra credit points to anyone who can correlate this difference in basic human strategy with the presence/absence of arguably ‘Neanderthal’ gene markers…

      Like

    3. It’s the same thing: threaten the out-tribe with the most sudden and graphic death imaginable, along with anyone who does not express sufficient hatred of the out group.

      In other words, life at the middle school mean girls table.

      Liked by 1 person

  24. What blows my mind is that the “proud-Antifa-but-don’t-you-dare-call-us-Antifa”, “punch-a-Nazi” crowd is siding with Hamas, who were quite literally spawned by the Third Reich, against the group Hitler tried hardest to exterminate. And if point this out to them, they’ll call you a fascist.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The only reason the Nazis didn’t call the Jews Nazis was that the term was not a pejorative at the time. Indeed, their propaganda pushes often paralleled their own acts with attacks on the other side for doing the same thing.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. It gets better…

      I haven’t heard of it being used in Gaza, but apparently Hezbollah in Lebanon uses the Nazi swastika as one of their symbols. Michael Totten once wrote about being in Lebanon with Christopher Hitchens and one other guy (name escapes me), and having to race an angry mob back to their hotel after Hitchens had a freak out over a swastika on a flyer someone had attached to a wall, and angrily tore it down.

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      1. Land in unplayable rough = +1

        land in hazmat = +2

        explosion = +3, unless a chunk of ball larger than a US dime lands on fairway. Then no-call and spot ball touching the largest chunk on fairway.

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