#blowback

[sowhatifiliveinasmalltowninjapan]

Tricky

Blowback (2001)

[itsmythang]

"If you wanna try to tell me that nobody cares about the politics of the quarterback, then I need you to explain to me why Donald Trump thought it was worth having the quarterback at his rally."

Bomani Jones reacts to Jaxson Dart introducing Donald Trump at his rally

[technofeudalism]

Blowback

A podcast about the American Empire.

please. i am begging you. every last one of you. especially if you are from the United States. listen to Blowback.

[biblioflyer]

Section 31 is responsible for the near destruction of Earth in Picard S3E10.

I had an epiphany the other day while I was out walking: Section 31 fairly reliably has never demonstrably "saved" the Federation on screen that I can recall. On the other hand, literally no good ever seems to come from its obsession with its epistemology that only Section 31 can preserve the Federation's wholesomeness and decency through doing the unethical things your average Starfleet officer cannot and must not do.

In modern espionage, there is a much discussed concept called "blowback." Blowback is a euphemism for the unintended consequences of an action or policy that seemed like a good idea at the time, but has ripple effects that may or may not be foreseeable.

The Fourth (?) Borg attack on Earth and the almost certain many thousands of casualties is an example of blow back. Now in Section 31's defense, the chain of consequences meanders quite a bit and heated arguments over whether this constitutes a black swan or gray rhino are not entirely unjustified.

But the fact remains, that without the assistance of Vadek's rogue Changelings, the Borg Queen clearly did not have the assets to execute her plan to infiltrate Starfleet and set conditions for the assimilation via transporter of Starfleet's junior crew.

Vadek and her Changelings were motivated by vengeance. Vengeance for the torturous experiments they were subjected to by Section 31 and, although its not clearly spelled out, almost certainly the near extinction of the Changeling species by a Section 31 bioweapon. This Vadek would have known about when she rejoined the Great Link, if not before when she and her crew killed the researchers experimenting on them and may or may not have had access to other Section 31 files in the process.

Classic blowback.

I may have misjudged the streaming era of Trek and its handling of Section 31, because while it has normalized it in some ways, that so many problems are caused by Section 31 in this era of Trek does not seem to be an accident. I don't like the normalization as a worldbuilding aspect, but I do appreciate its function as the provocation for cautionary tales.

In universe, Section 31 really needs to be disbanded. As an organization, there is no evidence it has ever actually saved the Federation from any existential threats and it seems to be in the business of reliably creating existential threats. If I had a strip of gold pressed latinum for every time Section 31 was in the chain of causality for a computer virus hive mind taking control of Starfleet vessels and attempting to exterminate organic life, I'd have two strips of gold pressed latinum. Which isn't a lot, but its weird that it happened twice.

[vacuouslyfalse]

Anyway. I've said this before but while I am generally critical of communism and the USSR, anticommunism is a far more bleak and disturbing ideology. There is an oft-repeated lie that the Cold War was a conflict between democratic capitalism and authoritarian communism, but you really don't have to look that hard to see how that narrative falls apart - the people the US supported as bulwarks against communism were consistently antidemocratic.

The cognitive dissonance induced by anticommunism was staggering - you have all these US government officials talking about the loathed enemy, unable to really articulate what they were fighting and why, and why they thought the people they were supporting were better, besides their shared opposition to communism.

A particularly stark example of this comes up in this season of Blowback when the CIA director was flirting with a plan to try and get Soviet soldiers to defect. To shoot down the plan, other CIA operatives showed him evidence of Mujaheddin sexual violence against Soviet prisoners, which elicited a response along the lines of "I see your point, there's no way any of the Soviets would ever ally with those subhuman monsters." But those were the same people the CIA were funding, training, and arming!

Even some concept of pro-US campism (support people who are pro-US!) or shared interest in capitalist profits (support people who make the US money!) doesn't hold up - the Islamic fundamentalists were completely uninterested in what the US was selling, except that it furthered their immediate aims!

[alientitty]

*listening to a podcast about the Korean war* oh ive heard of this historian before lemme look her up!

oh cool what other books has she written or been featured in?

wait is that....

no. 6 cosplayers??!??!?!

[tiredyeehaw]

if you don't have $25 to spare to listen to all of blowback they do have everything available for free on pretty much every streaming platform (incl spotify if you still use that). but also dm me because they literally send you all the mp3 files when you spend that $25, which i did, and I'm happy to distribute them.

Blowback covers the Iraq war, US involvement in Cuba, Afghanistan occupation, the Korean war, our bombing runs (among other things) in Cambodia, and the US involvment/support of South Africa while Angola fought for their freedom. They put in the work to find sources and interview locals who lived through these occupations, along with politicians and academics.

It was my first into to the scope of US imperialism and it's made very accessible to those just starting out in their political learnings. There were a couple times when I had to google certain events/names because I didn't have much of a leftist education on my first listen, but honestly that just inspired more curiosity and never happened enough to deter me from listening

please listen to Blowback 👉👈

[sowhatifiliveinfukuoka]

Record Label History: 4AD Records (TAD 2015)

Swallow

Blowback (1992)