epistemic status: talking to myself

there used to be just one computer in the house. I had very little access to it. ok maybe it wasn’t that little but soon after I started browsing the web, I developed a thing for wikipedia rabbitholing. over a few months it became incresingly harder to get enough of it on my limited ‘puter time. lucky me, my mother was employed at a large, state-owned energy company and had unlimited printer privileges¹. one day I call her at work and ask if by some chance the Brazilian taxpayer could afford to print some web pages for me, so I can read them offline.

sure, send them by email.

months go by with me just sending emails containing some wikipedia links and getting them in print later on the same day. well… one day, my mom calls me from work and

I’m not gonna print these last few requests. an AK-47, Pedro? Really? do you know who Mahatma Gandhi was? I can print his article.

truth be told, there was a silly amount of printed wikipedia articles in my bedroom circa 2006. and a good chunk of it was military aviation. why are boys of all ages and regions of the world drawn to maps, heavy machinery, violence, and yes, even heavy machinery used to violently change maps?

our poor, poor analogies

to start with an understatement: the reality of war is one of trauma. it is plainly senseless and unjust. there is no shortage of distant, irreponsible, unaccountable warmongering, but even that requires some form of self-mythology for why this fight is worth fighting. the people who do experience it leave scarred and wounded, in body and soul. those of us who have happily never been to a frontline can only make sense of the senseless through analogy and metaphore, vagues ones at that. we digest the undigestable by pretending it is something else entirely. an extension of religion, politics, language, land.

the good

you know what other human activity draws the curiosity of children and adults from all over the world? an activity that, for many of them, becomes a inescapable obsession dictating employment choices and how tens of thousands of hours are spent over a lifetime? chess. it’s a fantastic analogy for war: both fascinating and utterly pointless. there’s an ancient history to this game, and one can see distinct Eras and Schools (the British, Romantic, Classical, Hypermodern…). there is a notion of tactics, as in: maneuvering that seizes immediate opportunities. the existence of tactics implies strategy: maneuvering that sets conditions for later opportunities. and let’s not forget about initiative, which is owned by the player who can maneuver in such a way that the opponent is forced to respond.

before proceeding with my retarded ramblings, let me point out one relevant way in which chess differs from war - marked by the fog of war. chess is a perfect information game. in principle, all necessary information to assess a game is available to both players. you grow as a chess player by learning to interrogate the board with taste and discernment.

one notable way in which chess is just like war tho, is that it features combinatorial explosion. in most games, by the time you’re a couple dozen moves in, and you’re likely seeing a position that was never seen before. it provides you with a small set of primitives, and it’s up to us to find their emerging properties. how can you not enjoy that?

the bad and the ugly

soccer dispenses joy and sadness at random and it clearly demarcates who gets what - with uniforms! you, the Reader, have plenty of references regarding how people feel about their teams and I’ll trust that you don’t need any further elaboration on how this is all connected. winning feels good, doesn’t it? and who doesn’t like to identify with Power? the people and parties who blow things up and kill people must surely do that because they’re on my side, right? right???? war can be a mean by which people satisfy psycho-social-sexual needs within them.

monitoring the situation on the small rectangle of Doom

in late February 2022, when russia began its large-scale invasion of Ukraine, most Brazilians were celebrating Carnaval. I was staying at a friend’s house in a quaint little beach town in Rio de Janeiro’s northern coast with my then-gf and a few other couples. most people were busy chilling, but me… I was… well… you know… monitoring the situation. history was happening, live, right in front of me. well, not quite in front of me, more like… on that little rectangle thingy, the thingamabob, the phoneorinos. we now can see real combat footage on our phones while taking a crap.

let me take a little detour now. bear with me.

every teenager with a mild interest in history or politics gets negatively polarized into an esoteric political ideology that only exists among internet autists. they usually repeat the process a few times until they’re around 22 - at which point they either get real² or sink permanently in a tar pit made of jargon. you’ve seen this. a dude who “was a neocon” at 14, and then: a paleoconservative, an Austrian libertarian, leninist, maoist, and has now finally settled as a devote Orthodox Christian.

while I like to point and laugh at this sort of comment, I’m also guilty of this sin, of acting as if this is all entertainment. it’s real, but it’s so easy to forget that. it certainly doesn’t look real when it’s on the screen. might as well be a chess game, a football match. but it is.

Footnotes