Mr Pages Frontispiece

One of my favorite tricks is just that you can make something sound much more important by having it be a quote.

The sentence “I don’t want people to kill elephants” sound nice and all but if in response to “You should kill that elephant” you say “George Orwell once said: ‘It is a serious matter to shoot a[n] […] elephant […] obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided.”

Well, now, a philosopher agrees with you. Is the quote out of context? Yes. Is it heavily snipped? Yes. But, most importantly, was George Orwell an expert in animal conservation or elephant husbandry? Not at all, so he’s hardly a reputable source on the suitability of killing elephants. However, my point (that one shouldn’t kill elephants) now sounds, in casual conversation at least, significantly more reputable now that I can back it up with “a source”. Especially a famous source, like Orwell!

For those who don’t know what that means, it’s an idealized situation where there are a ton of vendors and consumers, all the vendors sell the same product, vendors can stop or start selling completely freely, and consumers all have every piece of information they could possibly need.

There are a huge number of grocery store brands, (off the top of my head I could think of six and while writing this I thought of four more), so we’ve got the large number of vendors, every person needs to eat food, so we have the large number of consumers, and every grocery store sells pretty much the same brands and products. (you’ve got your edge cases like Trader Joe’s and everywhere’s got their own store brands but 99% of the time if you walk into a grocery store you’ll be able to buy a banana or Cheez-its) The latter two are impossible but my point is that a grocery store is the Free Market at the most efficient it can possibly be—the only things that matter are supply and demand, because there’s no way for competition between those stores to actually exist; they don’t have profit margins they can cut down on to provide cheaper goods, since those margins are slim as hair already, and they almost never have unique products to offer, since a banana is a banana.

One of the things that really bugs me is when people say the USA is a puppet state of Israel. This is really awfully problematic for a variety of reasons--it shifts culpability away from the single most prevalent Empire of the modern day, it's rooted in anti-semitic conspiracy theories, etc., but one of the most annoying of those reasons is the fact that it's really rather the opposite--Benjamin Netanyahu (not the state of Israel as an entity! There was a famously long period, for example, when Americans were awfully worried about how close Israel was with the USSR, and we can't forget about the Suez Crisis) is a puppet of the United States. (specifically, the American Right, an ironic partnership given who they're in bed with these days, but the American Left has Platner so I suppose you just pick one at some point) He serves American interests over Israeli ones whenever possible, despite the perception to the contrary.

People will point to, for example, the massive packages of aid the US sends to Israel as a proof that they somehow influence us; this is ridiculous. Any student of Empire will know that the imperial periphery on the *very* edge, what you might call buffers, places held to project power rather than to extract wealth, will always be a drain on financial resources, because they serve to spread the influence of the Empire further, not to serve as an export market or source of raw material. This can be seen in the British (Malta) and French (Algeria) Empires alike, and all the way back to the Roman Empire's provinces of Armenia, Britain, and Germania Minor--it's no different with America.

Then, there's AIPAC--an equally stupid justification, for two reasons. If you are ultimately subservient to someone's diktaten, you will naturally want to get on their good side. Cushioning the kick, to borrow a phrase from my favorite opera, does not make you the kicker. Nextly, Israel is far from the only country with a PAC they fund. Take, for example, Deutsche Bank Securites PAC, which (though they've been less active 2018) is funded by, obviously, Deutsche Bank, which is under the direct supervision of the ECB, which (equally obviously) is under the direct supervision of the EU. This too is a PAC ultimately run by a foreign national entity, but if you said the USA were a puppet of the EU (prior to 2018), you'd be rightly laughed out of whatever room you were in.

I'm not done yet! I've heard "evidence" for the idea that Israel is the one pulling the U.S.'s strings because they "also have control over other countries as well!" Which countries? Germany, usually. Hmmmm, I wonder why Germany might be particularly favourable towards Israel? Maybe it's because they perpetrated the Holocaust? I don't know, but I think decades of national guilt over wiping out a third of the entire worldwide Jewish population *might* make you pretty darn nice toward the state with the rest of the Jewish people in it! In the eyes of Germany, supporting Israel is a sort of reparation for the Holocaust, and perhaps a crime of that magnitude can never be fully paid off. Israel does not control Germany, Germans control Germany, and Germans are very sorry and would like to try and make it up to the Jews (who, as it happens, do in fact control Israel) as much as they can. For the rest of Europe sending aid to Israel, well, Israel is a western-style liberal democracy! Whatever your thoughts on western-style liberal democracies, they objectively are one, and they're the *only* one in the Middle East, due to Turkey's best efforts to get out of that category. Western-style liberal democracies, such as most of Europe, like their peers, and when one of their peers is threatened on all sides by what is pretty close to the opposite of western-style liberal democracy, they'll support it, simple as.

Imagine you're one of those TikTok people who self-censors "rape" by saying "grape" ~~because you're an idiot~~ and you're out getting groceries to make a delicious vinaigrette for your salad. Unfortunately you've broken your legs and can't walk around the grocery store, so you order through calling the store. Now, for a nice vinaigrette, as all saladheads know, you need an oil with strong, bold flavours, since the oil plays a leading role. A great oil for this purpose is rapeseed oil, since it's very flavourful, especially when cold, like in a vinaigrette. So, you call the store and say "Would you be so kind as to get me a bottle of rapeseed oil except UH-OH! YOUR CENSORSHIP NEURONS HAVE KICKED IN! And you accidentally say GRAPESEED OIL INSTEAD! And they bring you a bottle of grapeseed oil but OH NO! GRAPESEED OIL HAS A BLAND AND NEUTRAL PALATE! Which of course is perfectly fine for many things but not a vinaigrette! And now your delicious vinaigrette is a TERRIBLE vinaigrette! A disaster!