A thread for Democrats Only
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UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 15:36
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General Stanley McChrystal Accidentally Reveals the Dishonesty of U.S. Generals
It is time to make a strange addition to the shortlist of essential documents on the dishonesty of America’s generals: a new book from retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal titled “Risk: A User’s Guide.”
McChrystal was removed from his command by President Barack Obama but afterward created a thriving consulting firm and often appears on TV to talk about war and politics. His new book is intended to be a primer for corporate leaders trying to navigate the perils of doing business in America. The conceit is straightforward: Hello, I am a retired four-star general who bravely led troops into battle, and I can tell you everything you need to know about managing risk.
There is a lot that McChrystal might teach us, because he was responsible for a series of consequential errors from which valuable lessons could be learned. Those errors include the concoction of a plan in 2009 to defeat the Taliban insurgency by flooding Afghanistan with as many as 80,000 additional U.S. soldiers. This was the kind of troops-and-money strategy that succeeded mainly in killing lots of civilians and helping the Taliban return to power.
On a less catastrophic scale, McChrystal actively participated in the cover-up of the friendly fire killing of NFL player-turned-soldier Pat Tillman, whose 2004 death the Pentagon initially blamed on the Taliban, knowing that this was untrue. McChrystal also took the ill-advised risk of allowing a Rolling Stone reporter to embed with his entourage on a trip around Europe, and the resulting article, which conveyed the general’s disdain for America’s elected leaders, led to his early retirement in 2010.
I am not arguing that McChrystal should abstain from writing about risk or suggesting that he didn’t have wartime successes. A book that intelligently drew from both sides of his military career could be useful. But that is not the book McChrystal chose to write, and for that we should be grateful, because he has instead provided us with a far more important document. “Risk” is stuffed with so many displays of dishonesty, ignorance, and banality that it’s the ultimate self-own for a generation of generals who led America into disaster after 9/11 — and profited from it.
With his new book, McChrystal turns himself into an accidental whistleblower.
More at https://theintercept.com/2021/12/04/stanley-mcchrystal-risk-military-g
enerals/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle
We're seeing now exactly why every big company is fighting against universal health care.
Decouple health insurance from work and people are free to quit their bad jobs.
If people quit their bad jobs, companies will have to pay living wages to attract workers.
Can't have that.
11:08 PM · Dec 4, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1467360176546234373
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle
We're seeing now exactly why every big company is fighting against universal health care.
Decouple health insurance from work and people are free to quit their bad jobs.
If people quit their bad jobs, companies will have to pay living wages to attract workers.
Can't have that.
11:08 PM · Dec 4, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1467360176546234373
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
And yet you're always giving me shit about not working a shitty job.
I think you just hate the fact that I'm not a Democrat and I figured it all out before anybody else did.
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Quote:6ix, try not to pick the wrong way to handle simple problems. From this next tweet from the same guy, you are supposed to conclude that workers should be paid more. You're NOT supposed to conclude that workers should forever quit working, although temporarily stopping working (it's called striking) can be one step along the way to being paid more. (One political party, guess which, does what it can to make strikes difficult to impossible.) Raising the minimum wage in Congress is a different step along the way. (One political party, guess which, does what it can to make raising the minimum wage difficult to impossible.)
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
And yet you're always giving me shit about not working a shitty job.
I think you just hate the fact that I'm not a Democrat and I figured it all out before anybody else did.
Dan Price @DanPriceSeattle
It's so weird to me that workers getting more money is presented as a bad thing.
We seem to have a belief that businesses have the right to exist at whatever pay rates they deem necessary but not that people have the right to make a living wage.
12:31 PM · Dec 3, 2021·Twitter Web App
https://twitter.com/DanPriceSeattle/status/1466837458226659328
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Low wages are a reflection of "too many people seeking too few jobs"
One party (guess which one) welcomes illegal immigrants with open arms.
One party (guess which one) actively encouraged companies to offshore production.
You're a moron, SECOND.
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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Quote:There wouldn't be any advantage to employers in hiring illegal immigrants if employers were forced by law to pay a high minimum wage. (I know well which party stands in the way.) The Invisible Hand does not make wage reductions automatic when the population grows. It is not a law, but minimum wages are law, and employers don't want that law changed.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Low wages are a reflection of "too many people seeking too few jobs"
One party (guess which one) welcomes illegal immigrants with open arms.
One party (guess which one) actively encouraged companies to offshore production.
You're a moron, SECOND.
Nor would employers hire illegal immigrants if the employers were punished for such hiring. But, you know the story, employers can hire anybody they want, pay whatever pleases the employer, and have few worries about employee unions forming or the employer being arrested for hiring illegals. Same is true with offshore production, or moving production to a different state in the Union, as is true with employee pay, the employer can make whatever decision without any input from anybody but what the employer feels is to the advantage of the employer.
Same is true with paying taxes because the employer is allowed to decide how much income the employer will be reporting without any input from anybody, knowing with certainty the IRS won't be able to prove anything if the employer and accountants won't cooperate because the IRS has few auditors and all IRS auditors are outclassed by the sneaky schemes of highly paid accountants to evade taxes. (And I know well which party stands in the way of paying IRS auditors more or even hiring more auditors.) And the Federal courts are already jammed with cases. Sadly for Federal prosecutors, tax evasion is hard to prove and the employer will hire the best and highest paid tax lawyers to thwart poorly paid prosecutors and make sure the Federal courts stay jammed. (I know which party stands in the way of expanding the number of judges and prosecutors.)
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Journalist
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.
The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject. His situation resembles that of the subject of Stanley Milgram’s famous psychological experiment (conducted at Yale in the early sixties), who was tricked into believing that he was participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning and memory when in fact what was being studied was his own capacity for cruelty under the pressure of authority. In an ingenious fake laboratory setup, the “naïve subject”—a volunteer who had answered an advertisement in a New Haven newspaper—was told to give an increasingly painful electric shock to a person, presumably another volunteer, in response to every wrong answer to a test question. In Obedience to Authority, his book about the experiment, Milgram writes of his surprise at the large number of subjects who obeyed the experimenter, and kept on pulling the lever even though the receiver of the shocks was screaming with pain—or, rather, with simulated pain, since the whole thing was rigged: the electrical apparatus to which the victim was strapped was a stage prop, and the victim himself was an actor. Milgram’s idea had been to see how ordinary Americans would behave when put in a situation roughly comparable to that of the ordinary Germans who were ordered to participate actively in the destruction of the Jews of Europe. The results were not encouraging. Although a few subjects refused to go on with the experiment at the first sign of distress from the victim, most subjects docilely continued giving shock after shock. However, Milgram’s chilling findings are not the point. The point lies in the structure of the situation: the deliberately induced delusion, followed by a moment of shattering revelation. The dizzying shift of perspective experienced by the subject of the Milgram experiment when he was “debriefed,” or “dehoaxed,” as Milgram calls it, is comparable to the dislocation felt by the subject of a book or article when he first reads it. The subject of the piece of writing has not suffered the tension and anxiety endured by the subject of the “Eichmann experiment” (as it has been called)—on the contrary, he has been on a sort of narcissist’s holiday during the period of interviews—but when the moment of peripeteia comes, he is confronted with the same mortifying spectacle of himself flunking a test of character he did not know he was taking.
However, unlike the reader of Obedience to Authority, with whom Milgram shares the technical details of the deception, the reader of a work of journalism can only imagine how the writer got the subject to make such
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In remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked ba**ards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fu**ing idiot”.
The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur.
The insult to the press recalled barbs while Trump was in power, including calling reporters and editors “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”, attacks many in the media regarded as dangerous, inviting political violence.
“The country is at a very important, dangerous place,” Trump said, amid familiar lies about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he says was the result of electoral fraud.
“We have no press. The press is so corrupt. We don’t have a press. If there is a good story about us, a good story about any of the people that are Republicans, conservatives, they make it a bad story. And if it’s a bad story they make it the worst story in history. It is the most dishonest group of people.”
More at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/06/trump-attacks-us-media
-mark-milley-foul-mouthed-speech
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In remarks to diners at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Saturday night, Donald Trump called the American media “crooked ba**ards” and Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, a “fu**ing idiot”.
The meandering, foul-mouthed speech to Turning Point USA, a group for young conservatives, was streamed by Jack Posobiec, a rightwing blogger and provocateur.
The insult to the press recalled barbs while Trump was in power, including calling reporters and editors “fake news” and the “enemy of the people”, attacks many in the media regarded as dangerous, inviting political violence.
“The country is at a very important, dangerous place,” Trump said, amid familiar lies about his defeat in the 2020 election, which he says was the result of electoral fraud.
“We have no press. The press is so corrupt. We don’t have a press. If there is a good story about us, a good story about any of the people that are Republicans, conservatives, they make it a bad story. And if it’s a bad story they make it the worst story in history. It is the most dishonest group of people.”
Good for him.
We don't need Trump to tell us any of that though. It was true before he was President, it will be true after his second term.
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Vaccinated People: "You need to get muh vaccination shots that don't work because I got muh vaccination shots that don't work and I'm afraid of people that didn't get muh vaccination shots that don't work because muh vaccination shots that don't work don't work."
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Quote:
SIGNYM:
Low wages are a reflection of "too many people seeking too few jobs"
One party (guess which one) welcomes illegal immigrants with open arms.
One party (guess which one) actively encouraged companies to offshore production.
You're a moron, SECOND.
SECOND: There wouldn't be any advantage to employers in hiring illegal immigrants if employers were forced by law to pay a high minimum wage. (I know well which party stands in the way.) The Invisible Hand does not make wage reductions automatic when the population grows. It is not a law, but minimum wages are law, and employers don't want that law changed.
Nor would employers hire illegal immigrants if the employers were punished for such hiring. ... and blah blah blah
a) I noticed you didn't address the OFFSHORING issue, so most of your word salad is distraction from that. There are still too few production jobs here, and
b) If you're talking about enforcing laws that prohibit hiring illegals, well ... one party does a terrible job on that, too.
So what makes anyone think they would do any better about any other labor law?
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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake
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