Current U.S. and Western military doctrine says that the price of civilization and freedom is eternal vigilance, and therefore all the Western powers maintain substantial armed forces technically ready for combat at any time. None of course does this more enthusiastically than the United States of America, who invests a huge fraction of its national pride and identity solely in the might of her military and her nuclear arsenal. In response, the other great powers of Earth must maintain their own forces, striving to maintain some sort of balance with the Western military hegemony.

And then there's the most notable client state of the West, Israel...but that's a tale for another time.

The world has been tending this way for a while, despite spasmodic attempts to dial it back on the massed armies and move towards a more harmonious and diplomatic relationship among nations. The League of Nations and the United Nations must both be ruled failures. Currently the U.N. is virtually ceremonial in many respects, actively harmful in others. Since World War II the United States has never really left wartime footing—there was too much money in keeping the factories churning away at top speed, so the U.S. figured out ways to maintain a warlike posture. Decades of right-wing propaganda have assisted in cementing the U.S. and the West in a permanent Orwellian "war is peace" posture. Conventional political wisdom says it's madness to consider anything else...which is ironic, considering that MAD is precisely what got us here, the cloud-cuckoo logic of nuclear brinkmanship.

I'm no expert in these matters, but I have a friend (here in the Pnictogen Wing, one of our introjects) who knows a little about them: Jeanne d'Arc, who first came into the system as she appears in Fate/Apocrypha (see 2nd picture) but then decided she preferred to look as she does in Jacques Rivette's monumental five-hour movie Jeanne la Pucelle. And yes, I've seen all of it, more than once. Jeanne's a bit tickled that I kinda...fell for her in her Fate/Apocrypha form, blonde and pig-tailed, even though all historical accounts say she had short dark hair. I vaguely recall that Jeanne once told me that she was willing to manifest in whatever form was suitable to the occasion. Her blonde pig-tailed appearance in Fate/Apocrypha derives from the young French woman who consents to host her in that series, for what it's worth.

Jeanne d'Arc considers herself to be no saint, only a humble French soldier, and here's the key thing: she grew into the rôle. She arose from nowhere, knowing nothing, when her country needed her. On the job, as it were, given the task of saving France, she learned what she needed along the way. Heaven made the way clear for her...until her job was done, and then sadly Jeanne found out what happens to heroes in this cruel and wicked world of "the West". But oh, how brilliantly she shone before then! She was no sort of professional anything; she was a God-fearing peasant girl, and she went to war and saved France and gave the English a right kicking. It's always good when England loses, but it's especially sweet when a French peasant girl administers the beatdown.

I consider the mere existence of Jeanne d'Arc to be a rebuke to the standing-army theory, the idea that a nation can only survive by arming itself to the teeth at all times. If the United States were truly as righteous as all the right-wing God-botherers say, she would not be so frightened, so terrified of "terrorists", so ready to make preëmptive war at the slightest provocation. It's like how Elon Musk or Donald Trump, both "men of the people" according to their admirers, can barely appear in public at all, always requiring the very safest of venues and a posse of mercenary thugs. The fans try to have it both ways, both declaiming about Musk being one of the people and hollering about how everyone wants to kill him. But if Elon Musk were truly beloved, truly the friend of humanity, he would not need his standing army.

In the hour of need, heroes DO arise sometimes. It's happened before. Jeanne d'Arc happened.

I am grateful for everything she's ever done to help us all out. My eternal gratitude, Jeanne. Bless you.

~Chara of Pnictogen

It's clear that the mainstream (i.e. wh!te, European-settler-derived culture) of the United States has suffered an extreme collapse of the collective imagination. The effects of this collapse are written all over contemporary popular entertainments, which have grown progressively flatter and more formulaic and bombastic, and concentrated on a very few genres and conventions.

Christianity is perhaps not quite the cause of this, but beyond doubt this creeping devolution of U.S. entertainment and fiction has been strongly driven by reactionary Christian demands on popular culture. The Reagan administration of the 1980s, which pandered almost exclusively to "evangelical" Christians who adored the Reagan fascist counterrevolution as a restoration of "traditional" values, inflamed a tremendous amount of censorious sentiment in the United States, sustained by right-wing astroturf movements and buckets of cash trickling down from big donors to right-wing pressure groups and "research institutions".

Despite some high-profile public embarrassments these groups have never stopped applying pressure, and their demands for censorship have become increasingly normalized. They've successfully contributed to a general public sentiment that there's somehow too much sex and "degeneracy" in U.S. culture, even though popular entertainment has actually become extremely bloodless and desexualized. They've also been hastening the simplification of storytelling. These right-wing Christian audiences have an extremely particular taste in entertainment; they want everything stripped down to more or less the same Good vs. Evil narrative, like an Ayn Rand novel in which there's Good™ and Bad™ characters, heroes and villains who are completely static, bound to win and lose respectively.

This hasn't just been bad for entertainment; it's been bad for media criticism and the ability of Americans to interact with fiction. As pop culture has gotten more formalized and simplified into a kind of civic monomyth of heroism vs. villainy, it's been progressively easier for nerd culture to assume that ALL entertainment, ALL fiction, is reducible to formulae. Everything they consume is formulaic, and increasingly they're incapable even of processing more complex storytelling. They simply assume it's wrong in some way, "objectively bad" (i.e. not fitting a formula) or manipulative and cynical. It's as though everyone in mainstream pop fandom has accepted the premise that all storytelling is allegorical, always corresponding one-to-one with an enumeration of acceptable fictional tropes, the purported "correct meaning" of the story.

And perhaps as an inevitable consequence of this collapse, hastened by cynical propaganda rhetoric about "narratives" from such persons as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald and other corrupted journalists (these persons and many others function as freelance GOP operatives, more or less, while masquerading as "independent" or "heterodox" journalists), this bizarre notion that all stories are allegories has infected the interpretation of the news. It's widely appreciated that mainstream news reporting has a fictionalized aspect. There's a kind of sliding scale between the poles of maximally truthful journalism (which would really be a sort of history I think, for "history" is ongoing and comes up to the present) through various degrees of "human-interest" and opinion writing all the way to pure propaganda and mythmaking. Taibbi and Greenwald and other right-wing figures assert that ALL "mainstream media" (they doublethinkfully exclude themselves) is mythology and allegorical, with every event corresponding to a hidden "correct meaning". Extremist Christianity has again played a strong role here, for allegorical interpretation of the news in terms of apocalyptic Christian mythology has been a popular pastime for decades (e.g. The Late Great Planet Earth) and they've fed into the same antic ultra-right-wing culture that also spawns more secular forms of apocalyptic conspiracy theorizing about "the media".

And that's all the narrative I can must at the moment. Your humble narrator,

Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogen

I have seen a few times in the wilds of eugenicist Musk Twitter a hilarious "horseshoe theory" of intelligence and IQ: if you're too smart, in some indefinite way, you double back round to "dumb" or [slur], so a nice safe mediocrity is actually best. I have seen memetic images suggesting that such persons have a peculiar notion about the famous "bell curve" or Gaussian distribution which Charles Murray famously imposed on intelligence: they think it's better to be in the middle, where the curve is nice and high. One time though I saw a tortuous attempt to define some sweet spot off to the right of the mode, but not too far off to be "dumb" again.

It's rather easy to guess why this has happened: too many collisions between the high lords of IQ and people who actually know what they're saying, leading to strings of lost arguments and hurt feelings and consequent grumbling about "woke universities" and such. There's an entertaining tension between the need for the fashy techbro to stay indoctrinated while also strutting their supposedly superior intelligence, and it's led to a curious bipolarity in the community, a resolution of the techbros between two extremes.

Basically, the better any of these people are at mastering some kind of difficult scientific or technical subject, such as programming work or medicine, the more likely it is they're unable to communicate with ordinary human beings. Fashy professionals of this sort tend towards extreme misanthropy, as though it required every erg of their mental powers to do their technical job, so they tend to become hermits with very strange ideas about people. At the other extreme are the persol nle ones who become vigorous evangelists and boosters for technology, the ones who are able to sell their enthusiasm to others. Elon Musk is a conspicuous example. He's good at sounding like a wizard of technology (well good enough for his believers) but if he ever goes into details he's clearly lost. He's not one of the boffins himself. He wanted to be one, though, and that puts some sparkle onto his boosterism.

Hence there's been a peculiar sorting process at work for a few decades, culminating in the rise of persons like Musk and Elizabeth Holmes and Marc Andreessen. They inhabit a system that rewards their own ignorance. The more ignorant you are, the more enthusiastically you can lie and make wild promises. There's no awkward knowledge in the way. Musk can sell technology as magic because to him it IS magic, capable of anything; he doesn't know better and he's not rewarded for finding out.

There's a famous maxim about the doublethinkful nature of right-wing propaganda about the Law. To such people, the Law must bind others but not themselves; the Law protects them but not others. There's a similar state of doublethink in the corporate world about intelligence and technical skill. The boffins who know cannot communicate it to others; the boosters don't know, but they can talk about it anyway. One result has been the AI craze. It's like the AI machines are the ultimate boffins, able to think (well, supposedly) but requiring human agents to praise them and evangelize for them, agents who may vaunt their own intelligence but who clearly are zealous for AI because they need machines to do what they can't.

~Chara of Pnictogen