Captain Pugwash

Somewhat salty. IR postgrad; logistics & marine industry professional; history enthusiast. Often found messing around in boats.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@AndreasKoureas_ Better than being funded by unaccountable, tax-dodging billionaires, surely?

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@MilHist_Lee It's kind of embarrassing that almost three years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this guy is still presented to first-year undergraduates as a pillar of the discipline.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@HLC_actual And presumably to see if all the money they spent on information operations was worth it...

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@richdecamp @Number10cat If you trash the Capitol again this time round, you'll have done it once more than us.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@deberd99 @Danger_Rand But it's not your entire personality, so that doesn't compute to them, I guess?

Or maybe they just don't know because you don't need to take your emotional support AR to Walmart

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

I want to tell you a story about an old man, with a silly name and ridiculous hair, who was born in New York, became a media personality and then a right wing politician. 🧵

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@WaldschratTomke @ForTullos Honestly, I think that if you write a tech-driven story, your only real novelty is continually raising the stakes, at which point it's even harder to find a human angle, you get to that Stalin quote about a million deaths being just a statistic, and you still get beaten by WH40K.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@WaldschratTomke @ForTullos I suppose one could argue that he's trying to show the kind of tragic cavalry-charging-machine-guns transformation at the start of WWI and that's why the casualties get so high... but what is the point if you're not going to actually say anything meaningful about the tragedy? >

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@WaldschratTomke @ForTullos I have enjoyed some deeply unserious war movies from time-to-time, and in the same vein, he does write good turn-your-brain-off action until the shark-jumping gets repetitive. Like the Star Wars prequels, if you even slightly interrogate the premise, it all kinda unravels.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@CathyYoung63 There are still people who use the word 'cuck' unironically?

[George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d]

One way to think of the Trump campaign is as kind of DEI program for sociopaths

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@WaldschratTomke @ForTullos If bad sci-fi authors wrote WWI, the High Seas Fleet followed orders and came out again in 1918 to get massacred in a last stand against the Royal Navy, because it would have been cool. I think it's much more interesting and human that the sailors refused to go and mutinied.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@WaldschratTomke @ForTullos And that's why I stopped reading, really. I'm a military history and technology nerd who liked it enough to build a career out of it, but you can't lose sight of how the real stories are the people in those machines, because once you do, you lose grounding in human reality.

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@jill_shank @kristenmag Genuine question - how do you know you're not also in an information silo?

[Captain Pugwash @_smartcasual]

@Phunkin_El @RestIsPolitics @RoryStewartUK @campbellclaret Unfortunately, I think the conflation of the three categories is quite deliberate in some quarters, because it allows some politicians and other influential people to weaponise and stoke racism without endorsing it.