Ryan Explains It

Yes, It's A War

And we're not winning. We haven't lost - but we're not putting ourselves in a good position to win either.

Today's Ryan

Sometimes you have to get down in the mud to meet the enemy where he is. But if you start to get used to being down there, you start to lose the plot, because you'll eventually become indistinguishable from what you're supposed to be fighting against.

Unless you count my stint as a pump jockey and wrench-bender at Zupe's Standard in the late 70s, I never served in uniform. Not that that has anything to do with it.

But anyway, I grew up surrounded by men who fought in WW2 and Korea and Vietnam. The ones who were able or willing to talk about it, all said something along the lines of, "You do what you have to do, but you do it with honor - otherwise, what's the fuckin' point?"

They all said something else: There's nothing good or glorious or ennobling about combat. It sounds bad, it looks bad, it feels bad, and it smells bad - it's absolutely terrifying, and you end up going a little crazy just doing everything you can think of trying to make it stop.

Today's Ryan

This is excellent is a couple of ways.

• He follows up on his own post, in order to make corrections and point out a possible error on his part
• He looks at it from an angle that's way out of his usual frame of reference

This is just good work.

Today's Ryan

You don't have to put the politician on the payroll. In fact, you don't want to do that because the risk outweighs the payoff.

You can pay lobbying firms to nag the congress critters, but that can get crazy stupid expensive.

So what you do is go with a social media campaign, aimed at getting a politician's constituents to pressure the politician for you.

(We're probably seeing a version of that at work with the Gaza protests, BTW)

Today's Ryan

Social Media is a weapon. We were supposed to have learned this one 8 years ago when Russia used Facebook to hit us with all kinds of dis-information shit.

Keep It Sane

Don't be fooled.

Putin's an asshole, but he's not a mad man and he's not stupid.

Слава Україні

Свобода знаходить шлях

Today's Ryan

I don't know that we're paying enough attention to this. The Russians' Facebook campaign in 2016 kinda sneaked up on us, and it's more than a bit probable that the same thing is at work across the social media universe.

 

Because We Are All Savages

About that TikTok thing - radicalization thru online short form content is real. We see it every day if we pay attention.