Steady Eddie

Been thinking a lot lately about Eddie Willers. (Cliffs Notes version…)

I started down this line of thinking after listening to an episode of Your Welcome where the guest posited that every single person can be best at one thing, and that it’s a good thing to promote that.

Mmm….not sure I agree. Can you be proficient enough at one thing to make yourself useful to someone else in furtherance of another goal? It Doesn’t Take A Hero. (Yes, the sorts of high school side reading that stem from being the son of an Army officer…)

Your abilities also change over time. Mine have been significantly affected (negatively) by my medical condition. So maybe I’m not what I was meant to be, what I’m best at, but I can still do various things, and derive a sense of accomplishment from doing those things that maybe aren’t my forte. But no matter what you end up doing, do it as well as you can, nad get the rewards from that.

And try to enjoy those rewards. (One of the places I really fall down; I beat myself for accolades…)

Back to Eddie, however — he’s not one of the bad guys, even if it’s not one of the incredible protagonists. He’s not stupid. I mean, in the early aughts, he might have driven a Dodge Stratus.

But that’s not the temperament he had in the book, or the movie(s).

He was always loyal to a goal set by someone else. I think there’s something admirable about that…even if he wasn’t doing the single thing at which he was best.

Return of the Mac

Background music… (And apologies to myself, or anyone who reads this in the future, for any broken/dead links; everything gets deleted, eventually…)

MacMoMo that is. On Orkut back in the day, there was a particularly-radical Islamic grad student at a university in Scotland who was particularly intrigued with the “new left,” or “Libertarian Socialists.” His first name was Mohammad, which got shortened to “MoMo.” Since he was in Scotland, that morphed into “MacMoMo.”

Cathy Young, a former writer for Reason (a publication to which I’ve been subscribed on and off since about 1995, and to whose foundation I donate money) published a tweet storm from someone I think might be MacMoMo just absolutely eviscerating the thing that seems to be an undeniable truth in the NeoHippie LP Russia Caucus, that the gas attacks against people in Syria didn’t happen.

So, who I think is MacMoMo’s rebuttal to that.

It has to be a lie to continue granting unquestioned veracity to the storylines coming from these people who’ve “taken over” the Libertarian Party. The biggest proponent, one featured prominently in the LP’s antiwar rally in DC a short time ago, claimed on another podcast that the Rwandan genocide was because of something the US did.

The source for that? Edward S. Herman. The same guy who helped write coauthored Distortions At Fourth Hand. He also wrote extensively denying what the Serbs did in Bosnia/Kosovo during the 1990s.

The evidence for those things is pretty conclusive. There’s people alive who were on the ground that you can talk to. The UN and ICC held hearings on what happened.

But it takes me back to “The Debate,” which the NeoHip bobbleheads running the LP loudly-proclaimed was won by one participant. You have to snake around the reasoning, but it’s ultimately straightforward — Everything bad that happens is because of the US.

No. That’s not true.

Then you start looking at the things that get omitted from the storylines to protect those who you admire, and who might have been at fault.

Things happen. There’s no underlying reason or cause. There’s no grand conspiracies.

That realization is very, very difficult for many people to accept.

It speaks to things like whatever happened with the Nordstream Pipelines.

It could have been the US. It could have been Russia. It could have been Ukrainians. It also could also have been an accident. But there’s Sy Hersh saying that the US blew it up!

Logical fallacy.

We’ll just gloss over contravening information about what Syria did with regards to chemical weapons.

Just leave out the parts that don’t fit, and you’ll be better off.

Um.

A similar line with the health effects of the mRNA vaccines. Any negative health thing that pops up for someone who was vaccinated is because of the vaccine.

Can’t be that there’s any other explanation. It has to be because of the vaccine.

Or not. It couldn’t be anything else, because there needs to be something immediately to blame.