Why the Left Should Support Star Wars: It’ll Never Work

A reader from Australia sent me the following quote from Alexander Cockburn (somewhere past the 32 minute mark):

Liberals sometimes say, “We want weapons that work.” No we don’t. We want weapons that don’t work. We should be in favour of Star Wars, it will never work…

4 Comments

  1. yastreblyansky April 25, 2015 at 9:42 pm | #

    Heh. That’s why I like NSA bulk data collection. To make sure they can never find anything.

  2. foppejan2 April 26, 2015 at 4:01 am | #

    I don’t think the point is to develop a star wars program; the point is to subsidize corporate america at the expense of the citizens, via prima facie important-sounding initiatives. If something comes out of a program like that at all, it’s only because a corporation accidentally developed something that will allow them to rake in even more free money at ‘cost plus’…

  3. Mushin April 26, 2015 at 10:22 am | #

    War never works and is dysfunctional narcissistic borderline hysteria of western patriarchal political economic bean counters herd stupidity in analysis paralysis with their heads up their a$$.

    Cory you can quote me on that sentence!

    Here is an inventive idea I have had in a star war musing and the ultimate solution to the hard wicked tail about to kill us.

    We create a company to install windows in current leadership’s belly buttons so they can begin to see what the hell their creating as bean counters with their heads up their a$$es. I want patten rights on this invention because fundamentally it is a “Meta Design Literacy Reframing Map Changing Landscape of Current Vision.” Looking hard and deliberately for high tech, low tech, no tech Co-Founders to assist in collaborative breakthrough innovation in biological cognitive science……Very complex and looking for expertise of human beings. I predict this is the next big big big iteration in technology. If you take the quantum jump early, today, immediately, limited offer, and send me $100 you are a founding member in the ultimate solution to war. Our spirit-sense-response creative enterprise promises future generations will be making songs up about US and Mission Impossible will become a “LIVE REALITY PROGRAM.”

    Come on trust me, dig down into those deep pockets and throw some change to barking dog in the village!

    A few Pointers for Our Hunting Party

    A new invention in language is like a scar that heals over the breakdown in the gap and eventually becomes a passable imitation of the original notions of those who deny, resist and oppose the notion at first hearing it.

    “Colonel, I’d call it a cluster f$ck.”
    Gunnery Sergeant Highway’s characterization of a mobilization drill in the film Heartbreak Ridge 1985

    “We sure liberated the hell out of this place.”
    
American soldier in the ruins of a French village, 1944; quoted by Max Miller, The Far Shore

    Surefire ways to stamp our Future All Seeing Eye innovation
    • We’ve never done it that way.
    • We’re not ready for that yet.
    • We’re doing all right without it.
    • We tried it once and it didn’t work out.
    • It cost too much.
    • That’s not our responsibility.
    • It won’t work.

    A poem for my Islamic Brothers
    Tired of Speaking Sweetly By Hafiz c. 1320-1389

    Love wants to reach out and manhandle us.
    Break all our teacup talk of God.

    If you had the courage and
    Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
    He would just drag you around the room
    By your hair,
    Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
    That bring you no joy.

    Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
    And wants to rip to shreds
    All your erroneous notions of truth

    That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
    And with others,

    Causing the world to weep
    On too many fine days.

    God wants to manhandle us,
    Lock us inside of tiny room with Himself
    And practice His dropkick.

    The beloved sometimes wants
    To do us a great favor:

    Hold us upside down
    And shake all the nonsense out.

    But when we hear
    He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
    Most everyone I know
    Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
    Out of town.

  4. Junius April 26, 2015 at 10:22 am | #

    Maybe, because “liberal” has never meant “progressivity”? Maybe because the ideological framework always promoted consists only in “cosmetic rights” based upon “social functionalism” and not upon “class struggle”?
    I don’t know. I just know that when in Europe all mass socialist parties became “liberal” in the end of the Seventies… democracy and social rights are progressively dead, and Europe is progressively become similar to the USA.
    Rawls warned Europeans, but nobody paid attention.
    Sorry, but this kind of irony is common in Europe since the last two decades.

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