Et in Arcadia ego…
Walking back from lunch yesterday I looked over the bridge and saw this. The weather currently is what used to be called an “Indian Summer”, possibly by people who had never been in India in the summer.
Quote of the Day
”You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
- Leon Trotsky
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Leonard Cohen | Hallelujah, arr. Tom Hodge | Sheku Kanneh-Mason
Long Read of the Day
Too Big to Nationalize
A really powerful blast by Mike Brock about the mess the world is now in — where a single, unaccountable, individual is wielding the kind of power that once was the prerogative of nation states.
When a business becomes critical infrastructure, its relationship with society alters. If SpaceX builds a near-monopoly on satellite internet, no matter how objectively good the product is, and its CEO then uses it to conduct foreign policy according to his own politics and against the interests of the United States, the company has violated the public trust. Full stop.
Starlink is a technological accomplishment, and I have always said as much. It functions approximately two-thirds of all active satellites in orbit, more than all other operators combined, and in one quarter last year it accounted for 97% of satellite internet speed tests worldwide. Ukraine runs its drones on it. This is what critical infrastructure entails. It is the thing individuals cannot do without, and the moment they cannot do without it, the person who owns it holds their lives in his hands whether he requested that responsibility or not.
On October 14, he shut his hand. The military-grade version of Starlink that Ukraine depends on had its speeds limited, so that any drone flying faster than 100 miles an hour lost its connection. According to The Wall Street Journal, Musk himself imposed the limits, after he had discussed Ukraine with Trump, and officials disagree on whether he acted alone or consulted with the administration first. Its journalists discovered a Ukrainian unit that dispatched six drones to a Russian army warehouse. One hit the warehouse. The commander stated that his drones now have to fly slower, and the Russians are bringing more of them down. Each Ukrainian drone that falls means a Russian warehouse remains standing, or a Russian drone that gets through to a Ukrainian apartment block.
The defenders continue to reach for the same phrase. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Washington had not cut Ukraine’s access, and pointed instead to the terms of service Kyiv needed to comply with. My response guy stated similarly: a commercial network with a TOS agreement. This is the private foreign policy, put simply by the individuals who claim it doesn’t exist. Whether Ukrainian drones reach their targets is now a question of contract compliance, adjudicated by a billionaire who has complained about Ukraine’s strikes on Russian refineries. I view that as a betrayal of American interests, and the American public, which sides with Ukraine over Russia 57% to 4%, seems not to disagree…
Read on.
My commonplace booklet
When contemplating the current state of the world, I’m often reminded of an adage that is often attributed to the Italian Marxist, journalist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by Mussolini in 1926 and spent a decade behind bars, during which time he wrote 30 remarkable notebooks of history and analysis.
The adage that caught my eye many years ago was the view that when contemplating a disordered world what is needed is “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will”. But since pessimism is disabling, I’ve argued for a while that when we need now is realism of the intellect and optimism of the will.
Sorting some notes the other day, I came on this diagram drawn years ago when I was grappling with these thoughts. I’m slightly ashamed of it now, because these quadrant-graphs are what one finds everywhere in MBA courses and I now regard them as the last resort of an exhausted mind. But still…
Seen and read
In the era of digital TV, Britain has shown the world two distinct faces. One is the twee, backward-looking nation of Downton Abbey and similar period dramas. This stuff sells well to credulous foreigners even as it infantilises us. The other is the Premier League. In this Britain, even medium-sized towns in conservative regions have multinational teams, and without second thoughts. No people could seem more at ease with the modern world, or with itself.
If the league were to decline, as the Italian Serie A did after its own scandal, Britain would lose the most attractive calling card that it has right now.
Janan Ganesh, FT October 17.
Yep. Sad, isn’t it.
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