From 2004, an update

WSJ,"A 'Torture' Memo And Its Tortuous Critics"

Posner and Verlmeule's op-ed was pulled so quickly that Balkin had to link to a cache file that died within a year. Now the piece has been republished. There's no telling if it's been cut but I'm betting it hasn't. That's how far we've come.

I found out it'd been republished because I had to search for it again after ridiculing a member of the extended PRC apparat who was defending the honor of China against a Foggy Bottom intellectual. The link in his header and the pinned tweet is to an interview with Vermeule.

"A lesson of virtue" in The Beijing Review. Vermeule must follow him because he blocked me, again.

Whining about the Cold War is like asking McDonalds or KFC to stop competing with each other; the difference is the armies and the nukes. The only option is to reject US and Chinese foreign policy goals as such, and look to the small states forced to negotiate a path between them.

I think the reason all these academic intellectuals follow edgelords and fascists, is that their minds are too dead to think for themselves.

Kathleen Stock: "Why incels should read Michel Houellebecq"

Conservative men should read T.S. Eliot. His poems describe the true misery of the conservative male, and reading him will help them escape it.

This list has gone to three

"My students were all obsessed with sex. Not the idea of sex, or the meaning of sex, but sex!"

"I find this reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling."

Eliot may well have become more liberal when he was older but it wasn't because of the poetry; it was the sex.

Philip Roth. "Céline is my Proust!" 

 commenter Abu Ali replies to Séamus Malekafzali 

Being an Iraqi dude, Iran and its internal politics has always been interesting to me. With how unpopular the government in Iran has become recently and with diaspora trying to properly organize into a semi-united front, it's hard to not draw parallels to how the Iraqi opposition slowly coalesced before the American invasion in 2003. The most striking difference to me is how "unrepresentative" the current diaspora opposition is of local attitudes. I've been to Iran multiple times and I've seen a diverse population that is sometimes not very fond of the government, but is still proud of their Iranian identity with both its Islamic and non-Islamic components. Mosques and Hussianiyas were filled with people and there's a genuine sense of pride over the fact that Iran is the face of Shia Islam.

The Iraqi opposition with all its disastrous mistakes still tried to reflect the diversity of Iraqi society, everyone from communists to shia islamists to CIA guys to separatist Kurds to secular Shias and even disgruntled London Sunnis found a place at the diaspora table in the end. I don't see anything representative of Iran in the diaspora opposition, they're only representative of the diaspora itself. You can't tell me that there isn't a single exiled Shia cleric that they can invite to a conference to at least make it look more legitmate. I found it very telling that when Reza Pahlavi visited Israel, he only went to the Western Wall when Al Aqsa is literally two minutes away. He pandered to a few neocon donors while he claims to represent the people of Iran, who are definitely more Muslim and more interested in Al Aqsa. I won't even be too harsh on him, the loudest voices in the diaspora opposition all seem to base their entire worldview on one reddit post titled "Female Iranian students playing and laughing, Tehran, 1974". They're so ridiculously disconnected from the lives of the local Iranian people. It's really a shame because Iran deserves better than the IR, but the so-called opposition in America is disgraceful. The regime doesn't even need to work hard when vilifying these people, when they're disgracing themselves in Israel and doing wacky performance art outside of embassies. All I can is God help the people in choosing their own path.

Eli Cook again

Below I compare ending slavery to ending the occupation. Yesterday, at his request, I spent a moving 3 hours with Hadash leader @AyOdeh , one of the most important Arab leaders in Israel, and discussed Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. This is why I became an historian. https://t.co/uazvj17eGL pic.twitter.com/c4bY2tbgiw

— Eli Cook (@Eli_B_Cook) March 31, 2023

Tim Barker of Dissent replies, "Amazing!"

"Yesterday, at his request...—See? They're not all terrorists." Some are appropriately servile.

The occupation is not going to end. It's been a single state for decades. And the two state solution always meant the Palestinian citizens of Israel would have a home in the neighborhood... when they left the Jewish state.

---

Sinan Antoon,  "A million lives later, I cannot forgive what American terrorism did to my country, Iraq"

Many of us who had stood against Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and his regime wrote and spoke against the planned invasion for what were already obvious reasons. We challenged the false narrative of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). After 700 inspections, Hans Blix, the head of the UN’s weapons inspectors, and his teams had found no weapons in Iraq. The “mushroom cloud over Manhattan” that Condoleezza Rice warned about was a propaganda cloud to intensify hysteria. George Bush, after all, had reportedly decided to strike Iraq the week after 9/11.

The corporate mediascape in the US was an echo chamber for state propaganda. It wasn’t just the Manichaean worldview of post-9/11 national security hysteria, but a deep-seated colonial mentality – variations on the white man’s burden. An analysis of US TV news in the few weeks preceding the invasion found that sources expressing scepticism of the war were massively underrepresented. The media performed its function quite well in manufacturing consent and parroting official propaganda. In March 2003, 72% of American citizens supported the war. We should never forget this. (Up until 2018, 43% of Americans still thought it was the right decision.)

In Cairo, I watched as the US began its “shock and awe” campaign – a terrifying rain of death and destruction on Baghdad. Poetry was my refuge and the only space through which I could translate the visceral pain of watching the violence visited on Iraq and seeing my hometown fall to an occupying army. Some of the lines I wrote in the early days of the invasion crystallise my melancholy:

    The wind is a blind mother

    stumbling

    over the corpses

    no shrouds

    save the clouds

    but the dogs

    are far quicker

    The moon is a graveyard

    for light

    the stars are women

    wailing.

    Tired from carrying the coffins

    the wind leaned

    against a palm tree

    A satellite inquired:

    Whereto now?

    The silence

    in the wind’s cane murmured:

    “Baghdad”

    and the palm tree caught fire.

I had always hoped to see the end of Saddam’s dictatorship at the hands of the Iraqi people, not courtesy of a neocolonial project that would dismantle what had remained of the Iraqi state and replace it with a regime based on ethno-sectarian dynamics, plunging the country into violent chaos and civil wars.

Four months after the invasion I returned to Baghdad as part of a team to film About Baghdad, a documentary about the war and its aftermath. The chaos was already evident....

update at the top. 

not bad.

If you condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a violation of international law (as I did), and you support the continued presence of US troops in Syria (a violation of international law, since the Syrian government doesn't want them there), you have some explaining to do.

— Robert Wright (@robertwrighter) March 25, 2023

VOA News: US Firm Secures Oil Deal with US-Backed Forces in Syria

A U.S. company has reportedly reached a deal with Kurdish-led authorities in northeast Syria to develop and export crude oil in areas under their control in the war-torn country.

A senior official at the Kurdish-led Autonomous Administration in Northeast Syria said the deal was approved by the U.S. government.

---

I haven't heard a single US journalist at a major outlet frame the anniversary of the illegal US war with the recent Putin warrant by asking if any US architects of the invasion should also have been prosecuted.

— شنشون (@humanprovince) March 21, 2023

the Guardian Fri 21 Mar 2003

Vikram Dodd, A modern day blitzkrieg

The shock and awe tactic was invented by the American rightwing military strategist, Harlan Ullman.

It is a modern day blitzkrieg of the enemy, targeting his mind, soul and physical being, achieved by merciless and overwhelming "precision" bombing.

By Mr Ullman's admission, the aim is to cower the Iraqis using conventional weapons, in the way Japan was terrified into surrender by America's nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war.

Speaking before the war started Mr Ullman said: "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes.

"You're sitting in Baghdad and all of a sudden you're the general and 30 of your division headquarters have been wiped out.

"You also take the city down. By that I mean you get rid of their power, water. In days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."

Of the attack on Iraq, he said: "The point is the simultaneous intensity and enormity of this, it will be a very complicated operation, it will tend to shock, awe and stun the Iraqi leadership.

"We want them to quit. We want them not to fight."

[The link's not in the original.]

the Evening Standard 19 June 2003

Bob Graham,  'I just pulled the trigger' 

At first glance they appear to be the archetypal Band Of Brothers of Hollywood myth, brave and honest men united in common purpose.

But a closer look at these American GIs, sweltering in the heat of an unwelcoming Iraq, reveals the glazed eyes and limp expressions of those who have witnessed a war they do not understand and have begun to resent. By their own admission these American soldiers have killed civilians without hesitation, shot wounded fighters and left others to die in agony.

At first glance they appear to be the archetypal Band Of Brothers of Hollywood myth, brave and honest men united in common purpose. But a closer look at these American GIs, sweltering in the heat of an unwelcoming Iraq, reveals the glazed eyes and limp expressions of those who have witnessed a war they do not understand and have begun to resent. By their own admission these American soldiers have killed civilians without hesitation, shot wounded fighters and left others to die in agony.

What they told me, in a series of extraordinary interviews, will make uncomfortable reading for US and British politicians and senior military staff desperate to prevent the liberation of Iraq turning into a quagmire of Vietnam proportions, where the behaviour of troops feeds the hatred of an occupied people. Specialist Anthony Castillo: "If civilians were there, they were considered the enemy"

Sergeant First Class John Meadows revealed the mindset that has led to hundreds of innocent Iraqi civilians being killed alongside fighters deliberately dressed in civilian clothes. "You can't distinguish between who's trying to kill you and who's not," he said. "Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home."

These GIs, from Bravo Company of the 3/15th US Infantry Division, are caught in an impossible situation. More than 40 of their number have been killed by hostile forces since 1 May - when President Bush declared major military operations were over - and the number of hit-and-run attacks is on the increase. They face a resentful civilian population and, hiding among it, a number of guerrilla fighters still loyal to the old regime. A lone Iraqi sniper nicknamed The Hunter is believed to have claimed his sixth American victim this week in a suburb of Baghdad.

The man, said to be a former member of the Republican Guard Special Forces, has developed a cult status among some Iraqis. One Baghdad resident, Assad al Amari, said: "He is fighting for Iraq on his own. There will be many more Americans killed because they cannot stop The Hunter. He will be given the protection of people who will let him use their homes for his shooting."

In this hostile atmosphere the men of Bravo Company are asked to maintain order, yet at the same time win hearts and minds. It is not a dilemma they feel able to resolve. They spoke to me - dressed in uniforms they have worn for the past six weeks - at their base in Fallujah. Here US troops killed 18 demonstrators at a pro-Saddam rally soon after the war and now face local fighters bent on revenge.

Their attitude to these dangers is summed up by Specialist (Corporal) Michael Richardson, 22. "There was no dilemma when it came to shooting people who were not in uniform, I just pulled the trigger. It was up close and personal the whole time, there wasn't a big distance. If they were there, they were enemy, whether in uniform or not. Some were, some weren't."

Specialist Anthony Castillo added: "When there were civilians there we did the mission that had to be done. When they were there, they were at the wrong spot, so they were considered enemy." In one major battle - at the southern end of Baghdad at the intersection of the main highways - the soldiers estimate about 70 per cent of the enem

y's 400-or-so fighters were dressed as civilians. Sgt Meadows explained: "The fight lasted for about eight hours and they just kept on coming all day from everywhere, from all sides. They were all in plain clothes."We had dropped fliers a couple of days prior saying to people to get out of the area if they didn't want to fight, so basically anyone who was there was a combatant. If they were dumb enough to stand in front of tanks or drive a car towards a tank, then they were there to fight. On that day it took away the dilemma of who to fire at, anyone who was there was a combatant."

Cpl Richardson added: "That day nothing went with the training. There were females fighting; there were some that, when they saw you f****** coming, they'd just drop their s*** and try to give up; and some guys were shot and they'd play dead, and when you'd go by they'd reach for their weapons. That day it was just f****** everything. When we face women or injured that try to grab their weapons, we just finish them off. You've gotta, no choice."

Such is their level of hatred they preferred to kill rather than merely injure. Sgt Meadows, 34, said: "The worst thing is to shoot one of them, then go help him." Sergeant Adrian Pedro Quinones, 26, chipped in: "In that situation you're angry, you're raging. They'd just been shooting at my men - they were putting my guys in a casket and eight feet under, that's what they were trying to do.

"And now, they're laying there and I have to help them, I have a responsibility to ensure my men help them." Cpl Richardson said: "S***, I didn't help any of them. I wouldn't help the f******. There were some you let die. And there were some you double-tapped." He held out his hand as if firing a gun and clucked his tongue twice. He said: "Once you'd reached the objective, and once you'd shot them and you're moving through, anything there, you shoot again. You didn't want any prisoners of war. You hate them so bad while you're fighting, and you're so terrified, you can't really convey the feeling, but you don't want them to live."

These soldiers have faced fighters from other Arab countries. "It wasn't even Iraqis that we was killing, it was Syrians," said Sgt Meadows. "We spoke to some of the people and Saddam made a call for his Arab brothers for a holy war against us, and they said they came here to fight us. Whadda we ever do to them?"

Cpl Richardson intervened: "S***, that didn't really matter who they were. They wanted to fight us so they were the enemy. We had to take over Baghdad, period, it didn't matter who was in there."

The GIs spoke of shooting civilians at roadblocks. Sgt Meadows said: "When they used white flags we were told to stop them at 400 metres out and then strip them down naked then bring them through. Most obeyed the order. We knew about others who had problems with [Iraqis] carrying white flags and then opening up on our guys. We knew about every trick they were trying to do. Then they'd use cars to try and drive at us. They were men, women and children. That day we shot up a lot of cars.

"We'd shoot warning shots at them and they'd keep coming, so we'd kill them. We'd fire a warning shot over the top of them or on the road. When people criticise us killing civilians they don't know that a lot of these civilians were combatants, they really were . And they still are."

The men have been traumatised by their experiences. Cpl Richardson-said: "At night time you think about all the people you killed. It just never gets off your head, none of this stuff does. There's no chance to forget it, we're still here, we've been here so long. Most people leave after combat but we haven't."

Sgt Meadows said men under his command had been seeking help for severe depression: "They've already seen psychiatrists and the chain of command has got letters back saying 'these men need to be taken out of this situation'. But nothing's happened." Cpl Richardson added: "Some soldiers don't even f****** sleep at night. They sit up all f****** night long doing s*** to keep themselves busy - to keep their minds off this f****** stuff. It's the only way they can handle it. It's not so far from being crazy but it's their way of coping. There's one guy trying to build a little pool out the back, pointless stuff but it keeps him busy."

Sgt Meadows said: "For me, it's like snap-shot photos. Like pictures of maggots on tongues, babies with their heads on the ground, men with their heads halfway off and their eyes wide open and mouths wide open. I see it every day, every single day. The smells and the torsos burning, the entire route up to Baghdad, from 20 March to 7 April, nothing but burned bodies."

Specialist Bryan Barnhart, 21, joined in: "I also got the images like snapshots in my head. There are bodies that we saw when we went back to secure a place we'd taken. The bodies were still there and they'd been baking in the sun. Their bodies were bloated three times the size."

Sgt Quinones explained: "There are psychiatrists who are trying to sort out their problems but they say it's because of long combat environment. They know we need to be taken away from that environment." But the group's tour of duty has been extended and the men have been forced to remain as peacekeepers. Cpl Richardson said: "Now we're in this peacekeeping, we're always firing off a warning shot at people that don't wanna listen to you. You make up the rules as you go along.

"Like, in Fallujah we get rocks thrown at us by kids. You wanna turn round and shoot one of the little f*****s but you know you can't do that. Their parents know if they came out and threw rocks we'd shoot them. So that's why they send the kids out." Sgt Meadows said: "Can you imagine being a soldier and being told 'you're fighting a war, then when you finish you can go home'.

"You go and fight that war, and you win decisively, but now you have to stay and stabilise the situation. We are having to go from a full warfighting mindset to a peacekeeping mindset overnight. Right after shooting at people who were trying to kill you, you now have to help them."

The anger towards their own senior officers is obvious. Cpl Richardson said: "We weren't trained for this stuff now. It makes you resentful they're holding us on here. It pisses everyone off, we were told once the war was over we'd leave when our replacements get here. Well, our replacements got here and we're still here."

Specialist Castillo said: "We're more angry at the generals who are making these decisions and who never hit the ground, and who don't get shot at or have to look at the bloody bodies and the burnt-out bodies, and the dead babies and all that kinda stuff." Sgt Quinones added: "Most of these soldiers are in their early twenties and late teens. They've seen, in less than a month, more than any man should see in a whole lifetime. It's time for us to go home."

On whether the war was one worth fighting, Sgt Meadows said: "I don't care about Iraq one way or the other. I couldn't care less. [Saddam] could still be in power and, to me, it wasn't worth leaving my family for; for getting shot at and almost dying two or three times, there's nothing worth that to me." Even though no Iraqis were involved, and there is no proof Saddam was behind it, the attack on the World Trade Center provides Cpl Richardson and many others with the justification for invading Iraq.

"There's a picture of the World Trade Center hanging up by my bed and I keep one in my Kevlar [flak jacket]. Every time I feel sorry for these people I look at that. I think, 'They hit us at home and, now, it's our turn.' I don't want to say payback but, you know, it's pretty much payback. 

Tooze in the FT: The west’s limited support for Ukraine fails to measure up

Europe and the US may sincerely want Kyiv to prevail over Moscow but they are failing to match ends with means

In the first 12 months of the war in Ukraine, the condemnation of Russia and rhetorical backing of Kyiv by the governments of Europe and the US has been intense and largely unanimous. But the economic numbers tell a different story. Judged against current potential and historical standards, the war looks like an exercise in calculated restraint.

This is not necessarily a sign of strategic failure. Though the moral force of war may seem to demand absolute commitment, total war is the dream of fascists or revolutionaries. For the rest of us, total war should be an absolute nightmare. War that does not envision the overthrowing of all order must involve the weighing of means and ends, costs and benefits, even in the face of death. And this is true for both combatants and their allies.

Tooze on Substack

What does it feel like to see a major war coming? Not to “sleepwalk” but to wake to the reality that one state, with deliberation and intent is about to invade another with massive military force? With drastic consequences for millions of people and huge loss of life.

We have experienced this before. For many of us that moment came in 2002 and 2003 when we watched with horror the massing of the “coalition of the willing”, including our own country’s forces, for the invasion of Iraq. Around the world the memory of that moment hangs like a shadow over events today. This, indeed, is one of the points brought out by Politico’s oral history of the Biden administration in the autumn of 2021. This remarkable collage of interview segments conveys vividly what it was like for those who were privy to the most top-level military intelligence to face the dawning realization of Putin’s intent.

Tooze on twitter with a screengrab from Politico 

VICTORIA NULAND: Suffice to say that in December I brought all of my shower stuff, a couple of changes of clothes, things to sleep in, a blanket and a much more nutritious array of snacks into the office, because I knew it was unpredictable what our hours would look like.

Nuland, then and now

repeats: Ragozin, from last October and December 2021, beginning with Zagorodnyuk's article in Foreign Affairs: Ukraine's Path to Victory  

Ragozin. (click the link and read the whole thread):

For context, Zahorodniuk left defence minister’s post on March 4, 2020 - same day as prime minister Honcharuk. Together they soon landed in the US and in the Atlantic Council during the election year devising a new hawkish strategy for resolving Ukrainian conflict.

This resulted in an abrupt change of tack in Zelensky’s policies the moment Biden entered office. It also resulted in Atlantic Council’s radical strategy for resolving the conflict which was published in March 2021, just before Putin started amassing troops at the border.

Enter Biden. His White House takeover in Jan 2021 coincides with Zelensky’s radical change of tack with regards to Russia. Ukraine is suddenly proactive and assertive in the manner that suggests some pre-planning. Ex-PM Oleksiy Honcharuk’s posting to the US is of note here. 

 Le Monde Diplo: Western media as cheerleaders for war

Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.

After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.

Wapo: In race to arm Ukraine, U.S. faces cracks in its manufacturing might

The war has exposed an inability to rapidly surge production of many weapons needed for Ukraine and for America’s self-defense

SCRANTON, Pa. — A sharp hissing sound fills the factory as red-hot artillery shells are plunged into scalding oil.

Richard Hansen, a Navy veteran who oversees this government-owned munitions facility, explains how the 1,500-degree liquid locks in place chemical properties that ensure when the shells are fired — perhaps on a battlefield in Ukraine — they detonate in the deadly manner intended.

“That’s what we do,” Hansen said. “We build things to kill people.”

Ragozin adds

US arms producers are going to have a decades-long bonanza because of war in Ukraine. Of course it will help them if Putin’s regime remains intact, Ukraine remains a hot or frozen battlefield and a new Cold War ensues.

NYT: Pentagon Blocks Sharing Evidence of Possible Russian War Crimes With Hague Court

President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the International Criminal Court in The Hague gathered by American intelligence agencies about Russian atrocities in Ukraine, according to current and former officials briefed on the matter.

American military leaders oppose helping the court investigate Russians because they fear setting a precedent that might help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. The rest of the administration, including intelligence agencies and the State and Justice Departments, favors giving the evidence to the court, the officials said.

President Biden has yet to resolve the impasse, officials said. 

 The FT: The Iraq war left western societies unchanged

Twenty years on, the political and cultural legacy of a divisive war is minimal

...Yes, US casualties were far higher in Vietnam. Yes, a conscript war scars a society in a way that an all-volunteer one can’t. But Iraq was easily the most controversial war fought by a western state in the past half-century. It set citizen against citizen in Britain and Germany as much as in the US (no European nation participated in Vietnam). Those who lived through it might have assumed it would mark our culture for a generation: that pro and antiwar would become signifiers of one’s wider worldview, even one’s tastes, as Leave and Remain now are in the UK. Instead, it is often an ordeal to persuade the young what a saga it all was.

And that, I think, is what makes this 20th anniversary so eerie. At least within the western world, the Iraq war has left little trace.

Tooze adds: "Discuss"

Marlene Laruelle, "Russian Studies’ Moment of Self-Reflection" Russian Analytical Digest No. 293

Almost the entirety. It's hilarious. From Ragozin and Kevin Rothrock.

Anglophone Russian Studies are largely autarkic, existing with little knowledge of (or at least reference to) what is produced outside of the English-speaking world. The very limited references made to the Russian-language literature belie the richness of Russian publications, as any visit to such Russian intellectual hotspots as the Falanster bookstore in Moscow would have shown—at least until the onset of the full-scale war. And this does not even take into account what is published in Russia’s regional capitals, whose publishing markets are segregated from those in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Even within so-called “Western” academia, publications in French, German, and other national languages rarely transcend their national borders to be engaged by the English-speaking literature. By contrast, history and literature seem to have been better able to integrate locally produced scholarship.

A second feature is that in contrast to old “Sovietology,” social scientists working on contemporary Russia are rarely invited to train in and enter into dialogue with the humanities. How many U.S. political scientists studying Russia have read Viktor Pelevin? More globally and more structurally, social sciences struggle to put into practice their self-proclaimed commitment to multidisciplinarity, or at least crossdisciplinarity. Segments of Anglophone political science on Russia, by stressing the need for causal identification study designs, have contributed to an overreliance on data from surveys with experimental designs at the expense of interactions with history, cultural anthropology, sociology, or geography. Here, too, the segregation is largely internal to the “Western” and especially Anglophone realm: Russian publications display much deeper cross-disciplinary approaches. And except in such marginal subfields as Russia’s Arctic policy, climate change, and sustainability policy, there is even less dialogue between the social sciences, geography, and the natural sciences.

A third feature relates to the succession of prisms or lenses used on Russia that have created distortions in analyses. At least four such prisms can be identified. First is a Putin-centric prism that entails looking at Russia through its president, his professional background, his inner circles, trying to identify his ideological gurus, illuminating his supposedly “irrational mindset,” or offering purely instrumentalist analysis of the regime.

Second is a Moscow-centric vision of Russia in which the capital city and its more liberal-minded residents obscure regional perspectives, which are often ideologically more diverse and are generally more nuanced. Similarly, internationally well-connected Russian scholars from the two capitals are frequently seen as the only legitimate “Russian voices” —because they are the only ones known in the West and able to speak its language, both literally and symbolically.

Third is an ethnic Russian-centric reading of Russia in which the ethnic minorities who were so intensively studied in the 1990s have become one of the blank spots of research. This contributes to the difficulties of capturing potentially “hidden scripts” of ressentiment—aggravated by the general Western lack of knowledge of Russia’s national languages and the marginalization of identity politics, seen as a “sub-area” that cannot explain Russia’s general features.

Last but not least is a Western-centric prism imposed on Russia, its regime and society, which are always com- pared to the West’s as the obvious normative benchmark. This approach, which treats the West as the only mirror of Russia, blatantly excludes views of Russia from non-Western perspectives. Scholars from countries neighboring Russia have increasingly called to be recognized as agents in interpreting Russia on the basis of their own experiences. Scholars from the Global South, too, look at Russia and at the West through their own prisms and experiences, including a vivid postcolonial approach.

Where do we go from here?

Acknowledging academic inequalities in knowledge production—of which there are many—would be a first step. The most obvious starting-point is probably that native scholars and indigenously produced work should be acknowledged as critical additions to the field that cannot be ignored. But there are other knowledge hierarchies, too: of English-speaking works over non-English ones; of Western-centric views over those from the post-Soviet world and from the “Global South”; of political science—the “reigning” discipline through which (Western) understandings of the Russian regime and society are developed—over sociology, cultural anthropology, history, and the humanities.

A second step would be to favor more granular and grassroots approaches that would allow for thicker conceptual knowledge. The Post-Soviet Affairs special issue shows us the path: it would entail, among other things, changing the questions we ask; being cognizant of the issues related to aggregative approaches and the need to blend survey data with qualitative analysis; going back to long-neglected ethnographic methods; looking at societal transformations over the course of generations; focusing on vulnerable segments of the population (both classes and ethnic groups); borrowing from social psychology to study ressentiment-based politics and collective emotions; and opening up to new comparative frameworks.

This is a transformative time for the Russian Studies field. Russia scholars have the opportunity—and duty— to both rethink the systemic features of their field and to contribute to changing the lenses applied to Russia in the hope of contributing modestly to new pathways for the peaceful coexistence of the nations that share the Europe-Asia continent.

Remember, the humanities are dying. "The End of the English Major"

Leiter reads the New Yorker too.

In 2022, though, a survey found that only seven per cent of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities, down from twenty per cent in 2012, and nearly thirty per cent during the nineteen-seventies. From fifteen years ago to the start of the pandemic, the number of Harvard English majors reportedly declined by about three-quarters—in 2020, there were fewer than sixty at a college of more than seven thousand—and philosophy and foreign literatures also sustained losses. (For bureaucratic reasons, Harvard doesn’t count history as a humanity, but the trend holds.) “We feel we’re on the Titanic,” a senior professor in the English department told me.

Students lacked a strong sense of the department’s vaunted standing. “I would never say this to any of my English- or my film-major friends, but I kind of thought that those majors were a joke,” Isabel Mehta, a junior, told me. “I thought, I’m a writer, but I’ll never be an English major.” Instead, she’d pursued social studies—a philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years. (Policy, students explained, was thought to effect urgent change.) But the conversations bored her (students said “the same three things,” she reported, “and I didn’t want to be around all these classmates railing on capitalism all day”), so she landed uneasily in English after all. “I have a warped sense of identity, where I’m studying something really far removed from what a lot of people here view as central, but I’m not removed from these cultural forces,” she told me.

English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.

"philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years."

PhD PPE

Isabel Mehta's choices describe the situation of humanism in a world of ideological instrumentalism and moral certainty: positivist, leftist or capitalist. She didn't want to know the history; she can't take it seriously, but she does it anyway, because she needs to tell her stories. Her LinkedIn page reminds me of Nwanevu.

I can't not think of LinkedIn as embarrassing. But that reminds me of my mother's reaction when I told her a friend of a friend had asked me to ask her for an introduction to a friend of hers. Her eyes widened: such things were not done. Mehta went to my high school, which means she probably was there for more. I got in, in the last year of elementary school, through the matriarch of one of the oldest families in Philadelphia, whose grandson was a staff lawyer at the ACLU. These were the days when the ACLU was principled, and frankly fun. The school had a few scholarship kids from my neighborhood but I never thought to mention to anyone that I was the only white or demi-white kid in the school who had a sibling who'd gone to the public school the scholarship kids had succeeded in avoiding. I'm not sure anyone would have gotten the joke. In my 20s I told my mother I was a tradesman. She was horrified. I said I was a carpenter and she was relieved. She's thought I meant I was "in trade".

Agnes Callard again, this time in the New Yorker. She now admits what was always obvious.

reworked. Lee Fang's "even-handed" podcaster is a fascist.

---

I shouldn't be surprised this is still up

I don’t really get why some of the “anti-woke” crowd is so uncritically pro-Israel. Israel is exactly what you get when you combine an identitarian movement, based on real historical grievance, with tanks and nukes.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) May 17, 2021

A good fit.

The answer to the confused identity politics of the Left is not an identity politics of the Right. https://t.co/tRqLxh9x6o

— Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) June 7, 2017

Fang praises a podcaster: "I was blown away by his humanistic and even-handed series on the founding of Israel."  The podcaster replies, "Thanks Lee".

Podcaster Darryl Cooper, "Martyr Made". 

Pedro’s tribute to General Francisco Franco, who, with a little help from a few friends, saved Spain from communists (for a while, at least). Ordered a hard copy, I’m not waiting for the online version.

Spain 1936. The left has launched a crusade against Christians, burning churches and murdering clergy. They attempt to overthrow the government more than once before eventually winning a rigged election. The campaign of violence against its enemies escalates, sometimes with help from the police. Liberals do nothing to stop the left. Faced with no alternative, nationalist forces stage a desperate uprising to save Spain and are eventually led by a reluctant general: Francisco Franco. My tribute to Franco in  @EuroConOfficial.

A small leap: Cooper's a racist and an anti-Semite; his "even-handed" discussion of the founding of Israel is founded on the belief that Jews aren't European, even though Zionism was explicitly an ideology of conquest by the battered children of Europe. "The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. We want to emigrate as a respected people" 

cf. Liberia. 

Cooper cohosts a podcast, The Unravelling, with Jocko Willink. "Jocko teams up with Darryl Cooper, creator of The MartyrMade Podcast, to pull on threads connecting the contemporary world to our shared past."  Willink, ex-Navy Seal and professional alpha male, is a co-founder of Echelon Front. Fang has a history defending Mike Cernovich, so it makes sense.

With Fang, at best, it's just the desperate need to be in the middle: the autistic corollary to black and white is a pathological grey. But like Jilani he's less concerned by anti-black racism. Asian anti-black racism gets less attention, but it's a given. Jews and Asians get respect from white nationalists. Muslims not so much. Half the history of the Reconquista is forgotten. It goes on from there to Holocaust revisionism.

Finally, @BarakRavid got a truly chilling response from @IsraeliPM: "Regarding the House of Destinies, the Hungarians have expressed the wish to create a consensus regarding the narrative as a condition for opening the museum. >>

— Noga Tarnopolsky נגה טרנופולסקי نوغا ترنوبولسكي (@NTarnopolsky) December 5, 2018

For Jäger and Leusder, and scholastic intellectuals, the process is aestheticized: political theology is more important than mere politics.

In the beginning was the word.

"The history of events merely provides a series of pegs to hang  the history of ideas on, and it is the letter that is of real interest. So, the time has come to turn to that history of ideas."  

Materialism for thee; Idealism for me. It's all so offensive. 

Follow the bouncing ball from Jager and "Franz Pokorny", to Lomez, Steve Sailer and Amy Wax, to First Things.

Steve Sailer ties all of the above, from Fang's fascists to Jäger's.

   Amy Wax

The AFA letter,  however, neglects the fact that some of the allegations concern not extramural speech, but speech and actions in the classroom; and some concern extramural speech on matters that impact the functioning of the school.  In the former category is the fact that Professor Wax invited an infamous (and unabashed) racist, Jared Taylor, to speak in her class and have lunch with her students.  It is dubious that the decision to host Mr. Taylor in her classroom can be defended on academic freedom grounds, as a professionally sound choice given academic standards in law teaching. 

Jonah Gelbach, via Leiter  and again, on Jon Haidt and Amy Wax.

I've rewritten everything above, so this has become secondary. But it's annoying. 

Jager rt's a friend, quoting Charles Maier's Among Empires

—“How not to die”: In I. M. Coetzee's dark Vision from Waiting for the  Barbarians.- “One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of  Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day  it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of  Cities, the rape of populations. pyramids of bones. acres of desolation.—

The obvious association in 2022 is Israel, but not for a white European. It's too close to home. Necessity is the mother of elision.

where are your priors?

October 18, Open Democracy, "Suella Braverman quietly tries to give herself fresh anti-protest powers"

Suella Braverman is quietly handing herself new powers to clamp down on the government’s political opponents, civil right advocates have warned.

The home secretary pushed through a last-minute amendment to a widely criticised anti-protest bill on Tuesday that would allow her to apply for injunctions against anyone she deems ‘likely’ to carry out protests that could cause ‘serious disruption’ to ‘key national infrastructure’, prevent access to ‘essential’ goods or services, or have a ‘serious adverse effect on public safety’. The proposal would also give police the power to arrest anyone they suspect to be breaching such an injunction.

Leading human rights groups say that the Public Order Bill, which passed a final vote in the Commons yesterday, would align the UK’s anti-protest laws with those in Russia and Belarus.

The bill includes new powers, such as protest banning orders, that the government was forced to exclude from its Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (PCSC) after they were voted down in the House of Lords earlier this year. Peers could reject the measures once more when the bill progresses to the Lords in the coming weeks.

2015, future former home secretary Suella Fernande [now Braverman] in The Telegraph

"Britain is so obsessed with human rights it has forgotten about human duties" 

The plight of millions of people belies the noble aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly those many decades ago.

One reason for this is because the Universal Declaration was never a treaty in the formal sense. It was not ratified by nations, never became international law, and had no real provision for enforcement.

Another reason is that the rights are described in imprecise, aspirational terms which allow governments to interpret them in any way they see fit. The US, for example, did not undertake to outlaw racial segregation until many years later. And there are hundreds of international human rights – rights to work and education, to freedom of expression and religious worship, to non-discrimination, to privacy, to pretty much anything you might think important in a perfect world. The sheer volume and array of rights imply an all-embracing protection. This is impossible, because there will always be trade-offs in which some rights are sacrificed to uphold others.

Professor Eric Posner makes this point forcefully in his book, Twilight of Human Rights Law. In Brazil, there have been several cases of the use of torture by the police in the name of crime prevention. They justify this by putting a general right to live free from crime and intimidation above their rights of those who are tortured. To wipe out torture, the government would need to create robust, well-paid policing and judicial services to guarantee the same results. The government might argue that this money is better spent on new schools and medical clinics, protecting wider rights to freedom of education and health. These sort of value judgments, inherent in the practical application of human rights (whether we agree with them or not), undermine their "universality".

But across most of the West, something else has happened which devalues human rights. A fatal misassumption plagues our whole approach to civil liberties: the predominance of the individual over the communal. The importance of the individual is seen as the defining axiom upon which we should base our policy and gauge its success. Emerging by reference to individual instincts and desires, rights and entitlements are paramount in our society, prevailing over considerations of how our choices affect others, over reference to past experience, or over the consequences for those born later on.

2004, Balkin, "Vermeule and [Eric] Posner Defend the Torture Memo"

2014, Eric Posner, The Twilight of Human Rights Law, OUP, 

[P]roblems with so-called positive or social rights are well known. Less well known is that the same problem exists for the “negative rights” in the ICCPR, such as the right not to be tortured. One might think that a state could comply with the prohibition on torture at no cost by refraining from torture. But it turns out that local police officials frequently engage in torture even though they are not authorized to do so. To stop torture, then, the government must not only enact laws, but must also invest resources in investigating allegations of torture, punishing torturers, and purging and retraining law enforcement. Thus, the key question for a state is how much of its resources it must devote to countering torture at the expense of building health clinics and public schools. The treaties provide no guidance as to how resources should be allocated. If there is no way to distinguish positive and negative rights, and we are skeptical about whether judges can enforce positive rights, then we ought to be skeptical about whether they can enforce negative rights as well. The real question is not the nature of the rights but the extent to which we can trust judges or other enforcing agents to distribute resources between competing rights.

There is yet another problem. Although not all treaty terms are vague, the actual legal effect of even specific norms is often ambiguous because they conflict with terms in other treaties as well as with broader norms of public international law. Consider sections 3 and 4 of Article 9 of the ICCPR:

3. Anyone arrested or detained on a criminal charge shall be brought promptly before a judge or other officer authorized by law to exercise judicial power and shall be entitled to trial within a reasonable time or to release. . . .

4. Anyone who is deprived of his liberty by arrest or detention shall be entitled to take proceedings before a court, in order that that court may decide without delay on the lawfulness of his detention and order his release if the detention is not lawful.

Whatever else these rights require, they do clearly prohibit a state from detaining people without charging them. Thus, many commentators accused the United States of violating the human rights of Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects by detaining them without charging them and taking them before a judge for a trial. However, the United States argued in response that the ICCPR does not apply to wartime conditions: the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war, which do not require the involvement of courts for detention, are lex specialis, and thus override human rights law.

The principle of lex specialis is well established in international (and domestic) law. Different sources of law conflict, and a principle is needed to resolve such conflicts. Many human rights advocates believe that the human rights treaties provide a moral minimum that other bodies of law can never supersede, much like the rights in the U.S. Bill of Rights. However, the human rights treaties themselves do not say this, nor does any other authoritative source of international law. There is no clear resolution of the dispute between the United States and its critics. [p.89]

1979, Richard Posner, "Utilitarianism, Economics, and Legal Theory",  

Among the severest critics of the use of economic theory to explain and sometimes to justify the principles of torts, contracts, restitution and other fields of Anglo-American 'judge-made law' are those who attack the economic underpinnings of the theory as a version of utilitarianism. Their procedure is first to equate economics with utilitarianism and then to attack utilitarianism. Whether they follow this procedure because they are more comfortable with the terminology of philosophy than with that of the social sciences or because they want to exploit the current tide of hostility to utilitarianism is of no moment. The important question is whether utilitarianism and economics are really the same thing. I believe they are not and, further, that the economic norm I shall call "wealth maximization" provides a firmer basis for a normative theory of law than does utilitarianism.

1948, John Houston (and B. Traven) 

---

Braverman

But across most of the West, something else has happened which devalues human rights. A fatal misassumption plagues our whole approach to civil liberties: the predominance of the individual over the communal.

1987, Thatcher, the same point from the opposite direction.

I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.

Jan 26, 2003. William Arkin, LA Times, The Nuclear Option in Iraq

WASHINGTON — One year after President Bush labeled Iraq, Iran and North Korea the “axis of evil,” the United States is thinking about the unthinkable: It is preparing for the possible use of nuclear weapons against Iraq. At the U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Omaha and inside planning cells of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, target lists are being scrutinized, options are being pondered and procedures are being tested to give nuclear armaments a role in the new U.S. doctrine of “preemption.” 

from Mark Ames. I was surprised I didn't remember it, but going through the archives, I found Blair from Jan 21st.

Tony Blair today refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in a conflict against Iraq, as MPs grilled the prime minister for two and a half hours on the subject of Saddam Hussein.

The prime minister said Britain and the US would deal with the threat from Iraq by "any way necessary". 

British defense secretary Geoffrey Hoon in Spring 2002

Normally, British ministers are reticent about their nuclear weapons. The standard formula is to say, if asked, that we don't rule anything out if anyone attacks us. All this has now changed. The first person who says nuclear use is worth discussing happens to be Straw's colleague, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary. In March, Hoon said, in the context of Iraq: "I am absolutely confident, in the right conditions, we would be willing to use our nuclear weapons."

Those who heard him say this, including some expert advisers, were startled. Such explicitness broke a norm that even Washington has usually observed. But they thought it was an accidental one-off occurring, as it did, at the end of a select committee session and without obvious premeditation. However, a few days later Hoon gave more particulars to Jonathan Dimbleby, insisting that the nuclear option would be taken pre-emptively, if we thought British forces were about to be attacked by Iraqi chemical or biological weapons. My colleague Richard Norton-Taylor reported and commented on this at the time, but there was little political fall-out.

Then, to make sure we understood, Hoon said it for a third time, telling the full House of Commons: "A British government must be able to express their view that, ultimately and in conditions of extreme self-defence, nuclear weapons would have to be used." This triple whammy, insisting on Britain's right to use nukes, pre-emptively if necessary, against states of concern that aren't themselves nuclear powers, has made the quietest of impacts. Yet it has no precedent in the policy of any government, Labour or Conservative.

--- 

Ragozin 

 Chief of Ukrainian military intelligence talks about near future:

- Big Ukrainian advances by year’s end

- End of war next summer

- Changes in Russia, some regions peeling off

- Russia’s “economic centre” shifts to Ukraine

The latter point is consistent with Azovian ideas of Muscovy being the wrong Russia. Switch the capital to Kiev and things gonna be all right.

--- 

On Dylan Riley. A pedant's take on Trump and fascism. Jäger et al. (Moyn) are happy. In a recent podcast interview Jäger referred to the "fascistic" European right. I guess he just slipped.

Gavin Jacobson and Riley in The New Statesman 

The issue for the left, as Riley sees it, is that it has become far too focused on redressing past wrongs at the expense of proposing solutions to the problems of humanity. “I don’t want to be dismissive of either Black Lives Matter or other mobilisations for redistribution, but there is no alternative for what a new kind of society as a whole would look like. What rushes into the vacuum is the concern over justice, and the problem is that justice is firmly backward-looking in its orientation. It’s not that justice is unimportant but it cannot be the lodestar of a project of a new society. As a strategy, it makes the left seem like a group of moralisers, which is not a political winner. Leftists would do well to remember that point, and more generally Marx’s profound scepticism about the very idea of justice.”

A confused mess. Marx was a philosopher and an orator, a moralizer and an observer from afar. He enjoyed playing both sides: determinism and free will. 

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Chains, winning, and losing: righteous moralism, irrelevant to science. Freedom? Humbug to a materialist.

"Truth and Politics"  repeats and repeats. Truth is private; politics is public. Philosophers' need for truth is authoritarian and anti-political. Riley's claim to oppose moralism is hilarious. His is the moralism of moral and intellectual superiority.

Riley in the NLR in 2016 "What is Trump?"

He says interwar fascism united the petty bourgeois and the industrial capitalists against the working class. Later he says this:  

Analysis of Trump’s supporters before the November 2016 election suggested they were likely to lack a college degree and have slightly higher-than-median incomes; he did well among skilled blue-collar workers.

That used to called the "bourgeoisification of the working class." And poor workers didn't vote for Trump. I've posted this before.

Trump has the support of regional capitalists, in Putin's case, national, and nationalist, who make and keep their money close to home. With Putin it's only the richest, with money and real estate in Zurich and London, where he had to resort to coercion.

At this point I can imagine a college professor—Moyn!—telling self-described fascists, the Israeli and the Croat I used to drink with, both combat veterans, that they're not really fascist.

I stand by my definition.

I'm still adding to this.

Riley on Fukuyama, from his new book of musings. At the Verso blog. 

It must be said, however, that neither of the two responses to the Fukuyama moment has really adequately dealt with the democracy problem. To pose the issue correctly requires a break with the metaphysics of sovereignty. It is important to recognize how right Weber was when he said that “the people” do not rule in modern states, regardless of whatever theory of sovereignty predominates in them. (Mosca, who is often wrongly dismissed as failing to understand democracy, of course made a similar point.) It’s also never sufficiently emphasized that Weber’s types of legitimate authority make no mention of democracy. They speak instead of legal-rational authority. The Althusserians would say, I suppose, that this is a “symptomatic” silence.

What perhaps should be recognized here is Weber’s total, if implicit, convergence with Lenin on precisely this point: both of them saw the terms “democracy” and “state” as antithetical, and quite rightly so. (It is true that Weber expressed himself somewhat differently than Lenin, but he was quite clear that the “people” never rule in the modern state.) How does one abolish an antithesis? By rendering it impossible. To imagine a postcapitalist political order is to imagine an order without sovereignty—and therefore without the metaphysics of sovereignty and its terminology, such as “democracy”—but with coordination and rationality. Surprising as it may seem, the Hayekian phrase, from The Fatal Conceit, “the extended order of human cooperation” somehow gets at the idea much more effectively than the limp and trite expression “socialist democracy,” which carries with it both a legacy of defeat and the faint odor of metaphysical decay.

The "Fukuyama moment" exists only in the minds of people who've spent their lives equating the processes of the world with the teloi of European, Christian, philosophy: Augustine, Luther, Hegel, Weber, Lenin, Hayek, and the hippies; the problem of politics for those who desire truth in the world, “the extended order of human cooperation”; one way or another, back to the garden.

And I'd forgotten that along with the end of history comes the end of art—meaning again, art as truth.  The same shit. It says nothing about Aristophanes, Chaucer, limericks, fart jokes, groundlings and fiction, the art of orators and liars. But all artists are charlatans, especially the ones who work for popes. 

How far we've come

I know it's un-Twitter-like to ask a genuine Q, not try to score points, but a Q. I understand how a court can enjoin further execution of a warrant. But does a federal court have authority to enjoin executive branch "use" of seized materials for "investigative purposes"?

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) September 5, 2022

Memories

Orin – as Belle suggests in the post I linked, one can create a hypothetical in which the sound utilitarian thing to do is to torture an innocent three year old to death. Does this tell us anything useful about whether it is right or wrong to torture three year olds to death? Are we merely negotiating over the circumstances under which torturing three year olds is OK and not OK, as per the Churchill quote?

The New Statesman, "New York’s hipster wars"

Why the city’s clash of cultures between progressive Brooklyn and transgressive Manhattan marks a new era in American politics.

In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone. As the main hub for the country’s media and frequent originator of trends that percolate through US society, what’s “in” with the New York scene today is often central to American culture tomorrow. And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture.

But New York City’s intellectual landscape is increasingly split between two warring scenes, divided by geography, aesthetics and politics. Which of these prevails could affect whether America shifts right or remains where it is.

In Brooklyn, the borough associated with the “hipster” revolution from the late 2000s, writers energised by the Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 retain their faith in left-wing politics through new “small” magazines. But on the island of Manhattan, a self-consciously transgressive artistic and literary scene is brewing downtown. In podcasts, plays and literary journals, a different sensibility is being elaborated. Scornful of the “woke” sanctimony of Brooklyn-based media, some flirt with alternative ideologies, while others claim not to be interested in politics at all.

[see also: A farewell to Enid’s, Greenpoint’s iconic “hipster” hangout]

Who wins in New York’s clash of cultures is high-stakes for the future of American political culture.... 

The first time I walked in Enid's all I thought was that it felt like the midwest: slackers from suburban Illinois and their junkie ex-cheerleader girlfriends. 

"And politics, too ­– as US conservatives never tire of noting – is often downstream of culture."

Serendipity/timing...

That culture might be powerless to affect the movement of history was a perception Viennese society held in abeyance for half a century, by endorsing every avant-garde that appeared in its arts and literature. 

The author is an American, a nationalist hipster conservative.

Even the pointless endless squabbling of the American culture war—which I have called an engine of unfreedom—is also a machine that originates new doctrines quickly copied from Brazil to Bessarabia, that generates entirely new lifestyles, physical-medical-cultural modes of life hitherto unknown.

To be present at the creation is why one lives in America and in New York specifically, why one bears the thousand tiny indignities of life here, why one consents to being broiled in summer and frozen in winter, ripped off for everything in all seasons, why one submits to the terrible restlessness and the deleterious effect on the body of the climate, the cuisine, the lifestyle—why it’s necessary to endure the vulgarity that pervades the city at every level, up to the highest levels of supposed refinement and intellectualism....

A postscript: I recently published a piece for the New Statesman gathering some observations on the political-cultural landscape in New York City. Just a fun little piece for the Brits, something to give them a very rough sense of developments here, because they love that sort of thing.  I figured it would probably get lukewarm pick-up this side of the Atlantic because I didn’t come out swinging against any of the people I mentioned.

Wrong! People outside New York City were irritated by what they perceived as an exaggeration on my part of the influence of a handful of figures in New York City, none of whom are household names. And after another essay was published earlier in the week, people in New York City were fed up with articles about cultural developments in lower Manhattan 

He links to Lorentzen's response. They're part of the same stupid scene. 

"In American cultural and intellectual life, New York City sets the tone....Who wins in New York’s clash of cultures is high-stakes for the future of American political culture." 

"To be present at the creation is why one lives in America and in New York specifically." 

I fucking had to laugh. A Californian fantasy of the center of the universe, 30[?] years too late. 

"—which I have called..." From the link:

Michel Foucault, ever more out of favour on the left, would have been right to see the American culture war itself as an engine of unfreedom, a means of disciplining thought and action on both sides.

Foucault, after Tocqueville, and all the conservatives, and historians who read them, who've made the distinction between aristocracy and wealth, and Puritans and drunks. Lawrence, as always: "The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! destroy! destroy!..." 

American liberals are optimists about themselves; American conservatives are pessimists about everyone else. The first principle for both is their own self-image. 

Leiter links to the wife of a recently fired Princeton professor, Joshua Katz.

I decided to apply for early admission to Princeton after sitting in on Professor Joshua Katz’s seminar in April of 2012.

...In November 2018, Joshua bought my father a martini and asked for permission to marry me. In March 2019, we found our dream home in Princeton. That December, Joshua proposed. 

I'm not a moralist. Is all that is just pious?

Solveig Gold, First Things, "Princeton and the Erosion of Expertise"

Plato argued that we should, in all areas of life, defer to experts. If you wish to raise good horses, employ an expert horse-trainer. If you wish to cure a sick man, take him to an expert doctor. And if you wish to live in a harmonious city, enthrone an expert statesman.

One would be hard-pressed to find a group of people today who take greater pride or place more stock in expertise than the faculty members at my alma mater, Princeton University. “Trust the experts”: a constant refrain, plastered across their yard signs and social media accounts. In theory, it’s easy to imagine the little town of Princeton, New Jersey, as a modified, modern-day Kallipolis.

A second generation writer for First Things; a defender of free speech and the Federalist Society; published in The New Criterion, defending western civilization against attacks by Peter Beinart. 

Peter Beinart’s assertion last week, in “The Racial and Religious Paranoia of Trump’s Warsaw Speech,” that “the West is a racial and religious term” has raised more than a few eyebrows, primarily for its implication that to champion Western Civilization is to participate in bigotry. Jonah Goldberg’s article in National Review took Beinart to task on this point, offering a rousing defense of Western Civilization. But not yet fully debunked is Beinart’s initial premise: that is, that “the West” is code for white, Christian culture—a culture that belongs to white Christians, and to them alone.

"Western Civilization" celebrates white marble statues; the Greeks themselves were all in for polychrome vulgarity. And "Plato, we know, looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art."  

The Federalist Society is no more conservative than the Club for Growth. The fight is over the definition of freedom, the American religion. American conservatives are fakers and vulgarians, like Ralph Lauren as a WASP. On the hipster's page I compared him to Whit Stillman and Andrew Exum. Stillman is a fantasist, and Exum sees himself as a cold war liberal in his own Vietnam. The Alden Pyle schtick was old in 1955. But American liberals now call themselves leftists—they're now social democrats—and American conservatives agree. Facts are boring to the faithful.  And we also have a new crew of fascists; academic fascist kitsch, and suburban club kid college graduates. I've mentioned Anna Khachiyan once and that's enough. I've never written about Whit Stillman, but I've told a story about Tina Barney, from before Stillman made his first film. Barney and Gold, a couple of Jewish Shiksa goddesses in an anti-Semitic world. It's amusing rereading it that I obviously worked on the tone, as I have here, maybe too much. I indulge myself responding to this shit, calling their snobbery and raising it. It's an affectation.

I never posted this pic and you can't find it anymore, but it takes me back.

Ibn Flashman.

Spent the day stuck watching CNN and now stuck watching American Sniper.  It's tiring.

Ukrainska Pravda English:  Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin came to a halt after Johnson’s visit - UP sources 

Following the arrival of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in Kyiv, a possible meeting between Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin has become less likely.

Source: Ukrainska Pravda article "From Zelenskyy's "Surrender" to Putin's Surrender. How Negotiations with Russia Are Going". 

Quote from the article: "The Russian side…was actually ready for the Zelenskyy-Putin meeting.

But two things happened, after which a member of the Ukrainian delegation, Mykhailo Podoliak, had to openly admit that it was "not the time" for the meeting of the presidents. 

The first thing was the revelation of the atrocities, rapes, murders, massacres, looting, indiscriminate bombings and hundreds and thousands of other war crimes committed by Russian troops in the temporarily occupied Ukrainian territories…

The second "obstacle" to agreements with the Russians arrived in Kyiv on 9 April." 

Details: According Ukrainska Pravda sources close to Zelenskyy, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson, who appeared in the capital almost without warning, brought two simple messages.

The first is that Putin is a war criminal, he should be pressured, not negotiated with.

And the second is that even if Ukraine is ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.

Johnson’s position was that the collective West, which back in February had suggested Zelenskyy should surrender and flee, now felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined, and that here was a chance to "press him."

The Guardian May 2019, Raqqa is in ruins like a modern Dresden. This is not 'precision bombing'

From Kosovo to Iraq and Syria, the US and its military allies have for years told a tale of “precision bombing” and “surgical strikes”. It was a lie then and it’s a lie now. When huge numbers of bombs and missiles are unleashed on densely populated cities like Mosul or Raqqa, civilians are killed in their hundreds – possibly thousands. But still, the myth of precision and “meticulous processes” persists. Not least because militaries like our own refuse to even go back to the cities they’ve bombed, and refuse to acknowledge deaths unless presented with irrefutable evidence from the likes of Amnesty.

Last week I did what UK, US and French military officials refuse to do: I went to Raqqa to see for myself what has happened to this city as a result of mass bombardments by the US-led coalition between June and October 2017.

Never before have I seen a city so completely devastated. Not just in one district area, but almost entirely. Think Dresden and you’d be close. Street after street of windowless, hollowed-out buildings. Miles of rubble. Piles of twisted metal. Utter ruin. There has been no assistance for residents desperate to rebuild, and entire families are reduced to living in bombed-out husks of buildings. Meanwhile, many children spend all day scavenging in the rubble for bits of steel and plastic they can sell so as to buy food. They risk injury and death from unsafe buildings and uncleared landmines.