One embarrassing fact about me is that I didn’t like Obama as a president initially because I thought he had Jimmy Neutron canceled because he didn’t let his daughters watch it. Unfortunately, I spread that all through my elementary school and didn’t realize my mistake until nearly a decade later.
If you had to choose between Red jumping into bed with someone who's not Liz, or Red's sexual side never being shown, which would you pick?
All righty! Your question brought a big smile to my face. Why? Because when you said jumping into bed with Red of course I thought of myself first. Um, I shouldn’t have said that. Except I would. No I wouldn’t, except I would in a New York minute. No I’m kidding! Sorry got distracted. And I am at work. Bad timing. Need to take a break and throw some cold water on myself. Be back in a minute to answer your question properly……
Okay I’m back #Anon! My boss was wondering why my face was dripping wet, but I told him I had a water accident in the bathroom. We are all good now.
To answer your question, I am a very strong Lizzington so I don’t want Red to have a current romantic relationship with anyone except Liz. I don’t care about a one night-stand or a quick fling to make Liz jealous. But to strong Lizzington like myself, we believe that Liz is Red’s soul mate, the one for him. Liz is HIS LIFE, HIS HEART. And for him to have a romantic or love relationship with someone else after coming back into Liz’s life and realizing what she means to him would be kind of like a betrayal. Because unlike Liz, Red feels an intense love towards Liz. She just doesn’t understand it yet.
Again I wouldn’t mind seeing Red jump into bed as a quick fling kind of thing. Or to show a past relationship. But nothing more than that. It would break my shipper heart. And I understand a lot of folks may feel differently about this, but you asked me my opinion. So there ‘ya go.
Thanks for the question #anon. And sorry to subject you to my daydreams.
Hey! If you get this, answer with 3 random facts about yourself and send it to the last 7 blogs in your notifs, anonymously or not! Let’s get to know the person behind the blog 💗
also hello i know u irl u better put some good n embarrassing facts in here >:)
1. when i was a toddler i did everything with my dog, including eating dog food
2. ALSO when i was a little kid, i liked mixing foods to find good combos and my favorite was strawberries and artichoke dip and you know what?? i stand by that one.
Sorsha’s eyes filled with mirth. “She swallowed two cigarettes when she was young doing something stupid…as she usually does.” Sorsha muttered the last part, chuckling. “All because she wanted some soda. Now she has a phobia of them to the point where she can hardly touch them.”
I went to the bookstore tonight. When I look at books, I tend to be attracted to really ambitious titles, like, STRATEGY: A HISTORY or WHY NATIONS FAIL. That’s not necessarily the kind of book I read, just what I’m attracted to! Kind of like first-date material.
For examples of books that I’ve bought, there’s like, Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger, or Islam my Annie Schimmel (for a class, that one!). I have an embarrassing number of astrology books on my Amazon library, but that kind of fits into the whole theme of ‘explain the universe to me please!’. They sit right along How Fiction Works and How Will You Measure Your Life?
After I’ve flirted with a nice book, I decide to look at her index for the first date. Kinda like, a taste test of what this book will REALLY be about. So here’s Strategy: A History (goddamn that’s an ambitious title), and the stuff it’s actually about:
Jane Addams (who the fuck is this?)
Saul Alinsky (isn’t this some kind of liberal? I dunno.)
anarchism (hey hey a word I recognize. Down with all government, rawr rawr rawr! Kind of a historical theme of decentralization, too.)
attrition warfare (oh hey, 33 Strategies of War also mentioned wars of attrition and how they’re really meant to be avoided because they’re stupid. Huh.)
Lee Atwater (???)
Mikhail Bakunin (????? o__o; oh god I know none of these names)
The Bible (What the hell is this doing here? Old Testament, I assume?)
Napoleon Bonaparte (All hail the Emperor!)
John Boyd (??? ugh more people I don’t know :< )
business management (alright, these seems fairly traditional for a book on strategy)
Chicago, IL (woah what the hell is up with Chicago that it deserves its own entry)
China (haha of fucking course China)
Carl von Clausewitz (oh, this guy was a powerful military strategist and theorist. Kind of like Sun Tzu.)
coalitions (like, let’s work together, Parent Trap style?)
Cold War (nuke haven)
communism (which failed and fails whenever conducted en masse)
counterinsurgency (ugh, like watching CNN)
crowd psychology (hmm, so like, political strategy, perhaps?)
Cuba (hey look a no longer relevant country)
Hans Delbruck (argh more names I don’t recognize)
US Democratic Party (CLINTON 2016)
John Dewey (this dude is a philosopher, I’m pretty sure, and also the inspiration for the Dewey Decimal System. Talked about education, iirc.)
Peter Drucker (I think this guy is really famous in management, an academic area I don’t know much about.)
Economics as an academic discipline (hey, I’ve done this. Briefly. And only half-successfully.)
Friedrich Engels (this guy was Marx’s friend. I dunno what he’s about specifically though.)
World War I (the war with no winners, possibly driven by the media)
Ford Motor Co. (known for making the cars we know and love)
Henry Ford (known for being a super cool business dude)
Michel Foucault (known for his History of Sexuality, among other things. Kind of a philosopher-historian. I like him but haven’t read a bunch of him. French guy.)
framing (I suppose that’s what I’ve done here)
France (viva la revolution!!!)
French Revolution (Hey I remember this. Atheist, started with good intentions, involved science-worship, descended into chaos and violence and beheadings en masse, ended by Napoleon)
John Frederick Charles “Boney” Fuller (lol wtf is with that nickname)
game theory (economic, not nearly as fun or cool as it sounds)
Ghandi (freed India from British control but at the cost of his life as a martyr. nonviolent.)
General Motors (a huge company but I dunno all their details, other than that they’re very important to US economic history.)
Germany (can’t talk about strategy without mentioning them)
Antonio Gramsci (unsure. I think he’s a philosopher.)
Great Britain (see Germany: too important to miss.)
guerrilla warfare (I’m interested in how people fight this because it’s like fighting criminals and social unrest in general, isn’t it? Except more organized.)
Gary Hamel (no clue)
Tom Hayden (yikes even more clueless who the heck are these people)
Adolf Hitler (well, I guess we could all see this coming.)
The Iliad by Homer (huh? What is this book doing here? Maybe because it’s the tale of the fall of Troy?)
industrialization (a slow and steady process over many years and sometimes contested, not a sudden, sharp revolution)
information operations (I’m pretty sure this involves both spying -- gathering information -- and propaganda -- spreading it.)
Italy (Rome, I’m betting)
Japan (WWII and otakus)
Antoine Henri de Jomini (wtf why do I not recognize more than half these people)
John F. Kennedy (hey the president who slept with Madonna and got shot. Yes these are his greatest accomplishments)
Martin Luther King Jr. (another martyr hero. I’m not sure if martyrdom makes you a good strategist -- you’re not around to see if you succeeded.)
Thomas Kuhn (nope never heard of him)
Mikhail Kutuzov (your guess is as good as mine)
T.E. Lawrence (OMG Lawrence of Arabia!)
Vladimir Ilych Lenin (Communist guy! Unsure why he’s important!)
Basil Liddell Hart (???)
Niccolo Machiavelli (Oooh, the cold-hearted motherfucker behind The Prince. Very cool writer.)
Mao Zedong (asshat, but he didn’t start off too terrible. an example of why no one man should have too much power.)
Karl Marx (everyone knows who this guy is but I’ve never read his books.)
mass media and communication (like information technology, right?)
mass publics (this is a term I’m not sure about, but I think it refers to the idea of publics as giant masses of people as compared to tiny and split demographic groupings)
Robert McNamara (oh oh, I think this guy was a general for the US in Vietnam or Korea. And I think he didn’t do a very good job, if I remember?)
C. Wright Mills (????????)
John Milton (the writer of Paradise Lost? What is he doing here?)
Henry Mintzberg (????????????????????????)
myths (Myths play a role in politics, so I guess I can see their inclusion.)
Napoleonic Wars (fuck you if you thought I’d do this whole list)
narrative
NATO
Nazis
New Left
nonviolent direct action
nuclear weapons
Odysseus
pacifism
Paradise Lost by Milton
Vilfredo Pareto
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Tom Peters
Philoctetes by Sophocles
plot
political strategy
Michael Porter
propaganda
Prussia
quantitative analysis
RAND Corporation
rational choice theory
Ronald Reagan
US Republican Party
revolution in military affairs (RMA)
William Riker
John D. Rockefeller
Russian Empire
Bayard Rustin
Thomas Schelling
scripts
World War II
Alfred P. Sloan
social science
socialism
sociology
Soviet Union
Spain
Josef Stalin
strategy
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
Sun Tzu
US Supreme Court
Taylorism
terrorism
Leo Tolstoy
Leon Trotsky
United States
Vietnam
Helmuth von Moltke (the elder)
Robert Waterman
Max Weber
So that’s kind of my first date. Each of these aren’t just random terms taken from the index -- haha, how boring would that be? Each of these, the author felt deserved its own heading, even though some of these people and ideas didn’t have many pages actually written about them.
So I look at this, and think, “Okay. Strategy, to this author, is about people: strategic theorists, great leaders, and even a few important fiction writers like Tolstoy. Giant wars, mass organizations, and nations matter a bunch too -- even Chicago is important in this telling. And tying it all together are theoretical groupings and concepts from different academic groups: economics, sociology, political science, and even a bit of literature and narratology.”
So from reading this, I know some of what the author is getting at, and I also know kind of the reach of their work. Sometimes after, sometimes before, I look at the table of contents, which are another intentional framing device by the author.
Here, we have:
Origins (of strategy, I think? One chapter is called “Satan’s Strategy”, damn if that isn’t clickbait, so to speak.)
Strategies of Force (bullying, guns, and nukes)
Strategy from Below (I think this refers to mass movements, grassroots kinda stuff)
Strategy from Above (bureaucracy and corporate strategy)
Theories of Strategy (talks mostly about rational choice. I wonder what rational choice in this context refers to?)
I also take a look at when it was written -- 2013, so the material is fresh. And the publisher is Oxford University Press, so it’s not just some weird writer nutjob.
So yeah. Then I read the book, maybe. But in a way, just by looking at all this stuff, I’ve kinda read it, and also opened my eyes to some of the stuff I have no frikken clue about.
And that’s how I get attracted to new books and then how I first ‘read’ them: indexes, publishing information, and Tables of Contents.
