Thomas Wictor

Today was a nadir in my ongoing interaction with people who are so stupid that they shouldn’t be allowed outside their houses. One way you can tell that someone knows he or she is wrong is when they frame your disagreement as illegitimate. Because I don’t think that Israel should unilaterally disarm, that means I love war!

It began with a tweet from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office. The red arrow indicates a tweet to which I responded.

I asked Rusty how a nuclear-free Middle East would be achieved, and he said that all the nations in the region would sign a treaty.

What became clear is that Rusty has absolutely no factual knowledge. None. He is universally ignorant. He didn’t know that Israel had bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak on June 7, 1981. He didn’t know that Iraq was a signatory of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation on Nuclear Weapons. He didn’t know that France had developed her own nuclear weapons; he thought the US had supplied them.

We’re in a very horrifying era in that you can’t shame anybody anymore. Nobody cares when they’re caught lying or shown to be as uninformed as a night-soil collector from the Dark Ages.

When you point out the monumental idiocy of what someone is saying, they insult you, but from a position of towering superiority.

“Pacifism is a term used by those who love war.”

Sure. War lovers like Albert Einstein.

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that possesses me because the murder of men is disgusting.

I’ve written about pacifism several times. Personally I don’t think there’s anything moral about it. The best film ever made about pacifism is Friendly Persuasion, starring Gary Cooper as Quaker Jess Birdwell.

Birdwell recognizes that the morality of the commandment usually rendered “Thou shalt not kill” depends on the circumstances one faces. He hopes that if he’s ever confronted with a situation in which he has to choose whether or not to kill, he’ll do what God wants him to do.

It’s an ambiguous position. Clearly Birdwell believes that God might want him to kill. I agree with him. Some people must be killed so that they can no longer murder, torture, rape, and pillage. Killing them is the only way to stop them.

I’m an unreasonable hardliner about too many things. It’s because I’ve experienced events that most people can’t even imagine. Here’s what I tweeted to an Israeli who’s a better man than I am.

GalerRoy is humane; he doesn’t immediately write off people the way I do. My own hot-button issue is phony peace-mongering. I don’t believe that those who spout off about “peace” give even the tiniest hoot about death and suffering. They simply oppose any military action taken by the US and Israel. In fact they oppose everything about the US and Israel, but it’s just lip service. For example, they don’t boycott Israeli medical advances or American technology.

In response to my tweet about how I imagine people look when they say “peace,” Rusty tweeted a devastatingly effective riposte.

Since he’d absolutely demolished me, I could barely muster a response.

To which he replied.

Rusty is projecting. He hates a whole passel of people for myriad reasons. I don’t hate Rusty because I don’t see him as a person. He’s a social-media robot that doggedly plows ahead, regardless of how ineffective and ridiculous it is.

These robots have been programmed to try and silence opposition by characterizing it as immoral. Because I don’t want Israel to give up her nuclear weapons, that means I love war.

Rather than explain why this position is as fallacious as everything else Rusty says, I’ll just use this post as an opportunity to list my favorite weapons of war.

1. The Chauchat machine rifle

This French fully automatic light machine gun was officially designated the Fusil Mitrailleur Modele 1915 CSRG. Made by a bicycle manufacturer, it was one of the worst firearms ever created.

The bolt—the part of the gun that moves forward and strikes the base of the bullet with the firing pin—traveled almost the entire length of the weapon with each shot. This made accuracy impossible, and it caused the wooden stock to hit the gunner in the cheek. French light machine gunners had permanently bruised cheeks.

Tolerances in the manufacturing process were so bad that the parts of individual guns were not interchangeable. If something went wrong, you threw away the whole weapon and got a new one. The semicircular magazine was open on one side, allowing mud into the gun, and the rate of fire was comically slow.

2. The Albree/Pigeon Fraser Scout

An American fighter aircraft that didn’t have elevators on the horizontal tail surfaces. Elevators make an aircraft climb or dive. On this piece of pure derangement, there was a hinge in the middle of the fuselage, and the entire tail structure moved up and down. The red arrow shows the hinge line.

A circus strongman was needed to pilot the thing, because the tail section was connected directly to the control stick by steel cables. It was so exhausting to fly that the company test pilot could stay aloft for only a few minutes. The US Army was never able to find a pilot strong enough to fly it, so they tested it to destruction by piling sandbags all over it until it broke apart.

3. The Grand Panjandrum

Designed by the British as a means to breach the concrete defenses of the Nazi Atlantic Wall, the Grand Panjandrum was a steel drum of explosives fitted with two wheels ten feet (three meters) in diameter. To propel the bomb, rockets were attached to the wheels.

With a top speed of 60 miles per hour (97 kilometers per hour), it was utterly uncontrollable and nearly killed its inventors and a crowd of spectators during one test.

4. Panzer VIII Maus

The heaviest tank ever built, the Nazi Panzer VIII Maus weighed 207 tons (187 tonnes).

Designers discovered that any engine powerful enough to move it ended up being too big to fit inside it. They finally settled on a hybrid drive of an internal-combustion engine that operated a generator to power the tracks with electric motors. The top speed was eight miles per hour (13 kilometers per hour).

Since the tank was too heavy for any bridge, it was supposed to cross rivers underwater, using a snorkel. This would’ve required laying concrete on the river beds, but the project never got that far. Hitler was obsessed with the idea that the thick armor of the vehicle would allow just one to smash the enemy line without suffering damage. Luckily Hitler was a narcissistic fabulist who never thought anything through. The Maus would’ve bogged down the second it left the road. It would’ve been worthless in combat.

I’ll end with “Rooster,” the best song about war I’ve ever heard, sung by the most underrated rock singer of all time, Layne Staley.