Chapter 229

It’s been a few days in a row where my favorite people on Earth came out and blew up bombs by my window, and every time it’s been at 8 AM on the dot. It used to be at 6, perhaps there’s a new rule in place. Baby steps, I guess. Every time I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

Coincidentally, a friend of mine in a shitposting WeChat group posted an article entitled noise pollution rules, and being my usual snarky self, I replied “They mean it as a verb, right? Noise pollution, it totally rules!” The article talked about dancing grannies who roll out a big speaker on public square at dusk, put on some bangin’ music, and do a choreography, apparently their days are counted and now the Powers That Be want to crack down on that. I for one think it’s a pretty cool aspect of Chinese culture, seniors get to exercise a bit and socialize, and yeah they can be loud and the music is more often than not godawful (sometimes it’s some dissonant dubstep though, which is hilarious) but if they want to alleviate noise pollution in the undending campaign to make the peasants more 文明, I’d say explosions in the morning, speakers playing advertisements on loop in front of stores and cunts with their cell phone videos in public should be a higher priorities than the dancing grannies.

I read the news, the story of the hour was about the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The whole thing was an absolute farce from the beginning, a little sprinkle of neocon interventionist put-your-fingers-in-others'-pies to impede China from dealing with Iran, lost in a trillion-dollar scam engineered by cartoon villains and their "reconstruction companies". There was zero chance of ever "stabilizing" the country, and even calling it a country in the Westphalian sense is inaccurate and Eurosolipsistic.

Some of the comments I've seen have a bit of sunk cost fallacy in them, in the sense that even people who agree it was a fiasco (ie: anyone except bumbling retards) say the transition/removal of troops should have been done better and that "American/Canadian/Afghan lives have been lost for nothing". Perhaps. But we could have stayed there until 2025, 2050 or 9000 and it would still be the same shit.

That's why I don't think Trump, or even Senile Joe, deserve that much blame. For the former, "bringing the troops back home" and stopping all this nonsense world police shit is in line with his isolationist/nationalist/America First platform. And for the latter, he doesn't know what he had for breakfast so let's cut him some slack. I dislike the whole blame game the way it's knee-jerkedly played, in this bipartisan arena, so as much as I hate the metric tons of undeserved shit Trump got thrown his way, just as infantile and unintellectual it is to just go "Biden bad" like some libertarian/conservative/right-wing commentators are doing since he got in.

Hell, I considered going on a tour in Afghanistan when I was still enlisted. Would have been a nice 50 000$ in my pockets for 6 months, plus all the reg force pay in the build-up. But getting potential PTSD or getting shot at for that cause I didn't believe in for a second after a bit of reading on the topic, nah. (Some guys in my unit went and were on base the whole time, barely hearing a shot fired and the hardest thing they did was drink an unrefrigerated Coke, but some saw pieces of human hamburger fall on their windshields after unsuccessful suicide bomber attacks) So I came to China instead.

At least the memes are spicy, like that person who pointed out that the Taliban will strictly enforce mask wearing and social distancing for 51% of the population.

I spent most of the day playing Warband, as a mercenary navigating some kind of fictional medieval world. You gather a band of warriors and go on missions given by lords and random people, making friends and enemies along the way, which can impede your movements through the map. You can also do trade and diplomacy rather than brute force attacks, and there are layers to the game I haven’t seen yet. It’s really fun, and very addictive. I had semi-plans for the day but none of them materialized, engrossed as I was in the game. After dark, the girlfriend peeled me from my screen to go take a walk, we went downtown with the dog and bought some odds and ends at a cheap goods store, before stopping at the wine bar like the urban hedonists we are. We shared a bottle of Riesling, a sweet white wine from Germany, chatting with the owners. It was a bit expensive but hey, are we urban hedonists looking for a quick endorphin rush or are we not?

We went back home, ate a late dinner of creamy pasta and a scrumptious salad while watching an episode of Close Enough. Then I played Warband until way too late.