Lately, when reading the news from the Middle East, I’m reminded of this dialogue from Blade Runner, the classic movie with Han Bladerunner.

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

You’re not helping. No one is helping.

The dialogue surrounding the Gaza War, like everything else in our terrible era, swiftly devolved into dueling realities that cannot tolerate each other.

On one side, Hamas schemed for years to carry off a brutal terrorist attack that killed over a thousand people in their homes, or in a concert field, for the crime of being Jewish. They then, like medieval reavers, after finishing the killing, raping, pillaging, and looting, carried off hundreds of captives to their lair. Israel, stunned, wounded, fought back like you would. Like anyone would. And now they’re being attacked for it. People are tearing down posters of kidnapped hostages or slapping “OCCUPIER” stickers on them. People are charging into airports demanding the staff produce the Jews for them to beat. What can be done, how do you negotiate with this?

On the other side, Israel has been, for the past month, constantly bombing a helpless open-air prison, simply because they’re Palestinians. They don’t see them as human beings, they’ve said as much publicly, repeatedly. Thousands of people are dying. Thousands of children are dying. Hospitals are being bombed. Refugee camps are being bombed. America is handing them the bombs that are being dropped. Israel commits war crimes constantly - one Palestinian NGO estimated that a child in Gaza is now being killed every fifteen minutes. What can be done, how do you negotiate with this?

The absolute hell that we are in is that both of those perspectives are absolutely, 100% correct. Hamas did storm into Israel and commit an act of terror worthy of the Mongol Horde. Israel is making a mockery of the Law of Armed Conflict on a minute-by-minute basis. People around the world are marching in the streets, demanding the bombing stop. Among them are people screaming “kill the Jews”.

The problem is war.

Chris Hedges is a problematic writer on the very best of days, but still occasionally a brilliant one. His best work, by far, is his first: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. Written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Hedges draws on his experience as a war correspondent in the Balkans to describe just how seductive and evil the symphony of violence that modern warfare is can become. Not just for the soldiers and others directly in its path, but in the societies corrupted by the demands of war’s steady drumbeat. The key lesson, in this case, is war’s essential simplification.

We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.

War makes the world understandable, a black and white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good, for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.

But war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, and its worship demands human sacrifice.

There is no room in war for nuance or dialogue. War is a cacophony of loud slogans and obvious demands, of the just who must regretfully slay the unrighteous. To quote Hedges again:

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians has left each side embracing death. They each believe that they are the only real victims. There is a celebration of suicidal martyrdom and justification of the tit-for-tat killing of noncombatants.

Twenty years after he wrote that paragraph, it has been proven beyond anyone’s doubt. Even continents away, there is a demand that each side acknowledge the others’ victimhood - that there can be no dialogue without first surrendering the field of debate and admitting “your side” are the inhuman bastards who did this to innocent children.

The fact that children on both sides are dead is of no consequence. Pain is at war with pain, loss in a never-ending battle with loss. There can be no resolution save death.

Thus, Israel’s chief diplomat globally, the ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, showed up this week for a debate about “our side” and “your side” with the ultimate accessory.

To Israeli society’s credit, this was universally seen as “too much” — although how a ‘diplomat’ who for the past month has been raving barely coherently about “Nazi ISIS Hamas Iran” is now seen as too much seems a bit, well, too much. It’s all too much, all of it.

The real danger, as I write this, is that there is no way for either side to climb down from the cliff’s edge. War has taken on its own logic, and as the death toll rises on every side, no one will take the essential leap of faith - of seeing one’s counterpart as a human being that should not be killed today - that making peace requires.

And on both sides there will be cheering, and screaming, and shrieking, and demanding that their pain be recognized, acknowledged, before they even consider the existence of the others’ pain.

It is a war of pain. There can be no victor. There will only be the dead, and those who survive.

Reading this, you may ask yourself - what can I do?

It may surprise you that peace in the Middle East is an elusive concept on the best of days. But the most important thing you can do is simply to listen, and try to understand perspectives with which you are unfamiliar.

If you oppose the bombing of Gaza, read this brief article from a noted historian of how the Hamas attack has wounded Israeli society.

If you oppose the Hamas terror attack, read this brief article of a writer trapped with his family in the midst of an unending bombing campaign of terror.

Try to understand that no matter how just one side may seem - there is an equal measure of justice on “the other” side. And only then can peace come.

This is taken from a blog post in 2008 just before the McCain/Obama election, explaining why I planned to vote for Obama. Note: at the time, I still called myself a conservative. What caused me to stop? Well, in large part, this — why Sarah Palin made it impossible for me to vote for John McCain, and my fears of what her candidacy meant for the future.

The last point is something that the Republican party has to face if it will survive the next decade: among many other ill-conceived decisions, in embracing Sarah Palin and the social conservatism that she represents, the Republican party has made itself the standard bearer for anti-intellectualism.

Sarah Palin, as best as anyone can tell, has no opinions. On anything. In her few unscripted interviews, she has been unable to answer such simple questions as what newspaper she reads in the morning. Her one policy speech has been to support care for disabled children, which while certainly something that we should do as a society as a general rule, is to put it mildly not chief among the issues facing us as a nation. Yet Palin’s, and McCain’s response to the very simple questions raised by Palin’s lack of intellectual curiosity is to attack those who ask the questions, and moreover, to attack the very question itself. “Joe Sixpack” or “Joe the Plumber” wouldn’t ask if Sarah Palin has a foreign policy beyond a woolly grasp of geography.

Instead they would go to political gatherings strongly, horribly reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg rallies to rail at their enemies for being terrorists and socialists and Arabs and the other. Literally. Raising the Republican bogeymen, much as Jews were for the Nazis – no actual meaning, simply the other to scare the faithful with in lieu of an actual reasonable dialogue. This is not merely troubling. It is deeply frightening for anyone with a sense of history, and the Republican campaign has been extremely irresponsible in its prosecution of the campaign and its consequent corrosion of the national dialogue. I disagree with many people politically – this does not mean they are Insert-scary-meaningless-word-here.

This is not occurring in a vacuum. It is part of a pattern shown by today’s Republican leaders and the current Administration – a lack of respect for dissent, an all too easy appeal to fear and the other – sadly made all too easy, and all too quickly exploited, by the 9/11 attacks. If you ask many people today if Saddam Hussein bore responsibility for 9/11, many would say yes. Our government, in this as in so many other ways, has simply failed us. It has devolved to primitive threats of fear and anti-intellectual rejection of reason, something cheered on by the shock-talk conservative partisan media. And we see its application in the McCain campaign and its apparent existence in a strange time continuum where William Ayers is responsible for the stock market collapse and Barack Obama is an Arab terrorist.

This must be confronted. It must be rejected. We as Americans are simply better than this, and we must show this, cleanly and clearly. The appeals to fear and horror must be rejected.

Note from 2023: being right sucks.

Sure, you have your favorite archetypes in whatever game you’ve been playing, but game production has archetypes as well. And without these specific archetypes, you would not have games today. Really.

10: The Radar O’Reilly. She knows everything about the game and the company. She knows every quirk about everyone on staff and knows exactly when to send a chipper email cheering someone up. She hasn’t gotten a promotion in twelve years because she’s far too important where she is. Without her the entire company would have collapsed into fistfights and embezzlement six years ago. She is paid $16.50 an hour and never submits any overtime.

9: The Publicity Whore. Every media outlet has his email, cell phone, home phone, and incriminating photos from That Night At The Club. He is the public face of your company. When people think of your game, they think of him. He talks pretty. Which is a good thing because he has no idea what the hell you have been working on, and the last time he was at your game demo Radar O’Reilly had to actually control the game for him. Every time he opens his mouth a part of your team’s heart dies a little inside, because they know they will some day be held to account for trying to implement the possibly drug induced ravings that pass for his knowledge of what features are planned for your game. But it’s hard to hate him, because he’s just so gosh darned likeable. And he talks pretty.

8: The Raid Leader. She is the one person on your design team who actually still plays games. Her knowledge base on her game is unassailable. Unfortunately it’s not for the game you’re working on. Still, without her you’d be making “World Of Warcraft With Monkeys In Space” or something. When work breaks her will to live she goes home, logs into her anonymous Twitter account and flames the crap out of The Publicity Whore.

7: The Fixer. He’s the producer, most often, or someone filling in the role because the person with the producer title is actually the Publicity Whore or something. When someone hasn’t shown up to work for two weeks because they’re exploring the validity of their peyote visions in the desert, he’s the one leaving screaming ‘reminders’ on their voicemail. He makes the schedules. He keeps the charts. He attends the meetings with executives trying to figure out what the project actually is and why there’s a ill-concealed line item for peyote in the budget. He can’t sleep at night because he knows keeping the jobs of 50 to 100 people are his direct responsibility. He hasn’t played a video game, ever. It doesn’t matter. He makes the trains run on time. Every Friday he and Radar O’Reilly drink heavily after work and make fun of The Publicity Whore.

6: The Community Person: She is the only person who actually talks to the customers on the boards, because it is technically her job and because she’s crazy enough to actually enjoy it. She’s usually female because studies show that online bullies have a 32% harder time depersonalizing a woman. She is the person on the team with the most alcohol tolerance from far too many player gatherings. She knows exactly where to touch a ranting customer on the shoulder to defuse them in mid rant. She eats bullets. Her secret is that she actually cares what people think about her company.

5: The Idiot Savant. He has never had a real job. He has worked in games ever since he hacked into an MMO server when he was 14 and gave his character godlike stats so he could level faster. He has no social skills whatsoever and every time a new woman is hired for the team he hovers around her cubicle making awkward small talk. His code is completely brilliant and utterly incomprehensible to anyone else. He is a multimillionaire from having bought the third bitcoin ever minted, but doesn’t know quite what to do with money.

4: The PR Flack. She comes from the same vats everyone else in PR is grown in. She has only the vaguest idea what computer gaming is and think everyone involved in it is somewhat smelly. She has the second highest alcohol tolerance in the company from attending too many trade shows. Still, she speaks publicity-cant, and without her no one would know about the game you work on and it would sell four copies. The Idiot Savant is in love with her, but every time they pass in the halls he casts his eyes downward and walks very fast.

3: The Guy In QA. He has 12 posters in his cubicle, ranging on various topics such as cryptocurrency, Cthulhu and George Lucas. He has worn a bizarre costume hat to work every day since he was hired. He has 90,000 fully poseable toys on every possible surface. Everyone is frankly terrified to talk to him. He files bug reports about how the game isn’t fun and has no clear purpose. He’s right.

2: The Bitch Programmer From Hell. She hates players. She especially hates players of the game she works on. She submits passive aggressive patch notes like “Fixed some spell everyone uses because it’s overpowered.” Everyone online is convinced she exists. She is the bane of The Community Person’s existence and The Community Person has idly considered using a sniper rifle to remove the threat at long range. She is a reason why your favorite game sucks, but there are others. But she is a reason, and that keeps her happy. At home she’s a Twitch streamer and makes 12 times what she does at work from people watching her curse while shooting people in Call of Duty.

1. The Pontificator. He is convinced his job is to think deep thoughts about game systems. This isn’t actually his job, and he hasn’t done his actual job in years. But since he is an encyclopedic font of knowledge about the game he works on, he is barely tolerated. He thinks Web3 games and Play-to-Earn are actual workable concepts and the future of game design. He believes that remaking Ultima Online only without “all the mistakes” is a slam dunk. He actually uses the word ‘carebear’ in daily conversation. He is insanely, insanely jealous of The Publicity Whore. He has forgotten all the actual job skills he ever had and in the event of a sudden recession in the gaming industry he would be hard pressed to work at a Circle K on the graveyard shift.

Note To People I Have Worked With In The Past Or Present: if you think I’m talking about you, you’re wrong. I can fill in three people for each of these classes from personal experience, minimum. You are not a unique snowflake. And I’m four of them.

Watching “The Rollicking Adventures of Wagner PMC Along Route M-4 Of The Russian Countryside” this weekend, it’s hard to remember that prior to this, the main actors involved, Vladimir Putin and Yevgeny Prigozhin, were two of the most feared and brutal figures in Russian, and for that matter global politics.

The latter isn’t a household name for most people. I wrote about Prigozhin previously in a previous “What the hell exactly is going on in Russia, anyway?” newsletter, and the Economist has a pretty good summary of Prigozhin’s career as well.

Up until now, Prigozhin had a pretty good niche carved out for himself. He would pop on Telegram (Russia’s Twitter-like social network of choice) and leave a video where he rants and raves in a style typical of a drunken Russian ultra-nationalist tired of being poor and whomever he’s currently violently racist against. Here’s an example.

The thing about Prigozhin’s rants is that they are almost always targeting the elite, which he castigates with undisguised scorn and disgust (again, channeling the average Russian nationalist, who also not too happy with 99% of Russia’s wealth going to a dozen or so oligarchs). This is unusual since, in Russia, normally, this would get you thrown in prison. In fact, it’s exactly what got Alexei Navalny thrown in prison. Specifically, this video (it’s long, but if you haven’t seen it, budget an hour some time - it has English subtitles and Navalny does really good video journalism/demagoguery).

In fact, since the war began, quite a lot gets you arrested in Russia these days, including calling the “Special Military Operation” a war, or just wearing the wrong color hat while walking outside. So it’s worth asking why Prigozhin gets away with, you know, mouthing off so much. Meduza wrote up a short while ago some opinions from anonymous Russian leaders on why that is (aside from the obvious, such as Prigozhin being constantly surrounded by thousands of his closest heavily armed friends).

There’s an inner circle of people who are absolutely loyal to [Putin] and who are already bound to him by blood. Prigozhin is one of them. People from this circle can afford a lot more than everyone else, including any wayward thoughts. This is, first of all, because the president has no doubt about their personal loyalty, and, secondly, because nobody can touch them: they have the significant resource of personal access to the president, and in Prigozhin’s case, armed force as well.

Events shortly overtook this assessment.

The first event that changed this narrative was the ending of the Battle of Bakhmut. This was portrayed in the Russian media as Wagner’s finest hour, where Prigozhin bravely led his patriotic militia house by house, liberating the small city of Bakhmut to death. Left unsaid: that it took the corpses of at least 20,000 untrained Russian prisoners to do it, in a slaughter that made the Somme look like a picnic ground.

Yet Bakhmut did eventually, finally fall, and Russia managed to hold on to a blasted post-apocalyptic pile of rubble that was once a small city. Prigozhin around this time issued diatribe after diatribe on Telegram about how the evil Ministry of Defense (MoD) refused to send Wagner enough ammunition or supplies, leaving the brave Wagnerites fighting for Russian glory in the lurch out of greed and incompetence. It eventually resulted in this memorable video (CONTENT WARNING: Prigozhin chose to use the corpses of his men as video props - thankfully blurred out in this version):

Shortly afterward, Prigozhin gave an ultimatum that if not given adequate supplies, his troops would peace out of the war and go chill somewhere else, like, you know, maybe Moscow is nice this time of year. That ultimatum expired, and Bakhmut fell shortly thereafter (although not in time for Russia’s big May 9th Victory Day celebration of winning World War 2 All By Themselves With No Help At All, which stuck in the craw a bit). Prigozhin announced that Wagner’s forces would withdraw to its bases for some well deserved replacements, rest, R&R and letting the prisoner-soldiers left standing go to terrorize their home communities.

Then, about a week ago. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu answered Prigozhin’s video diatribes in an appropriate fashion: all Russian PMCs would be folded into the Defense Ministry. Prigozhin was getting his toy soldiers taken away.

Without twenty thousand of his closest heavily armed friends, Prigozhin would no longer have effective legal immunity to rant on Telegram. He would be treated like any other oligarch in Putin’s Russia - made to toe the line, or else suffer consequences such as, say, falling out of a window. And Prigozhin very much knew this, and that he had made a lot of powerful enemies.

So, on Friday, Prigozhin gave his answer.

First, a video accusation that Russian forces had bombed a Wagner camp. The video was, to put it mildly, unconvincing. To quote Meduza:

The video footage posted by Prigozhin earlier on June 23 that reportedly shows the aftermath of a Russian rocket strike on a Wagner rear camp is almost certainly staged. Here’s why:

• Whoever is filming doesn’t run away from the explosion, as you would expect if they feared more artillery or rocket strikes, but moves toward it.

• The people speaking off camera, before they could have gotten any real details about the incident, come to the conclusion that the Ukrainian military “can’t get at us” and that only their own “allies” could have carried out the strike.

• There’s no visible crater in any of the posted footage, or any dirt that a normal explosion would gave scattered. The surrounding vegetation and trees appear essentially unharmed, which rules out a rocket that exploded in the air. Most likely, the explosion was caused by a hand grenade going off under a tent or in one of the camp’s numerous structures.

• One part of the footage shows two fires burning in a dugout, but the fresh cover of leaves in the dugout is undamaged, and there are no visible artillery casings around.

• Prigozhin reported that the strike left a large number of victims, but the footage doesn’t show any of them. One clip shows part of a human body, but the color of the dried blood on it suggests that the person died much earlier than when the alleged strike took place.

This was, Prigozhin declared, the last straw - his troops would now march on Moscow to deal with Shoigu and his deputy Gerasimov personally. And woe betide anyone who gets in their way.

This is known in history circles as crossing the Rubicon - the river beyond where it was forbidden for Roman legions to cross, and where Julius Caesar memorably noted his fate was sealed - “the die is cast” - when he led his troops past it to take over Rome. Prigozhin literally crossed the Rubicon (in this case, the Don river). No take-backsies.

Wagner troops swiftly swept into Rostov, the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District (the military command overseeing the Ukraine war effort) and took it over with no resistance. Prigozhin stopped for a bit to cut a video claiming his light treason wasn’t going to affect the Ukraine war at all, really! Then — they kept going.

They kept going FAST.

Putin finally gave a speech on Saturday morning. It was about five minutes long and, for most Russians, bone-chilling.

…the actions splitting our unity are a betrayal of our people, of our brothers in combat who fight now at the front line. It’s a stab in the back of our country and our people.

It was such a blow that was dealt to Russia in 1917 when the country was fighting in World War I, but its victory was stolen…

…Anyone who consciously went on the path of betrayal, who prepared the armed mutiny, went on the path of blackmail and terrorist actions, will be punished inevitably. They will answer before the law and our people.

The armed forces and other departments have received the necessary orders. Additional anti-terrorist security measures are now being implemented in Moscow, Moscow region, and a number of other regions. Decisive actions will be taken to stabilise the situation in Rostov-on-Don, which still remains difficult. The operation of civilian and military control departments is practically blocked…

Almost immediately, every single private plane in Moscow took off. Including, um, Putin’s, heading for his bolthole outside of St. Petersburg.

We laugh (because it’s funny, and because Putin’s entire appeal of power rests on his personal macho invincibility) but it was in fact a reasonable reaction, given that apparently Russia had literally no troops available to stop Wagner from driving into Red Square and, I don’t know, popping wheelies with technicals or something. A few helicopters made desultory passes at the Wagner column heading swiftly north, and a surveillance jet was shot down, but other than that, Prigozhin’s Big Adventure was remarkably bloodless, considering a group of 20,000 ne’er-do-wells was moving through Russia faster than Heinz Guderian’s wildest dreams.

In fact, it was SO fast a drive, and so well supplied and planned, that in case you haven’t already figured it out, Prigozhin’s constant complaining this spring about not getting enough supplies was, you know, baldfaced lies. Wagner was keeping fuel and munitions back, pre-placing supplies, and planning exactly how this was to happen, for weeks if not months. In the gangster parlance Putin loves so much, he got played, yo.

And then it was over.

Literally at the gates of Moscow, Prigozhin announced that because, you know, his adventure might result in some people getting hurt (please remember, this is the same person who sent tens of thousands of Russian prisoners to their certain death) he had worked out with Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko (a man who, to put it mildly, has not been known up to his point for his diplomatic acumen) an agreement that would make everyone happy.

Shoigu and Gerasimov would be fired (this has, so far, not been confirmed by Moscow), Wagner forces that didn’t participate in the Rostov-Moscow Fun Run (all six of them) would be free to join the Russian Army (you know, the very fate they were supposedly revolting against), the remainder would be free to join Prigozhin in exile in beautiful downtown Minsk, everything is fine, please remain calm, it’s all good, how are you today?

This was… abrupt.

I mean, just call off a coup/civil war on account of rain? Can you even do that? None of this made any sense at all. It still doesn’t make any sense at all, about 8 hours later. Prigozhin left Rostov cheered on by its ever-so-briefly-occupied residents (most of whose experience with Wagner forces consisted of waiting in line behind them for NotMcDonald’s breakfast sandwiches) and… what? What even happens now?

Does Prigozhin REALLY stay in Minsk, just happilly chilling out with his private army? Does Putin REALLY just let this all be bygones, you know, bros just being bros, sometimes you just gotta let off some steam and organize a furious drive on your nation’s capital? How does ANY OF THIS EVEN WORK?

We’re definitely in uncharted waters, well past any sort of Rubicon. Ukraine is reportedly running perilously low on popcorn. And Russia is, you know, still in the midst of invading Ukraine.

How all this will work out? I haven’t a damn clue, and anyone who claims to is lying, and that includes the Pentagon and the Kremlin.

One thing that will be the most annoying out of all this? Those weirdo Trumpist right wingers who insisted that this was all a shadow play orchestrated by Senile Evil Mastermind Joe Biden to take away attention from Hunter Biden’s very real crimes and his very real girlfriend who lives in Canada, they swear?

They’re going to think they’re right. And that, my friends, is why everything continues to be terrible.

(Note: be sure to read the edit at the bottom where apparently Elon insists he isn’t in fact subsidizing Carlson. Other than not banning him for racism, that is.)

The news just came out that Elon Musk has partnered with Tucker Carlson to revive his “news” show on Twitter.

This just happened, so not a lot of concrete details, but some things are already immediately apparent.

• Tucker Carlson had a $25 million no-compete with Fox. So presumably Musk is paying Carlson at least that much. There’s no official word as of yet, because Elon Musk doesn’t bother to talk to anyone that’s not a far-right Twitter poster. He has been quoted as saying he wants Twitter to begin hosting premium video content, and it’s very difficult to see Carlson making this announcement without some sort of collaboration - unless he just plans to post links to Rumble videos or something.

• It’s also worth noting that in the past few days Musk has notably stepped up his open embracing of far-right conspiracy theories, most recently regarding the Allen, TX mass shooter. He ridiculed the thought that someone in America (who presumably, at least before Musk’s tenure, would be banned from every major social network for being a genocidal Nazi) would have an account on a second-tier Russian social network (Odnoklassniki) and repeated accusations that painting the genocidal Nazi as a genocidal Nazi was “a psyop”, far-right lingo for a government conspiracy to conceal the truth.

• Carlson is, let’s not forget, fired from Fox for being too toxic. Too toxic for Fox News is a very high bar to clear, and Carlson cleared that bar with regularity and gusto. He is the leading proponent of the “white replacement” conspiracy theory that postulates Democrats are intentionally importing illegal immigrants from Latin America and giving them voting power to cancel out the votes of white people. (This is, need I not explain, false and hella racist.) He so consistently parrots the Russian propaganda line on Ukraine (sample quote: “Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he ever tried to get me fired for disagreeing with him?”) that he is a regular fixture on Russian state television. He was forced to let his lead writer go when it was revealed he was a regular poster on white supremacist message boards. Basically, he’s really not a nice guy.

Given all this, it’s really hard to argue with the logic of Arieh Kovler:

Or, as someone else said on Bluesky, the new Twitter invite-only alternative (no, I don’t have any invite codes yet):

This newsletter’s official motto (“everything continues to be terrible”) just doesn’t seem to be enough, so let’s throw it to Viktor Chernomyrdin while we wait to see what develops:

Stay safe, space ghosts. You can find me on Mastodon (lum@brokentoys.social), Bluesky (@brokentoys.social) but on Twitter, at least a whole hell of a lot less, I’m thinking.

EDIT: Elon Musk just tweeted that he had nothing to do with this, which means Carlson is indeed throwing away $25 million to post links to his Rumble videos. Or something. I don’t even know any more. Everything is still horrible.

Elon Musk would very, very much like you to buy Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.

Unless you’re seriously into cryptocurrency, a serious fan of Elon Musk, or a conservative tweeter (who is also probably seriously into crypto and Elon Musk), you probably are not interested in buying Twitter Blue.

On April 20 (because Musk dearly, dearly loves making juvenile jokes) Twitter finally removed the “verified” badge of previously notable users. This promptly led to, say, a crypto enthusiast named “Lil’ Bubble” being, in Twitter’s eyes, more notable than the Pope.

Everyone laughed a bit, some nervously, most not, and moved on, as is the wont of people who for whatever perverse reasons still post on Twitter. The plan was to “encourage” previously verified users to sign up for the Twitter Blue service.

It did not go well.

(No word on if Jordan is in fact single.)

Pretty soon it became very obvious, thanks to Twitter’s new ranking algorithms prioritizing Twitter Blue users, that most Twitter Blue users are, for lack of a better term, raging arseholes.

So a movement popped up to #BlockTheBlue - aka to block every Twitter Blue user since, well, just look. For the record, this was my initial reaction:

But it seemed really popular! So popular, in fact, that Musk first banned the Twitter account organizing the hashtag, added a few famous accounts such as LeBron James and Stephen King manually, and then, when that proved wholly insufficient to make a dent in all the blocking going on, this morning simply forced Twitter Blue on everyone with over 1 million followers. Can’t block them all if all the most famous people are on it!

One problem: the aforementioned most famous people weren’t consulted. And… they were not happy. At all.

This even extended to users with over 1 million followers who, um, were no longer alive.

You see, what Musk didn’t realize (or did, but didn’t care) is that for your average famous person, the barrier to subscribing to Twitter Blue wasn’t the $8 fee (I’m fairly certain Lil Nas X can afford $8), it was that with all the “legitimate” verified checks gone, the very act of having that blue check was seen as being one of the Uncool Ones.

For their part, the people who DID subscribe to Twitter Blue were FURIOUS at the implication (well, OK, the very clearly communicated statement) that buying a Twitter Blue subscription was not enough to make someone one of the Cool Ones.

As it sunk in to the Formerly Verified that they now, whether they liked it or not, had a Twitter Blue account, one very famous Twitter user decided he was not going to take it and declared Internet War on the richest man in the world.

Yes, dril was going to war. The world had changed.

If you are not familiar with dril, he is essentially the personification of the humor of the web forum days of the 2000s migrating into the social media era of today. His first tweet was arguably the best tweet ever made:

Since then he has posted many, many classic tweets.

And now dril was one of the Uncool Ones and no sir, he did not like it.

Word began to spread that you could lose the hated Blue Tick of Shame by changing your username (a “feature” Twitter introduced back when verified users were changing their names at random to mock Musk’s refusal to see the value of verified identities) and there was quickly relief among many.

Except in dril’s case for much of the day. It seemed that every time dril changed his display name, the Twitter Blue icon would reappear almost immediately.

And only dril.

Yes, one of the richest men in the world was furious that a blurry forum character was refusing his largesse and forcing it on him. Repeatedly.

Anyway, as of this writing dril seems to have managed to dodge the Blue Check o’ Shame, so perhaps Musk finally gave up, or went to bed, or gosh, had something better to do. (Surely not that.)

Continuing updates as this incredibly inane view into a social network’s collapse develops, because everything continues to be horrible.

While Airman Teixiera currently cools his heels in a jail cell awaiting his transfer to Florence ADX for a lifetime stay, his disclosures have opened up several independent hornet’s nests. For example, publicizing the Pentagon’s take on Ukraine’s long-term combat effectiveness prompted a “HAW HAW!” from Russian state media and “NUH UH!” from Ukrainian government officials — fairly predictable stuff.

Also sadly predictable: US politicians and media figures slotting the intel leaks neatly into the diatribes already in progress. The far right, which has already been extremely enamored of the Russian narrative (this story, from Trumpist site American Greatness, is basically a catch-all retelling of Russian propaganda in English - all Ukrainians are Nazis, Zelensky isn’t a real Jew and probably gay, and America shouldn’t spend money on those guys) supports Teixiera’s right to espionage because Dear Leader doesn’t like Ukraine for personal reasons and the conservative imperative in American politics now is “do whatever the Dear Leader wants”. Very predictable, not very interesting.

More interesting is the reaction from what could be called the “dissident wing” of media reporting - people like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, whose political viewpoints are less easily slotted into left/right tropes and more populist vs establishment, essentially arguing that what Teixiera did was a case of classic whistleblowing because… the military shouldn’t have secrets.

From a piece by Taibbi this evening (paywalled):

This isn’t tracking down a serial killer or exposing Enron’s fraud. The alleged “crime” here is releasing true information, information that belongs to the American public and is secret only by official designation.

I’m sorry…

Pray tell, if what Teixiera leaked (briefing slides prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff detailing the precise order of battle, location, and estimated combat effectiveness of Ukraine’s recent military buildup) isn’t a military secret, what is? By this logic, military secrets do not exist and future JCOS briefings should be published on Tiktok: “18 Powerpoints You Can Dance To”. This is taking an otherwise valid point (that the military overclassifies things), misses the actual story (that an E-3 had access to JCOS briefing slides and could distribute them to his Discord pals) and instead argues that nothing is secret, everything is permitted, let’s levitate the Pentagon.

Taibbi and Greenwald both make a valid point: that the race between national media giants New York Times and Washington Post to chase down the story resulted in a frankly very weird competition to expose the leaker. I agree, that reporters shouldn’t do the police’s job for them exposing leakers. And I hope Greenwald eventually gets right on that apology to Reality Winner.

If it’s one thing Twitter and Facebook and the like have done for public discourse, it’s made everyone an expert in political science. Right-wing commentators will tell you that everything is communist, with the frankly hilarious end state of people accusing large multinational corporations of being literally communist, thus proving no one knows what words mean any more. (Hint: “communism” in its simplest definition means “state control of the economy”. So, no, corporations not owned by the state — a clause we can call Corporations With Chinese Characteristics — cannot be communist, much as green cannot be red.) Left-wing commentators will tell you that everyone not in their personal group chat is fascist, because, like, obviously. This is a bit harder to disprove, because first we need a working definition of “like, obviously”.

So, some definitions. First off, we can dispense with the right-wing corollary quite simply: America is not “going communist”, and most likely never will, as fiercely individualistic capitalism has since the nation’s birth been baked into our national blood. The arguments flying to and fro about what a federal government can and should do have nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with how to allocate the public resources of, for now, still the world’s dominant economy on what sort of public welfare. No matter how many times certain people’s eyes twitch when Snickers runs TV commercials with a diverse cast, the private resources of the economy — the overwhelming majority — will remain exactly that. The government isn’t coming for your AR-15s or your 401Ks.

The reverse, a slide of America into fascism, is, unfortunately, not nearly as easy to dismiss. And the blame for this lies almost entirely on the greed of the Republican party, which has dealt with its decline in popularity amongst the greater part of the population by focusing on its base and seeking to disenfranchise everyone else. This has resulted in the capture of the party by its most extreme elements; for example, just two years ago Marjorie Taylor-Greene was a pariah, widely mocked for her nonsensical conspiracy theories and given the Congressional equivalent of the death penalty. Today she is one of the most powerful members of the Republican caucus.

Yet, having kooky Congresspersons is not, by itself, a sign of a fall into fascism. America has had odd legislators its entire existence, primarily because America has had odd voters its entire existence. In fact, there’s a theory called the “crazification factor” that states that around 20% of the electorate in any given election cannot be predicted because, well, those voters are literally insane.

John: Hey, Bush is now at 37% approval. I feel much less like Kevin McCarthy screaming in traffic. But I wonder what his base is --

Tyrone: 27%.

John: ... you said that immmediately, and with some authority.

Tyrone: Obama vs. Alan Keyes. Keyes was from out of state, so you can eliminate any established political base; both candidates were black, so you can factor out racism; and Keyes was plainly, obviously, completely crazy. Batshit crazy. Head-trauma crazy. But 27% of the population of Illinois voted for him. They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That's crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

And to be fair, Alan Keyes was, you know, pretty barking mad. But then came another politician that made Keyes look like a genteel patron of the finest debating societies, and all bets were off.

So, we can conclude that America is insane. But is it fascist? The two aren’t the same, after all.

If you ask 10 political writers what fascism is, you’ll get 10 different answers. Here’s an 11th — mine. It’s short and simple. (For me, anyway. I’m rarely either.)

1. Concentration of power in the hands of a single party, led by a person who motivates his/her party through charisma and/or fear into personal loyalty beyond any rules or laws (the Führerprinzip, in other words)

2. Use of the military (or a paramilitary force that supplants the military) to enforce rule through force and the militarization of society to enforce the obeying of all orders

3. Suppression of all dissent through violent and overpowering means

4. Focus on an outcast group or groups as justification for the above extremist measures

If a party or nation isn’t defined by all of these, it’s not fascist. If it’s defined by some of them, it’s authoritarian, not fascist. As a right-wing commentator (Michael Knowles, of the Daily Wire) said recently proving my point:

‘Authoritarian’ is just a word that liberals use when conservatives wield political power.

Other political writers will quibble about whether the above defines fascism — for example many believe fascism requires state control of the economy — but I think it’s workable for our discussion. At a minimum, it’s not a place you want to live.

For example, modern Russia, under Vladimir Putin. Putin’s Russia is effectively led by one man, supported by a single party (United Russia, which holds an overwhelming majority in the Russian parliament through manipulated elections). Since the outbreak of the Ukraine war, the military has been elevated to a position of dominance in the economy and society, with billboards every 100 feet depicting a brave martyr of the state.

Dissent isn’t completely crushed yet, but it’s approaching that, with independent media fleeing the country, dissidents sent to gulags, and protests rapidly dispersed and the protesters threatened with being sent to the front lines. And while there isn’t a single ethnic group being blamed for all the ills of the world, Russia certainly isn’t a great place to be gay currently.

So, is Russia fascist? No, but it’s getting there, fast.

How about America, under Trump or otherwise? Obviously, we’re nowhere near Russia in terms of state repression. Dissent is still not only quite legal, it’s almost inescapable (heck, you’re reading it right now, you dissident, you).

And the military is almost the opposite of what you’d see in a fascist regime - if anything, it is kept apart from the greater society; a separate caste of Janissaries, whose members join because it’s what their family does, and who fight in all corners of the world while their homeland is barely aware of it. But that’s another rant.

However, two of those points are “signs point to danger”, I’d argue. First, the Republican party is absolutely now a personality-driven Führerprinzip party, even if the leader has no idea what the word even means. As Trump faces an increasing set of indictments and convictions, the Republican answer is simply that Trump should be beyond the rule of law because he’s the leader. A clearer definition of Führerprinzip would be hard to make.

And second - unfortunately, the right very much are finding a group of people to blame for all the woes of the world.

Is America fascist? No, not yet. We do not yet have the military enforcing order, and you are still free to dissent.

In fact, if you do not want everything to continue to be horrible, I would strongly argue for taking up the battlecry of Sister Miriam Godwinson in a certain videogame everyone should have played: We must dissent.

There haven’t been many truly major cases of espionage that have hit the US intelligence establishment. In the 1980s, there was the Walker Family cabal, which if World War 3 broke out would have probably resulted in the deaths of a lot of NATO submarines thanks to John Walker’s finding out that the USN has, to quote him, “worse security than your average K-Mart.” 25 years later, there were the Chelsea Manning disclosures to Wikileaks, which involved a disaffected soldier putting the whole goddamn government intranet on a Lady Gaga rewritable CD and handing it to Julian Assange, who then used this to be absolutely insufferable for the next decade. Shortly afterwards, Edward Snowden took his thumb drive full of precisely how the US monitors literally every electronic communication on the planet out of his contractor gig and gave it to, among other reporters, Glenn Greenwald, who then used this to be absolutely insufferable for the next decade. Just a few years ago there were the Vault 7 disclosures breaking down the types of cyber weaponry the CIA uses to do its thing, which were leaked to Julian Assange, who continued to be absolutely insufferable.

And now there’s… the leak of pretty much everything the Pentagon had to say last month about a currently active major war, among many other things, including the results of its spying on close allies, by a guy who wanted to impress a tiny Discord he hung out on named after a racist, pornographic meme. It’s still so early that I don’t know who’s going to be absolutely insufferable about this, but the entire stupidity of the enterprise implies maybe it’ll be, I don’t know. Marjorie Taylor Greene?

OK. Let’s break this whole thing down. Because it really is so powerfully dumb that it requires quite a bit of thought to digest.

First off, if you’re going to show off all the classified intel you brought home from work, please don’t upload it to Discord. Discord’s CDN (content distribution network) is publicly accessible and searchable. No, REALLY. Nothing you upload to Discord is private. This goes well beyond the usual three letter agencies tracking the usual suspects, this is like putting your secret letters to your mistress on, I don’t know, Pinterest or something. So as tempting as it may be, don’t upload it to Discord.

Or your favorite gaming forum to win an argument. Please don’t do that either. War Thunder’s community relations people would really like you to stop it.

(This was back in the halcyon days of two days ago when it was thought the original leaks happened on a Minecraft Discord. No, turns out that was just a point of exit.)

Second, if you’re the largest, most well-financed military on the planet, with global-spanning capabilities for force projection, communications monitoring, and real-time satellite analysis, you may possibly consider not hiring your sysadmins straight out of high school.

Unfortunately, there is a thing among militaries, and it’s been a thing for a very long time: namely, that officers are treated like noble knights and common work is considered beneath them. This includes, well, pretty much anything involving a keyboard, so, at least in the US military, that work is farmed out to civilian contractors and enlisted men. Thus, a disturbing number of intel analysts with Top Secret alphabet soup clearance are not old enough to drink legally. This is why Edward Snowden had access to literally every major program the NSA had running on spying on everyone. This is why Chelsea Manning was able to bop into a secure facility and pretend to jam to Lady Gaga while downloading everything she could find. And this is why Jack Texeira, an E-3, a rank you normally get within a year of leaving basic training, was able, for months, to print out the Pentagon’s most secret briefings, prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, take pictures of the briefings, and post them to the Thug Shaker Central Discord’s #bearvspig channel to be assigned as homework.

I’m not even going to touch on how stupid Texeira was to blow his life on chasing clout with a microcommunity of disaffected fans of a particular Youtuber. Or the fact that he, and his fans, are casual racists who think the government can’t be trusted (well, in this case it certainly can’t!) When you’re a kid, you make kid mistakes. God knows I’ve made my share, and somehow thankfully managed to survive into adulthood without committing massive amounts of espionage to impress some girl I met at a bar.

No, the fault here lies in the people who gave Texeira his access, did not do even the most basic of security audits to make sure he wasn’t literally stealing everything not nailed down, and created such a relentless omnivore of a security state that your average idiot kid from upper Massachusetts gets to read CJSOC briefings and hand them out to his buds.

Maybe, I don’t know, we should do something about that. Maybe we should look at a culture in our military that piles life and death responsibilities on children without oversight, training, or consequence, and then become surprised when they commit wacky war crimes to impress their battle buddies.

Or maybe we’ll just plug this into our ongoing culture war and blame our political nemesis of choice for this (“He was a chud! Of course he betrayed his country!” “He just wanted to expose how we’re selling out our country to benefit Ukraine! He’s a political prisoner!”) and ignore any root causes whatsoever, because everything continues to be terrible.

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The penultimate episode of Star Trek: Picard came out today and, I have bad news for you Star Trek fans (I assume you are all Star Trek fans except for a few cranky dissidents and I have been taking notes), it finally flipped the switch from “ham-fisted nostalgia exercise that could probably benefit from better writing” to “oh my god, this is as bad as Rise of Skywalker”.

I’m going to break down precisely how. It’s going to spoil the BIG REVEALS of the MYSTERY BOX of the season, so if you care about such things, don’t read this. I’m also going to explain why you really shouldn’t care, because clearly the writers don’t.

“Somehow, the Borg returned!”

One of the clumsiest moments of Rise of Skywalker (a movie which was a chain of extremely clumsy moments) was, as pictured above, Mark Hamill stand-in Oscar Isaac trying gamely to explain that the movie you’re watching just took a giant crap on continuity, logic, and common sense by bringing back a villain that died 25 years ago. Look, somehow Palpatine returned. Just accept it, guys, let’s move on. It’s what we got to work with here.

“Picard” did that this episode, and with even less subtlety, if you can imagine it. After an entire season of carefully teasing out the antagonists as Changeling infiltrators who were subverting Starfleet Command for …some reason, it all got thrown out in literally the first 5 minutes of the episode. Changelings? Eh. That was last week. The Borg are back, baby! You loved the Borg 25 years ago, right? Weren’t they awesome? Well, enjoy!

I know “Picard”’s whole deal is nostalgia trafficking. I get it. I’m the target for that, I watched every episode of “The Next Generation” so eagerly I was very, very annoyed that the conclusion of the “Descent” cliffhanger in 1993 was pre-empted over something as banal as live news coverage of America bombing Iraq. But, and this is something we’ll come back to, proper nostalgia implies a respect for the source material. And Star Trek’s whole deal is a consistent narrative. Doing a last minute bait and switch on what the entire plot of the season is supposedly about doesn’t speak to a great deal of respect.

“Kids today, am I right? They ruin everything, man!”

Aside from the larger meta problems with copy/pasting the entire antagonist of a season in five minutes, literally everything about this episode is so badly written it almost seems as if the writers actively hate their audience. “They’ll accept this crap! They’ll accept anything!”

First - Picard’s son Jack Crusher, who the entire season was teased as having mystical powers and voices in his head? Yeah, Borg drone. Sorry. It makes no sense! And Jack yells at Picard about it making no sense (because it makes no sense) with weird phrasing like “I’ve always thought things would be better if we spoke with one voice, one mind, but is cybernetic authoritarianism really the answer?” which I’m sure sounded a lot better when someone asked that question in the Bernie Sanders Discord. And before you have enough time to marvel at a character in a prestige drama actually using the phrase “cybernetic authoritarianism” without any perceivable irony, Crusher becomes SUPERVILLAIN, possesses the mind of two security mooks, and storms off in a shuttle to go embrace his Borg destiny.

You might think I’m overdramatizing, exaggerating, or otherwise making this look worse than it is - but this is really just a transcript. That happened. And I didn’t even mention Picard threatening to send his kid to a Vulcan group home for wayward Borglings. That also happened.

Second - now that we’ve done away with Jack Crusher, who for the season was the entire point of the series as Picard’s lost and regained son, we see some plot exposition as Geordie LaForge manfully tries to explain that you see, Picard had BORG DNA and it was passed down to his son, and oh, the transporters picked up on that DNA and thanks to compression algorithms and NO I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP everyone who used a transporter now has Borg DNA also and can be droned at any moment. Before anyone could react to how utterly stupid this is or explain genetics does not work that way the Titan shows up for Frontier Day at Earth Central, where all of Starfleet conveniently is. Look! It’s the Enterprise-F! Isn’t it cool and shiny! Thanks, Star Trek Online artists!

And it’s commanded by another minor character from Next Generation, Commander Shelby! Give it up for now Fleet Admiral Shelby, explaining briefly how the entire fleet is networked together because no one in Starfleet ever watched “Battlestar Galactica”, or remembers “The Ultimate Computer” episode from the original series which had literally the same plot of networked starships running amuck, or even the recent season finale of “Star Trek: Lower Decks” which somehow is a much better series than this despite being pitched as “Star Trek: Rick and Morty”, and oh wait, the sudden inevitable Bad Thing is happening and Shelby’s dead.

What is that Bad Thing? Oh, let me explain. You see, the youths are bad.

No, really. That’s it. The Borg transporter DNA virus species changer thingamabob only affects people under 25, because no one remembers “Logan’s Run”, either. So all of a sudden all the youths become Borg drones thanks to an ear-splitting audio signal because that’s how it’s always worked in no Star Trek episode ever and they all become zombies and take over their starships by ex-ter-min-ating all the old people and god, this has no longer become just bad, the implications of all this given the target audience for this show being people MY AGE is literally toxic. THE KIDS ARE GONNA KILL US ALL. ONLY WE OLD FOLKS ARE IMMUNE TO THE WOKE MIND VIRUS MAKING THEM ALL SOCIALIST CYBERNETIC AUTHORITARIANS! TO THE LIFEBOATS, OLD PEOPLE!

God. Like I said, this is so insultingly bad, it’s not just banal (although it is very, very banal), it’s an ode, a very literal, very intentional callout to the worst of Trump-era Facebook rants about how the yoots of today have ruined our Star Treks with their diversity and crap. And realizing that is about when I wanted to throw my iPad into the trash.

It’s impossible to not address the fact that Terry Matalas, the “Picard” showrunner, has hobnobbed with and encouraged the worst of the Youtubers who complain about “Woke Star Trek”. I was willing to excuse this as, at worst, a failed attempt to appeal to all parts of Trek fandom. But this —- this is red meat to the most toxic of those fans. This tells them they’re right. That Star Trek, the show the phrase “fully automated luxury gay space communism” was literally invented for to describe, is somehow another victim of the endless culture wars the aggrieved right are fighting over insufficiently sexy M&Ms and awful beer brands giving shoutout to trans influencers and whatever else some guy with a goatee that looks disturbingly like mine is raving about on his latest four hour Youtube rant.

Words fail at describing how badly I am angered by this. You cretinous reactionary throwbacks, you ruined my Star Trek. Thanks a lot.

Anyway, the show’s not done, although at this point we and by that I mean me really should have stopped watching.

“Starfleet is Borg. I miss the carpet!”

Anyway, our heroes fight off all the kid zombies, calm Geordie down because for some reason he can’t get over his two daughters turning into literal Borg zombies, and fly off… back to Geordie’s museum workshop where he literally conjures the Enterprise-D back from the 1990s, the wreck of a poorly written attempt at a feature film, a forest of nostalgia memberberries, and his butt.

Meanwhile: the entirety of Starfleet, which remember, was assembled all in one place for reasons, is now under Borg control, a fact which is announced by the yoot Borg zombies declaiming “We are the Borg. Starfleet is Borg.” This could be bad, both in that it’s a hilariously clumsy line and that, you know, Earth is about to be completely destroyed.

So, for the last ten minutes of the episode, Picard and the gang work out an intricate plan to carefully infiltrate the Borg interphasic logic nexus, overwrite the mysterious DNA signaling, and return Starfleet to something approaching normalcy, once again saving the galaxy.

No, wait, they don’t do that. That would make sense. Instead, everyone walks around the bridge set talking about how much they miss the 1990s, and the carpet’s so swag, guys, and Worf is pouty because he wants more photon torpedoes, and everyone laughs, and then they head straight back to Earth without any sort of plan because it’s far more important for Jean-Luc Picard to intone “ENGAGE!” from that chair once again. And… that’s it.

Finally, we can stop watching. Because it’s over. I mean, there’s another episode next week. I don’t know if I can watch it. I don’t know if I can look away. It’s just all so very, very bad.

“Last week, on Star Trek: The Next Generation…”

The thing is, “Picard” wasn’t always hideous.

The second season was pretty bad, but it could be explained as a victim of, like much else of the time, the COVID-19 pandemic making literally everything a challenge. That, plus what was apparently a greatly reduced budget, forced the majority of the season to take place in present-day Los Angeles, which I’m sure made filming convenient but made it considerably less, well, Star Trek-y.

The first season also had its flaws - but here’s the irony! It also had the Borg! And it wasn’t just a shadow-monster-booga suddenly youth zombies but an attempt at a thoughtful portrayal of how the Federation of 2400 would deal with integrating the now “ex-Borg” liberated drones of their most fearsome enemy. It brought back Hugh, the first Borg individual, with the same actor, in a well-cast and well-scripted bit of actual nostalgia, as the leader of these “xBs” dealing with various factions treating them as either unspeakable castoffs or literal bioweapons.

In short, it was Star Trek. Not the best Star Trek ever, but it attempted a consistency with how Borg had been treated in the past, how the shared universe progressed as time marched on, and didn’t insult everyone’s intelligence in the process.

And under Terry Matalas’ stewardship, this season of “Picard” takes a very intentional huge crap on all of that. They literally have a character (Beverly Crusher) say “the Borg? They haven’t been seen in over ten years!”. (She wouldn’t know that, having been in hiding for longer than that, but expecting the writers to remember that tiny fact they wrote just a few episodes earlier is too much to ask for.)

Hello? The entire “xB”/Borg cube run by the Romulan remnants in season one? The literal deus ex machina of a Borg queen showing up in season two, merging with a main character who then saves the day at the last minute?

“Picard” not only wants to live in the halcyon days of the 1990s, it wants to actively forget its own recent history. Those were those OTHER guys who made those episodes! They sucked! They don’t count!

There have been some hints of this previously in the season (when Riker and Troi bond over how much they hated the crunchy-hippie forest hideaway they were shown to live in during season 1, for example) but this is more than just a throwaway line designed to get Reddit upvotes. This actively shits on its own canon.

And for Star Trek fans, that is one of the worst sins of all. The whole POINT of a multi-decade investment in Star Trek is an internally consistent universe, and Matalas and company basically responded with a big upraised middle finger.

In short, this series is without honor and must be destroyed, because everything in it is horrible. Thank you for listening to my TEDtalk.

The fallout over Elon Musk’s latest high profile snit (this over Substack - you know, you’re soaking in it!) continues to, well, fall out. Musk, as is his wont, rolled back his snit-driven and frankly quite bizarre censoring of any Substack link on Twitter, but not before exchanging words with the Twitter Files (Musk’s great expose about how pre-Musk Twitter co-operated with the evil Feds by, uh, moderating tweets) authors, Matt Taibbi (previously known for writing a lot about Russia and Wall Street before losing his goddamn mind) and Michael Shellenberger (a right-wing apologist for climate change and homelessness). As part of that, Musk posted screenshots (and then deleted them, because no one would ever save anything on the Internet) of a conversation he had with Taibbi over Signal. Those conversations didn’t really reveal anything at all, other than that Taibbi and Musk talk to each other (which, uh, based on the Twitter Files we already could have guessed), but, you know, Twitter gonna Twitter.

Reading this tweet that someone else boosted, this was pretty much my reaction.

”Congressional oversight?” Look, pinheads, Musk and Taibbi are both private figures. They don’t work for the government, there are no rules on Congressional oversight of private conversations between private figures whatsoever, other than one that most people like to refer to as the goddamn First Amendment to the Constitution. Using Signal merely means that they would prefer outside agencies (like, you know, the government) not be able to have a transcript of their conversation, so that Musk can later post it himself for no apparent reason.

There is NOTHING suspicious about wanting to have your messages be private! It should be the EXPECTED DEFAULT BEHAVIOR!

And as for auto-deleting messages on a timer - there is NOTHING inherently suspicious about that either! You know what messaging app does that also? Snapchat. You know why people use that feature? Because of this:

Do you really want government oversight of that? Think it over. Do you WANT this man to be able to freely subpoena your more interesting messages?

NO, I DIDN’T THINK SO.

Use Signal, goddamit. Because, if for no other reason, everything continues to be horrible.

Part of the reason for this newsletter update is an experiment. You see, Elon Musk reportedly has blocked Substack links on Twitter, despite (or possibly because) Substack being precisely the ideological and business model Musk envisions for Twitter itself. It certainly has blocked Twitter embeds on Substack, as can be seen when I just tried to create one:

That’s OK, here at brokentoys.substack.com we fight the power like the Public Enemy wannabes we are (that would be me and my cat) and can easily harness the awe-inspiring power of screenshots.

Substack pays its writers generously (something I’ve studiously avoided, both because I already have a well-paying full time job and because the subscriber base for this newsletter is in the low triple digits) and generally skews rightward in the writers who have found success on the platform (for example, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, two of the reporters Musk hired to investigate Twitter, have turned their own newsletters into independent self-sustaining publications). These are both directions Musk has explicitly claimed as goals for Twitter.

Given that level of similarity, and the fact Substack is not a social network but a blogging platform, it seems quite odd that Musk would order a blanket censoring of Substack, unless you’ve been paying attention the past few months. It seems that Musk’s tenure at Twitter has been mainly to shitpost his way to greatness while avoiding anything involving making Twitter a viable business, or even particularly behaving as a responsible adult. A brief and woefully incomplete synopsis of Musk’s actions as Lord of the Twits thus far:

• Indicated his desire to force users to subscribe to the platform, first at a $20/month rate, then lowered to $8/month when Stephen King complained.

• Dismantled the verified user program (a scheme where people who were considered notable could have a blue check by their name) because of a perception among the right wing that “blue check Twitter”, specifically mainstream media figures, were elitist and dismissive of their extremely valid opinions on Democrats, transgender women, vaccines, and Jews. After months of waffling, Musk finally removed the verification mark from one account (the New York Times) and otherwise made indistinguishable persons verified under the old regime and people who paid for a Twitter subscription. This made browser plugins to denote the difference anyway very popular (an example can be seen in the tweet screenshot above) enabled by a for now still functional Twitter client API.

• Speaking of APIs, Musk has threatened to charge wildly varying amounts somewhat untethered to reality for API usage which in practice would eliminate API usage entirely due to its unaffordability. As I write this (the beginning of the three day Easter weekend of April 7th=9th) these changes appear to be going into effect, with the usual haphazard chaos.

• Unbanned virtually every right-wing account that was banned for such things as inciting riots, racism and abuse, including but not limited to Donald Trump, Jordan Peterson, the Babylon Bee (a rather unfunny Onion clone whose banning for transgender-related slurs prompted Musk to acquire the platform in the first place), and Kanye West. Musk then banned West again immediately when it was clear the musician was unable to make a single tweet of over 5 words without blaming all Jews for his various misfortunes.

• Banned a Twitter account that used publicly available information to track the position of Musk’s private jet (claiming somewhat oddly that it was a tool for assassins) and then banned literally every reporter who posted about the ban, and every reporter who posted about its move to Mastodon (an open source alternative to Twitter). When the banned reporters found out they could still use Twitter’s “Spaces” teleconferencing system to talk to one another, Musk then temporarily shut down Spaces entirely.

• Revamped Twitter’s recommendation algorithm to heavily favor his own posts - at one point the “For You” recommended feed (a now virtually useless algorithmically driven post registry) was almost exclusively Musk’s own tweets. Musk later announced that only subscribers would appear in the “For You” feed.

• Announced a ban on any user posting links to other social networks such as the aforementioned Mastodon, LinkedIn, link.tree, Facebook, or pretty much anywhere else people congregate online, and then reversed himself six hours later.

• After a series of polls on such subjects as whether or not to unban Donald Trump, Musk then posted a poll that he claimed he would abide by on whether or not he should resign as Twitter’s CEO. When the poll results were overwhelmingly in favor of his resignation, Musk then claimed no one else would take the job, then announced that polls would be restricted to subscribers only.

• Labelled NPR, the US publicly funded radio news network, as “state-affiliated media”, a label usually applied to outlets such as Russia Today and Xinhua, to much celebration from right wing users happy to see a liberal-leaning news outlet “GET REKT”. When users pointed out that Twitter’s own posted guidelines specifically exempted publicly funded but not government-run news sources such as the NPR and the BBC from that label, the guidelines were then changed to remove the NPR reference.

• Replaced Twitter’s logo with a doge icon. No one knows why and it was removed shortly thereafter.

Something you might note as missing from all of this is any action that would be considered Musk’s actual job, being the chief executive of Twitter as opposed to the head of its moderation and rules enforcement team. To date, his only visible actions in that role appear to be destroying the value of the platform through firing anyone who disagrees with his tenure, had a connection to the previous ownership, or, finally, anyone not directly seen by Musk as an “extremely hard-core” worker. In all, 75% of Twitter’s staff has been fired, laid off, or quit since Musk’s acquisition of the platform. Even if one believes that Twitter had overstaffed or had departments considered unnecessary (such as public relations, user moderation, customer support, or accounts payable, all of which apparently no longer exist) that is less a trimming of fat then a decimation. The fact Twitter still functions at all is a testament both to the quality of work of those programmers who were fired and those who somehow still remain.

Given that, a reasonable question would be, just what the fuck is Elon Musk doing, anyway? Why is the richest man on the planet, who owns one of the most successful car companies and the most successful private space launch company in the world, concerning himself with forum moderation?

Apparently, it’s just what he likes to do.

He posts - a LOT - on Twitter, and very badly wants those posts to be liked. He posted metrics on every tweet just so he could see how much people liked his posts. And quite a few people do, since Elon Musk was until very recently regarded as a real life Tony Stark, a tycoon with visions of Mars colonies, cryptocurrency reforms, clean energy, and all sorts of other very cool things. Which he has apparently cast aside in a desperate desire to get a certain sector of right wing twitter to like him.

The tragedy is that in the process of Musk’s very public visionquest to gain the approval of @CatTurd2, he has demolished the public commons of the 21st century. Twitter for all its faults, its enabling of Two Minutes Hate versus whoever dared to be “Twitter’s main character” that day, and its undeniable toxicity, still was a place where people could quickly and easily form connections, make friends, and keep up with their social circles. And unlike Facebook, which rapidly devolved into an algorithmically driven farce of ads and posts presented to provoke violent reactions, Twitter through its basic simplicity could still be curated by its users to be what it was designed for - a public or private water cooler.

The emotional loss provoked by Musk’s mismanagement has been already written about, far more eloquently, by Ed Zitron, so I will just refer you to his piece if you haven’t read it already (you should). I will just something add that an astute reader may have noticed about this piece - every time that I referenced an action taken by Twitter, I referred to it as action taken by Elon Musk.

Because that’s what it has been. It no longer is Twitter, it is Elon Musk. He makes the decisions, is the personal face of those decisions, and is the one who attempts to justify them. He has personalized every management decision and made it about him. Because everything continues to be horrible, we are no longer posting on Twitter, we are posting on Elon Musk’s website.

And maybe we should stop.

If you are utterly sick of reading about ex-President Donald John Trump, I don’t blame you in the slightest. Here is the TL;DR version of this post - a keen and bracing analysis of the Trumpian psyche.

Trump is, as I write this, running for President. Trump is, also as I write this, most likely about to be indicted by the district attorney of New York for election fraud. Both of these can be true (and in fact is not even that unusual worldwide — see my previous post on Israel’s current crisis sparked by a similar dilemma involving Benjamin Netanyahu — but what makes this unusual, if not (at least yet) a full-blown crisis, is Trump’s very peculiar circumstance.

First off: Trump is a criminal. He’s been a criminal all his life; he learned the craft from his father, and made a career of being several varieties of con man, including gleefully refusing to pay people who work for him (a habit which eventually resulted in the spectacle of an ex-President of the United States who has to search widely for an attorney who’ll take him as a client), pretending to be a glamorous celebrity for the New York tabloids, manipulating his taxes so that he paid virtually none for decades, playing someone named Donald Trump on television, and finally playing someone named President Donald Trump, also on television. Not all of these are crimes (although “The Apprentice” was certainly bad enough to count as one) but enough are to make the point. Trump, like most wealthy people in America, firmly believes rules are for other people.

In fact, weirdly, that was part of his campaign platform in 2016. “Vote for me - I’m the guy who benefited from the crooked system his whole life, and I’m on your side now. Only I can fix it.” Trump was one of the first avatars of the new populism shaking up nations across the globe, a reaction to what many saw as emotionless “globalists” who saw nothing wrong with industrial zones depopulating and wealth shifting towards the upper elite. An intelligent, adept politician could have ridden such a backlash to a complete deconstruction of the American experiment in democracy.

Thankfully, Trump was neither an adept politician nor particularly intelligent, and as his omnishambles of an administration stumbled from wound to self-inflicted wound, it became ridiculously clear that Trump only cared about one thing: what people thought — and were they thinking — about Donald Trump. Trump’s obsessive self-absorption is pathologically all-consuming; briefers quickly learned to include his name in presentations to keep his attention, and the Trump foreign policy became a bizarre exercise in “who is nice to me, Donald Trump” (one North Korea and Russia both essentially won). The whole exercise seemed like a prolonged Al Franken Decade sketch.

Thus the second part of this weird circumstance: Trump will do anything to stay in the public eye, because he honestly seems to believe he is the most important being in the universe and anything that affects him is, by definition, of critical importance to the nation and the world. His 2020 campaign was essentially a pro-forma exercise in using the power of the Presidency to remain there; his 2024 campaign seems to be shaping up to be “vote for me, and I’ll get back at all my enemies! I mean, your enemies. Same thing, really.” Or, as Trump often puts it:

This exact meme was so popular, by the way, it was picked up by at least two other wannabe-autocrats, Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi. Populism is definitely a thing.

His campaign this year thus far has been restricted, until now, mainly to a few rallies where he can soak up adoration from his fan base (as New York attorney Ron Kuby put it, “I mean, the man is beloved by 20 percent of the American population. Admittedly, they're fascist psychos.”), workshopping nicknames for likely opponent Ron DeSantis, and otherwise staying home and not doing very much. Which, you know, all things considered, that’s great! Keeps him out of the news, which everyone can agree is for the best.

Unfortunately, as noted, Trump is also a criminal, and being a very famous person who is also a criminal means that you might actually run the small, yet real risk of suffering some degree of consequences for your actions. Thus the indictment coming from a New York grand jury, most likely sometime within the next week or so. The story behind that indictment is very typically Trumpy: Trump at some point slept with a porn actress named Stormy Daniels, who when Trump began his 2016 run for office saw the opportunity to monetize what she describes as “the worst 90 seconds of my life”. She approached the National Enquirer, which is very close to Trump thanks to his previous career as some kind of weird tabloid celebrity, and the Enquirer brokered a deal between Daniels and Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen. At the time (2016) he was one of Trump’s strongest supporters in the media, as can be seen here in all his pugilistic and clueless glory:

However, when news leaked out of Cohen’s role in funneling money to Daniels in exchange for her (short-lived) silence, he was prosecuted and sent to prison. Oddly, this resulted in his not being a big fan of Donald Trump any more, and he cooperated fully with the NYC investigation into Trump’s role in what was a pretty clear payoff to influence an election (his own). Thus the current looming indictment.

If you just go by Trump’s increasingly unhinged and ALL UPPER CASE statements on his Mastodon clone, truth.social, this is the worst thing to ever happen to America, engineered by Communists, Marxists, Republicans, and Hillary Clinton only knows who else. Don’t take my word for it!

So, reading all this, you’d think that indicting Donald Trump is bad, right? Well, not so fast. He wants to go through the motions of being arrested. He wants nonstop 24/7 news coverage of this “horrible injustice”. Because they’re talking about the most important person in the world, Al Franken.

So, while the NY attorney’s office and the Secret Service are in, let’s just say, delicate negotiations over how to handle the spectacle of a former President being booked in a court of law (no perp walk, because it’s too easy for would-be assassins; no handcuffs, because what’s Trump going to do, choke someone?) no one seriously believes Trump will actually suffer any consequence from this — the charges in question, while absolutely criminal, are barely above the level of a misdemeanor, and even if convicted, the Secret Service will surely have something to say about the logistics of protecting Trump’s life in Rikers lockup. Meanwhile, Trump’s handlers, remaining attorneys, and Lindsey Graham are all gleefully saying that the spectacle itself will ensure Trump’s re-election.

And who knows, it might. We live in strange days, where everything continues to be horrible, most of all because I spent the past hour and a half writing about Donald Trump again.

Israeli politics, even in the most peaceful of times, is best described as the world’s most authentic successor to the Byzantine court. An incredibly tiny nation (the entire north-south length can be driven across in about six hours, and the Old City at the core of Jerusalem can be leisurely walked through in about two), its status as the focus of Jewish ingathering for the past 75 years and near constant conflict with its neighbors for the majority of that time have kept it news-worthy, yet its most fraught decisions are usually resolved based on which old man is pissed off the most at which other old man.

These are not the most peaceful of times. And this month, specifically, Israel looks to be at the greatest threat of flying apart from its own internal contradictions since its founding. How it got here, for the curious outsider, requires a lot of explanation. Good thing this Substack is just sitting right here, huh. (Imagine trying to explain all this as a twitter thread. It’s doubtful Twitter will still exist by the time you finished reading it.) There are three basic causes to the current crisis: the Palestinian problem, Israel’s system of government, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Let’s look at all three. I promise it will be brief. Somewhat. (Spoiler: it’s very much not brief.)

The Palestinians: How do you go home when you’re already there?

The Jews and Arabs of the area used to live in harmony, allied together. Unfortunately, that was a thousand years ago and the two were allied against the invading Crusaders who wanted to kill them both. Since France and England both stopped trying to convert the Middle East for Christ, the two groups have fought almost non-stop since; a brief pause in the fighting ended when Jews globally began returning to Palestine as part of the Zionist movement in the early 20th century. The Arabs responded with riots and massacres, the Jews responded with fighting the British who ran the place and by this point really did not want to any more, World War 2 happened and in its wake a shocked world agreed that the Jews were probably owed someplace they wouldn’t be genocided, the Arabs responded that they weren’t responsible for Hitler’s concentration camps (although they didn’t think it was that bad an idea when you think about it) and shouldn’t have their land taken away for it, and a war broke out with massive ethnic cleansing and massacres on both sides that ended with the land roughly split between a new Israeli state, Jordan and Egypt, Israel then fought a series of wars with both along with Syria that ended in 1967 with Israel in control of the Golan, Sinai, and West Bank. And that’s where it actually started.

As a result of Israel’s almost being defeated by Egypt in a war in 1973 and consequent diplomacy by Egypt’s leader, Anwar Sadat, Israel handed the Sinai back to Egypt, minus the Gaza strip. However, Israel was determined to keep the land it took from Syria and Jordan. The Syrian conquest, the Golan Heights, was deemed necessary for security reasons since otherwise Syrian artillery had a perfect firing position over a good chunk of northern Israel. (Less relevant now in the age of missiles and drones, but in 1973 a consideration.) And the West Bank was deemed necessary because it was a core part of Israel. And by core, I mean religion.

Israel suddenly found itself in control of virtually every village named in the Bible and every holy Jewish site, such as Abraham’s Tomb in Hebron, and most importantly the site of the Second Temple, razed to the ground except for one wall by the Romans 2000 years prior. Israel promptly demolished a 800 year old neighborhood nearby and created a new holy site for pilgrimages to the Western Wall. However, Islam also claimed the precise location of the Second Temple as its own holy site, where Muhammad ascended to heaven. This posed a problem; planting the Star of David flag triumphantly on Islam’s second holiest mosque would cause a holy war the likes of which had not been seen in generations. Thus Moshe Dayan, the general in command, offered to allow the Muslim religious leaders present to continue to run the place; Jews would be allowed access to visit and to pray at the Western Wall, but not on the Temple Mount itself. (This agreement has for the most part been upheld since - but we’ll come back to it.)

The problem of the Temple Mount was replicated throughout Israel’s new conquests. There were about six million Arab Palestinians who lived in the area who did not particularly want to become Israelis. The same problem, during the Independence War, was resolved by Israel forcing the Arabs to leave. A little ethnic cleansing may have been acceptable to the world in a post-World War Two 1948; it certainly wasn’t in a very much active Cold War 1967.

Israel’s response was to sprinkle the area with Jewish towns, called “settlements”. They began as “kibbutzes”, or farms that acted as paramilitary armed fortresses, which were specifically intended as a backstop to the military occupation. As time passed, those kibbutzes became villages, and those villages became cities. Currently there are believed to be over 700,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, living amongst their Palestinian neighbors in a situation very much not harmonious. The intent is to create “facts on the ground” - or, as Joseph Trumpeldor, a founding father of the Zionist movement put it, “Wherever the Jewish plow plows its last furrow, that is where the border will run.” That this is contrary to international law is just one of many problems with this policy; the primary problem is that the Palestinians who live there don’t particularly want to give up their land. And as the occupation goes on and on and on (it is now the longest conflict of the modern era), the Palestinians get more and more desperate about expressing their displeasure.

After repeated “intifadehs” or mass revolts, a somewhat workable peace plan was agreed to between Yitzhak Rabin, the then Prime Minister of Israel, and Yassir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, a guerilla organization notorious for hijacking airplanes and shooting Jews. Called the Oslo Accords, and midwifed by the United States, it laid out a timeline for removing the Israeli settlements from the West Bank, turning them over to a Palestinian authority, and dividing the land between two people. Finally, the conflict was ended, and peace had been restored.

Yeah. Spoiler: it didn’t work.

Yitzhak Rabin was almost immediately assassinated by a Jewish extremist enraged at Rabin’s making peace with the devil. Israel drug its feet on withdrawing its settlements - a trial run, removing a few thousand settlers from the much less coveted Gaza Strip, resulted in near anarchy as the Israeli right revolted at the prospect of giving up any land whatsoever. Arafat refused to agree to any border compromise that would move the process forward; the ongoing rumor was that he was terrified that he would share Rabin’s fate. Instead he led a new intifadeh, was confined to his compound in Ramallah, died in somewhat mysterious circumstances and was replaced by his deputy Mahmoud Abbas; elections to name a new leader were called off indefinitely when it became clear the militant rejectionist group Hamas, that had seized control of Gaza, would win them. Abbas made peace, after a fashion, with Israel; under his rule the “temporary” Palestinian Authority structure became as its primary role Israel’s unofficial police force in the Palestinian-held territory. Palestinians who rioted found themselves facing Palestinian police instead of Israeli soldiers.

And the settlements continued to grow. And grow. They gave birth to a new, toxic far right strain of politics in Israel, spearheaded by the “hilltop youth”, anarchist, fanatically religious teenagers at the front lines of seizing Palestinian land for illegal even by Israeli law outposts (later renamed, in Orwellian fashion by the right, as “young settlements”) that they intended to, through creating more “facts on the ground”, roll what land the Palestinians lived in further and further back.

The Palestinian resistance to this became more and more desperate as the years passed and more and more villages are shoved aside to be replaced with Jewish settlements. The largest refugee camps, now so long established as to be well-established if extremely impoverished tenement cities, in places like Nablus and Jenin became no-go zones for both Palestinian police and Israeli troops; gun factories churned out poorly made handmade submachine guns that might fire once; the theory being that’s all they would need to since any attack on an Israeli soldier was suicidal. When the guns ran out, the Palestinians used knives.

Israeli’s response to these “lone wolf” attacks became more and more extreme; family members who had no idea their relative would snap and attack a soldier found themselves homeless as IDF troops bulldozed their homes in retaliation. Israeli prisons swelled with Palestinian prisoners, who only became more militant through their stay.

It’s still going on.

The latest mutation in Palestinian resistance is the “Lion’s Den” movement. What differentiates this from previous factions is that the Lion’s Den is apparently leaderless; an anonymous collective of pissed of Palestinian young teens who quit giving a shit and want to die in glorious battle. Israel has no idea what to do about them; they’ve raided the camps they appear in more and more frequently, with higher and higher death tolls. It’s not helping.

To see why, we need to look at the other side.

The Israelis: holding the same election over and over again until you get it “right”

Israel’s politics have been dominated for the past 25 years by one man: Benjamin Netanyahu, “King Bibi”. Taking power in 1996, shortly after Rabin’s assassination, and holding power with a few interruptions since, Netanyahu has turned Israel sharply rightward. His politics can be described fairly succinctly:

• Iran is the generational threat to Israel’s existence and must be confronted at all costs.

• The Palestinians will never make peace on their own and must be “managed” to the point they can be safely ignored.

• Israel’s neighbors only respect strength and don’t care about the Palestinians.

• Israel needs to jettison its socialist past and embrace being a modern capitalist economy.

Other politicians, foreign and domestic, who have dealt with Netanyahu, would describe his politics even more succinctly:

• Benjamin Netanyahu is a goddamned liar.

It cannot be overstated how much almost every Israeli politician of any ideology completely and totally despises Netanyahu. He has broken every promise he’s ever made in the service of holding personal power; his party, the Likud, has lost most of its leadership when it became clear there was no future within it for anyone not named Netanyahu and is now staffed almost entirely by Netanyahu loyalists. Thus, every election for the past 5 years has deadlocked between Netanyahu, the parties he’s managed to ally with that election, and a collective of everyone else who can’t stand him and been stabbed in the back after previous coalition attempts. After a series of elections which kept Netanyahu in office when no coalition could be formed and yet another election had to be called, he finally lost power briefly when virtually every other politician in Israel, right, left, center, Jewish, Arab, WHATEVER, all united in one coalition with one guiding principle - for God’s sake, someone not Netanyahu run this country. That government lasted longer than you’d think!

Netanyahu reacted to losing power by turning into a Jewish Donald Trump. His party stalwarts refused to treat the coalition as a legitimate government, attacking everything it tried to do at every turn, and painted the next election as a literal battle of good and evil (the evil being the not-Netanyahu factions).

A complicating factor for Netanyahu is that he was (and still is!) under trial for corruption (specifically bribery and breach of trust). You would think this would disqualify someone from running for high office. You’d think. Instead, Netanyahu’s response has been to attack the legitimacy of the entire Israeli legal system. The bribery charges in particular are almost laughably ridiculous (a tycoon gave Netanyahu some expensive cigars and some jewelry for his wife) and almost certainly a result of Netanyahu’s belief that he is above the law and thus shouldn’t worry about it.

This is a good point to briefly segue into how Israel’s legal system plays into all this. Israel has no constitution; instead it has “Basic Laws” which enumerate what a constitution normally would, passed in piecemeal fashion by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Israel’s Supreme Court especially, as a reaction to Netanyahu’s somewhat imperial ruling style, has established itself as a barrier against the government’s wilder impulses; ruling often against Israeli settlers who blatantly steal privately owned Palestinian land, for example. This independence absolutely infuriates the Israeli right wing, who are usually the ones being ruled against since they’re usually the ones doing laughably illegal things. Unlike in the US, Supreme Court justices are named by a nonpartisan legal group, so they are not particularly sensitive to political pressure. And oh, boy, we’ll be coming back to THIS in a hot minute.

So, when the anti-Netanyahu coalition finally collapsed (primarily because some of its right-wing members were relentlessly harassed by members of the far right and defected) the ensuing election resulted in almost a 50/50 even split between pro- and anti-Netanyahu electoral lists. HOWEVER! Israel has a fairly high threshold for list representation (established to try to keep the less popular Arab parties out of the Knesset) and two unrelated events turned out to be pivotal - a last minute split between the Arab parties (who had united to stay in the Knesset despite the high threshold) resulted in one Arab party missing the threshold wasting 140,000 votes, and more critically, the leader of the largest anti-Netanyahu party, Yair Lapid, campaigned to a large extent on taking votes away from smaller votes on the left instead of from the right. This resulted in his party, Yesh Atid, getting more seats, but it was at the expense of his coalition partners, all of whom lost significant votes - and one party, the leftist Meretz faction, for the first time in decades fell below the threshold entirely, wasting 151,000 votes. Thanks to both of these, the reapportioned list totals resulted in a narrow, but clear majority for the pro-Netanyahu parties.

And this was a problem. A big one.

You see, in previous coalitions, Netanyahu preferred to rule as a big-tent coalition, bringing in parties from both left and right, and pitting them against each other while he remained above the fray manipulating things. But thanks to Netanyahu’s years of stabbing literally everyone he’s worked with in the back, his only coalition partners this time were fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox parties out for their own very narrow interests, the far-right Religious Zionism party which campaigned on annexing the West Bank, and the even farther-right Jewish Power party which campaigned on beating the Arabs into a pulp. And they ALL demanded they get their coalition demands in writing.

And thus the disaster began.

The Collapse: What happens when the dog catches the car?

Those coalition demands were some times ridiculous (one Orthodox party demanded that Israel stop producing electricity on the Sabbath, which would surely have gone well) but mostly frightening. Bezalel Smotrich, of Religious Zionism, demanded and was given control of the military authority controlling Israeli settlement in the West Bank; this was explicitly so that no settlement would ever be uprooted, no matter how illegal or wildcat, and a step towards “sovereignty”, or a de jure annexation of the West Bank. Itamar Ben Gvir, of Jewish Power, for his part, made the quite reasonable demand he be placed in charge of the police.

By “reasonable”, I mean, of course, hysterical. You know how everyone likes to label right-wing politicians fascists these days? Ben Gvir is an actual fascist. As a teenager he got on the news for attacking Yitzhak Rabin’s car and ripping a part of it off, brandishing it before the cameras saying that they would get to him too. (Very shortly thereafter, they did, and Rabin was assassinated.) He was a part of the Kach movement, led by Meir Kahane. All you need to know about Kach can probably be expressed by its logo:

Kahane’s political positions were simple: Israel must become a theocracy, and the Arabs must be eliminated; by expulsion preferably, by other means if that doesn’t work. Another follower of Kahane, Baruch Goldstein, walked into the shrine of the Cave of the Patriarchs (Abraham’s tomb) while Muslims were at prayer (Abraham being a key figure in Islam as well), and calmly opened fire with his assault rifle at the crowd. Before the crowd managed to overpower him and pummel him to death, he killed 29 and wounded 125. Israeli society across the spectrum of politics was utterly disgusted, and Kach was finally outlawed in response.

Until very recently, Itamar Ben Gvir had a shrine to Goldstein in his home. A literal shrine, with a picture and everything.

For most of his career, Ben Gvir has been a marginal figure; he became a lawyer to defend fellow extremists hauled before the courts, and became well known as a likeable, humorous defendant of the extreme far right on Israeli TV. He became closely associated with the hilltop youth movement (one of its leaders, Meir Ettinger, was Meir Kahane’s grandson) and began running for the Knesset; Netanyahu convinced Bezalel Smotrich to put Ben Gvir on his Religious Zionist list as a partner to try to get as many right wing votes as possible for a coalition. In that election, Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power list managed to get one seat.

In this election, it got six. It’s estimated that a third of active duty Israeli soldiers voted for Ben Gvir.

Why did Ben Gvir, and the far right, become so popular in Israel? Primarily because of extreme polarization - after election after election, and a seeming unending stream of lone wolf Palestinian terror attacks, some Israelis wanted to vote for the most right wing figure possible, and Ben Gvir qualified. His campaign slogan was “It’s time to be the landlords of our country.”

And he demanded, and was given, control of Israel’s police.

Almost the very first act of the new coalition was to push forward a complete restructuring of the Israeli judicial system. Essentially everything described earlier about how the Israeli supreme court exercised oversight over lawmaking would be surgically removed; supreme court justices would be named by the currently governing coalition, and the Knesset could overrule any ruling by the supreme court regarding the legality of its actions by a simple majority.

The fact that these reforms would almost certainly result in the end of Netanyahu’s corruption trial is, I’m sure, a complete coincidence and not foremost in anyone’s mind. Another minister, Aryeh Deri, head of one of the ultra-Orthodox coalition parties, was removed by the Supreme Court after he broke his plea bargain to stay out of politics after a conviction on tax evasion; a key plank of the reforms is intended to restore him to power specifically and by name.

This caused Israeli society to explode in protest. It was very clear to everyone at this point: Netanyahu’s coalition meant to remove any brakes and restructure the very system of government so it could do whatever it wanted. And in case anyone was unclear what this would result in, Israeli settlers in response to a shooting (which was in result to yet another raid against the Lion’s Den resistance within Jenin that resulted in dozens of dead, including uninvolved civilians) stormed a Palestinian village, Huwara, and put it to the torch in a literal pogrom.

Bezalel Smotrich, when asked, said that it was a tragedy that rioters tried to wipe out Huwara. It was the state’s job to wipe out Huwara. I am not making this up. Another MK, of Ben Gvir’s party, said “we need burning villages when the IDF doesn’t act.”

There have been absolutely huge protests every weekend in Tel Aviv and elsewhere in Israel, across the political spectrum (even ex-Likud members have addressed the protesters approvingly).

Netanyahu has in return labelled the protesters “anarchists”. Ben Gvir, in his new role as head of internal security, has demanded the police crack down harshly (those demands have been so far mostly resisted, to Ben Gvir’s publicly expressed fury).

There have been huge protests in Israel before, though, both from the left and right. However, in response to the judicial coup and the government-sanctioned pogrom, a new phenomenon never before seen is happening - a critical mass of IDF reservists, ranging from fighter pilots to elite commandos to cryptologists, are notifying their commanders “you know what? I didn’t sign up for this. If this goes through, I quit.” To quote one anonymous officer, a brigadier general in the IAF:

We didn’t hear unequivocal wall-to-wall condemnation of the lynching of Palestinians civilians by Jewish hoodlums. Instead, we heard support for these actions from some Knesset members, equivocation from ministers, and mealy mouthed condemnations from large swaths of the hard right. And then, to cap it off, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich came along on Wednesday with his blunt statement calling for Huwara to be ‘wiped out.’

In the past, we never doubted the righteousness of the path and the morality of decisions. Today there are question marks regarding the moral fiber of some of the decision-makers – that is why we are issuing this warning.

The IDF is utterly dependent on reservists; Israel is such a tiny country that a reserve-driven military is the only way it can exist. Without their support, it won’t function.

In response, a government minister told them to go to hell. Literally.

The people of Israel will manage without you and you can go to hell. The [judicial] reform movement will move forward. It was for this moment that we came to power.

It’s unclear how this will end, or even if it can end. The President, usually a ceremonial figure above politics, is trying to broker a compromise; the coalition is ramming through the reform proposals through the Knesset as quickly as possible with the goal of a final vote by the end of this month. At which point the Supreme Court may well rule the reform package illegal (not unreasonably, since it quite literally takes away their power to do exactly that) which would cause an existential crisis where two branches of the Israeli government are at literal war with each other. Smotrich and Ben Gvir, meanwhile, are doing their level best to ensure that the Palestinians revolt; for their part the Palestinians are doing their best to keep up their end of the deal.

And Iran is closing in on a nuclear weapon, at a time when the IDF may be paralyzed.

Israel may well be on the verge of self-destruction, unless cooler heads prevail, quickly. Very few seem to be on offer. Everything continues to be horribly, apocalyptically terrible.

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Mike Pompeo is running for President. This is probably the quickest that I’ve made it to the everything continues to be horrible tag line, but there you go. Pompeo, as befits his recent gig as the most undiplomatic diplomat of recent memory, (and I remind you, this is a competition where John Bolton is a strong favorite!) has decided to launch his campaign by coming out strongly in favor of dismembering journalists. I am not making this up.

Pompeo bemoans “faux outrage … fueled by the media”. Reporters, he says, “hammered the story extra hard because Khashoggi was a ‘journalist’.

“To be clear, Khashoggi was a journalist to the extent that I and many other public figures are journalists. We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things. The media made Khashoggi out to be a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticising the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles in the Washington Post.

“In truth, Khashoggi was an activist who had supported the losing team in a recent fight for the throne … unhappy with being exiled.”

In case you forgot, we’re talking about a columnist who was lured into an embassy in Turkey and hacked to death with a bone saw. On bin Salman’s direct orders. I just feel this should be pointed out.

When multiple people, including Khashoggi’s widow, pointed out that Pompeo’s account was not only morally void but factually incorrect (which, to be fair, describes almost every action taken by the Trump administration), Pompeo of course immediately apologized. Or, you know, not.

Pompeo: if you condemn bin Salman’s killing of reporters, you don’t support our troops. I was unaware our troops were killing reporters with bone saws, but Pompeo clearly knows something we don’t here.

But in case that wasn’t enough, Pompeo’s book goes into further detail: not only was Khashoggi’s death not that big a deal, it distracts from, you know, how awesome bin Salman is!

“The progressive Left hates MBS,” he wrote, using a common moniker for Mohammed, “in spite of the fact that he is leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history. He will prove to be one of the most important leaders of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage.”

So, let’s make something perfectly clear. bin Salman is not a great leader. And he is only “truly historic” in his embrace of cruelty matched with gross ineptitude - which might remind you of another world leader Pompeo is quite fond of. (Hint: he cheats at golf.) It befits a quick review of, in a part of the world not known for enlightened governance, bin Salman really, really is one of the worst.

Operation: Beat Them Till Money Falls Out

One of bin Salman’s first actions upon taking over the reins of state from his father was to arrest 400 of the wealthiest businessmen in Saudi Arabia, lock them in a nearby Ritz-Carlton, and not let them out unless they gave bin Salman a lot of money. Those who did not cooperate were beaten, within earshot of the others.

bin Salman said this was necessary because some of them were corrupt and what can you do? Well, apparently, this.

“On the first night, everyone was blindfolded and nearly everyone was subjected to what Egyptian intelligence calls the ‘night of the beating’”, said a source with intimate knowledge of what took place. “People were asked if they knew why they were there. No one did. Most were beaten, some of them badly. There were people tied to the walls, in stress positions. It went on for hours, and all of those doing the torturing were Saudis.

“It was designed to soften them up. And then the next day, the interrogators arrived.”

Coincidentally, among those detained were pretty much any member of the royal family that might have posed a threat to bin Salman’s rule. Took care of that!

Operation: Desert Warcriming

Even before bin Salman’s coup/money grab/gratuitous demolishing of the Saudi government/business compact, as Minister of Defense bin Salman led the Saudi armed forces into a liberation! intervention! invasion of its tiny southern neighbor, the impoverished land of Yemen.

For some reason, possibly because of the wild corruption deeply embedded in the Saudi military, and possibly because no one could really work out a reason for invading Yemen in the first place, the intervention went spectacularly badly, with Saudi troops somehow completely unexpectedly finding themselves enmeshed in a years-long insurgency (which is still going on) against a bunch of hill tribesmen called the Houthis, using Iranian arms and taking great joy in blowing up Saudi bases regularly. The Saudi Air Force (flush with US-provided aircraft) responded with pinpoint accuracy and surgical precision, bombing refugee camps, civilian housing, and an entire province. When the Houthis then responded with sending Iranian drones into Saudi airports, bin Salman imposed a complete blockade of the country, which is still ongoing and the cause of massive starvation throughout the country.

Did I mention this was still going on, after 8 years? Cracking good job, guys.

Operation: Shut Up Shut Up SHUT UP!

Not content with blockading Yemen, bin Salman in 2017 imposed a land blockade of Qatar because they host a TV network he doesn’t like. Unlike Yemen, Qatar hosts some very large US military bases, so the blockade mostly just forced Qatar to import everything via the sea from still-friendly Turkey instead. bin Salman finally gave up in 2020, which the Trump administration completely took credit for.

Operation: Resign Immediately Or Else

In case you thought that was enough mischief for bin Salman to get into in the few years he’s run the place, in one particularly strange episode, bin Salman held the leader of a friendly nation hostage and forced him to resign.

Lebanese officials described the long hours between [Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s] arrival and the resignation as a “black box.” They said they were reluctant to press Mr. Hariri for details. When asked, one of them said, Mr. Hariri just looked down at the table and said it was worse than they knew.

Apparently, Hariri’s crime was in making a friendly overture to an Iranian diplomat, and bin Salman decided to respond by, you know, totally fucking up Lebanon, a country which, if you haven’t been following lately, is already really pretty fucked up. However, it helps in, when fucking up a neighboring country, you know what the fuck you’re doing.

What is clear, they say, is that Saudi Arabia sought to instigate a broad realignment of Lebanese politics to reduce Hezbollah’s power by forcing the collapse of Mr. Hariri’s coalition government, which includes Hezbollah and its allies.

But crafting the nimble and activist foreign policy that Prince Mohammed wants requires “a depth of understanding of political dynamics in other countries and an investment in diplomatic ties that can’t be created overnight,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington.

“The competition for power and influence in today’s Middle East has changed significantly,“ he said, “and the Saudis are playing catch-up, with very mixed results.”

So bin Salman summoned Hariri to Saudi Arabia, forced him to resign (apparently at gunpoint, although blackmail may have been involved), forced him to appear on Lebanese TV from Saudi Arabia swearing he’s totally not a hostage and really did mean to just fly to another country and resign his job, and then finally let him return home, upon which the second he arrived on Lebanese soil he un-resigned. So if you’re keeping track, bin Salman basically tried to meddle in the most unstable country in the Middle East and did the foreign policy equivalent of this:

…and failed completely for some reason. Great job, MBS. Cheese fries all around.

Operation: Spend All My Country’s Money On This Weird Project Because It Seems Cool

You may think bin Salman is just a murderous thug who likes to shake people down for money or commit random warcrimes, but he has a softer, sensitive side. He just wants people to like him, guys.

And he’s going to make that happen by spending all the money (and I do mean ALL the money) on a city of the FUTURE.

Neom. It’s beyond parody. It’s beyond understanding. It’s beyond financing. And it’s apparently beyond bin Salman’s attention, because he shifted gears from NEOM, a tech city the size of Belgium on Saudi Arabia’s coast to, um, er. Yeah. Let’s go to the video.

Bin Salman himself, doing his best Steve Jobs, introducing THE LINE. THE LINE, which also, like NEOM, or possibly instead of NEOM, or possibly coexisting and not-coexisting in some sort of Schroedinger’s-cat space, will cost 500 billion dollars, is totally real, is totally going to happen, and is totally your girlfriend who lives in Canada and is real and likes you.

In case you didn’t watch the video, or couldn’t believe the video, THE LINE is a city that is one big line (thus the name) through the northern Saudi desert that is a wonderful magical place where there are no cars and robots do all the work and life is great, you guys, totally nothing wrong could happen here ever, don’t ask about the people who used to live where THE LINE was, it’s a bad idea. Don’t anger or taunt THE LINE. THE LINE knows where your children sleep.

If any other world leader proposed this, they would definitely be removed, and possibly escorted to the nearest “recovery facility”. But bin Salman does what he wants and what he wants is a city so cool he reportedly had his developers research science fiction dystopias because he thinks they’re also cool.

THE LINE will of course never exist, but it will waste an ungodly amount of Saudi money (which was, remember, extracted in part via beatings) to make bin Salman feel better about himself or something. I don’t know why THE LINE exists. No one does. No one can.

Anyway, bin Salman is obviously an idiot who also happens to be a psychopath who also happens to be the undisputed ruler of one of the Middle East’s great powers. Which explains why Trump and his henchmen love him so much - he’s one of them. (And like them, he’s also not that fond of Islam, at least the variety Saudi Arabia’s championed its entire existence.) And he’s prospered in our benighted age, because everything continues to be horrible.

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#pragma startup blog.post.ai.character.design

As gaming technology continues to evolve, so does the types of characters we interact with in our favorite titles. The latest development in this trend is the use of GPT-powered NPCs, which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. GPT-powered NPCs are a type of artificial intelligence that can be used to create more realistic and lifelike characters in games. By taking advantage of the latest advances in machine learning and natural language processing, these NPCs are able to interact with players in a more natural way, allowing them to express emotions, make decisions, and respond to player choi…

(seizes control of the article from the AI)

AI can generate text all day. Interesting text may be another matter. As in blog articles churned out to sell you something or trick ad networks, so too in video game NPCs printed at scale to populate an endless virtual reality full of people trying to sell you something or trick ad networks.

But an actually valid question remains: can AI-generated NPC design be used to, if not completely automate, at least make possible the creation of MMORPG NPCs that can use GPT-style full text interaction to deliver the illusion of in-world characters that respond to the players around them and react to a changing world?

That sounds like an absolutely insane challenge. I should know. I tried to do it 10 years ago. And failed miserably.

Every Villain Needs An Origin Story

In 2013, I was hired by Portalarium to work on Shroud of the Avatar, a Kickstartered RPG that advertised being a spiritual successor of the Ultima games from the 1980s/1990s. For some reason known only to God, I was almost immediately handed responsibility for the NPC conversation system (I think I made the mistake of saying “*I have some ideas for this” within earshot of other people) and that became my life for the next 5 years or so. But first, since this is the era where everything is horrible, a necessary disclaimer!

Disclaimer: Since as part of my leaving Portalarium I signed a fairly restrictive NDA, I really can’t go into detail about the many, MANY things that angered you, personally about the project. The only reason I’m writing this much is because it’s arguable how enforceable an NDA is from a company that no longer exists, but I’d still rather not get into it, whatever value of “it” may be. Thanks, and keep being really, really mad at me personally over my part in making a video game 10 years ago!

Richard Garriott (aka Lord British) had some very specific ideas about how NPCs should react. Specifically, they should be functionally identical to other players - you click on them, a window opens up, and you talk to them, in a natural full text interface, and they respond, exactly as how you would talk to another player. They then ask you to do something, and you may or may not agree to do it, and at some point in the future you may or may not do that thing, and the NPC will recognize that whenever you see them again and tell you “Nice job”.

Remember, as you read this, I agreed to implement this. Just in case you were at all in any doubt about my sanity.

As development progressed. and the first iteration of this system about six months later found its way into the hands of the eagerly awaiting players, some things became very, very obvious.

• This wasn’t going to work.

• Creating an NPC with full-text responses was very time intensive. The less time spent, the less convincing the NPC was.

• This really wasn’t going to work, at all.

• The Kickstarter promised that the shipped game, including all NPC dialog would be localized in most major European languages. You know, just in case this task wasn’t already completely off the rails.

• it’s not working

• The first “scene”, or area in the game, Owl’s Head, was developed in about 6 months. Two months of this was spent scripting the first demo NPC. The second scene, Kingsport, was developed in about 2 months. Further scenes would follow on a monthly cadence, sometimes 2 or 3 a month. Each scene would have anywhere from 25 to 50 NPCs.

• help

• Conversations had to, as part of their structure, embed a “quest-like” structure. I refer to it as this because for the first years of development, Garriott was vehement that the game would have no quests whatsoever. Players, on the other hand, understandably expected an RPG to have, you know, a quest. Or seven. Or more. Or a lot more. I seriously, and continuously, referred to the system internally as “not-a-quest”.

• make it stop

• The less time devoted to each NPC, the harder it was for players to figure out how the hell to make them work. Without a roadmap of the designer’s mind, it was impossible to tell if an NPC wasn’t responding to the next step in a not-a-quest because a flag was missed somewhere in the NPC’s state system, the player didn’t perfectly guess what keyword would trigger that step of responding to a not-a-quest, or if some other unrelated bug, say, loaded the fragment of an NPC state from a nearby other player. As development continued, this got constantly worse and compounded upon itself.

• i seriously cannot drink enough alcohol

• By the time the game was declared content-complete in 2018, everything had combined into an unholy mess that absolutely no one could understand, including me and I wrote the damnable thing. The reviews were predictably scathing.

Shortly after release, I had started drawing up plans to convert all the dialog in the game to a more standard RPG dialog tree system so that the game would be actually, you know, playable. Like every other task with this game, this would have been herculean to the point of impossibility given that there was already thousands of NPCs implemented (for better or worse) and at any rate thanks to low to nonexistent sales almost the entire content team, including me, was laid off very shortly thereafter.

What did we learn from this, class?

• Never, ever volunteer.

• Never believe me when I tell you I can do some impossible weird thing.

• Never work on a Kickstarter project, ever. Trust me on this. Really.

• Oh, you mean NPC dialog. Uh, don’t reinvent the wheel, don’t let scope go wildly off the rails, remember that whatever you do you’re going to have to do hundreds of times if not thousands, and Keep It Simple, Stupid.

But wait! AI is here to save the day!

Ironically, thanks to the Metaverse, another project with unclear goals and an impossible scope, all of these problems may have been solved, thanks to GPT, the god of AI text memes. Several startups (with financial backing 10x or more beyond the budget of my last project) have appeared in the past year to put the promise of AI generated NPCs in your hot, grubby developer paws. The furthest along seems to be Inworld.ai which has APIs for Unreal and Unity available already and quite a bit of buzz.

Inworld uses advanced AI to build generative characters whose personalities, thoughts, memories and behaviors are designed to mimic the deeply social nature of human interaction. This area of the tech industry has exploded this year with generative AI art projects that can churn out painted portraits of people or chat programs such as ChatGPT.

“I’m dead focused on how we build this into a new form of expression, a new way of creation, with these characters,” said Kylan Gibbs, chief product officer and cofounder of Inworld AI, in an interview with GamesBeat. “How do we create a completely new medium for interaction? That’s what I’m excited about.”

I put it through its paces and here’s what I found.

• Interaction with a full text interface is seamless and convincing, courtesy of GPT magic. It really works. It made me cry. Trauma does that. If I had access to this technology 10 years ago, I would be 4% less bitter than I am today.

• Because GPT requires computing power well over what’s currently available on consumer PCs, it requires a cloud computing component. Which means, if you implement this in your game, every line of text a user enters, on every game you ship, will cost a few cents. Now even your single player RPG can have live user support costs!

• There’s very little interaction possible between NPCs (inworld.ai is working actively on this, it seems, so this may change rapidly). Mostly, it’s one-on-one interaction between the player and one NPC.

• There’s no way to have the NPC acquire knowledge of the game world on the fly. You can script the NPC to have knowledge of various things manually, but simply implementing a quest using this system appears to be impossible. Further, there’s no state, or memory, so every interaction is a one-off.

• As is a “feature” of GPT in general — you can’t control what it says, you can only apply guideposts and hope the user doesn’t figure out how to turn your wizard into Heinrich Himmler.

Essentially, at their core, these are still chatbots. Extremely convincing, well implemented chatbots. If you’d like to experiment, here’s my take at one: Lum the Mad, the character from TSR’s Greyhawk and the namesake for my Ultima Online character (and from that, my blogging persona for the past 20 years and dear god I’m old, no wonder my back hurts). You can talk to the NPC via a web interface, I assume in multiple languages, and it will be suitably evil, unless you manage to get into a discussion about Frasier reruns or something. To its credit, it is pretty difficult to knock off track.

So, essentially, it’s a chatbot. A very well implemented chatbot, feature rich and with lots of relevant text derived from about 15 minutes of guidance. But it’s a chatbot, not an NPC. It can’t be relied on for anything gameplay related, just a diversion you dance around with while bored. (I implemented a far less functional chatbot in Shroud as an experiment early in its development. I think a few NPCs in Owl’s Head still have that functionality active, so you can have long meandering conversations about nothing whatsoever and get amusing nonsensical screenshots to show your friends.)

If you need to put 50 chatbots in your game quickly (and don’t mind that they are essentially islands unto themselves that don’t affect the world around them and that any time someone talks to one you’ll be billed), this level of technology is perfect. If you were looking for AI-driven NPCs that could be used for quest support or plot development, to quote Lum the Mad, we have been seeking revenge for this transgression for many years, but it remains elusive.

OK, Smartypants, so what’s next?

The thing is, we are actually tantalizingly close to AI-supported NPC generation that’s useful in a gaming context. Here’s what needs to happen:

• The ability to build a text model for each and every NPC and have them resident on a client’s PC (ideal) or a self-contained affordable cloud server (less so). This is essentially a function of Moore’s Law at this point - right now, those models currently require a level of computing support beyond the reach of almost all consumer-level PCs, but that will inevitably change.

• API support for a gaming framework that gives access to a state machine (aka NPC memory) and also allows for less technical users to create and tweak in-game NPCs. Unity has some promising candidates with ORK Framework and Quest Machine - adding AI-enriched dialogue support to these tools would be a godsend for independent RPG developers.

It’s easy to see both of these happening within a year or two. And at that point, you really will talk to NPCs in your game of choice with a free-form text interface, and when not giving you the next quest they’ll probably try to sell you bitcoins, because everything continues to be horrible.

A few weeks ago, this incredible costume made the rounds on Twitter:

What made this truly incredible, over and above a beauty pageant contestant going as a Battle Sister from Warhammer 40K, is that the designer of the costume, Lesya Patoka, created the outfit in Kyiv “in extreme conditions, to the sound of sirens, without electricity, and by candlelight”, because the city was busy being bombed by Russian drones.

crystal.viktoria

A post shared by Viktoria Apanasenko (@crystal.viktoria)

The contestant, Viktoria Apanasenko, arrived in New Orleans this weekend for the Miss Universe contest, deploying her Battle Sister Flight Suit in glorious fashion.

AND SHE WON IMMEDIATELY AND EVERYONE LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER AND THIS STORY IS NOW OVER.

oh, if only.

You see, this is 2023 and in case you haven’t figured it out with the line I close every one of these with, everything is horrible now. Because not only did Russian trolls deploy immediately in force to support Miss Russia (seen here as Princess Elsa from Frozen)…

…those trolls were joined by Americans. Whom you’d think would know better, or at a minimum cheer on, oh, I don’t know, Miss USA or something. But no! A certain variety of Americans were very concerned.

This might be confusing to those who live in the real world who understand that an entire country’s existence, including costume design, is not actually paid for by US taxpayer dollars, but anger at support for Ukraine among MAGA conservatives has been building for some time.

Joe Biden, the military-industrial-congressional complex, State Department neocons, the War Party comprised of all Democrats and many corporate Republicans, and Western globalist elites have the United States and NATO in a Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. The warmongers are obsessed with destroying Russia. To achieve it, they are determined to fight to the last Ukrainian.

The war in Ukraine is not in the interest of the American people; Biden’s sanctions on Russia are destroying our economy; the billions wasted on this war are taxpayer dollars that should have been spent fixing problems here at home; the Zelenskyy government is a corrupt, de facto Nazi regime; and the proxy war against Russia is pushing us towards nuclear destruction. 

This may be confusing to people who have been following the news the past year or so and distinctly remember Russia invading Ukraine — a minor point not mentioned in the above article, which is essentially Russian propaganda talking points distilled into Conservative English. But what’s more important than Russia invading, brutally occupying, and committing war crimes perilously close to ethnic genocide? Simple: 4 years ago, Volodymyr Zelensky made Donald Trump look really, really dumb.

I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation in Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.

You see, Ukraine was already in the Donald Trump Cinematic Universe as the source of corruption involving Hillary Clinton, Hunter Biden, and all manner of other things very much not involving Donald Trump owing Vladimir Putin favors for some unknown reason, who could say? which explains Trump going on about Q-Anon adjacent conspiracy theories to a reportedly very deeply confused Zelensky, who just wanted some anti-tank missiles to help deter Russia invading his country and now apparently had to make up political dirt about the possible next president of the US to get them. You’d think a president who did that would get impeached or something!

But it’s now fixated in Donald Trump’s squishy-matter-where-other-people-have-a-brain-and-I-dunno-maybe-it’s-cabbage-or-something that Ukraine BAD because it made Trump LOOK BAD and that is BAD, and thus Vladimir Putin, who in the Donald Trump Cinematic Universe is strong, manly and not at all a leader of a crime syndicate masquerading as a government, is good and smart because he invaded Ukraine, which is BAD.

Look, among small children, the mentally handicapped, and elderly ex-Presidents confined to their golf resorts, that sort of reasoning is acceptable. Where things go off the rails is how that has reverberated around the American right in general.

The ultra-far-right - the actual Nazis, exemplified lately by human pond scum Nick Fuentes - are pro-Russian invasion explicitly. They think Russia’s run by Nazis and that’s great! More of that! I trust not much more explanation is necessary, because you are not and cannot pay me enough to search for Nick Fuentes quotes.

The merely far right - best exemplified by Tucker Carlson on Fox News, (who previously has been documented hiring from the ultra-far right to help propagate racist conspiracies) support Russia’s assault on Ukraine because Putin’s Russia is explicitly what they want: a white nationalist ethnostate with a national religion imposed by law. Prior to Russia’s assault, this was seen in their fawning support for Viktor Orban, who while a right-wing strongman who whips up ethnic hatred, at least allows the pretense of elections every so often. Now, Tucker Carlson explicitly parrots the Russian propaganda line so closely, you can watch his show in the original Russian regularly.

And beyond that, the right wing as a whole, which has absorbed so much of the above that an Oklahama state rep recently demanded Ukrainian troops not be allowed there because “they might misfire missiles into Oklahoma”. (I’ve been to Oklahoma. Mistargeted missile strikes would only improve the place.)

This all filters down to the meme lords and influencers on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit responding to any mention of Ukraine’s resistance with “why are my tax dollars paying for this”, a question never applied to, say, Trump’s weekly taxpayer-funded golf trips, because golfing is far more important than resisting fascist invasions.

And here we are, where even a beauty pageant is held hostage to right-wing trolls screaming “muh money”, because everything continues to be horrible.

Surovikin’s previous claim to fame was running Russia’s intervention in Syria - as an air force commander, this involved almost exclusively massive air strikes, usually against civilian targets. This helped establish Surovikin’s image as an iron-fisted brutish caricature of a Russian general, one which he was all too happy to encourage when dealing with the media.

As Russia quickly discovered, the lessons learned in Syria weren’t terribly helpful in Ukraine, mainly because Ukrainians had the annoying habit of having actual air defenses. However, in the aftermath of the Russian rout from Kharkhiv, Ukraine pulled off a surprise blow deep within Russian territory - knocking out the Crimea Bridge, a huge prestige project for the Kremlin and a thumb in Vladimir Putin’s eye. In response, Putin, supported by yowling ultra-nationalists on Telegram, decided to make Ukrainian civilians suffer and suffer hard. Thus, enter Russia’s most experienced bomber of civilians, stage left.

However, while gleefully bombing Ukraine’s electric infrastructure into the Stone Age (or at least giving it the old war college try, with the assistance of a bunch of Iranian drones), Surovikin also used the influence he had won from stomping around on Russian TV to pull Russian troops out of Kherson. Militarily, this was absolutely the correct move; Ukraine had almost entirely cut off supply lines to the troops on the far side of the Dnieper river and were set to annihilate them in detail. The withdrawal itself, unlike the Kharkiv collapse, was performed competently; no massive stockpiles of weaponry were left behind, and the vast majority of troops got out to fight another day.

However, a tactical victory can be a strategic defeat, and Kherson was the largest city Russia had taken in the war. Losing it was a pretty big blow, and it looks like Surovikin is taking the blame for it.

Or maybe it’s a bit more complicated. Russia being what it is (a militarist state verging on outright fascism), politics tends to be opaque. And here Wagner PMC enters the story.

Wagner PMC (private military company) is the mercenary army of Yevgeny Prigozhin, who since Vladislav Surkov lost power is the most interesting person in Russian politics. A longtime “associate” of Vladimir Putin, and like most now fabulously wealthy for the association, Prigozhin is also an ex-convict whose public pronouncements usually verge on the unprintably obscene (such as when the New York Times asked as to Wagner’s interest in Sudan’s mineral wealth, he explained it was because he wanted to impress a woman he had “friendly, comradely, working sexual relations with”). Prior to the war in Ukraine, he was known, at least in America, mainly for one of his other business interests - the “Internet Research Agency”, the notorious St. Petersburg troll factory that did its best (on a shoestring budget) to cause havoc in the US electoral system, mostly through really bad Facebook ads.

Yet now Prigozhin isn’t just a Facebook troll, he’s a full-on 21st century warlord, in direct — and open — competition with the Russian army. A few months ago, Prigozhin suddenly appeared in Russian prisons offering amnesty for anyone willing to go fight in Ukraine under Wagner’s auspices. I realize this sounds exactly like the bad plot of a movie starring Nicolas Cage, but it really happened.

In his own words:

I only want stormtroopers. Those who move forward, those who are fast as greyhounds, they survive better. Those who hang back, do not understand what to do, get it in the ass.

The first prisoners who fought with me were on June 1, the assault on the Uglegorsk thermal power plant. Forty people from St. Petersburg, strict regime, relapse, went into the trenches of the enemy, cut them with knives, three dead, seven wounded. Among the dead, one was 52 years old, thirty of them were imprisoned, he died heroically.

No one falls back, no one retreats, no one surrenders. When you learn how to behave when surrendering, you will be told about two grenades that you should have with you. For those who arrive and on the first day say: “I’m not going there”, we make a mark, “deserter”, and after that execution follows.

And from a witness:

On July 24 the Wagner PMC boss, Prigozhin himself, came to our [prison] colony. At the command of the head of the institution, all the inmates lined up at the parade ground, and he started to speak about the war (that's how he called it), about the weakening of the regular army, which cannot cope, about cleansing one's sins by blood.

He promised a salary of 100,000 rubles and 100,000-ruble bonuses for the fulfillment of specific tasks. He talked about a pardon from Putin in six months. That if one is killed the relatives would be paid 5 million rubles. He said he had classified orders from the president to use all possible resources.

Prigozhin said that for now he needs volunteers - the bravest and the most vigorous. He called his organization an organized crime group and talked a lot about the advantages of participating in the war through them. Honestly, I thought it was a surrealistic dream. A man, who had a Hero of Russia star pinned to his T-shirt, was telling us loud and clear about what was going on in our country. That bandits are really in power and they don't give a fuck about all kinds of human rights organizations like Gulagu.net or the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers. He told us about losses in combat operations: 10-15% will be killed and 15-20% wounded. He said they did not need cannon fodder, but needed fighters who would fight.

All in all, it sounded very attractive and solid. And the worst thing is that around 300 people out of the 1,300 serving their sentences in the colony wanted to sign up. And what's even scarier is that, according to a man from the entourage, the next time they will not be taking volunteers but those who are on the lists.

Shortly thereafter, Wagner’s assault on the strategically insignificant town of Bakhmut began. And it has been going on ever since. The prisoners recruited by Prigozhin are sent in human wave assaults on the at first surprised, then disgusted, and finally grimly determined Ukrainian fortified lines. And they die. And the next wave is sent. And they die. And the next wave is sent. And they die.

To quote Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president:

Everything is completely destroyed, there is almost no life left. And thousands of their people were lost: the whole land near Soledar is covered with the corpses of the occupiers and scars from the strikes. This is what madness looks like.

Russia’s casualty figures from the Battle of Bakhmut are comparable to a similarly poorly conceived throwing of meat against machine: the Battle of the Somme, in World War One. Tens of thousands dead in a single month (December).

The convicts who fall back are shot by their own men. A few manage to surrender. One, for whatever reason, was sent back by Ukraine in a prisoner exchange. Wagner immediately published an video to the internet of the convict being executed with a sledgehammer. The sledgehammer was later sent to the European Union parliament. Prigozhin loves to troll.

Why is Prigozhin sending a significant portion of Russia’s convict population to die in Bakhmut? Partially to show that Wagner is more effective than the Russian army. This was true, at least until Bakhmut bled them to death. (Regular Russian army units often act as follow-on forces to Wagner human wave assaults.) Prigozhin also mentioned that there were cavernous underground salt mines in the region. Seizing a shattered city because it has a mine nearby may have some logical sense, if you don’t kill tens of thousands of your own men in the process. In the end, we don’t know what is driving the lemmings of Wagner to run off that particular cliff yet.

But here’s the key and why I went on this very long tangent explaining Prigozhin’s history in the war: Surovikin was Prigozhin’s, and Wagner’s, highest ranking ally in the Russian military. And Prigozhin has been very loudly proclaiming how well his praetorians have been doing, as opposed to the regular army - with the exception of Surovikin, who Prigozhin has had nothing but praise for.

Thus the one remotely competent combat leader in the Russian high command is demoted. It will be interesting to see in the next few days how Prigozhin and Wagner respond to this. Most likely, it will involve more senseless attacks. After all, Russian convicts are a renewable resource.

And if Wagner run out of Russians, there’s always Africa.

Because in this blighted world, everything really, really is horrible.

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself, "Well, how did I get here?"

“After 15 Grueling House Speaker Votes, America's Long National Nightmare Can Finally Begin” — the Babylon Bee, which usually isn’t funny.

Or, as I put it on Twitter (which also somehow still continues to exist) late last night:

For a tumultuous hour or so, it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. Vote 14, which started around 10 PM, was hyped by McCarthy and friends as THE VOTE, the one that was finally going to end this nonsense, Deals Have Been Made, Top Men Have Agreed, time to bring it home.

Then Matt Gaetz happened. Matt Gaetz, unindicted sex offender, far-right troll, and avatar of Mike Judge’s “Beavis” character, found himself, sitting next to fellow publicity hound Lauren Boebert, as the center of the universe. The entire country has waiting on the edge of its chair for his vote. The deciding vote. Surely McCarthy wouldn’t have called a vote without nailing down the gentleman creep from Florida. Surely.

As anyone who’s ever been involved with any online communities knows, what happened next is of course what happened. When the spotlight of the global media shined on the troll of the hour, he did what trolls always do: he dropped his pants. And McCarthy was left staring at Gaetz’s metaphorical ass.

On live television.

As the congressmen who surrounded him clapped confusedly (thinking Gaetz’s “present” vote would have enabled McCarthy’s ascension, not dooming it) McCarthy pleaded with Gaetz to change his vote. Gaetz refused. Words were exchanged. A Democrat nearby heckled “On your knees!” at McCarthy, mocking his pleading.

Other Republicans lined up to alternately plead with or shout at the troll of the hour. Mike Rogers of Alabama, the head of the Armed Services Committee, and the person whose job Gaetz was demanding, for one had had enough and lunged at him, only to be pulled back at the last minute by another Congressman, while a nearby Democrat yelled “Gentlemen! Decorum!”

With no speaker, there’s no rules. Democracy in action!

Meanwhile, Donald Trump — remember him? — was busy calling holdouts during the vote, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who somehow is becoming one of the leaders of the Republican party despite, well, everything, acted as his secretary trying to connect him on the floor.

After the mess, the initial impulse of McCarthy’s people was to take the rest of the weekend and figure out what to do next. But apparently Trump pulled his “Thou Shalt Not Disobey Trump” card for the occasion, and another vote was immediately held. Every holdout, including King Troll and unindicted sex offender Gaetz, sullenly voted “present”, and McCarthy had finally nailed his seat, for what little it had become worth. He then gave a long acceptance speech (at around 1 AM) promising to do everything the far right wing of the party demanded.

“This is the great part,” [McCarthy] told reporters. “Because it took this long, now we learned how to govern.”

My reaction to that is adequately explained by Katie Porter’s reading material during all this mess.

So, now we get to watch possibly the most dysfunctional Congress in recorded history meander its way through demolishing the country just to watch it burn, because one of the two national parties has been taken over by trolls and maniacs, where a Q Anon conspiracy maven is suddenly the normal one.

Everything, as always, continues to be terrible.

Nothing describes the mood of Russia’s media these days better than a 2000’s laughably bombastic symphonic metal band stomping through memories of their D&D campaign.

Except, maybe, Russian media itself. Take this excerpt from a New Year’s broadcast that was widely, justifiably mocked on Twitter:

“Springtime for Hitler” by way of Lawrence Welk, with a disturbing number of bored military officers milling around and plastic smiles that never break? Happy new year, everyone.

Now, make no mistake. Russian television has been, for decades now, the sort of thing you don’t watch for fun, but use as psychological torture to demolish the minds of your enemies. It’s been banned in Europe and elsewhere this past year not only for being horribly kitschy, but for justifying genocidal war. And yet, it remains a valuable mirror, not so much of what Russians themselves think, but of what the government wants them to think.

Take this video, for example, which received quite a bit of airplay on prime time Russian television shortly after the invasion of Ukraine:

Performed by “Leningrad”, a group led by the head of a TV network, the song, “No Entry: Russians and Dogs” is a typically subtle piece where the lead singer, backed by two band members wearing stereotypical Slavic blouses with stars of David taped on, screams about how Europeans are discriminating against Russians for absolutely no reason at all, just like Nazis and the Holocaust. It ends with the angry shout “Europeans, don’t be silent: Russians are the new Zhids [a racial slur in Russian for Jews]. You want us all to burn in an oven!”

Much like American conservatives, Russian nationalists are not too fond of taking any responsibility for their actions (often threatening nuclear annihilation and complaining that they’re not allowed to shop in Paris any more in the same sentence). But beyond that, it mirrored the state narrative of the time: Russia was fighting the Nazis again, defending the motherland against fascist invaders. The key difference - in 1941 Russia was fighting for its survival within Russia against fascist Germans who were killing millions of Russians and in 2022 Russia was fighting within Ukraine against a democratic resistance and killing tens of thousands of them as part of a land grab - wasn’t pointed out very often.

Yet, that fig leaf of justification wore off as the war wore on. The turning point was the fall of 2022 - with the Ukrainian army going on the offensive and liberating Kherson and large parts of the Donbas, and the ensuing “partial mobilization” causing massive chaos that couldn’t be swept under the rug, the attitude of the state propagandists shifted noticeably. Much less angry spitting about European fascists and their treachery, and much more… fatalism. Nihilism. This is not the sort of thing you expect to see on your nightly news.

And it’s not a one-off.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but from all accounts it appears that the government of a nuclear armed state is rapidly embracing a Warhammer 40K-style death cult. These examples were all from last week.

Not every message is “you should embrace death”, some, of course, are still “you must break the bones of our enemies”.

No more any attempt at justifying an invasion through Nazis, or Satanists, or “globalists”, or piously claiming Russians are the real victims. Blood and soil, submit or die.

And yet, that’s not the worst of recent Russian media.

As Russia fires its last stock of missiles at Ukrainian power stations trying to ensure they live through winter in misery and darkness, the goal of the bombing campaign is spelled out in lurid detail by this RT video aimed at Europeans. It needs to be seen to be believed.

Psychological operations professionals have a methodology for analyzing propaganda: “SCAME”, an acronym for Source, Content, Audience, Media, and Effectiveness. Unlike most RT product, the SCAME analysis for this is pretty brutally clear: We, Russia, will make you, our enemies, suffer. And bear in mind, the target audience for this piece, at least overtly, was not Russians. Its message is that comfortable, rich Europeans can be reduced to eating rodents in the cold darkness, just like Ukrainians.

This isn’t a war-winning message. It isn’t inspirational at all. It’s an angry yell of a defeated yet still upright fighter that he can still hurt you.

Or, to quote a really bad metal song from the 2000s:

Because everything, profoundly, is terrible.