As the National Security State Turns
I’ve always liked movies, too much really. I grew up with WGN, which showed a lot of movies, most especially all those flicks from the 1930s Hollywood Golden Age. The screen was still new, sound just added, and they thought good writing was essential to good screen.
Hollywood always put out tons of schlock. Is it more today than previously? The answer to that is definitively yes. Yet, once in awhile, maybe it’s just another probability equation at this point, good screen appears. Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine is excellent. Well written, well acted, smart, funny, beautifully filmed, and the greatest piss-take on the American National Security State since Kubrick’s, Dr. Strangelove.
While Kubrick brilliantly skewered the atomic madness of the military, McDonagh looks at the global machinations of the always oxymoronic titled intelligence agencies, specifically the 1973 Chilean coup. Though he does also show Lumumba, "I always forget that African country." Well worth the ticket.
McDonagh is another representative of that London Irish phenomena. You ravage a peoples, then let a bunch of them into the imperial capital. You end up with some great art, literature, movies, and music. Go back to Rome and the Greeks for that matter. So America, don’t despair the future.
In a related matter, Radio War Nerd has an excellent interview with Stephen Kinzer about his new book, Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine. A long time ago, in a galaxy not nearly far enough away, I first read Kinzer and his essential book Bitter Fruit concerning the National Security State’s 1952 Guatemalan coup.
One of the National Security State's greatest propaganda acts is to ignore their past actions. For example, they ignore America's long history of provocations preceding the Russian invasion of Ukraine, same with across the Middle East. Ignorant of the world, though completely dependent on it for our standard of living and the violence bestowed to secure it, Americans are simplistically told, “They hate our freedom.”
Which gets to the most recent security state intrigue, the entertaining Jensen Huang affair. The Journal writes, “The CEO, who has acknowledged an affair with a woman accused of spying for China, has lobbied President Trump on loosening export controls.”
Really? I don’t think Jensen needs subterfuge to explain his actions. That he is a greedy, greedy pig is more than enough explanation for everything he does. After all, we’ve celebrated as an unmitigated good greed and its excesses for the last half-century, really it goes back further. A hundred years ago, Keynes wrote we'd get over it. Not yet anyway.
Speaking of AI and greed, Eli the Computer Guy has a nice little rant on the latest Tech layoffs. I agree they are just beginning. How much is as purported AI and how much is, as Eli argues, that Tech over the last decade grew fat and bloated remains debatable. Whichever the immediate case, I’ve cautioned over the last few years that being dismissive of the power of this latest generation of compute is done at one’s own peril.
In its short, seventy-five years of existence, compute has already done plenty to rearrange the world and concentrate power. With greed as our most dominant contemporary social value, job destruction will assuredly be compute’s greatest value measure. Not that we can't do with a lot of job destruction, but it needs to come with a restructuring of societal organization and a revaluation of values.