Behind the Bastards

That's like weird and rich dad, poor dad. Yeah. The rich dad, poor.

It's fantastic when talking about violence and violence in the decolonial process and like how it gets very nice that these colonial states, apartheid states like Israel speak in the language of rights.

But every time they fucking do, they get met with violence.

And it is entirely understandable that when the state speaks to you only in violence, you will reply using the same language that is spoken to you with.

From Algeria to Vietnam to Palestine.

It's also a real good example of one of the things Umberto Eco talked about in her fascism, his essay trying to kind of explain what fascism is, syncretism, right?

cough cough Ready Player One yeah

by the end of June, he had built around the mills, a protective 12-foot fence that included rifle holes, water mains capable of blasting strikers with boiling water and wires attached to a generator, which could be electrified.

This serious battle would last the next 14 hours. After an initial surge, the Pinkertons were pinned down in their barges. After several hours, the crowd attempted to sink the barges by cannon fire.

Residents borrowed the cannon that had been, that the city used for commemorations.

The crowd also sent burning rail cars rolling towards the barges and sprayed oil into the river, which they attempted to light on fire in hopes of burning the Pinkertons out of their barges.

That is a phase of our business that we are not particularly delighted or proud of and we're out of it. However, there was nothing illegal about it at the time.

You think about stuff like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Now All Quiet on the Western Front was based off of a classic book about german soldiers in world war one.

It's also gives you a sympathetic Oh, yeah, like take on the german soldier.

I keep going back to James Scott's Seeing Like a State, which is you know an amazing book and people haven't read it absolutely pick up a copy.

In the first you know couple of chapters one of the things he talks about is land disclosure.

The question of exclusion from property or exclusion from space not only is it fragmenting public space but we start to look at the way that all of a sudden property has to exist right.

There's debate as to the extent to which he was actually trying to program them and the extent to which they were all just taking acid.

But it's the classic thing of, it's the brainwashed assassin.

The person who doesn't know they're an assassin, where you can literally program someone, I guess like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall, to go assassinate somebody.

The book, The Manchurian Candidate, and the movie have a big impact on this program.

When that comes out, it gets them another wave of interest.

The book The Manchurian Candidate is about a bunch of Americans who get captured by the Chinese and then sent back to the United States having been secretly programmed to damage the United States.

The earliest influential book that Ron read as a kid was The Science of Hitting by baseball legend Ted Williams.

One of Ted's pieces of advice in that tome is to be very careful about the swings that you choose to take.

Ron's father claims his son took this advice to heart, telling The New Yorker, 'I must have thrown half a million pitches to Ron. I think he swung at about 500 of them.'

He went after Disney like seven months ago. I know. I know. He did not learn that fucking lesson. That did not stick with you, man.

Yeah, the net force novels, not necessarily a young adult franchise, but they also were ghost written by somebody else.

Like, Al Gore Bullshit Warming Myth. Yeah, it's a bad pun.

But this is kind of, you know, it was they they claimed it had nothing to do with actual political content.