We use a fair number of those venerable old Saxon words, but they’re mostly considered impolite, as Samuel Beckett reminds us in his novel Watt

Watt conceived for Mr Graves a feeling little short of liking. In particular Mr Graves’s way of speaking did not displease Watt. Mr Graves pronounces th charmingly. Turd and fart, he said, for third and fourth. Watt liked these venerable Saxon words. And when Mr Graves, drinking on the sunny step his afternoon stout, looked up with a twinkle in his old blue eye, and said, in mock deprecation, Tis only me turd or fart, then Watt felt he was perhaps prostituting himself to some purpose.

Exactly you have to look at it objectively. It's like the trolley problem bomb 2 cities killing ~240k people almost instantly or continue fire bombing and launching a land invasion for another year or 2 potentially killing millions.

Would I want to make that decision, fuck no.

And to this day there are people who believe and argue that this was fair. Propaganda is louder than a nuke.

Umm, that last claim is wholly untrue. Every nuclear-armed country (save perhaps a couple) has detonated nuclear bombs. The US isn't even the only one to use it intentionally against civilians, since the French were actively studying the deleterious effects of fallout on their colonial subjects in French Polynesia, which is what led to the Rainbow Warrior state-sponsored terrorist attack against New Zealand. I'm sure that there are other cases of the USSR or some other nuclear power testing their own devices against civilian populations if I had a mind to check.

Perhaps "the US is the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon against civilians of a country with which it was at war" or "the only country to detonate a nuclear weapon as an act of war"

Those certainly were appalling and destructive events. But why give them some special status over other bombing raids like the March 9 fire bombing of Tokyo, which also killed over 100,000 people in one night? Dropping 1 bomb vs. dropping 1,600 tons of conventional bombs in 3 hours?

Your title would read better if you changed the second “against” to “of”, OP.

...and used them against civilians.

It was hard to find again so now I got it saved!

Awesome blog.
I keep meaning to delve into it more, but the lure of doomscrolling keeps interfering with that, sadly. 😕

(whoops, I meant that emoji in my comment, not as a reaction)

My face when I took mushrooms at the family picnic cuz I thought it was gonna be boring.

I’ve driven the entirety of i95, and Richmond was the very last of the northern metropolis. After Richmond, there was nothing until we hit Jacksonville, and continued into central Florida.

Lol.

Lots of that space is really beautiful countryside. I've driven through a fair bit of it.

Wealthy people used to summer in the Appalachians - it's 10-20 degrees cooler there in the summer.

Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway run for a total of hundreds of miles from Northern VA to I think Georgia, along the eastern portion of the Appalachians. I've ridden some of it on my bike in the summer, and it's amazing, especially the Shenandoah valley.

Really, once you go west of 95 even a couple miles it becomes farmland.

Huh. I'm certainly not as well-traveled as some, so... right on?

Yea, comparatively empty is a good description.

If you've ever been up and down the east coast, it's pretty apparent. Population density just plummets once you hit Richmond (heading south) and really stays low until you reach central/southern Florida.

If you drive westward towards the Appalachians in those states, you see a lot of farmland and forest.

It's a beautiful thing.

I mean... comparatively empty?

AFAIK there are still many millions of people living there, despite whatever struggles are mentioned.

No..?

If it is inaccessible, here are other ways to read:

• Tadeusz Borowski, Here in Our Auschwitz
• The War on History is a War on Democracy
  • Listen

Great video. Love to See demonstrations!

That spear launcher is so much cooler than a bow

More mass, more velocity, more badass

I want to see a person who’s spent their whole life flinging these things launch one

Very cool. Never knew about spears like that before.
Also, ...camels? Lots changed I guess.

Fuuuuuck this is bleak.

And Republicans and billionaires keep pushing to roll back child labor laws and reduce the minimum working age. Because of course that would allow companies to pay workers less because they’re kids and less experienced, and thus reduce costs while increasing the labor force. Absolutely fucked.

This is the gilded age the billionaires want to return us to.

All but the very smallest babies work. All began at 3:30 a.m., expected to work until 5 p.m.

He is on the job from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. [17 hours a day] for seven days in the week

When Lewis Hine began traveling the country in 1908 to document the working lives of children, around two million Americans younger than 15 were full-time laborers. A reformer and an investigative photographer for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), Hine, who trained as a sociologist, used his Graflex camera for what he called “detective work”: He’d materialize outside a factory or mine or cannery (sometimes in the guise of a Bible salesman) and wangle his way in. Other times, management denied him entry, even threatening him with physical violence.

I didn't know that Hine was a trained sociologist when he started taking his camera into these places. How fascinating! The images are worth a look, they're haunting and stark.

Damn.

It’s on brand

Do you mean brand of Olga or brand of Christianity? I'm really curious.