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.
… the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so
desperately and invariably sees as a hallmark of its own
enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing—a premise
that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete
vocabulary of violence.
I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American
flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone
who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.
My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s
no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this
particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity—it’s
self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of
American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority
understands that both have been created to serve them.
I ask my friend how the years following the Arab
spring have been for him, and he shakes his head.
Everything’s falling apart, he says.
I had heard the same sentiment before, from many members
of my family—Egypt’s precarious upper middle class, for whom
democracy was a nice abstraction, but the janitor’s son getting
all worked up and forgetting his place was very, very real. With
a strong, decisive man at the helm, you have stability, I was told
time and again—not this chaos where all norms and values
go out the window, and who knows what your kids end up
thinking or saying or doing. Years later, I’d hear all this again
on a different assignment, interviewing Trump voters.
It’s not surprising, I don’t think, that in the midst of this
indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most
active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of
pain, of the past century’s most horrific crime, love of one’s own
spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is,
it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres
neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor
to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own,
that love for one’s people may never become love for another.
Daily we are told there is nothing better than this. Our
graphics cards and loafers arrive at our doorsteps the same day
we order them—what more is there to want? We hurtle from
shock to shock, bubble to bubble, oriented in the direction of
complete ecological collapse and a future mortgaged beyond
any hope of repayment. Yet we are told the most frightening
thing is not this building chaos, but rather the possibility that
any other course might end in secret police and breadlines.
Daily the entirety of the right-wing sphere and an alarming
number of liberals fret about a generation of young people
deluded into Marxism or some other ideological bogeyman.
When students at the most prestigious universities in North
America build encampments in solidarity with Palestine, it’s
difficult to believe the institutional response isn’t colored by a
sense of betrayal. These young people have been afforded entry
into the heart of the system, with all the privileges that entails.
That they should jettison such a privilege in favor of a people
on the other side of the planet who are able to offer nothing in
return—to an ideology fixated on self-interest, it must seem
like an embrace of nihilism.
In reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace.
It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes
it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other
generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for
it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it.
A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived.
A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.
To orient oneself in relation to this kind of equivocation as it
exists in the West—where a genocide is a conflict of equals, and
really who’s to say what a sufficient number of dead civilians
is, and it’s all so complicated anyway—is to temporarily forget
that most of the world sees this for what it is right now. This
mandatory waiting period, in which the rest of the planet
politely pleads with the West’s power centers to bridge the
gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to
do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the
defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression
of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so
long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit
me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a
thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the
dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance
later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed
argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.
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.
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +
Alexander Micek commenting on Nothing to do with this +