Long [-ish] reads

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  • imbecile0

    We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
    Philip K. Dick

    https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/si…

  • Khurram2

    [H1]Kennan’s Warning on Ukraine[/H1]

    [H2]Ambition, Insecurity, and the Perils of Independence[/H2]

    https://www.foreignaffairs.com/u…

    George Kennan, the remarkable U.S. diplomat and probing observer of international relations, is famous for forecasting the collapse of the Soviet Union. Less well known is his warning in 1948 that no Russian government would ever accept Ukrainian independence. Foreseeing a deadlocked struggle between Moscow and Kyiv, Kennan made detailed suggestions at the time about how Washington should deal with a conflict that pitted an independent Ukraine against Russia. He returned to this subject half a century later. Kennan, then in his 90s, cautioned that the eastward expansion of NATO would doom democracy in Russia and ignite another Cold War.

    Kennan probably knew Russia more intimately than anyone who ever served in the U.S. government. Even before he arrived in Moscow in 1933 as a 29-year-old aide to the first U.S. ambassador the Soviet Union, he had mastered Russian and could pass as a native. In Russia, Kennan immersed himself in newspapers, official documents, literature, radio, theater, and film. He wore himself thin partying into the night with Russian artists, intellectuals, and junior officials. Dressed like a Russian, Kennan eavesdropped on Muscovites in the streetcar or at the theater. He hiked or skied into the countryside to visit gems of early Russian architecture. His disdain for Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship, particularly after the onset of the bloody purges of 1935–38, was matched only by his desire to get close to the Russian people and their culture. In 1946, after dictating his famed long telegram to the State Department warning of the Soviet threat, Kennan was brought back to Washington. The following year, he won national attention for his article in Foreign Affairs calling for the containment of Soviet expansion.

    Kennan was unique. When Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson told a colleague that the gifted diplomat was slated to head the newly formed Policy Planning Staff, the colleague replied that “a man like Kennan would be excellent for that job.” Acheson snapped back: “A man like Kennan? There’s nobody like Kennan.” Operating from an office next door to the secretary of state, Kennan helped craft the Marshall Plan and other major midcentury initiatives.

    Kennan’s star would dim after 1949 as he opposed the growing militarization of U.S. foreign policy, but he was still venerated as a Russian expert. His advice was sought by the Truman administration when it feared provoking Russia’s entry into the Korean War, by the Eisenhower administration after the death of Stalin, and by the Kennedy administration during the Berlin crisis of 1961. Despite his televised opposition to the Vietnam War and his protests against the nuclear arms race, Kennan was consulted by officials in the State Department and in the CIA well into the 1990s. In 2003, he held a press conference to protest the invasion of Iraq. An elitist blinkered by ugly prejudices that he had absorbed in the early twentieth century, Kennan nevertheless remained a clear-sighted foreign policy analyst until his death in 2005.

    In light of this expertise, it is worth examining both Kennan’s skepticism about Ukrainian independence and his suggestion of how Washington should respond to a Russian attack on an independent Ukraine.

    A UKRAINE SKEPTIC
    In a policy paper titled “U.S. Objectives with Respect to Russia” completed in August 1948, Kennan laid out the United States’ ultimate aims in the event that the Russians invaded Ukraine. He realized that Ukrainians “resented Russian domination; and their nationalistic organizations have been active and vocal abroad.” It would therefore “be easy to jump to the conclusion” that Ukraine should be independent. He asserted that the United States should not, however, encourage that separation.

    Kennan’s assessment grossly underestimated Ukrainians’ will to self-determination. Nevertheless, two problems identified by Kennan three-quarters of a century ago have persisted, particularly in the minds of Russian leaders. Kennan doubted that Russians and Ukrainians could be easily distinguished in ethnic terms. He wrote in a State Department memo that “there is no clear dividing line between Russia and Ukraine, and it would be impossible to establish one.” Second, the Russian and Ukrainian economies were intertwined. Setting up an independent Ukraine “would be as artificial and as destructive as an attempt to separate the Corn Belt, including the Great Lakes industrial area, from the economy of the United States.”

    Since 1991, Ukrainians have struggled to establish a territorial and ethnic dividing line while forging economic independence from the Russian behemoth. Moscow has undermined these efforts by encouraging discontent in the eastern Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine, fomenting independence movements and now officially annexing four breakaway regions. With years of political and economic pressure and now with military brutality, Russia has tried to thwart Ukraine’s economic independence by disrupting its gas pipelines, grain exports, and shipping.

    Even at the height of the Cold War, Kennan insisted that “we cannot be indifferent to the feelings of the Great Russians themselves.” Because the Russians would remain the “strongest national element” in the area, any viable “long-term U.S. policy must be based on their acceptance and their cooperation.” Again, Kennan likened the Russian view of Ukraine to the American view of the Midwest. A separate, independent Ukraine could “be maintained, in the last analysis, only by force.” For all these reasons, a hypothetical triumphant United States should not seek to impose Ukrainian independence on a prostrate Russia.

    Should the Ukrainians achieve independence on their own, Kennan advised the State Department, Washington should not interfere, at least initially. It was nearly inevitable, however, that an independent Ukraine would be “challenged eventually from the Russian side.” If in that conflict “an undesirable deadlock was developing,” the United States should push for “a composing of the differences along the lines of a reasonable federalism.”

    Notwithstanding the vicissitudes of the last 75 years, Kennan’s advice remains relevant today. A federation allowing for regional autonomy in eastern Ukraine and perhaps even in Crimea could help both sides coexist. Many analysts tend to portray the current conflict as “Putin’s war,” but Kennan believed that almost any strong Russian leader would eventually push back against the total separation of Ukraine. Finally, the realities of demography and geography dictate that Russia in the long run will remain the principal power in these often tragic “bloodlands.” For the sake of both regional stability and long-term U.S. security, Washington needs to sustain a hardheaded, clear-eyed empathy for the interests of the Russians as well as of the Ukrainians and other nationalities.

    [b]A PROPHET IGNORED[/b]
    ...

  • Khurram0

    [h1]Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek[/h1]

    https://www.counterpunch.org/202…

    One of the most prominent intellectuals in the contemporary world was named to the list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers” in Foreign Policy magazine in 2012.[1] He shares this distinction with the likes of Dick Cheney, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Benjamin Netanyahu, and former Mossad director Meir Dagan. The theorist’s best idea—according to this well-known publication that is a virtual arm of the U.S. State Department—is that “the big revolution the left is waiting for will never come.”[2]

    Other ideas were surely strong contenders, and we could add to the list more recent positions. To select but a few examples, this top global thinker has described 20th-century communism, and more specifically Stalinism, as “maybe the worst ideological, political, ethical, social (and so on) catastrophe in the history of humanity.”[3] As a matter of fact, he adds for emphasis that “if you measure at some abstract level of suffering, Stalinism was worse than Nazism,” apparently regretting that the Red Army under Stalin defeated the Nazi war machine.[4] The Third Reich was not as “radical” in its violence as communism, he insists, and “the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough.”[5] Perhaps he could have taken some tips from Mao Zedong who, according to this theoretical grandee, made a “ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death.”[6] This undocumented assertion positions its author well to the right of the anti-communist Black Book of Communism, which recognized that Mao did not intend to kill his compatriots.[7] Such information is of no import, however, to this theorist since he operates on the assumption that the worst ‘crime against humanity’ in the modern world was not Nazism or fascism, but rather communism.

    The thinker in question is also a self-declared Eurocentric who intimates that Europe is politically, morally, and intellectually superior to all other regions of planet Earth.[8] When the European refugee crisis was intensified due to brutal Western military interventions around the wider Mediterranean region, he parroted Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ credo by declaring that “it is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a culture that is incompatible with Western European notions of human rights.”[9] This top-tier pundit also endorsed Donald Trump for president in the 2016 election.[10] More recently, he explicitly positioned himself to the right of the notorious warmonger Henry Kissinger by accusing the latter of “pacifism” and expressing his “full support” for the U.S. proxy war in the Ukraine, claiming that “we need a stronger NATO” to defend “European unity.”[11]

    Being fêted by the preeminent journal co-founded by the arch-conservative national security state operative Huntington is only the tip of the iceberg for this global superstar, who has achieved a level of international fame rarely accorded to professional intellectuals.[12] In addition to being an academic celebrity with prestigious appointments at leading institutions in the capitalist world and innumerable international junkets, he has consolidated an enormous media platform. This includes publishing books and articles at a dizzying speed for some of the most prominent outlets, serving as the subject of multiple films, and regularly appearing on television and in major media spectacles.

    Given the nature of these political positions and their amplification by the bourgeois cultural apparatus, one might assume that the thinker in question is a rightwing ideologue promoted by imperialist think tanks and the U.S. national security state. On the contrary, however, this is a commentator that anyone perusing online for radical theory or even Marxism is likely to encounter almost immediately, because he is one of the most visible intellectuals taken to represent the Left: Slavoj Žižek.

    Donald Trump expressed his belief in the power of the U.S. propaganda machine by infamously claiming that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing a single voter.[13] In our perverse and decadent society of the spectacle within the imperialist core, much the same applies to the poster child for the global theory industry. Žižek could take the most reactionary political positions imaginable, have them broadcast around the world by the capitalist cultural apparatus, and still be presented as a towering intellectual of the Left. As a matter of fact, he has done precisely that.

    [b]Discursive Sausage for the Uneducated[/b]...

  • Nairn0

    https://longreads.com/2017/09/12…

    I want to eat here. I don't even much like lamb.

    • Lambs that lives outside eating grass = far cleaner + healthier meat than beef/chicken/pork.shapesalad
  • imbecile0

    (U//FOUO) Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment

    This product is one of a series of intelligence assessments published by the Extremism and Radicalization Branch to facilitate a greater understanding of the phenomenon of violent radicalization in the United States. The information is provided to federal, state, local, and tribal counterterrorism and law enforcement officials so they may effectively deter, prevent, preempt, or respond to terrorist attacks against the United States. Federal efforts to influence domestic public opinion must be conducted in an overt and transparent manner, clearly identifying United States Government sponsorship.

    https://irp.fas.org/eprint/right…

    • Is a 13yr old document really current?Morning_star
    • It’s a long-ish read. Maybe try reading it?imbecile
  • Nairn0

    “Maybe grapes from one little 80-acre vineyard in France are really the best in the whole world, but I have always had a suspicion that 99% of it is in the telling and about 1% of it is in the drinking.” – Warren Buffet

    https://thehustle.co/how-a-small…

  • Khurram0

    "A striking feature of these well-worn arguments over Nato is that they all assume a high degree of familiarity with the thing itself. For all that it is central to a certain conception of Europe – or even the west – few can say what, exactly, it is. Crammed into a four-letter acronym is something more than a simple military alliance. Nato is no longer particularly “Northern”, nor “Atlantic”, nor bound to a “Treaty”, while calling it an “organisation” almost makes it sound like a charitable enterprise. Part of the reason Nato’s shape can be difficult to discern is that the alliance has, at least in the west, won a long war of public relations. In the 50s, Nato sent travelling “caravans” – mass exhibitions and outdoor movie theatres – into the hinterlands of Europe to explain the benefits of the alliance to sceptical populations. Such a strenuous case for Nato no longer needs to be made, and opposition to it has vastly diminished since the 1980s. What was once presumed to be an artefact of the cold war order sits so comfortably at the heart of the west’s military-political-economic system that it is frequently mistaken for a natural feature in the European landscape."

    https://www.theguardian.com/news…

    • "Khurram Aziz
      Montreal, Canada"

      Bruh gtfo
      grafician
    • We have people in Moldova rn freaking out over the war next door - they are not under NATO

      and you have the guts to post this shit?

      fucking idiot
      grafician
    • And you have the guts to insult me on the internet. Touché!Khurram
    • An insult is an insult only if the party addressed is actually aware of the insult - thus you're a proper idiotgrafician
    • You momma. In the ass! fUKKHOLEKhurram
  • imbecile0

    He Planned a Treasure Hunt for the Ages — Until He Went Missing

    Hunter Lewis was an adventure-lover who spent two years devising an elaborate outdoor quest for his friends and family, only to see it end in tragedy

    https://www.rollingstone.com/cul…

    Let’s start at journey’s end. Some adventures exact a terrible cost.

    It’s the last Sunday in January. More than 300 guests walk single file into the Arcata Community Center in far North California. Some wear blazers with sneakers, and some wear gingham dresses with muddy hiking boots. They patiently wait their turn and then sign their names into the guest book.

    They are here to celebrate an extraordinary young man. His achievements are perfectly organized and displayed chronologically on a series of tables. There he is as a little boy with his father and grandfather preparing to launch a rocket into the Colorado sky. There are snapshots of a handsome kid with lank hair climbing on rocks, and another where he is playing his guitar. Then a pair of blue canvas shoes with sand still clinging to shredded soles.

    You glance up and see someone who resembles the young man. It’s his brother. He’s a different kind of free spirit, with glasses and blond-green hair, his skinny body clad in Doc Martens, a Phish hoodie, and a Bikini Kill T-shirt. He stops for a moment and looks at the different stages of his brother’s travels, and then moves on alone.

    ...

  • Gnash0

    The Nature of Art

    https://inference-review.com/art…

    ex nihilo nihil fit—nothing comes from nothing

    • 69th post. nicepango
    • Interesting piece. Yes, Owen Jones will be a common ancestor of so much decorative art. Including the humble Custard Cream even!Brabo_Brabo
  • Fax_Benson0

    Inside the Rise of the Niche Twitter Expert

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/…

  • Fax_Benson0

    How city folk ruined the countryside

    https://theface.com/life/go-wild…

  • garbage0

    Not a longish read, but a good one.

    https://dirkdeklein.net/2018/03/…

  • Fax_Benson1

    The dying art of the hatchet job

    https://unherd.com/2021/09/the-d…

  • Nairn0

    "Who Owns My Name?"
    Amanda Knox

    https://amandamarieknox.medium.c…

  • Bennn2

    The ballad of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping

    In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town, capturing the world’s attention. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story.

    https://www.vox.com/the-highligh…

  • renderedred2

    Web Design History Timeline

    https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/…

  • grafician-2

    "The most popular series of NFT collectibles are algorithmically generated. And what they reveal, compared to the rest of culture, is a broader and more prevalent trend of art and entertainment that has the uncanny feeling of having been made by algorithm, even though it wasn’t.

    A painter and performance artist once told me, in the brutalist basement of the old Met Breuer, that Future had destroyed the future.

    Trap music has taken over the world, and it all sounds more or less the same now. It might be amazing, but it sounds the same. It’s supposed to sound the same. That’s the idea, what makes it so powerful. A talented producer can make a song in ten minutes on a live stream. A talented producer can make a song in less time than it takes to listen to. It’s never been quicker to write a song than now. Songs keep getting shorter and shorter. Records keep getting shorter and shorter. It’s a numbers game. I can write these columns pretty quickly now.

    This is an age of great speed and competition. We’re all looking for more popularity, new ways to find an edge; and yet, all this competition only seems to lead to blandness and mediocrity, rather than breakthroughs. Nor does it lead to collapse; even accelerationism doesn’t work. We want too much content, too fast, and it just leads to this endless algorithmic churning, this paint-by-numbers effect.

    You see it in art. In Netflix documentaries. Spotify playlists. Op-ed pages. The news. The latest manufactured outrage. Well-reviewed first-person novels about nothing. All so dreadfully banal and repetitive. This is what results when everything is forged in economies of dollars, of ether, of attention.

    Most culture now has the feeling of having been made by algorithm; and the reason for this, is that humans have begun to act like algorithms."

    https://www.spikeartmagazine.com…

    • "Ever look in the mirror for too long and start thinking like, Damn I’m really a human being. I’m really in this bitch.
      KAWS, BFF (2020)"
      grafician
    • “Don’t speak to me about ‘Claude Monet,’ worm, I’m a graduated art teacher. I’m not saying the jpegs or videos aren’t art, I’m saying your whole system is a...grafician
    • ...mere pretence of an art scene for profiteering by platforms and crypto moguls.”
      Art Tyom Trakhanov
      grafician
  • Nairn1

    One of the richest people across history was a smart Fucker.

    https://notesonliberty.com/2021/…

    • Great read, thanks! Venice is fascinating in so many waysGnash
  • renderedred0

    Gulf slave society
    The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies

    https://aeon.co/essays/are-the-p…

    • Do you read HackerNews, rendererered?Nairn
    • sometimes, yes.renderedred
    • but i do follow a few fairly obscure link-longs for interesting articlesrenderedred
  • renderedred0