Seeing privileged Westerners complaining about their miniscule issues relating to their reactions to an online dictator in #TwitterMigration, makes me extra mindful of war, climate, and other human refugees who need to physically relocate their homes from one country to another and don't have any support systems at all.
Format StatusPosted on November 6, 2022 5:13 pm November 6, 2022
Author Chris AldrichCategories Social StreamTags climate crisis, Elon Musk, first world problems, human resources, Mastodon, refugees, social media, Twitter migration, TwitterMigration, warSyndicated copies:
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👓 Defence in depth | Wikipedia
Read Defence in depth (Wikipedia)
Defence in depth (also known as deep or elastic defence) is a military strategy that seeks to delay rather than prevent the advance of an attacker, buying time and causing additional casualties by yielding space. Rather than defeating an attacker with a single, strong defensive line, defence in depth relies on the tendency of an attack to lose momentum over time or as it covers a larger area. A defender can thus yield lightly defended territory in an effort to stress an attacker's logistics or spread out a numerically superior attacking force. Once an attacker has lost momentum or is forced to spread out to pacify a large area, defensive counter-attacks can be mounted on the attacker's weak points, with the goal being to cause attrition or drive the attacker back to its original starting position.
Format LinkPosted on December 28, 2018 4:13 pm December 29, 2018
Author Chris AldrichCategories Read, Social StreamTags negative results, strategy, warSyndicated copies:
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👓 An Interview with John O'Brien | Dalkey Archive Press
Read An Interview with John O'Brien (dalkeyarchive.com)
The following interview was conducted in-house at two different times, in 2000 and 2004. The purpose of the interview was to provide a very readable documentation of Dalkey Archive Press's mission and history. It was amended in 2004, and likely will be amended again in the future, to reflect changes in the culture that have an impact on the work we do.
After reading this interview, how could one not want to devote their life to supporting such an institution?
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
subversive ❧
maybe also the word uncomfortable?
uncomfortable ❧
There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among-and should be evaluated against-a whole history of other novels. ❧
As with all of the arts, literature was once upon a time entirely made possible through patrons. This goes at least as far back as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were able to write because their patrons provided them financial support. And this was of course true of all of the other arts. Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, literature and commerce got mixed. ❧
In some sense, there is a link between these areas of art/writing and funding and what we see in social media influencers who in some sense are trying to create an "art" for which they get paid. Sadly, most are not making art and worse, most of them are being paid even worse.
While many people say that such and such a book changed their lives, you can be sure that they could not tell you who published the book. The identification is with the book and its author, not the publisher. ❧
My models were New Directions Press and Grove Press. ❧
Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review ❧
Academics will probably bristle at this thought but, at least in relation to literature, all you have to do is look at the courses that are offered featuring the literatures of other countries. Not only don't they teach these literatures, they don't read them. ❧
We certainly could use an Anthony Bourdain of literature to help peel back the curtain on other countries and cultures.
I think only the philistine mind thinks that art needs a social or moral justification. ❧
Quote of the year.
A prerequisite for war, as well as bigotry, is that one sees a people or a country as a stereotype, as something sub-human or non-human; this is why politicians spend so much time trying to create stereotypical images for those countries they want to go to war with. ❧
Small publishers are oftentimes awful at getting their books out to people, even though of course the marketplace determines many of the limitations. ❧
Author Chris AldrichCategories Publishing, Read, Social StreamTags Anthony Bourdain, art, bigotry, fiction, humanities, literature, patronage, politicians, racism, reviewers, stereotypes, war, writingSyndicated copies:
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🎧 Episode 52: Warriors (MEN, Part 6) | Scene on Radio
Listened to Episode 52: Warriors (MEN, Part 6) by John Biewen from Scene on Radio
Do nations fight wars because men are naturally violent? Or do societies condition men to embrace violence so they'll fight the nation's wars?
Along with co-hosts John Biewen and Celeste Headlee, this episode features reporting by Barry Lam of the Hi-Phi Nation podcast, with scholars Joshua Goldstein of American University, Tom Digby of Springfield College, and Graham Parsons of the United States Military Academy, a.k.a. West Point.
Format AudioPosted on November 26, 2018 8:21 am December 6, 2018
Author Chris AldrichCategories Listen, Social StreamTags Magnificent Seven, Men, military, Scene on Radio, violence, warSyndicated copies:
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History cannot tell us the origin of wheat
Quoted Les Merveilles de l'Instinct Chez les Insectes: Morceaux Choisis (The Wonders of Instinct in Insects: Selected Pieces) by
Jean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)
History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
An aphorism which should be more broadly known, particularly as fearmongers begin to attack the public going into election cycles. I thought I'd make an ironic motivational poster out of it.
Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas's excellent Eat This Podcast
Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
Format QuotePosted on October 11, 2018 11:01 am October 11, 2018
Author Chris AldrichCategories FoodTags accentuate the positive, agriculture, battle, folly, gossip, history, Jean-Henri Fabre, kings, warSyndicated copies:
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👓 The End of History? | Francis Fukuyama
Read The End of History? by
Francis Fukuyama (The National Interest | No. 16 (Summer 1989), pp. 3-18)
IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.
And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.
In general, while I've been reading Stuart Kauffmann's At Home in the Universe, I can't help but thinking about the cascading extinctions he describes and wonder if political extinctions of ideas like Communism or other forms of government or even economies might follow the same types of outcomes described there? ❧
August 29, 2018 at 09:37AM
Building on this, could we create a list of governments and empires and rank them in order of the length of their spans? There may be subtleties in changes of regimes in some eras, but generally things are probably reasonably well laid out. I wonder if the length of life of particular governments follows a power law? One would suspect it might. ❧
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. ❧
Total exhaustion?
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. ❧
What if, in fact, we've only just found a local maximum? What if in the changing landscape there are other places we could potentially get to competitively that supply greater maxima? And possibly worse, what if we need to lose value to get from here to unlock even more value there?
Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment – a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious. ❧
and probably not a bad outcome in an earlier era that thought of things in terms of clockwork and lacked the ideas of quantum theory and its attendant uncertainties.
Believing that there was no more work for philosophers as well, since Hegel (correctly understood) had already achieved absolute knowledge, Kojève left teaching after the war and spent the remainder of his life working as a bureaucrat in the European Economic Community, until his death in 1968. ❧
This is depressing on so many levels.
Paul Kennedy's hugely successful "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers", which ascribes the decline of great powers to simple economic overextension. ❧
Curious how this may relate to the more recent "The End of Power" by Moisés Naím. It doesn't escape one that the title of the book somewhat echoes the title of this particular essay.
But whether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defense rather than consumption is entirely a matter of that society's political priorities, which are in turn determined in the realm of consciousness. ❧
It's not so much the percentage on produced defense goods, but how quickly could a society ramp up production of goods, services, and people to defend itself compared to the militaries of its potential aggressors.
In particular, most of the effort should go to the innovation side of war materiel. The innovation of the atomic bomb is a particularly nice example in that as a result of conceptualizing and then executing on it it allowed the US to win the war in the Pacific and hasten the end of war in Europe. Even if we otherwise had massive stockpiles of people or other weapons, our enemies could potentially have equaled them and dragged the war on interminably. It was the unknown unknown via innovation that unseated Japan and could potentially do the same to us based on innovation coming out of almost any country in the modern age.
Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer, raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, ❧
Science could learn something from this. Science is too far focused on the idealized positive outcomes that it isn't paying attention to the negative outcomes and using that to better define its outline or overall shape. We need to define a scientific opportunity cost and apply it to the negative side of research to better understand and define what we're searching for.
Of course, how can we define a new scientific method (or amend/extend it) to better take into account negative results–particularly in an age when so many results aren't even reproducible?
FAILURE to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature. ❧
"Protestant" life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path of poverty and security.[8] ❧
Is this simply a restatement of the idea that most of "the interesting things" happen at the border or edge of chaos? The Catholic ethic is firmly inside the stable arena while that of the Protestant ethic is pushing the boundaries.
Hence it did not matter to Kojève that the consciousness of the postwar generation of Europeans had not been universalized throughout the world; if ideological development had in fact ended, the homogenous state would eventually become victorious throughout the material world. ❧
This presupposes that homeostasis could ever be achieved.
One thinks of phrases like "The future is here, it just isn't evenly distributed." But everything we know about systems and evolving systems often indicates that homeostasis isn't necessarily a good thing. In many cases, it means eventual "death" instead of evolving towards a longer term lifespan. Again, here Kauffmann's ideas about co-evolving systems and evolving landscapes may provide some guidance. What if we're just at a temporary local maximum, but changes in the landscape modify that fact? What then? Shouldn't we be looking for other potential distant maxima as well?
But that state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy. ❧
Writers spend an awful lot of time focused too carefully on the free market economy, but don't acknowledge a lot of the major benefits of the non-free market parts which are undertaken and executed often by governments and regulatory environments. (Hacker & Pierson, 2016)
\August 29, 2018 at 10:02AM
Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure? ❧
Churchill famously said "…democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…"
Even within this quote it is implicit that there are many others. In some sense he's admitting that we might possibly be at a local maximum but we've just not explored the spaces beyond the adjacent possible.
For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind. ❧
While this seems solid on it's face, we don't know what the future landscape will look like. What if climate change brings about massive destruction of homo sapiens? We need to be careful about how and why we explore both the adjacent possible as well as the distant possible. One day we may need them and our current local maximum may not serve us well.
anomie ❧
I feel like this word captures very well the exact era of Trumpian Republicanism in which we find ourselves living.
After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellery as well as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all of the pro-fascist movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army withered after the war. ❧
And yet somehow we see these movements anew in America and around the world. What is the difference between then and now?
This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. ❧
But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies. ❧
and then there are the millennials…
Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to give peasants a taste of the universal homogenous state and thereby an incentive to work. The reform doubled Chinese grain output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend the reform to other parts of the economy. Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the dynamism, initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began. ❧
At present, no more than 20 percent of its economy has been marketized, and most importantly it continues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist party which has given no hint of wanting to devolve power. ❧
If Facebook were to continue to evolve at it's current rate and with it's potential power as well as political influence, I could see it attempting to work the way China does in a new political regime.
IF WE ADMIT for the moment that the fascist and communist challenges to liberalism are dead, are there any other ideological competitors left? Or put another way, are there contradictions in liberal society beyond that of class that are not resolvable? Two possibilities suggest themselves, those of religion and nationalism. ❧
This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations, and assumes that aggression and insecurity are universal characteristics of human societies rather than the product of specific historical circumstances. ❧
But whatever the particular ideological basis, every "developed" country believed in the acceptability of higher civilizations ruling lower ones ❧
Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again. ❧
Has it started again with nationalism, racism, and Trump?
Format LinkPosted on August 29, 2018 12:48 pm November 16, 2019
Author Chris AldrichCategories Annotation, Complexity, Economics, Highlight, Read, Social StreamTags adjacent possible, aggression, anomie, Big History, bureaucracy, capitalism, Catholicism, chaos, China, communism, conflict, democracy, Donald J. Trump, End of Power, Facebook, fascism, Francis Fukuyama, free market economy, government regulation, Hegel, history, Hobbes, imperialism, inequality, innovation, liberal democracy, local maxima, Millennials, mixed economy, Moisés Naím, nationalism, negative results, open questions, opportunity cost, philosophy, political influence, political reform, political science, political theory, politics, positive results, Protestant work ethic, Protestantism, quantum mechanics, racism, Reading.am, religion, reproducibility, scientific method, social reform, socialism, Stuart Kauffman, war, Winston ChurchillSyndicated copies:
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🎧 Food — and bombs — in Laos | Eat This Podcast
Listened to Food — and bombs — in Laos by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
Karen Coates is a freelance American journalist who writes about food – among other things. She emailed to ask if I would be interested in talking to her about a book that she and her husband, photographer Jerry Redfern, have produced. It's called Eternal Harvest, but it isn't about food, at least not directly. Its subtitle is the legacy of American bombs in Laos. Some of those bombs are 500-pounders. Lots of them are little tennis-ball sized bomblets, which are as attractive to farm kids as a tennis ball might be, with horrific consequences. The story of unexploded ordnance in Laos was an eye opener, for me. But I also wanted to know about food in Laos, and so that's where we began our conversation.
audio
A technician with a UXO Lao bomb disposal team scans for bombs in a woman's yard as she continues weeding. They work along a new road built atop the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. ©2006/Jerry Redfern
Interesting to hear about the monotony of some of the local diets, which across large areas are actually quite diverse. The limited selections show a high incidence of forced locovorsim while the lack of diversity also goes to show limited trade areas and links between towns and villages. The show also touched on some longer 500 year trends in food in the area, but only in a passing manner. Even small amounts of animal protein in diets shows how important they can be in the long run.
Format AudioPosted on May 1, 2017 8:47 am July 25, 2020
Author Chris AldrichCategories Food, Listen, Social StreamTags bombs, Eat This Podcast, Laos, warSyndicated copies:
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Chris Aldrich is reading "Dwight D. Eisenhower: Address 'The Chance for Peace' Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. April 16, 1953"
Read Dwight D. Eisenhower: Address "The Chance for Peace" Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors (presidency.ucsb.edu)
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Format StatusPosted on December 2, 2016 11:03 pm May 25, 2017
Author Chris AldrichCategories Read, Social StreamTags cold war, Dwight D. Eisenhower, peace, Soviet Union, speech, warSyndicated copies:
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