I forgot to mention the other week that one of my ‘must-reads’ was “Reading and Writing the Lake District” by Jeffrey Bilbro.  “Erasing the Art of Our Imperfect Past” by Katherine Dalton was also very good.  They’re not available on-line but if you can put your hands on a copy of Local Culture I recommend them.  That noted, my lists from the past week:

Must Read/Listen

• Ezra Klein, Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem

At least for my adult life, on foreign policy, our political problem has been that the parties have agreed on too much, and dissenting voices have been shut out. That has allowed too much to go unquestioned, and too many failures to go uncorrected. It is telling that it is Biden who is taking the blame for America’s defeat in Afghanistan. The consequences come for those who admit America’s foreign policy failures and try to change course, not for those who instigate or perpetuate them… The tragedy of humanitarian intervention as a foreign policy philosophy is that it binds our compassion to our delusions of military mastery. We awaken to the suffering of others when we fear those who rule them or hide among them, and in this way our desire for security finds union with our desire for decency. Or we awaken to the suffering of others when they face a massacre of such immediacy that we are forced to confront our passivity and to ask what inaction would mean for our souls and self-image. In both cases, we awaken with a gun in our hands, or perhaps we awaken because we have a gun in our hands.

• Robert Wright in conversation with Ezra Klein, The Foreign Policy Conversation Washington Doesn’t Want to Have

KLEIN: I want to draw this out to a principal about the way we talk about foreign policy here, which is that the American foreign policy conversation, the establishment that drives that conversation — it focuses very intensely on the harms caused by our absence, our inaction, or our withdrawal, but there is no similar culpability or reckoning for the harms we directly commit or that our presence creates.  And so if you’re only ever looking at one side of the ledger, then, of course, you’re going to be biased towards action… Look at the intense moral fervor we get into when we think about the harms that could be triggered by our withdrawal from Afghanistan. And I don’t want to say they’re not real… [but] where is the conversation about the harms that our continued occupation of Afghanistan have visited upon those people, as opposed to simply the harms that our absence might lead to?

• Jeet Heer, Lies About Afghanistan

A useful chart created by The Economist based on data from UNAMA other sources makes clear that far enjoying “an affordable status quo” Afghanistan was wracked [in recent years] by endemic violence.

Worth Your Time Continue reading →

Must Read/Listen

• L. M. Sacasas, Outsourcing Virtue

In a prescient 2020 essay about the pandemic, Ed Yong observed that “instead of solving social problems, the U.S. uses techno-fixes to bypass them, plastering the wounds instead of removing the source of injury—and that’s if people even accept the solution on offer.” No need for good judgment, responsible governance, self-sacrifice, or mutual care if there’s an easy technological fix to ostensibly solve the problem. No need, in other words, to be good, so long as the right technological solution can be found.

I was introduced to L.M. Sacasas via Ezra Klein’s podcast.  This essay prompts me to remember that I became a scientist because I had a (not fully-formed) belief in “Science for Conviviality”. I contrast “Science for Conviviality” with making it an endeavor because it can serve as a basis for dominion over Nature – for the purpose of financial reward or just a feeling of control.

• Sarah Chayes, The Ides of August

For those of you who don’t know me, here is my background — the perspective from which I write tonight.

I covered the fall of the Taliban for NPR, making my way into their former capital, Kandahar, in December 2001, a few days after the collapse of their regime…. I reported for a month or so…. Within another couple of months, I was back, not as a reporter this time, but to try actually to do something. I stayed for a decade. I ran two non-profits in Kandahar, living in an ordinary house and speaking Pashtu, and eventually went to work for two commanders of the international troops, and then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff….  From that standpoint — speaking as an American, as an adoptive Kandahari, and as a former senior U.S. government official — here are the key factors I see in today’s climax of a two-decade long fiasco:

Afghan government corruption, and the U.S. role enabling and reinforcing it…. Pakistan…. Hamid Karzai… Self-Delusion.

Afghanistan

• President Biden’s Address to the Nation
• Tom Vanden Brook [from 2019], Bombs, missiles falling at record pace in long-running Afghanistan war
• Daniel Larison, Drawing Lessons from Afghanistan
• Amanda Marcotte, The Afghanistan blame game begins – and the media immediately ignores what triggered this disaster
• David Rothkopf, Biden’s Right That It’s Time for Us to Leave Afghanistan
• Greg Jaffe, From hubris to humiliation: America’s warrior class contends with the abject failure of its Afghanistan project

Also Worth Your Time

• Tamsin Shaw, The Morally Troubling ‘Dirty Work’ We Pay Others to Do in Our Place
• Andie Taylor, I’m a Trans Runner Struggling to Compete Fairly
• William J. Broad, The Black Reporter Who Exposed a Lie About the Atom Bomb
• Shira Schoenberg, Massachusetts population shifts toward cities

Ending on a Positive Note

Short List

• L. M. Sacasas in conversation with Ezra Klein, This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology

A lot of technological criticism today is about weighing whether a technology is good or bad, or judging its various uses. But there’s an older tradition of criticism that asks a more fundamental and nuanced question: How do these technologies change the people who use them, both for good and for bad? And what do the people who use them — all of us, in other words — actually want? Do we even know?

L.M. Sacasas explores these questions in his great newsletter, “The Convivial Society.”… Sacasas recently published a list of 41 questions we should ask of the technologies and tools that shape our lives. What I loved about these questions is how they invite us to think not just about technologies, but about ourselves, and how we act and what we want and what, in the end, we truly value. So I asked him on the show to talk through some of them, and to see what light they shed on the lives we live.

Related reading:  Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

• Know Your Enemy (podcast hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell), After Nationalism (w/Sam Goldman)

In this episode, Matt and Sam are joined by political theorist and conservative intellectual Samuel Goldman—a very sensible and polite “enemy”—to discuss his brilliant new book, After Nationalism. Topics include: Goldman’s punk-rocker past; the influence of Leo Strauss on his thinking; historical attempts to provide Americans with a coherent, enduring symbol of national identity; why these symbols have failed; what all this means for debates about teaching U.S. history; and what alternatives to nationalism its critics can offer.

For the record, I have favorable views of Sitman, Adler-Bell and Goldman.  We disagree some on the path forward, but I think Goldman’s diagnosis is largely correct.

Also Worth Your Time Continue reading →

Short List

• Eric Jacobsen in conversation with Chuck Marohn, How Car Culture is Making Us Lonelier

Prior to the rise of car culture, we could expect to regularly interact with friends, neighbors, and strangers as we made our way through cities developed with walkability and multimodal transportation in mind. Especially since World War II, we still encounter those folks…but many of those encounters are “mediated by the automobile windshield.” Not only did car culture change how we build cities, it changed how (and how often) we encounter other people: “When we encounter someone [as a driver],” writes Jacobsen, “we don’t encounter another human being with whom we might connect. We as a driver meeting another driver encounter a competitor—a competitor for lane space and parking spaces.”

• Asad Haider, Social Media’s Sad Passions

The more acceptable it is to denounce people because of their speech, the more likely it is that it will eventually happen to you.

Haider’s argument is far more nuanced than that, so much so that I couldn’t pick a paragraph-long excerpt that made sense out of context.

• John Ganz, Feb 6 1934/Jan 6 2021:  What Do The Two Events Really Have in Common?

Shortly after January 6, I exchanged a few emails with Robert Paxton, author of The Anatomy of Fascism, asking him his opinion about what happened. A long time skeptic of the idea that Trump was a fascist phenomenon, the events of January 6 appeared to have changed his mind. In particular, he made the comparison—made by others in subsequent days—between the January 6 riots and the attempt by far-right leagues and military veterans to storm the Chamber of Deputies in Paris on February 6 1934.

This comparison appealed to me immediately, because I’ve thought for a long time the French Third Republic was a more interesting and productive place to look for parallels to the present than the Weimar Republic or post-World War I Italy.

Also Worth Reading/Listening Continue reading →