I think I’ll leave some more quotes from the same book in the comments.
… the chief concern of so many stories is not the substance of
the policy proposal but the way it moves the polls. It’s a bizarre,
destructive form of pragmatism—the jettisoning of moral faculties
in favor of a near-Machiavellian view of the world.
For members of every generation, there comes a moment of
complete and completely emptying disgust when it is
revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable
thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or
administration of justice but the preservation of existing
power. History is a debris field of such moments. They
arrive in the form of British and French soldiers to the
part of the world I’m from. They come to the Salvadorans
and Chileans and Iranians and Vietnamese and Cambodians in
the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue
and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save
them from some otherwise terrible fate. They arrived at
the turn of the twentieth century to Hawaii (the U.S.
apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian
government—almost a hundred years later.) They come to the
Indigenous population eradicated to make way for what
would become the most powerful nation on earth, and to the
Black population forced in chains to build it, severed
from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every
subsequent generation’s search for lineage arrives,
inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of
sale. And at every moment of arrival the details and the
body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a
commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice
saying, Just for moment, for the greater good, cease to
believe that this particular group of people, from whose
experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.
Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To
watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth
endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind
of disgust of anger, but a severance. The empire may claim
fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies
any measure of violence in return, but this severance is
of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the
machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such
horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it
will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of
people looked to the West, the rules-based order, the
shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it
serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.
For some time I’ve been saying that the storied choice
between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely
clear a good many years ago in the United States, and
both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously
and consequentially different barbarisms—one had
reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in
it, at least for a while—and I can tell you why I have
sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn’t to
kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of
increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources,
cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a
putatively liberal order, both are barbarisms. Mamdani
seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all
that.
Come for that insightful, incisive dichotomy above, stay for the elegant body slam of poor journalism below:
Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances
make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact
which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which
is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on
the relation between those two “sides,” or their
histories, or their sponsors, or their relative
evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get
is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises
of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of
anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
Work is service, not gain. The object of work is life, not
income. The reward of production is plenty, not private
fortune. We should measure the prosperity of a nation not
by the number of millionaires but by the absence of
poverty, the prevalence of health, the efficiency of the
public schools, and the number of people who can and do
read worthwhile books.
Is there anything better than chasing flying toy faeries around your yard with your ten-year-old? After a delicious meal on the deck. In the sunset. A few days before she turns eleven. Love you, Ess.
Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil
fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics
for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a
reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply.
…
In fact, the sheer scope of that potential change seems to
be motivating much of the current backlash against clean
energy in the U.S.
Plus, I always love a bit on e-bikes; not only fun, but an excellent way to get around without burning things:
E-biking—best thought of as biking without hills—may prove
to be an even more important innovation. The e-bike is
almost unbelievably efficient: to fully charge a
five-hundred-watt e-bike costs, on average, about eight
cents. That charge provides some thirty miles of range, so
it costs about a penny to ride five miles.
Tons of facts here that indisputably illustrate how the transformation of global energy that is not only under way, but accelerating:
The United Kingdom—where, after all, fossil fuel really
began—now has so much wind power that in 2024 its carbon
emissions fell below what they were in 1879
Worth a read. Let’s see if the optimism I felt while reading it is still there in five years.
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the
department of immunology and infectious diseases at
Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s
leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious
cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar
N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel
exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to
find ways to better control the disease. It is now the
beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has
supported work involving some sixty people across
fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve
University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the
University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South
Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and
machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to
a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was
previously believed impossible. The team had been
conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine
developed by researchers at Boston Children’s
Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received
an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to
stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all
spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the
stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which
ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs
and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people
in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and
people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference
to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is
most horrifying.
In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon
characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named
Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined
her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow
scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an
air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her
bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five
surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy,
who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air
strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the
attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical
wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later.
“How can something so horrible be real?”
…
Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza
than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during
the Second World War. More than fifty thousand
Palestinians have been killed.
…
I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work.
Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your
own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children,
another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that
the world has allowed this to happen to us.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP,
Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles,
her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her
body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used
“in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground
and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a
member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of
what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets
into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried
with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle
marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an
article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is
Unrestrained.”
The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
A large group of people feels one way, while a small
group with a disproportionate amount of structural power
tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is
particularly true for college students around the
country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated
children, but their passionate protest—the real-world
application of everything their liberal, humanistic
education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal,
first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now
to their government. The tactics of the protest movements
they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
I think I’ll leave some more quotes from the same book in the comments.