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Soggy reads: Trofimov, Yaroslav - Our Enemies Will Vanish (2024)

Subtitle: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine's War of Independence

Heroism is a very unpredictable quality. There seems to be no discernable rhyme or reason to its distribution. Answering the question 'who will stay?' before the onset of a given situation is pretty much impossible. I unfortunately have some first-hand, albeit limited, experience with this and find family ties not to be a particularly reliable indicator.

Ukrainians whose families straddle the border had to find that out the hard way. One throughline between this book and The War Came To Us is that in the event, many of their family members on the Russian side of the border preferred to stick their heads in the sand and pretend the war was not happening, no matter how many of their relatives in Ukraine got mulched.

Russian officialdom loves to bask in the glory of past heroes, designated entire cities heroic and has demanded in negotiations that Ukraine remain littered with depictions of their heroes, even as Ukraine's peoples proved that if there are inheritors of the mantles of the Zhukovs and Polivanovas, it is them.

Whether they know it or not, the Russian way of war now chiefly relies on exporting the conditions under which the motherland labors to the rest of the world; that is, to deny notions of heroism and inure would-be supporters of their enemies in the same kind of gray "they all suck" cynicism Putin's rule is meant to be the sole exception to.

To that end, no example of Actually Existing Heroism is allowed to stand untarnished by propaganda: Zelensky is not like Tsar Alexander or Stalin because he's an English puppet and a pederast. The defenders of Mariupol are not like the defenders of Leningrad because they're neo-Nazis.

An on-and-off debate has commenced in Germany, kickstarted by a teenybopper Jacobin/DSA-equivalents type called Ole, who, in truth, dresses more like Nathan J. Robinson while preaching socialist Wohlstand für Alle. Ole does not want to fight for his country, which, more precisely, means: Not for this state, not for the government du jour, for this particular incarnation of the welfare state et cetera, et alii. Ole now gets column space in broadsheets and invitatons to the political talk show circuit to disseminate the ideology of certain allegedly leftish sects to a nationwide audience. Zeitenwende, this is not.

It's a pointless debate so long as the question does not present itself. The Ukrainian state is a mess. Its people fight "for" a state perennially incapable of paying out pensions. Ole thinks bare survival, no matter how degraded the standard of living may become, beats even one minute of fighting. Of course, that only applies to Ukrainians. It seems that, as far as he's concerned, Gazans should continue to be killed in droves in sacrifice to their stillborn state. Because most peoples do end up taking up arms against an invading army. My prognosis is that many Oles would resist an invasion of Germany while a lot of NAFO dogs would run. You just don't know in advance.

People fight, kill and commit (war) crimes for all sorts of reasons; most of which are at best tangentially related to the lofty principle of national sovereignity. My go-to reading recommendation on this topic is Stefan Kühl's Ordinary Organisations, a sociological study of a Hamburg reserve police battallion that conducted ethnic cleansings. Pay, prestige, promises of career and social advancement, loyality to the unit and one's commanding officers are all featured in the catalogue of reasons why one might go torch a Ukrainian village. In that sense, Orcs are people, too.

I have a theory regarding the prominence of units representing far-right political parties or organisations in the coverage of the Ukraine War. Part of it is journalistic policy enterpreneurship. Trofimov, who, by the way, was apparently pretty brave himself in trying to cover this war, went out of his way to center in much of this book one such unit: 49th Assault Battalion, Carpathian Sich, named after a group trying to resist Hungary's opportunistic seizure of Ukraine's westernmost region, enabled by Nazi Germany in the wake of the destruction of Czechoslovakia. The 49th is an outgrowth of the Svoboda (lit. "freedom") party which had western Ukraine for a stronghold and whose leader was one leg of the triumvirate of Maidan leaders, alongside Klitschko and Yatsenyuk.

As a political party, Svoboda fell off, as did the National Corps out of which what's now the Azov Brigade arose or the Right Sector (Ukrainian Volunteer Army). Some people handwave this, saying; they don't need a presence in parliament, all these units have been integrated into the military. Still think it is too rarely remarked upon that in the one European country that matches the conditions of the case of (for?) fascism par excellence, the far-right simply does not have a parliamentary presence while it is having the rest of the continent for breakfast. Russia, of course, has a whole slew of similarly motivated units because it absolutely does not discriminate when it comes to where it is getting its manpower from. But this is also rarely remarked upon because, well, Russia does not hold itself to any standard other than sheer domination, so they cannot be hypocritical or, God forbid, cringe, and that's the only thing that matters, right?

Anyway, the theory. It's very unambitious. A PR guy for German chemicals giant and Holocaust profiteer BASF once wrote, "do good and talk about it". When Yanukovych absconded and the Ukrainian state, again, already not a poster boy for stability, began to actively dissolve, Russia invaded from the south and the east and the collective West didn't manage to utter more than a tut-tut about the sacredness of Europe's post-war territorial settlement (terms and conditions apply), the much-maligned guys above ran into the proverbial burning building. At this point, Azov and Mariupol are practically synonymous. I can only assume that their actions bought them a certain amount of, for lack of a better term, respect. They were there when few others were.

The idea that being able to claim such a thing might be advantageous to a political project and that, conversely, an upfront rejection of the very notion of sacrifice for an Actually Existing Community, not just to a hypothetical, future one, might be disadvantageous to it does not seem to enter the mind of the many Oles of the world. Which is confusing, because, again, they recognize it elsewhere. Hamas' singular credibility in resisting Israeli encroachment is commonly cited as the reason for why an such an organisation can remain embedded in Gaza indefinitely.

If I am to be charitable, I'd say; a lot of people, out of an earnestly held moral righteousness, have gotten themselves stuck in an irreconcilable contradiction that they're afraid to simply step out of for fear of social sanction. It's a collective action problem. Genuine russophilia is nonexistent outside of the right and the LaRouchite überfringe, but scepticism, lack of enthusiasm, a fear of getting hoodwinked again and perhaps most powerfully of all, the base reluctance to admitting that one was wrong, those are bound to be more plentiful.

But this was and is not the time for that sort of whinge. Slava.

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Possessed Diamond Zeta Guillotine

VFX + recolor mod. Don't use in default collection. Download

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Soggy reads: Miller, Christopher - The War Came To Us (2023)

Mark where his carnage and his conquests cease! He makes a solitude, and calls it — peace.

For the minor powers of this world, when shit hits the fan, there really is no alternative to appealing to the nebulous concept of the international community for help. It's a raw deal: In exchange for whatever aid that's provided, they have to become bit actors or mere props in the party-political psychodramas of Western societies. Their fates are negotiated largely in accordance with the precise balance of power in domestic politics and the personal sympathy or revulsion for the main actors of the day.

The task, then, of every country that expects itself to become dependent in some way or another and of its advocates throughout the world is to humanize the people of that country to the extent possible to render them deserving enough in the eyes of enough voters in places like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, or, indeed, Thüringen, Sachsen and Anhalt. To say the least, this is not a precise science, and it's not a space anyone is operating in alone.

In that sense, The War Came To Us is an excellent contribution to the ongoing task of humanizing the Ukrainian people sufficiently in the eyes of the world for their cause to shine through the thick haze of cheap commodities, financial surplus recycling and whataboutisms emanating from Russia.

Part autobiography and told in a style that I am personally quite partial to; a series of vignettes between four paragraphs and 20 pages long, it's a trip down memory lane the author invites the reader to tag along for. It starts, is substantially set and ends in Bakhmut and the Donbas, where he was first posted as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps in 2010.

Bakhmut has, perhaps unfortunately, eclipsed Bucha as the primary symbol of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I suspect this is because it was a place that could give a day-by-day accounting of its fate at the precise moment when both attention paid to and sympathy for Ukraine peaked: Even more than the successful defense of the greater Kyiv area, the counteroffenses into Kharhiv and Kherson proved that a Russian victory was not inevitable. People love an underdog story. The dogged defense of the city, dogged perhaps beyond the point of military reason, made for grim but, evidently, to many, oddly compelling viewing: A Thermopylae, an Alamo, a Verdun, a Nanking, a Monte Cassino for the 21st century.

Over the span of a few short years, Miller gets to be put off by, familiarize himself with, teach and live in Bakhmut. He has the misfortune of spending just enough time in the vicinity to be there when Russia first invades in 2014, and enough time to see it be destroyed completely in 2022. People he used to live and work with either end up dead, strewn across the earth as refugees or as question marks: Did they make it out and, if so, in what state, and what did they have to leave behind?

First and foremost, a lot of people leave behind their lives in this. As wars tend to, the tone flips back and forth between the hopeful and the apocalyptic. On all the battlefields of Ukraine's independence from the Maidan to the Donbas, people were and still are shot, shelled, crushed, stabbed, electrocuted, mutilated, violated en masse. Miller wasn't spared the detail and he does not spare the reader. He's right not to.

(This will be a two-parter. Next up: Trofimov, Yaroslav - Our Enemies Will Vanish (2024).)

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29 / 08 / 2024 🪩💪🏽🌈

this is one of the stupidest things ive ever come up with! 💘

#suggestive #nsfw talk

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Soggy reads: Ganz, John - When the Clock Broke (2024)

Subtitle: 'Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s'

"We shall repeal the twentieth century."

In 2002, then-German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder won re-election by the slimmest imaginable margin: 6,000 votes. He did it partially by distancing himself as far as possible from the impending invasion of Iraq by the United States and its Coalition of the Willing. Not having been personally wronged on September 11, 2001 but very much so by U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he consigned Germany and France to "Old Europe"¹, anywhere between 70-80% of the German public were opposed to the war, and Schröder managed to make the 2002 election a referendum on whether Germany ought to follow America into Iraq or not.

The invasion caused a precipitious decline in Germans' appraisal of the United States as a country and as an ally that would not be reversed until the election of Barack Obama. Since then at least there has been a reliable pattern to German public opinion on the U.S.: They're good when a Democrat is President and bad when a Republican is. Against the odds, the Germans reliably manage to land on the common-sensical position on the topic.

Although America has been Germany's primary benefactor during the 20th century, they do so mostly without being particularly well-informed about their uncle Sam. German foreign correspondents seem content to mostly regurgitate what they see on cable news one or two days after the fact. Annika Brockschmidt's 2021 Amerikas Gotteskrieger became a minor politicum in itself when Germany's reflexively transatlantic conservatives tried to smear it as "an obvious caricature"².

I suspect their thinking might go a little something like this: If the Germans knew, really knew, what America was actually like beyond a certain estrangement about the difference in our health care systems or our implementations of freedom of speech or the gun thing, the socio-cultural foundation for the transatlantic alliance may very well disappear. Purely on its merits as an economic bloc, Europe and America already rejected one another in the shape of TTIP. On the merits as a political and military alliance, well, see above. What keeps this joint together is a basic, unquestioned understanding of a vague similarity. After all, yes, Wilson took away their Sauerkraut, but isn't a plurality of Americans originally from Germany in one way or another?

Perhaps in a few years time, they may not need fret anymore. The political culture of all developed, in fact, of all countries, is rapidly converging onto the same set of cleavages that the United States have been familiar with for quite a while now: Urban/rural, old/young, educated/uneducated, majority/minority. I've thus long held that it's fruitful to look toward America for a rough outline of things to come. If you squint, you can see a little bit of Barack Obama in Olaf Scholz, if not in his personality then at least in the trajectory of his tenure. As Obama was dogged by the Tea Party, the debt ceiling and regular government shutdowns, so Scholz is dogged by the Free Democrats, the debt brake and regular revisions to the federal budget. And potential Trumps abound in contemporary Germany's political scene: Merz, Spahn, Weidel, Höcke - take your pick.

But when did everything go so wrong in that shining city on a hill? According to John Ganz, in 1992. Okay, that's not quite what he's arguing, but Ganz situates his portrait of an America cracking up to the backdrop of the 1992 presidential election. And it is a backdrop, the election is context, not the actual protagonist. It's almost as if Ganz lets on that it didn't matter whether Bush (that's H.W.), Clinton or Perot won because confronted with the end of the Cold War, the end of a particular economic model and the end of an implied cultural understanding, they all had more or less the same things to offer to replace them: Culture war, free trade and deficit hawkery.

And so the three candidates are joined as co-protagonists by a number of men who and events which also broke the clock: David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, Pat Buchanan, Randy Weaver, Daryl Gates, the 1992 L.A. race riots and the "Rooftop Koreans", Waco, the paleo- and the neo-conservatives locked into a civil war over the future of the Republican Party and the United States, John Gotti ...

The 1992 election cycle, the events that informed it and its immediate aftermath makes for a sturdy frame within a number of people, independently of one another at first but as time went on increasingly in dialogue with one another collectively sketched the contours of American and by extension world politics for decades to come: Conspiracism, white supremacy, foreign wars, the dang deficit, outsourcing, organized crime. Following contemporary American politics even a little bit you'd be surprised at how much stuff was apparently prefigured 20-30 years prior. I first realized Ganz was on to something when he revealed to me that Dinesh d'Souza, known to me as a right-wing faux-investigative journalist and failed filmmaker first made a splash writing a tract about "the politics of race and sex on campus" in 1991 and we're basically still forced to talk about that sh*t three decades later.

This book divides its roughly 370 pages into 13 individually easily digested episodes. None of them overstay their welcome, nothing feels superfluous. It doesn't have an epilogue: We're living in it.

¹An expression that would go on to become "Worst Word" of its respective year in Germany.

²https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-pivot-from-america/

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Soggy reads: Debes, Martin - Demokratie unter Schock (2021)

Subtitle: 'How the "Alternative for Germany" elected a Prime Minister'

"The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."

tl;dr: Local journalist Martin Debes describes en detail the 2019/2020 government formation crisis in the small east German state of Thüringen.

Weimar, Thüringen has the dubious honor of being at once the cradle of German democracy and an incubator of German fascism. Debes is at pains to stress the historical dimension of the crisis. Its protagonists seem aware of this history, sometimes more so, sometimes less so, but either way, powerless to stop themselves from stumbling back into it face forward almost a century later.

The French expression cordon sanitaire in a political context describes a taboo on cooperation with certain groups or parties. In Europe, this is commonly understood to mean a policy of not working together with far-right parties. Germany, however, is special in operating not one, but two cordons: One warding off the far-right and one warding off the far-left.

On its face, the reason for this is that the socialist Linke, formerly the Party of Democratic Socialism, is in some sense the successor of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party. If you ask me, it has more to do with the fact that the people most vehemently trying to uphold this particular cordon, the leaders of the Christian Union parties, knew that at least for a while there was no structural majority to be found right-of-center and they had to coax the Social Democrats into self-sabotaging to not get stuck in the political wilderness for a generation. The Social Democrats obliged. That the character of die Linke was amply changed by the fusion with the rebellious left wing of West German social democracy after Schröder imported the policy of workfare and expansionary tax cuts from the Anglosphere in the early 2000s goes politely ignored to this day.

It's the policy of two "No"s that plunges first Thüringen and then all Germany into a political crisis in late 2019. When an election results in a parliament that can not produce any majority without either the fascist Alternative für Deutschland or die Linke, Thüringen's pig-headed political operators steer the ship of state unto the rocks by "sleepwalking" into letting AfD provide the marginal votes necessary for liberal¹ and spoiler candidate Thomas Kemmerich to be elected Prime Minister.

In the weeks that follow, Germany speedruns its way through the Kübler/Ross model attempting to put the genie back in the bottle. The result was what the basic political conventions of the Federal Republic ought to have made the only logical conclusion in the first place: Die Linke ended up the largest party, so it gets to try to form a government and provide a Prime Minister.

It doesn't help that at least some of the protagonists of this story were essentially too stupid, venal and or egomaniacal to simply let this happen. Another thing Debes is at pains to stress is just how small Thüringen's political class is: A few dozen people out of 1.8 million who tend to go way, way back and get along across party lines fairly decently on account of meeting each other basically everywhere else within the organized social fabric of the region. You get the distinct impression that there actually are more hurt feelings between the local CDU's main actors - Althaus and Lieberknecht, Mohring and Voigt - than there are between everybody else put together. And therein lays at least some of the rub: Easily half of the roughly 250 pages of this volume are spent on Mike Mohring's desperate attempt to escape a car crash unscathed by unbuckling his seat belt in hopes of being thrown clear through the front window. It doesn't work. Of course it doesn't.

The pages of this book are haunted with the premonition that just like it was in the 1920s, Thüringen once again served as the stage for the dress rehearsal for a future, greater political catastrophe. In the end, the impetus for the solution of Thüringen's crisis comes from above, from the federal government, from Angela Merkel, who seeks to protect her cabinet and her "legacy" from dissolution. But Merkel is long gone and Germany will not soon see the likes of her again. What will happen when there is no higher authority to appeal to?

¹That's liberal in the European sense, i.e. a Swiss bank account in a suit posing as a libertarian.

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Soggy reads: Münkler, Herfried - Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche. Welt im Umbruch (2021)

(It's another Münkler. I do actually think quite highly of him.)

Biographies are good. It might sound like I am regurgitating the great man theory, but if I want to get a feel for a certain place and/or period, the way to go is to read the biography of a pivotal figure and then branch out from there. In fact, here is a short list of biographies I've read in recent years that I've enjoyed;

Jackson, Julian - A Certain Idea of France. The Life of Charles de Gaulle (2018)

Steinberg, Jonathan - Bismarck. A Life (2011)

McPhee, Peter - Robespierre. A Revolutionary Life (2012)

Scurr, Ruth - Fatal Purity. Robespierre and the French Revolution (2006)

Siemann, Wolfram - Metternich. Strategist and Visionary (2019)

... and yeah, I'm really not beating the Great Man allegations.

So, I've read this one in fits and spurs over a period of months whenever I've had some idle time downstairs waiting on my father. As such, my recollection of it is maybe not as good as it ought to be. On top of that, it certainly doesn't help that I am a pseud who has at most a passing familiarity with the oeuvre of the three figures concerned. But, hey, starting points, right?

At first blush I did not think these three people had very much at all in common besides the fact that they are roughly contemporaries, and indeed, the interactions between them are sparse to the point of non-existence. But as it turns out you can fill 720 pages, hardcover to hardcover, with the parallels in their lives. If you for whatever reason just need three 19th century German guys battling health problems, the German nation-building process and messianic delusions; voila, there are your men. All three ended up in their own ways intimately involved with the attempted revolutions of 1848/49, were inextricably shaped by them and forced in one way or another to find a new way of life both for themselves and their respective field because of them.

They also all kind of ended up dependent on the financial, but more saliently, the intellectual patronship of somebody else to help elevate their life's work to the lofty heights of canon. Marx famously had Engels do double duty, Wagner was substantially funded by King Ludwig II. of Bavaria (better known for Neuschwanstein), his family squats on his work to this day and Nietzsche's apparently came to us chiefly through his sister who, because she was sort of an insane Nazi to the point of co-founding an "Aryan" settler colony in Paraguay, shaped it in such a way that at least initially ended up also being primarily received by other insane Nazis, so that's something you want to be careful about if you ever undertake some sort of intellectual project of your own.

I don't know, I thought it was enjoyable. It'd definitely have benefitted from me having more of an education to begin with (but what wouldn't), but even without it, you get a bit of a feel for why this place is like this from the vantage point of its nutty Poets and Thinkers.

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unsuccessfully holding hair back

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... en garde!

The Count prefers to do his own wetwork.

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Soggy reads: Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus (2005)

Subtitle: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Part Two: Tragedy

As far as the Atomic Era is concerned, a cursory look at the world today informs us how the rest of the story goes. Despite decades of arms control agreements, most of which are now defunct anyway, the former parties to the Cold War still have nuclear arsenals so large they'd have been considered apocalyptic from the vantage point of the late 40s and early 50s. Seven more countries joined the nuclear club, a tenth member is forthcoming in Iran, it won't be the last. Only South Africa and the post-Soviet states ever voluntarily parted with nuclear weapons once acquired, and the latter probably, in the case of Ukraine definitely, regret it since February 2022.

So, Oppie did not manage to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle. After reading, it seems inconceivable that that outcome was ever actually seriously on the table. Oppenheimer pursued a kind of bureaucratic defense in depth: His first preference was putting all things nuclear under the control of the newly created United Nations. A proposal he helped pen to that effect was never actually offered, what was offered was unacceptable to the Soviet Union. If the Bomb could not be banned completely, then at least the size of the American arsenal should be limited and development focused on weapons that would serve a purpose on the battlefield instead of just "city-busters"¹. The hydrogen bomb should not be developed, at least not immediately, and there should definitely not be nuclear-tipped submarine-launched ballistic missiles². At every turn, the American government should be transparent about what it is and isn't doing and try to use the latter as bargaining chips to induce similar constraint in their Soviet counterparts. More generally, there needed to be a different doctrine than to throw America's entire arsenal at the Soviet Union the second anything happened anywhere.

Lesser evils, harm reduction, compromise, the art of the possible. Contemporaries suggested Oppie was a fool for playing this game and should have resigned out of principle. Plus ça change. But I can see why he refused: Having inherited the belief in an open world from Niels Bohr, and expressing it by pointing out the American people could ill be expected to come to reasonable conclusions about their country's nuclear stance not being allowed to know anything about it, he did need to be in the know to opine on it, and for that, he needed to stay in good graces. A reasonable ask, but too much to ask from the McCarthies and Hoovers of post-war America.

What makes Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing so galling is that the articles of faith of nuclear strategy during the second Red Scare, against which he rebelled, for which he was crucified, were mostly dropped soon after he was forced out of public service by said hearing anyway. Massive Retaliation gave way to Flexible Response. Nuclear tests stopped. Arsenal sizes were reduced, yields can now be adjusted before deployment on many weapon types, going as low as 0.3 kilotons³. With an openness to self-restraint and transparency, it became possible to make at least a partial exit from the arms race. At worst, Strauss, Nichols and Borden tried to lock the United States and all humanity into nuclear omnicide to further their own personal careers, at best, they still did it out of adherence to a worldview that was so obviously foolhardy it did not survive another change in administration.

After Oppenheimer, the public figure, was reduced, the actual man soon followed. I find his tendency toward self-abnegation quite relateable, the same way I find it relateable that he was apparently incapable of sitting down long enough to produce something wholly original and Nobel-worthy instead of 'merely' synthesizing from and inspiring in others. So he shrank and shrank and shrank until there was nothing left of him, physically and otherwise. There just isn't that much to say about it, the bleakness has to speak for itself.

Prometheus is of course a figure of Greek myth, but perhaps it's equally fitting to invoke The Good Book. Take your pick, Luke 4:24, Mark 6:4, Matthew 13:57;

A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.

¹ The "tactical nuclear weapon" is sometimes considered to make a strategic nuclear exchange more likely, the assumption being it necessarily requires a larger and nuclear response to re-establish mutual deterrence, but the idea here is that you need extra steps from conventional to global thermonuclear war to gain opportunities to stop altogether.

² This idea, of course, was emphatically not followed up upon, since nuclear-armed submarines are the final guarantor of the so-called "second strike".

³ In the case of for example the B-61 mod. 12, the bomb dispensed by the United States to its NATO nuclear sharing partners - Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

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Soggy reads: Bird & Sherwin - American Prometheus (2005)

Subtitle: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Part One: Triumph

The cover helpfully informs me that this biography is the basis on which Nolan built the recent movie bearing the subject's name. Simply from reading it, however, one might not immediately grasp this, as the movie starts in medias res twice over: First, by being told in hindsight from the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing of Lewis Strauss, nominated to be U.S. Secretary of Commerce, and second, by introducing us to the titular character when he was a young adult studying in Cambridge.

He was 20 then, and the preceding twenty years of Robert's life don't come up in the movie at all. At a glance, it's not difficult to see why Nolan might have chosen to excise them: If life was a fanfic, Oppenheimer might easily be identified as a sort of author wish fulfillment Mary Sue Gary Stu type character: Born into the upper class, doted upon, all his curiosities indulged, educated in a thoroughly liberal and humanist fashion and apparently loved and adored by damn near everyone who got to know him for being a nice and precocious little guy (with the notable caveat that he was born a Jew at a time when antisemitism was becoming chic even in the previously apparently-sort-of-resistant-to-the-notion United States [at least relative to Europe, I suppose]).

Despite all this, Oppie arrives in Cambridge a nervous wreck. Unfortunately for him, he's too intelligent to be psychoanalyzed and too neurotic to get laid, so he continues to be a wreck until he has some sort of awakening, perhaps a religious one inspired by Hindu myth, on Corsica and realizes that maybe life is worth living after all.

A clear distinction between the book and the film is that the film for reasons of brevity is limited in the number of angles it can give us on a given incident or utterance. The 'poisoned apple' incident (don't worry about it) comes up in both, but only in the former is the viewer told a number of stories about it instead of just one. This is most relevant in one of the central questions of both (in the film's case, via the 1954 security clearence hearing) - was Oppie or has he ever been a member of the Communist Party?

It turns out this is a surprisingly difficult question to definitely answer one way or another and also has been at the time. He was not entirely sure about it, his friends were not entirely sure about it, members of the Communist Party were not entirely sure about it ... at the very least what can be said is that Oppie did pretty much everything just short of actually having his name written down on a membership roll and subjecting himself to party discipline: Organizing, debating, donating, most prominently to the Republican¹ side of the Spanish Civil War. By the looks of it, it earned him few friends (but a lot of folks who later sought to exploit him for their or the Soviet Union's gain) but a lifetime's worth of enemies and trouble down the road. Plus ça change.

It's rather easy to tell where "Triumph" ends and "Tragedy" begins in this book and in his life. Trinity splits both of them in half like a neutron splits an atom. After the Corsica incident, Opje gets his shit together, learns enough about theoretical physics to start teaching it and begins assembling something honestly resembling a cult around himself, it and his stature growing, bulging outward, metastazing, until they swallow Los Alamos and the Manhattan Engineering District whole and excrete unto Earth the Atomic Era. Everyone wants him, and if they don't want him, they want to be like him. The pages of this book are haunted: If the reader does not exercise caution, they, too, might fall victim to Oppie's preternatural charm.

People took the release of the movie as an opportunity to re-re-re-re-re-re-litigate the morality, wisdom and necessity of dropping the first nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is a debate that began in the minds of those assembling these weapons at Los Alamos, and the only thing that could settle it is mankind's annihilation at the hands of the laboratory's products. Viewers and readers might notice that no original thought seems to have been had on the event since those days: Japan's defeatedness or lack thereof, the role of the Soviet Union's invasion of Japan's continental holdings and its likely reaction to being shown or rather being surprised by the Bomb's existence were then already and are still now the core around which people's opinions have stably orbited. As far as I'm concerned, the Oppenheimer view, pithily summed up in the movie as, "they won't fear it until they understand it. And they won't understand it until they've used it", was at the time a kind of cope for the fact that a weapon meant to incinerate Hitler ended up being used on Japan almost as a kind of afterthought, but as far as the Atomic Era is concerned, it is a cope that has aged reasonably well: Regardless of whether you ascribe this to Deterrence² or the Nuclear Taboo, nuclear weapons were created and tested essentially to not be used in anger.

This wasn't a foregone conclusion, however, and probably has as much to do with the energetic albeit not always consummate lobbying of the atomic bomb's father than anything else. And so; a Tragedy unfurls within the halls of Asphodelos ...

¹ Referred to as "loyalist" as in loyal to the government in Madrid, but at any rate, the correct, non-nationalist, non-fascist one.

² Which cannot explain why the United States never exploited its brief nuclear monopoly against the Soviet Union or China, who could not have retaliated, or why nuclear powers generally don't use their weapons against countries which could not.

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Soggy reads: Blas & Farchy - The World For Sale (2021)

Sub-title too long for the post title: "Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth's Resources".

Blas (who you can follow on Twitter¹ @ JavierBlas if you're so inclined) writes about Commodities (that is, agricultural produce and raw materials) for Bloomberg, so I was expecting this book to be a dry yet informative read about the global commodities market replete with charts and graphs of trade volumes, prices et cetera.

Not so.

British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis in 1999 presented "The Mayfair Set" - a tetralogy of short films about a few British tycoons who became rich and powerful even as the British Empire and the United Kingdom collapsed around them. In so doing - via all sorts of shady business ventures (arms deals, mergers and acquisitions, naked speculation ...) - they helped usher in what we would today call neoliberalism. They also found themselves made redundant by it after the fact.

The World For Sale is a similarly structured book, tracing the rise and fall and rise again of the commodities trader as a type of guy, a relatively young creature, by looking at the handful of men who did more than anyone to bring this particular kind of business into existence. When each generation reaches the apex of its power and wealth, it is immediately superseded by a new generation of people who add another previously-eschewed wrinkle to the operation.

This is about technique as much as it is about locale - improvements to dealmaking through the inclusion of finance and eventually outright purchases of parts of the supply chain on one hand, and a willingness to boldly go where no man has gone before; post-Soviet space, China, Africa.

As they do, the sums become more vast and the stakes higher, millions become billions and traders find themselves funding entire nations in exchange for future flows of goods. Yet, the books ends on an almost melancholic note: The trade is no longer the cloak-and-dagger affair it once was, and the spaces and niches for such behavior have been eroded by reassertive governments and the internet. The companies the traders built are not going anywhere, squatting on global supply chains as they are, but the buccaneering spirit is apparently on its way out.

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Soggy reads: Münkler, Herfried - Die Zukunft der Demokratie [the future of democracy] (2022)

German political scientist¹ Herfried Münkler is worried about the future of (German) democracy. So is anybody who has been paying attention and is not actively involved in trying to dismantle it since around the mid-2010s at the latest. This slender (200 pages with quite a large font and if you include the ample references and footnotes) pamphlet can be divided into a number of logically proceeding segments; sketching a dual threat to democracy, from within and from without, helpfully providing a taxonomy of democratic (and not-so-democratic-anymore) regime types as well as an overview of past and present theories of democratic ascent and decline. If nothing else, this makes for a snappy introduction to this particular field of discourse and provides the reader with a laundry list of authors and works to peruse next running from Samuel Huntington to Chantal Mouffe. Münkler's diagnosis is nothing that one could not have absorbed via osmosis from the papers - structural changes in the economy generally and the communications industry in particular have hammered two pillars upon which post-war liberal democracies were constructed: The political party and the printing press. As both declined in favor of narrower vessels for participation (such as NGOs) on one hand and first television and then social media on the other respectively, both the quantity and quality of peoples' input into their political systems has declined precipitously while expectations in their output remained constant or increased further. Obviously, frustration follows. How these two variables can be brought back into broad realignment remains a bit of a mystery even after reading. Essentially, Münkler would see the population embark on a kind of long march through the institutions² starting with local politics with the ultimate goal of refamiliarizing them with the mechanisms and constraints of power. I have my reservations³.

¹ Though arguably best known as a military historian for his works on War and Empire generally and the 30 Years' and First World War in particular.

² After an expression of Rudi Dutschke.

³ Of course, you could argue that in the sense of this being a purely didactic exercise, starting with the municipalities is a great idea given how they are (going to be) chronically short of funding and lack in areas in which they are fully sovereign.

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CY GYT TOUTE LA ISHGARD 🪦

fit courtesy of @memesupporter

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Slay [TB SE Dress + Blades]

Outfit for TB SE · Uses TB SE legs/hands + Type-W torso (shape derivative of TB SE tosro). Works for male Midlander, Miqo'te, Elezen, Au Ra, Viera. For this mod to work, you need to install TB SE

To correctly display the character in heels, use Heels plugin

Replaces: · Dress - Spring Dress; · Jockstrap - Gryphonskin Pantalettes; · Belts - Aesthete's Necklace of Gathering; · Heels - Spring Dress Shoes; · Sleeves accessory version - Aesthete's Ring of Gathering; · Blades - Dead Hive Kris.

Jockstrap has dress-friendly model option. Belts have "Cake"-friendly model option (my stockings mod).

Sleeves can clip in extreme poses. The skirts of the dress can clip with the character's butt in sitting poses. Sleeves accessory version is designed for use with Type-W mods only. Jockstrap and heels will work for male Highlanders.

Physics video

Contributor Information: Tsar - The Body SE

Public release · 2 September 2023

Boosty

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there

hey guys where are the drafts