What Stays in Vegas

I could hear blast door bolts slotting home behind me, but there wasn’t any use trying to pretend I’d come through before it closed. The woman standing next to the captain’s chair in the center of the hide—short hair, sand camo, half-drawn sidearm—was looking straight at me, her you gotta be fucking kidding me reaction turning lethal before either of us could blink. Except for the obvious crew at stations to my left—I counted six of them—the hide seemed to be jammed all the way to the back wall with raggedies of every age and condition, probably survivors brought down from the ruins of the Strip.

“How the hell?”

“Grepped by your portal north of the Wynn—what’s left of it anyway. You were after someone else?”

“Wasn’t us.”

“Unfunny either way. Any idea who hates us both?”

“At this point? Damned near everyone. Where’s the rest of you?”

“Name, rank, and serial number, all you get.”

The sidearm was all the way out now, the business end glowing. “Think again.”

The air around me rippled briefly like a stone tossed into a pond, and suddenly my whole crew was formed up between us, the better part of a heavy weapons squad already in full on search and destroy mode. “Hold!” I shouted, and well-trained fingers came off half a dozen triggers. “Make a hole.” Pushing a couple of nasty-looking muzzles aside, I stepped to the front. “This is the rest of us. I don’t know why we’re here. Do you?”

She shook her head slowly, the sidearm already back in its holster. “So now what?”

“I’m thinking what our betters call ‘a frank exchange of views.’”

“Works for me. Let me get these people someplace first.”

I nodded. She unshipped a handheld and tapped at it briefly. Somewhere beyond the huddled masses at the far end of the hide an airlock began to cycle. “Okay everybody, 20 at a time into the lock. Gunnery Sergeant Walker there will monitor. There’s secure shelter at the farside end of the tunnel—beds, food, water, and sanitary facilities including showers. Changes of clothing will be handed out as and when. Anyone needing medical attention or prescription meds see the corpsman on duty. We’ll get you back topside as soon as we can.”

Took a while, but eventually there were just us grunts in the captain’s hide—half hers, half mine. We signaled them to stand down while we were off sorting out our uneasy truce.

Her ready room, built for speed, not for comfort. A table with four chairs, a sitrep holo over the center that blanked as we entered. She gestured. We sat. We talked.

“You are?”

“California. 1st Armored Cav. You?”

“Texas. 415th Force Recon out of Corpus Christi. Also a handful of stray Hoosiers and Jayhawkers from that KC sigint battalion got mauled last month up around Pahrump. Some awful shit went down there. Here too. I used to fly over from home with the sigo for a show, now I hate the fucking place.”

“Not really a place anymore, though, is it? Not much left but latrines, body bags, and rubble. I figure we’re just about done here. Some papers’ll get signed, some razor wire’ll get unrolled, a few mines and flagpoles planted. Then the fuckers in charge’ll declare it a demilitarized zone, and anybody left alive’ll finally get to go back home and start over.”

“Yeah, probably got in mind going all ‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ for the coastal stringers. Not this time, though, not with all the broken parts getting shipped back home to the folks.”

“So…wasn’t you grepped us?”

“Wasn’t. I been asking myself who pulled it and why, but I keep coming up with nada. If it wasn’t my people, and it wasn’t yours, who the hell else has the mooch to grep half a fucking infantry squad halfway across a city this size with most of what’s left of it still under fire? You want a beer?”

“You got beer?”

“Liberated a dozen cases of longnecks a week ago from a half-wrecked convenience store behind our perimeter. Been doling them out for good behavior, but I’ve still got a dozen or so left. So yeah, I got beer.”

“Bring it, then, and let’s see can we figure this shit out.” 

We never did figure it out. I said maybe some do-gooder NGO put us together on purpose, see if a couple of ground pounders’d make love not war. She said no fucking way, just blind luck we didn’t waste each other on sight. We were still scratching our heads at 1650, when both our handhelds started to flash. Armistice signed, all hostilities to cease at 1700. And that was that.

Around sundown, I raised one of the last two longnecks, knocked it against hers. “I hope you’re right about this time being different. Sad we have to live in hope—probably what guarantees we stay at the bottom of the foodchain where we are. Hope or no hope, I’m thinking I oughta get my people up top before reporting in. Just in case.”

She upended her bottle, drained it, slammed it down on the table next to mine. “Until the next one, then, Califa. ¡Que te vaya bien!”

All Your Base Are Now Belong To Us

Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen.
Der Musk maschiert mit mutig festem Schritt
Kam’raden, die Wokist’n vernichtet haben
marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.

(For those of my readers who don’t know German, this is a contemporary parody of the 90 year-old Nazi party anthem das Horst-Wessel-Lied.) In English, it goes more or less like this:

The flag held high, ranks firmly closed together!
Musk marches on with bravely stiffened stride
Comrades who’ve done away with Wokeists
march with us in our ranks in spirit now
.

GERMAN CITIZENS PLEASE NOTE: Reproducing these lyrics is, with few exceptions, currently illegal in the Federal Republic of Germany. In the US our laws are more permissive. My apologies to the citizens of the Federal Republic, but given the current constitutional crisis in my own country, I felt the need to fiddle with them here.

Im Westen Nichts Neues

Judging by the chaos engendered by our Orange Furor’s decree cutting off all aid to everybody everywhere, it’s a good thing our cut-rate Nazis weren’t trying to invade France. And will somebody please tell Stephen Miller that even if he shaves his head, squints malevolently, and shouts a lot, people will still know he’s a Jew, and will still find a Jewish Goebbels unseemly.

The Irrelevance of Precedent

What do I think about TikTok? What do I think about X? What do I think about all our 21st century digital anxieties—China’s nefarious designs on democracy, Musk’s knee-jerk racism, Zuckerberg’s peculiar concept of masculinity, Thiel’s equally peculiar attitude toward his own mortality, and by extension our own?

What I think is that once the box is opened, Pandora can no longer help us—or, in more contemporary terms, scale matters. What does that mean? It means, to resort to the original Latin, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. Genuine freedom of speech reveals things to us about ourselves that we’d rather not know. Content moderation can’t help us with that. Neither can the clever pretense of algorithm patrolling, nor bans that, for obvious economic reasons, won’t ever actually be enforced except selectively. Not even some real version of the Butlerian Jihad can help us.

The singularity may never come to pass, but governmental interventions in the creations of the digital age, legislative, executive, or judicial, are, like the military career of Josef Švejk, tainted with all the accidental qualities an indifferent universe can conjure. The truth is, we can no longer afford our own immaturity. My advice is simple: don’t go with the tech bros if you want to live. They really have no idea what they’ve wrought.

A Pledge of Non Allegiance

With Austria now governed by Nazis, the US destined to follow at the end of the month, and Germany itself due to join both of them in the wake of its upcoming election in February, I have an announcement to make. Since there’s nowhere to go now that isn’t under threat from the Zeitgeist, it’s time to stop merely alluding to my lack of allegiances, and to publicly and formally declare myself a rootless cosmopolitan.

Yes, I know that’s what Stalin called the Jews. I can even give it to you in the original Russian: безродный космополит. (No, I don’t know any Russian I didn’t learn first from the glossary at the end of A Clockwork Orange, but we have Wikipedia now, don’t we? If nothing else, it allows us to more accurately catalog our afflictions.)

Full disclosure: I’m not a Jew, but I could easily have been one—I suspect a great grandfather of converting to Catholicism in his native Austria during the waning days of the Habsburg empire, something he seems to have done to advance his career prospects in uncertain times. Be that as it may, I’m willing to grant Stalin a bit of poetic license here, as the phrase clearly has resonances well beyond the obsessions of a single autocrat. (I doubt Donald Trump is aware of it, but Stalin was a poet laureate of brutality long before Donald stumbled into the role on idiot TV.)

So, with my apologies to the muse of history now made, I can say openly that I feel no allegiance to any current political faction, nor to any forseeable future faction, no reverence for any religion (in my view they’re all based on fear and steeped in superstition and hypocrisy), and finally, no desire to submit to hagiographies and catechisms past, present, or future. If you need help, I’m available. Whatever I can do, I will do. But if you want me to rat on my neighbor, round up people you consider undesirable and put them in camps, reeducate the children of the very poor, or otherwise kiss a vicious imbecile’s ass, look elsewhere.

Novus Ordo Seclorum

Along with many others, I’ve long thought—and said as much here and elsewhere—that Americans would have a difficult time adjusting to the end of post-war US hegemony and the rise of a multipolar world order. It now seems fair to say that the re-election of Donald Trump makes that hard-core recalcitrance a certainty. And when you start finding things like this on the Internet, it’s probably also fair to say that none of that pig-headedness will go down well with what our previous leaders have been pleased to call The International Community:

How It Happened

The DNC wants to know how it happened, by which they mean how it happened to them. Someone—I no longer remember who—once said that after 1968, the Democratic Party finally succeeded in locking its entire left wing in a windowless room, then spent the next 40 years booby trapping all the exits. Ironically, it was a Democrat who once told us that those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. He was another kind of Democrat, though, and anyway he was talking about somebody else.

Nancy Pelosi thinks it happened because men in her party aren’t cunning enough. She may be on to something.

Joe Biden thinks it happened because the Democratic Party wasn’t Joe Biden enough. Enough said about that.

AOC tried everything she could think of to keep it from happening, including reluctantly acting the part of a loyal apparatchik in party conferences. To no avail, as is now clear even to her.

David Frum says he knows how it happened, but rather unconvincingly ignores the fact that he was in the room when it was being planned.

Donald Trump thinks it happened because he’s the bonfire of all the vanities. Not quite all the vanities, though, as will soon become abundantly clear.

Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it happened because stupid is not only stronger than smart, it’s also more patient. She’s wrong, yet on the scale of a single human lifetime, it’s gonna be impossible to prove to her or to anyone else exactly how wrong she is.

How do I think it happened? You don’t want to know.

The Rush To Surrender

Whenever I read about our new capitalist overlords gutting each other over who gets to profit from the rabbit-out-of-a-hat tricks of large language models, I have to laugh. Here are a handful of quotes that will give you some idea why:

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I don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

—@kat@weatherishappening.network, from a Mastodon thread about ChatGPT

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Und so wie gesellschaftliche und technische Entwicklungen zuvor die Unantastbarkeit Gottes in Zweifel zogen, so stellen sie nun die„Sakralisierung” des Menschen zur Disposition.

And just as social and technical developments once cast doubt on the sanctity of God, so they now subject the sacralization of humanity to renegotiation.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Der tiefere Sinn der Singularity-These ist die technische Überwindung kultureller Pluralität.

The deeper meaning of the singularity-thesis is the triumph of technology over cultural plurality.

—Roberto Simanowski, Todesalgorithmus: Das Dilemma der künstlichen Intelligenz (Passagen Thema)

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Die Aufklärung ist der Ausgang des Menschen aus seiner selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit.

The Enlightenment is the emergence of humankind from its self-inflicted immaturity.

—Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung

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Remember, imbeciles and wits, 

sots and ascetics, fair and foul, 

young girls with little tender tits, 

that DEATH is written over all. 

Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul 

they are so rotten, old and thin, 

or firm and soft and warm and full— 

fellmonger Death gets every skin.

All that is piteous, all that’s fair, 

all that is fat and scant of breath, 

Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, 

is Death’s collateral: 

—Basil Bunting, Villon

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Say what you will, it’s clear to me that the Pax Americana, and more generally humanism itself, with all its honorable striving, are both well and truly done. Contemplating what passes for virtue and wisdom among those so obviously eager to feast on the leftovers would make even the gods laugh.