In the midst of a rambling blog post arguing that a large terrorist attack on American soil before November “puts Trump in the White House for certain,” former Twitter activist Andrea Hardie makes a rather startling pronouncement: She would support nuking Mecca if she thought it would be an “effective” way to strike a blow against Islam.
No, really:
I don’t think Trump will nuke Mecca or anywhere else, for the simple reason that it won’t be effective. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved millions of lives and ended the war decisively, because it brought Japan to its knees. Nuking Mecca won’t bring the Islamic world to its knees – quite the opposite. Trump isn’t going to do it for that reason. If nuking Mecca stood a chance of being effective, I’d be fully in support of the measure.
Emphasis mine.
In addition to being the birthplace of Muhammad and the most sacred city for the world’s 1.57 billion Muslims, Mecca is home to roughly two million residents, and the number of people in the city “more than triple[s] every year during the hajj (“pilgrimage”) period,” as Wikipedia notes.
In other words, Ms. Hardie, better known on the Internet under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and JudgyBitch, would support the murder of as many as six million people of a particular religious persuasion if she thought it would be an effective way to rid the world of that religion.
Six million, where have I heard that number before?
Despite being permabanned from Twitter, Hardie is still listed on A Voice for Men as the site’s “Director [of] Social Media,” and she was one of the speakers at last month’s International Conference on Men’s Issues in London, organized by AVFM and Mike Buchanan of the UK’s spectacularly unsuccessful Justice for Men and Boys party.
I’m not quite sure how murdering three million Muslim men and boys — in addition to another three million women and girls — would enhance the rights of men, or boys, or anyone.
@Gert
It would seem that you implied that Mary is insane. Don’t. Especially don’t do so with the word ‘bonkers’. Comments policy
@ Virgin Mary
The thought of Mio being forced to enter the Soviet army fills me with some kind of low-burning, deep rage for some reason.
On the other hand, since she’s in essence a genderswapped Paul McCartney, she may already have been back in the USSR, so the rage is counteracted by irony.
I’m pretty sure this is the third time Gert has had to be directed to the comment policy. It’s getting old.
Jenora Feuer – Considering how many actual Nazis have appropriated anime images, I don’t know if using one for a pro-USSR image is all that odd. 😀
@WWTH
And history suggests this is only the beginning. I’m ready if you are…
http://ct.fra.bz/ol/fz/sw/i55/2/12/4/frabz-Brace-yourself-Drama-is-coming-c6b48a.jpg
@Peregrine from page 2
Hiya, I’m Axe!
If ya hafta say that, something probably went horrifically wrong in the rest of the comment. I mean, the whole post is mildly suspect
For example, any statement about “Muslims as a group” is almost assuredly wrong or at least too simplistic. Religious Muslims, ethnic Muslims, western Muslims, 1st generation, Muslims that were ‘born here’, old, young, Shia, Sunni, etc
Now, ironically given that last bit, I’d also argue that Muslims don’t “have values that fall much closer to those of western conservatives than liberals”. See, the number 1 value Muslims have is that they’re actual people. Human beings, ya know? So long as “western conservatives” keep acting to the contrary, western Muslims and “liberals” have more in common
Other than that, welcome aboard
@Virgin Mary
It’s a bit of a mystery. I like to think that he may or may not know, kinda like secret services. When that picture first appeared a lot of media articles were published saying “Hey Boris, here’s how you use a capo.” but he just didn’t seem to give a fuck. He just went on about his glorious business of doing whatever the hell it is that he was doing to that guitar.
… back then, he was still funny.
It wasn’t my intention to pigeonhole Muslims or imply that they weren’t people. Maybe my statement would’ve been better phrased as “Muslim culture is largely PORTRAYED as more conservative than the rest of the Western world, which is the standard by which many people judge them.” That isn’t to say that it’s a good thing, just an explanation for how liberals and conservatives approach the faith. I’m sorry if I offended anyone.
@Peregrine
Nah, you good. Welcome package to the right of the page 🙂
@Axe,
You misunderstand me, sir 🙂
That you would respond was fairly predictable, sure, but the actual content of said response was not. Never is.
@Peregrine – ah, I get you now. Thanks for explaining!
@Jenora Feuer You’re right that the Apollo-Soyuz link up was amazing. Even just designing the docking module was an amazing feat. Alexy Leonov is awesome. This past April 25 he spoke at the unveiling of a new monument in Moscow to the meeting at Torgau on the Elbe. Most of the principals are long dead; Polowosky of course, Gardiev, but I think William Robertson is alive in his late 90s, though Alexander Shilvashko (from the famous photo) is passed away I think. I’d love to know the identity of some of the Red Army women in the more famous photos. They’ve tracked down even some individual enlisted guys identities, good grief.
@Pavlov’s House
By the way, that made me laugh a little (not in a mocking way) :
That’s as scholarly as it gets when it comes to antifacist-internationalist chill out pastimes.
In my town we usually just get back to the little concert-hall-turned-HQ’s (or was it HQ turned concert hall ?) backroom and raid the fridges for beer. I’m totally bringing what you mentioned next time I’m there though.
@Mish
I shall take it and wear it with pride, madame!
@Jenora Feuer
Buran was not the only component, nor was it really the most important. Its launch vehicle, Energia, could deploy payloads into orbit without the use of the spaceplane. Its particular configuration also meant the engines were non-reusable, though the kerosene fueled boosters and their extraordinarily powerful engines live on in the Atlas V and Zenit launch vehicles. The main stage also represented one of the few cryogenic rockets ever worked on in Russia.
Yet Energia’s first launch didn’t even involve Buran at all. Its first payload was an orbital Anti-Satellite platform: Polyus. Armed with, I kid you not, a functional laser for destroying potential SDI anti-ballistic missile satellites and an autocannon to shoot down other anti-satellite weapons. Polyus was fitted on a propulsion module developed for another series of spacecraft and mounted on to its Energia carrier upside down, encased in a rather sinister black shroud confusingly labeled both Polyus and Mir-2. As luck would have it, Polys decided it wanted to be a submarine instead of a spacecraft on launch day and flipped 360 degrees instead of 180 degrees as originally intended to make a fateful burn towards the Pacific Ocean (something it was not designed to do). Polyus’ presence in orbit would’ve complicated things, to say the least.
In any event, the real reason I am here (because orbital death lasers are insufficient reason to stop lurking): Valentina Tereshkova’s contribution to the Soviet spaceflight was itself symptomatic of Soviet era sexism than a real attempt to live up to the egalitarian ideals of communism. I think it’s very important to keep in mind that she was chosen specifically for her background as a good communist woman (because it was important to show those capitalist Yankee dogs that Soviet women were also capable of surviving in space!) and her noted experience as a recreational parachutist (the latter being quite important given that cosmonauts didn’t land inside the parachute-less Vostok spacecraft unless they wanted to end up as chunky salsa inside their suits). She was not expected or even trained to do much and in fact found her three days in space physically unpleasant. Her predicament would be later echoed by the various, “guest cosmonauts” of the Interkosmos program who were also not expected to do anything besides fill up the second seat on Soyuz spacecraft and not touch anything. While Khrushchev fell out of favor, his use of the Soviet space program for improving the nation’s image lived on.
James Oberg’s, “Red Star In Orbit” while old, does give a decent enough and fairly accurate summary of Valentina Tereshkova’s stint into space alongside a greater history of the Soviet space program up to Salyut 6. An extended passage from the book discussing Tereshkova’s mission is also hosted on Oberg’s website as its preview.
Anyway: The next female cosmonaut, Svetlana Savitskaya, cosmonaut did not fly into space until 1982. Her achievements remain sadly obscure to most of the world at large. Aside from having completed two missions, her later 1984 mission to Salyut 7 saw her become the first woman in history to conduct an EVA and also complete a set of tests during said EVA that evaluated the performance of metal cutting and welding in a hard vacuum. So, yeah: She was the first welder in space. Ten years later, Yelena Kondakova would later complete an extended stay onboard Mir.
Yet since Kondakova, there’s been only one other female cosmonaut: Yelena Serova, who was on board the International Space Station for nearly six months as part of Expeditions 41 and 42 in 2014. She attracted rather, ah, unwanted media attention: Members of the local press were more interested in her hair and makeup than her cell cultivation experiments and background as an engineer and economist. Predictably, she was visibly irritated during the pre-launch press conference after being asked about her hairstyle one too many times when that really isn’t what she spent years of training and education for. I’m sure a certain judgy someone being discussed here might also take serious offense to the fact that Serova also has a daughter and husband.
It really is tragic that the Soviet and Russian space programs don’t get much positive attention beyond Sputnik and Vostok 1 (though some of the failures ala the aborted Soviet Moonshot from which the Soyuz spacecraft was derived are also quite interesting), but it is very nice to see people show a sincere interest the program as a whole and interest in the small but pioneering women cosmonauts.
There is no real possibility that the invasion of Japan (“Operation Downfall”) would have been necessary. Having lost Malaya and the then Dutch East Indies, Japan had no access to supplies of tin, rubber or oil. It could not have maintained an industrial economy, let alone continued the war, for more than a few months. I recommend, to you and to Pavlov’s House, Gar Alperovitz’s Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam – The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power. Both Stalin and Truman (and Churchill) were focused on the post-war balance of power long before the bombing of Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.
@ nick g
I’ll keep an eye out for that, cheers. The war in the East seems to get a bit neglected by historians (It’s often referred to as “the forgotten war” here, especially by veterans organsisations catering for people who served there).
I’m not as sure though that Japan would have given up so easily. The guidance at the time for civilians was to improvise weapons and take at least one of the invaders with them. It’s difficult to know how long that could have been sustained of course. But societal pressure and just fear of the authorities was very effective in other territories beside the home islands.
@ scolar
That was all really interesting.
There were some great ideas in that programme. It’s interesting that the Soviets went down the ‘lunar lander’ route from the start. You probably know that the original US plan involved landing the whole service/command module assembly (Hence its rather 1950s sci-if rocket look).
I also like how the Russians got round the LEO rendezvous/transfer problem. “Go out of that door, jump across, try not to miss”
To be fair, would you expect Russian astronauts to do it any other way ?
It’s something I still catch myself doing–and “crazy” has never been one of my go-to insults, even in the most pugilistic corners of the internet. In other words, I don’t think it’s worth more than a “dude, c’mon” and moving on.
@[email protected]
The difference being that Gert has doubled down and insisted that he’s right and everyone else is wrong about what is and is not in violation of the comments policy, and then he just keeps doing it anyway even after David intervened.
@Scolar Visari, others:
Aside from the talk I mentioned by Dr. Grechko, I actually worked with some Russians on work related to the original RadioAstron Space VLBI project in the mid to late 1990s. While I never traveled there myself, several of the others in my lab were in Vladivostok for discussions and design work. So I’ve definitely heard stories about the Russian space program.
(Unfortunately, at the time, the Russian space program was experiencing date slippage of over a year per year for many projects. RadioAstron, or at least the Spektr-R satellite, ended up not being operational until 2011. Much of our work ended up getting shifted over to the Japanese equivalent, VSOP/HALCA, which operated between 1997 and 2005. A lot of people were hoping we could have both the Japanese and Russian space radio telescopes in orbit at once.)
Granted, my favourite story was the one about choosing space station crews for Mir by putting the cosmonauts in a car in Vladivostok and telling them to drive to Moscow. If they were still talking to each other by the time they got there, they would make a good space station crew. There’s just something so pragmatic about that.
This is an interesting and informative thread. I’ve seriously learned more about what was going on with the Japanese in WWII and the US/USSR space race here than I ever did in school. Thank you everyone!
Whenever I see moon hoax stuff come up, I always want to ask why on earth we would have faked it 5 more times after the first one? Do they even know we went to the moon more than once?
@ chesslewit
Well Stanley Kubrick was notorious for multiple takes. 🙂
What I don’t get is why they never improved the special effects.
I’m thinking that the “Danger of empathy” for Hardie is that, if you have empathy, you won’t listen to her.