It is not widely known, but galaxy brains have gotten their name from the fact that their ideas surface in many places at once, like a single fungus colony popping up mushrooms all over a meadow.

For example, one would assume that “Ukraine needs to hold elections in an ongoing war” and “Israel needs to vaccinate civilians on the hostile side of an ongoing war” are outpourings of the same retarded mind, given the parallel reasoning, and thus be surprised to see them in such disparate environments…

“Hezbollah is an idea. You can’t kill an idea.”

Right, which is why Aum Shinrikyo is still around, rebranded as “Aleph” with over a thousand members all over the world. Yet, if something bad happens in a subway, they wouldn’t be my first guess, nor my twenty-first. Organizations don’t live in the noosphere, and it takes much more to be dangerous than an idea.

I am hardly the first to compare Ukraine 2022-4 with Israel 2023-4, but those who make the connection rarely seem to take it anywhere interesting. Case in point: hostage politics.

Both Russia (in Kherson and Mariupol) and Hamas have taken civilian hostages that they have been mistreating and falsely portraying as PoWs on dubious grounds. In both cases, extrications have been achieved both using military and diplomatic means, but there are also cases of hostages dying when such attempts failed, o…