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When we weren’t walking the streets of Haqlaniyah with machine guns, we read. Books passed through our hands like contraband. We were often too tired to hold a conversation, but we still had energy to pass off paperbacks like dime bags.
“The militants fought to protect us from the Americans and the Americans fought to protect us from the militants, and being so protected, life was very dangerous.”
― Green on Blue
― Green on Blue
“the hegemony of America in the community of the free world creates some curious moral hazards. We are ironically held responsible for disparities in wealth and well-being which are chiefly due to differences in standards of productivity. But they lend themselves with a remarkable degree of plausibility to the Marxist indictment, which attributes all such differences to exploitation. Thus, every effort we make to prove the virtue of our “way of life” by calling attention to our prosperity is used by our enemies and detractors as proof of our guilt. Our experience of an ironic guilt when we pretend to be innocent is thus balanced by the irony of an alleged guilt when we are comparatively innocent.”
― The Irony of American History
― The Irony of American History
“This is class warfare by elites on the working class, in which the elites try to hide the way they have benefited from skyrocketing inequality by portraying themselves as more virtuous than those on the other side of the tracks, and thus more worthy of their good fortune. Call it COVID Calvinism: you aren’t simply lucky that your job allowed you to stay home or could never possibly be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English; you are more virtuous, and therefore justified in perpetuating the yawning gulf between yourself and the workers. You then use allegations of racism or sexism or transphobia to hide the class divide from which you are benefiting. Woke politics, in other words, is a smokescreen that obscures the realities of class.”
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
― Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy
“The old Hoover Building had housed the Federal Bureau of Investigation before the Split, but the FBI was long gone. The People’s Bureau of Investigation now occupied that building and several others in the area, forming a huge complex dedicated to the dark work of internal security. The name “Hoover” had been scrubbed from the building and whitewashed from history when the People’s Republic had first arisen, but later came back when J. Edgar had been embraced as a pioneering example of resistance and the face of the toll oppression had taken upon gender-fluid individuals in the hateful old United States. His statue, in a flattering cocktail dress and a pair of strappy heels, graced the central foyer of the recently added annex.”
― Wildfire
― Wildfire
“Prostitution was a miserable job, and all the more miserable when the location was next to a godforsaken military outpost in a hostile foreign country. The Japanese military did some appalling things during the war, but it did not programmatically and forcibly conscript—or dragoon, if you will—either Korean or Japanese women into providing sex. Some of the comfort women had been sold into this prostitution by abusive parents. Some had been defrauded by dishonest private recruiters. But many—probably most—were desperately poor women who deliberately chose to sell sex for the money. They worked in a wretched job, but they were not “sex slaves.” They were not “gang-raped.” They were not conscripted into the job at bayonet-point. Instead, they chose prostitution as (in their minds) the least bad option available to them. We deceive ourselves and insult impoverished women if we deny that they could have made such a decision for themselves.”
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THE COMMANDANT'S PROFESSIONAL READING LIST
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— last activity Sep 14, 2017 05:38PM
THE COMMANDANT'S PROFESSIONAL READING LIST (CPRL) AS PROMULGATED IN REFERENCE A REPRESENTS AN UPDATED VERSION OF THOSE BOOKS MOST PERTINENT FOR PROFE ...more
Military Professional Reading
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This group is primarily intended for active, reserve, retired or military veterans. This serves as a forum to discuss professional reading for militar ...more
Azriel’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Azriel’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
177 books
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606 books
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3,070 books
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1,137 books
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1,430 books
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485 books
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34 friends
2,001 books
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57 friends
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