Get a move on mate, I’m hungry too

My wildlife photography is improving — slowly — thanks to advice from readers like Jonathan Potter (for which many thanks).

The madness of war seeps into everything

Jan Dalley had a thoughtful column in the weekend edition of the Financial Times about how we in the West are tarring everything Russian (including musicians and artists who have nothing to do with Putin or the war) with the same brush.

She points out that that is an old, old story. “During the First World War,” she writes,

”there were society ladies in London whose proud anti-German war work was to stroll in the Park every day and throw stones at dachshunds”

We will be going abroad for part of the Summer and so on Saturday we went to see a cattery where our cat might spend a week or two. As we talked to the proprietor about the post-pandemic increase in demand for ‘cat hotels’, she remarked that some people are now taking against Russian Blues.

This is madness. I feel particularly strongly about it because many years ago we had a wonderful Russian Blue called (in homage to the Marx Brothers), Harpo. He died because he was hit by a car on one of his nocturnal expeditions, but he left a gap in our lives which we felt for years afterwards. And although he was quite territorial he wasn’t in the least interested in politics!

Quote of the Day

”Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it.”

• Max Frisch (and not, as I had mistakenly thought — until more erudite readers put me right — Martin Heidegger)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Everybody Hurts (Ya Rab) – Sachal Studios Orchestra

Link

This unusual performance of a lovely REM song (which I had highlighted last November) was suggested by Neil Sequeira. I’d never heard of Sachal Studios Orchestra and so went searching. It’s described as “the only orchestra in Pakistan that plays live and tours internationally”. Apparently it first became famous after recording a fine version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. And it seems to be entirely made up of chaps, which may or may not tell one something about the musical scene in Pakistan.

I still much prefer the Glastonbury performance by REM, though.

Long Read of the Day

In a World on Fire, Stop Burning Things

Great, long New Yorker essay by Bill McKibbin.

Burning fossil fuel has driven the temperature of the planet ever higher, melting most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic, bending the jet stream, and slowing the Gulf Stream. And selling fossil fuel has given Putin both the money to equip an army (oil and gas account for sixty per cent of Russia’s export earnings) and the power to intimidate Europe by threatening to turn off its supply. Fossil fuel has been the dominant factor on the planet for centuries, and so far nothing has been able to profoundly alter that. After Putin invaded, the American Petroleum Institute insisted that our best way out of the predicament was to pump more oil. The climate talks in Glasgow last fall, which John Kerry, the U.S. envoy, had called the “last best hope” for the Earth, provided mostly vague promises about going “net-zero by 2050”; it was a festival of obscurantism, euphemism, and greenwashing, which the young climate activist Greta Thunberg summed up as “blah, blah, blah.” Even people trying to pay attention can’t really keep track of what should be the most compelling battle in human history.

So let’s reframe the fight. Along with discussing carbon fees and green-energy tax credits, amid the momentary focus on disabling Russian banks and flattening the ruble, there’s a basic, underlying reality: the era of large-scale combustion has to come to a rapid close. If we understand that as the goal, we might be able to keep score, and be able to finally get somewhere. Last Tuesday, President Biden banned the importation of Russian oil. This year, we may need to compensate for that with American hydrocarbons, but, as a senior Administration official put it,“the only way to eliminate Putin’s and every other producing country’s ability to use oil as an economic weapon is to reduce our dependency on oil.” As we are one of the largest oil-and-gas producers in the world, that is a remarkable statement. It’s a call for an end of fire.

It’s an interesting and informative essay. The key insight is that renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel, and becoming more so. So a determined transition to renewable energy would save the world twenty-six trillion dollars in energy costs in the coming decades. Which is precisely the opposite of what everyone assumes — that a green transition would be an unbelievably expensive undertaking.

Is Google’s domination of the internet finally over? Search me…

Yesterday’s Observer column:

For seasoned users of the internet, the chronology of our era divides into two ages: BG and AG – before and after Google. The year 1998 marks the dividing line. Before then, as the web expanded exponentially, a host of “search engines” had attempted to provide searchable indexes to it. The best of them was AltaVista, which launched in 1995 and provided the first searchable, full-text database of the web via a simple interface. It was the engine that I and most of my colleagues used until one fateful day in 1998 when an even starker webpage appeared with a simple text box and almost nothing else except the name Google. And from the moment you first used it, there was no going back.

Why? Because Google used an original way of ranking the relevance of the results turned up by a query. It effectively conducted an automated peer review of websites. The more webpages linked to a particular site, the more relevant it was likely to be and so it was given a higher ranking. The algorithm, dubbed PageRank, which did this was the foundation on which Google’s domination of the internet search was built.

The reason Google swept all before it was that its ranking system seemed objective: it just counted links and ranked accordingly…

Well, of course that was then and this is now. Read on.

Christopher Alexander RIP

The great design theorist passed away on Thursday. A Pattern Language, the hypertext book he wrote with a group of his students and colleagues, changed the way not just architects thought about design, but also influenced some software engineers over the years. At the core of his thinking was the idea that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects, but by the people who inhabit them. I first came on his ideas when involved in a row with the ‘architects’ of a huge public-sector computing system which would have to work for decades after it was commissioned. What was striking was that none of its designers were thinking about how the needs of its future users might change over the lifetime of the system. They reminded me of Corbusier and his delusion that houses are “machines for living in”.

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A message to the Russian People…

… from, Guess Who? None other than the Terminator himself. Not many people can pull off a piece like this — and hold one’s attention throughout. It’s nine minutes long and, I think, worth it.

Here’s the Link.

Quote of the Day

”Three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write.”

• Anthony Trollope

He would know. According to some reports, he

paid a servant an extra £5 a year to wake him up at 5:30 am every morning and get him a cup of coffee. Trollope would then work on a novel for three hours. The first half hour was spent reading over what he had already written, and after that he wrote at a pace of 250 words per 15 minutes. So, over three hours, he would write approximately 2,500 words.

And he did that while holding down a serious job in the Post Office. Infuriating, isn’t it?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Strauss | Four Last Songs | No 4 – Im abendrot | Renee Fleming

Link

Strauss’s four songs were part of the programme at the Metropolitan Opera’s Concert for Ukraine the other night. This one is my favourite.

Long Read of the Day

 How Putin’s Oligarchs Bought London

Marvellous review essay by Patrick Radden Keefe on a number of courageous books which have revealed the extent to which the top layers of British UK have been compromised by the dirty wealth of Russians who are, in one way or another, obligated to Putin.

For the past several years, Oliver Bullough, a former Russia correspondent, has guided “kleptocracy tours” around London, explaining how dirty money from abroad has transformed the city. Bullough shows up with a busload of rubberneckers in front of elegant mansions and steel-and-glass apartment towers in Knightsbridge and Belgravia, and points out the multimillion-pound residences of the shady expatriates who find refuge there. His book “Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Oligarchs, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats, and Criminals,” just published in the U.K., argues that England actively solicited such corrupting influences, by letting “some of the worst people in existence” know that it was open for business.

Invoking Dean Acheson’s famous observation, in 1962, that Britain had “lost an empire but not yet found a role,” Bullough suggests that it did find a role, as a no-questions-asked service provider to the crooked élite, offering access to capital markets, prime real estate, shopping at Harrods, and illustrious private schools, along with accountants for tax tricks, attorneys for legal squabbles, and “reputation managers” for inconvenient backstories. It starts with visas; any foreigner with adequate funds can buy one, by investing two million pounds in the U.K. (Ten million can buy you permanent residency.)

It’s full of interesting stories. For example:

In 2014, the American political scientist Karen Dawisha submitted her book “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?” to her longtime publisher, Cambridge University Press. After reviewing the manuscript, Dawisha’s editor, John Haslam, wrote to her praising the book but saying that Cambridge could not publish it. “The risk is high that those implicated in the premise of the book—that Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle—would be motivated to sue,” he explained. Even if the press ultimately prevailed, the expense of the proceedings could be ruinous, Haslam said.

It’s a terrific read. And also an infuriating one, not least because the sudden faux-outrage of the Tory party about the wealthy London concierges and legal pimps who service the needs of oligarchs is so nauseating.

Preparing for Defeat 

Francis Fukuyama in upbeat mode.

I’ll stick my neck out and make several prognostications:

1 Russia is heading for an outright defeat in Ukraine. Russian planning was incompetent, based on a flawed assumption that Ukrainians were favorable to Russia and that their military would collapse immediately following an invasion. Russian soldiers were evidently carrying dress uniforms for their victory parade in Kyiv rather than extra ammo and rations. Putin at this point has committed the bulk of his entire military to this operation—there are no vast reserves of forces he can call up to add to the battle. Russian troops are stuck outside various Ukrainian cities where they face huge supply problems and constant Ukrainian attacks.

2 The collapse of their position could be sudden and catastrophic, rather than happening slowly through a war of attrition. The army in the field will reach a point where it can neither be supplied nor withdrawn, and morale will vaporize. This is at least true in the north; the Russians are doing better in the south, but those positions would be hard to maintain if the north collapses.

There are ten more where they came from.

I hope he’s right. In the meantime, I liked Charles Arthur’s sardonic take on the piece. “Mr End Of History predicting End Of War. It’s probably as good an analysis as any.”

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St Patrick’s Day!

(And it’s not true that he banished the snakes from Ireland, as a casual inspection of the country’s political elite will confirm.)

The flock

Lovely photograph taken the other day in Glencolumbcille by John Darch (Whom God Preserve). Note the symmetry of the group.

Quote of the Day

”Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted”

• Groucho Marx‌

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steve Cooney | O’Farrell’s Slip Jig

Link

You’ve got to have a slip jig on this day of all days.

Long Read of the Day

The Channel 4 exposé of the Jeremy Kyle Show made me ashamed of the TV profession

Great piece by Dorothy Byrne, the former head of news and current affairs at Channel 4 TV.

Over two nights this week, millions of viewers watched the horror that was ITV’s Jeremy Kyle Show exposed. The two-part investigation, Jeremy Kyle Show: Death on Daytime, on Channel 4, suggested that the production team lied to vulnerable participants, some of whom had obvious mental health issues, with sometimes terrible consequences. The Jeremy Kyle Show was taken off air only after one victim, Steve Dymond, “failed” a lie detector test on the show and killed himself a week later. It was also revealed that at least one other participant had killed herself after appearing on the programme years earlier – and the investigation hinted there were potentially more cases.

But the programme’s greatest shock lay not in its content but in what – or who – was not on screen. It approached more than 200 people who had worked on the Jeremy Kyle Show over 14 years, and not a single one would go on camera…

I was a TV critic for 13 years and really enjoyed the medium but detested many of the people who worked in the industry. Dorothy Byrne was one of the shining exceptions.

The Jeremy Kyle show was one of the most obnoxious, cruel and exploitative shows ever to appear on British television. What was even more depressing, though, was that so many people tuned in to watch it.

Xi’s awkward dilemma

From Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times ($)

A short, victorious Russian war would have suited China. Beijing’s favoured narrative about the inexorable decline of American power would have looked even more credible. The stage might have been set for a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

Instead, Russia has got bogged down. The western alliance has been revived, and the US and its allies have unveiled a new armoury of economic sanctions that will look very threatening in Beijing.

China is now having to digest the news that, as a result of western sanctions, Russia has lost access to most of its foreign reserves. As the economist Barry Eichengreen points out, one of the main reasons that countries hold foreign reserves is “as a war chest to be tapped in a geopolitical conflict”. But China, which has the world’s largest foreign reserves, has just discovered that it could lose access to its war chest overnight.

China is not nearly self-sufficient in either energy or food. It has worried for decades about the “Malacca Dilemma” — the threat that the US navy could blockade China by cutting off key shipping routes. China’s huge investments in its navy are partly aimed at averting that possibility. Now, however, Beijing has to consider the possibility that a freezing of the country’s foreign reserves, allied to other financial sanctions, could be just as threatening as a naval blockade.

Frustratingly for China, there is no easy way out of this. The obvious solution would be for it to trade increasingly in its own currency, the renminbi. But Beijing has shied away from making the RMB fully convertible, fearing that this would lead to destabilising capital flight.

The piece is accompanied by a brilliant cartoon showing Putin, with hands dripping with blood, embracing ‘Pooh Bear’, as Xi is known to Chinese dissidents.

The moral of the story is, I suppose, “don’t put all of your Faberge eggs in other people’s baskets”.

Later Noah Smith has an intriguing blog post suggesting that Xi suddenly has a lot on his plate — to wit: the Ukraine war, renewed Covid outbreaks, a stock-market crash and a real estate bubble that is now bursting.

My commonplace booklet

Saturday Night Live does Amazon Go Lovely sketch. Link

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Quote of the Day

”Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose.”

• Garrison Keillor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan & Van Morrison | And It Stoned Me | BBC Outtake, Athens 27.06.1989

Link

Two of my favourite singer-songwriters in the open air on a hill in Athens, with the Parthenon in the background.

I love outtakes. They show how the magical sausage is made.

Long Read of the Day

In my Observer column last Sunday I wrote about DAOs — Distributed Autonomous Organisations, the latest crypto-obsession. I said that the Gadarene rush into this crypto wormhole reminded me of the 1960s and early 1970s hippie obsession with communes. “There’s something touching about the DAO idea”, I wrote.

It seeks to break the stranglehold of hierarchical organisations dominated by a few and replace them with more democratic structures. In that sense, they’re reminiscent of 1960s and 1970s attempts to create communes for breaking the grip of the nuclear monogamous family and creating more collegial structures for domestic life. Those experiments often broke up because the alpha males couldn’t hack real egalitarianism. And DAOs are now riven by similar conflicts. The only difference is that some members are more equal than other, not because of gender but because they own more of the cryptocurrency tokens and can therefore determine what happens. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

This struck a chord with Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve), who has an enviable talent for making complex ideas clear by finding material examples. In a lovely blog post he told the story of a British football team, Ebbsfleet United, a “proto-DAO” which was taken over by an online community of fans in 2008 and initially did well in the league in which it was located.

The fan voting evolved in what I imagine many social anthropologists would regard as an entirely predictable way. After the investment, the fans voted on who should pick the team, themselves or the manager: they chose the manager every time. This is exactly what I would do: If I had a vote in how Manchester City should line up at the weekend, I would inevitably delegate that vote to someone who knows what they are doing (in this case, one of the most successful managers in the history of the game, Pep Guardiola). Why on earth would I allow people like me to decide on something that they have no demonstrable aptitude for?

Will Brooks, who was behind the idea in the first place, later said that “one of my biggest conclusions is that perhaps the idea was more exciting than the reality”. I think this probably going to be true of any other DAO as well. Even if there was a wisdom of crowds to be tapped, people have other things to do. Such communities tend to evolve rapidly into groups where a small number of people co-ordinate action and the majority are happy to delegate responsibility. You get, in effect, cabals or councils who direct the organisation. Thus there is what SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce called “shadow centralisation”.

Dave’s point is that “truly decentralised systems just do not survive, they mutate into centralised systems (ie, representation and republic) or an anonymous oligarchy (whales and warlords)”.

I think he’s right, but his blog post is worth reading in its entirety for pleasure as well as wisdom.

Niall Ferguson on ‘Czar Vladimir Putin’ and MAFD

Interesting interview in Nikkei Asia which is behind some kind of impenetrable paywall. But two things in it struck me as interesting.

First, Ferguson’s guesses about Putin’s misjudgement of the possibility of effective Ukrainian resistance:

These are miscalculations, not signs of madness. They’re the kind of miscalculations you make if you are very divorced from reality, because you lead the life of a czar, in vast — if hideous — palaces, surrounded by people who are terrified of you and tell you what they think you want to hear. If I put myself in Putin’s position, I don’t think he’s trying to resurrect the Soviet Union. He’s looking back even further and trying to bring back the Russian Empire, with himself as “Czar Vladimir.” It’s an ideology of conservative, orthodox nationalism that Putin offers, that has nothing to do with the Soviet legacy. A lot of people get this wrong.

Secondly, how will Putin’s difficulties be interpreted in Beijing? In particular, what are the implications for Taiwan?

Ferguson: Xi Jinping has, as his ultimate goal, to bring Taiwan under the control of the Chinese Communist Party, and I assume that he will conclude from observing the events in Ukraine that the West is weak, in military terms, and reluctant to fight, but it is strong in economic terms and prepared to use sanctions to punish aggression.

The question he will ask himself is: “Can they do to me what they are doing to Russia?”

And the answer will be no. Unlike Russia, China is a huge economy that is still, despite Cold War tendencies, deeply bound up with the U.S. economy, with very large U.S. investments in China. If you did to China what we’re currently doing to Russia, it would hurt us a lot more. That is what I’ll call the “mutually assured financial destruction” problem.

My commonplace booklet

• Restoring and attributing ancient texts using deep neural networks An imaginative use of machine-learning.  Nature report 

• People are being arrested in Russia for demonstrating with blank posters Link. This reminded Ben Evans of an old Soviet joke. A man hands out leaflets on Red Square, and the KGB arrest him. But when they get him to the station, they find that the leaflets are all blank. And he says “Well, everyone knows what the problem is, so why bother writing it down?”

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A picture for our time.

Farewell, painted by August Macke in 1914.

Quote of the Day

”Every country has its own mafia. Putin’s Russia is the first where the mafia has its own country.”

• Garry Kasparov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | Visions of Johanna

Link

A bootleg recording of a wonderful song. Written during a black-out in New York while he was dating Joan Baez but was falling in love with his first wife Sara. “Visions of Johanna” is one of Dylan’s most enigmatic and loved songs. The message? He misses Johanna. Lyrics here.

Long Read of the Day

Time for a Diplomatic Revolution

by Noah Smith

Really thoughtful essay by Noah Smith. The basic message is that Cold War 2 is here, and the U.S. needs all the allies we can get.

By way of a preamble, Smith writes:

I’m taking a brief break from posting about economics to offer some ideas on geopolitics and international relations. I’m not any kind of an expert on these things, so as always, take what I have to say with a grain of salt. But remember that lots of other people confidently writing about these subjects make no such disclaimers when they offer their opinions.

What I like about the essay is the way a non-specialist in the history of international relations goes about pondering our current moment.

In late 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered France and was allied with Japan, while the USSR had helped Hitler devour Poland. The U.S. was neutral, still hobbled by isolationism. It looked as if totalitarian powers would dominate the globe. But a year later, when Hitler turned on Stalin and Stalin allied with the U.S., the tables were entirely turned — the Allies now had a coalition that could beat the fascist powers.

In the Cold War, too, alliances played a role. When the USSR and China were communist allies during the Korean War, it was all the U.S. could do to hold them at bay; after the Sino-Soviet Split, the USSR had to worry about attack from China. The U.S. was able to exploit this by arranging a de facto alliance with China against the Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s. The Soviets probably would have lost the Cold War anyway, but the U.S.-China rapprochement probably hastened the end.

Now we find ourselves at another dangerous, potentially pivotal moment in history.

“Pragmatism in the defence of liberty is no vice”. And the ambiguities thereof. The best is always the enemy of the good.

Time to think about the unthinkable?

We liberals have spent the last two decades being continually surprised and horrified by the ‘unthinkable’ things that have happened. It was unthinkable that the deregulated and globalised financial system would very nearly bring the world to its knees — that ATM machines wouldn’t dispense cash on a Monday morning. It was unthinkable that the criminals who presided over this catastrophe would not go to gaol. It was unthinkable that the costs of bailing out these criminals would be imposed on ordinary citizens. It was unthinkable that the UK would vote to leave the EU. It was unthinkable that the US would elect a crooked narcissist as its President. It was unthinkable that there would be a land war ever again in Europe.

And here we are. You’d have thought that by now we’d have wised up.

We haven’t, I think, which is really worrying because now there is one more unthinkable that we really need to think about — the thought that there might be a nuclear exchange in Europe.

Up to now we have been dismissing Putin’s putting his nuclear forces on a heightened state of readiness as the sabre-rattling of a madman, or the intimidatory bluff of a brutal gambler. I don’t see it that way, I’m afraid.

Nor does David Holloway, Professor of International History at Stanford. His books include Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1994) and The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (1983). An essay of his in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suggested that he might be someone who is indeed thinking about the unthinkable. Here’s the money quote:

On February 24—the day Putin invaded Ukraine—he warned that Russia would respond immediately to those who stood in its way, with consequences that “will be such as you have never seen in your entire history.” On February 27, he publicly ordered his minister of defense and chief of the general staff to transfer Russia’s “deterrence forces” to “special combat readiness.” Putin’s aim was evidently to deter outside intervention and to signal Russia’s determination to achieve its goals.

But another, more troubling, aspect to Putin’s recent comments has received little or no attention. It has to do with the circumstances under which Russia might use nuclear weapons.

In June 2020, Putin signed a decree—the Basic Principles of the Russian Federation’s State Policy in the Domain of Nuclear Deterrence—that specifies two conditions under which Russia would use nuclear weapons. The first is unsurprising: “The Russian Federation retains the right to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies…” But that sentence ends with an unusual statement: “… and also in the case of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is put under threat” [emphasis added].

In his February 24 speech, Putin echoed that unusual language to describe his Ukraine invasion. The United States, he claimed, was creating a hostile “anti-Russia” next to Russia and in Russia’s historic land. “For the United States and its allies, it is a policy of containing Russia, with obvious geopolitical dividends,” he said. “For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration; this is a fact. It is not only a very real threat to our interests but to the very existence of our state and to its sovereignty” [emphasis added]. Putin has defined the current situation as one in which, in line with the principles of its deterrence policy, Russia retains the right to use nuclear weapons.

That’s the ‘unthinkable’ that we should be thinking about now. The concept of “de-escalation” embedded in current Russian military doctrine says that if Russia were faced with a large-scale conventional attack that exceeded its capacity for defence, it might respond with a limited nuclear strike, i.e. so-called ‘tactical’ nukes, or maybe neutron bombs.

And if that were to happen, what would NATO’s response be? Hopefully someone is thinking about that unthinkable back at Ramstein.

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Hello, neighbour

I spent a few hours last week trying — mostly unsuccessfully — to photograph the birds clustering round our bird-feeders. This is a poor photograph, technically speaking, but it’s the best of the bunch.

I set up my Nikon D700 on a tripod with a very good lens and remote control focused on particular feeders. It’s an excellent full-frame camera, but because it’s a single-lens reflex, it flips up the mirror before taking a picture. The blue-tits have such acute hearing and fast reflexes that they’re gone the moment the mirror starts to flip and there’s nothing to see when the shutter opens to take the picture!

My initial conclusion: anyone who thinks wild-life photography is easy has never done it.

Our holiday from history is over

A product of a weekend spent brooding on what’s happening in Ukraine…

Ever since Brexit and the election of Trump in 2016 I’ve had a sinking feeling that, in the long view of history, the post-war-era (the seven decades from 1946 to 2016) would come to be seen as a blip — a brief period in which democracy expanded and significant segments of the world (though of course not all — think Korea, Indochina, India & Pakistan, the Congo, the Middle East, just to name a few) came to regard peace, stability and some degree of prosperity as normal.

2016 was a pivotal moment because it highlighted the extent to which this comforting perception was the solipsistic illusion of a particular generation — mine. I’m a baby-boomer, a member of that lucky cohort of post-war Western babies who were the main beneficiaries of the period; we had free education, good jobs and careers, were able to own our own homes, had good healthcare and interesting lives, and wound up with generous pensions. And so when the Soviet empire imploded and disintegrated in 1989-1991 we complacently agreed with Francis Fukuyama that the world had indeed arrived at ‘the end of history’ with the future belonging to what we grandly called ‘liberal democracy’.

In the process, what we failed to notice was that that vaunted democracy hadn’t been so good for many of our fellow-citizens. The globalised economic system that had provided us with the good things in life had systematically and inexorably impoverished and excluded them, leaving them in post-industrial wastelands picturesquely called ‘rustbelts’. As Thomas Piketty rudely pointed out, this economic system had somehow managed to restore inequality to the levels it had before the First World War — an outcome that our politics had consistently failed to notice, or do much about. This was in part because Western political elites had been drinking the neoliberal Kool Aid since the 1970s and so allowed our democracies to morph into what John Kennith Galbraith, had he lived to see it, would surely have called The New Corporate State.

The political earthquakes represented by the Brexit vote in the UK and Trump’s election in the US should have dented our confidence in the triumphalist Fukuyama narrative (it certainly did that for me). A better reading of those shocks would have been to accept that history hadn’t come to an end and we were about to enter another phase. Or perhaps even a repetition of stuff that had gone before.

Which I fear is what we’re now seeing in Ukraine. The supposedly ‘smart’ super-integrated Russian military machine turns out to be not that smart after all, and is bogged down in a longer struggle than its dictatorial master envisaged. Which is why, in recent days, it is returning to type — or, more accurately, to a script we have seen before: a script that calls for the reduction of everything to smoking ruins, regardless of the collateral damage.

Those with long memories will recall that when the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, a tiny (population 1.5m) Muslim republic in Southern Russia began agitating for independence. Boris Yeltsin launched an invasion of the country, with heavy artillery bombing everything in sight, but failed to quell the insurgency. So in 1996 Yeltsin signed a peace treaty with Chechnya, removed all Russian troops from the territory and granted broad autonomy to Chechnya, though not formal independence.

This ‘humiliation’ seems to have infuriated Vladimir Putin, who became Yeltsin’s Prime Minister in August 1999, and within months launched a renewed bombing campaign which bombed Grozny flat and this time succeeded in taking control of the little statelet and installing a puppet regime.

My fear is that what we’re seeing in Ukraine is this history repeating itself. But what do I know about these things? Interestingly, though, Thomas de Wall, an experienced journalist who does know about these things — and who covered the war in Chechnya, also sees the parallels. “There was a project,” he writes,

“to restore Chechnya to Russian control, and nowadays in 2022, to restore Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence. And there was no Plan B. Once the people started resisting, which came as a surprise in Chechnya and is coming as a surprise in Ukraine, there was no political Plan B about what to do with the resistance.

There’s clearly no Russian Plan B for Ukraine. If that is indeed the case, then we know what’s likely to happen.

When Chechnya was being obliterated in 1999, most of us paid little attention. After all, it wasn’t a European country. But Ukraine is.

Our complacent post-1946 holiday has really come to an end.

Quote of the Day

”How smart is that? I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine, of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful … And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. … There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen. They’re gonna keep peace all right. … Here’s a guy who’s very savvy… I know him very well. Very, very well.

• Donald Trump, two weeks ago.

Trump’s way of talking is weird. He always reminds me of the know-all drunks one used to meet in saloon bars.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | Deep Elem Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putin’s Challenge To The American Right

Terrific blast from Andrew Sullivan.

Steve Bannon summed it up: “Putin ain’t woke. He’s anti-woke.” Congressman Madison Cawthorn took it further: “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt, and it is incredibly evil, and it has been pushing woke ideologies.” That plucky little Zelensky, speaking live to the British House of Commons as bombs rained down on his country’s cities? An “incredibly evil” “thug.” Our old friend Dinesh D’Souza, in his usual temperate style, sees the Democrats as posing “a far greater threat to our freedom and safety than Putin.” And Bannon is still urging his minions to give “zero dollars to Ukraine,” even as the corpses of children lie on the streets. There’s an alt-right edginess to this moral perversity.

And over the years, this drumbeat of love for the Russian dictator shifted the views of many grassroots Republicans. In the wake of Trump’s personal infatuation with Putin, the murderer’s favorability among Republicans jumped from 10 percent in 2014 to 37 percent by December 2016. Until as recently as January this year, “62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents considered Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.” That’s the primrose path down which the GOP led its supporters — seeing Putin as a more legitimate president than Biden.

The last two weeks, to put it mildly, have pummeled this narrative…

Great essay. The problem with Putin, as Trump will eventually discover, is that in the end he will be a ‘loser’. And the thing we will all have to worry about then is the stupendous economic power that’s brought ruination to Russia.

The DAO of Blockchain

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In 1982, a guy called Benjamin Hoff, who was then employed as a tree-pruner in the Portland Japanese Garden in Oregon, published a charming little book, The Tao of Pooh, in which he argued that AA Milne’s bear had ways of doing things that appeared to echo some of the principles of Taoism, the ancient Chinese philosophy. Taoism teaches the various disciplines for achieving perfection through self-reflection, and one of its central concepts is that of pu – the idea that you should always be open to, but unburdened by, experience.

The Tao of Pooh was a runaway success, spending 49 weeks on the New York Times’s bestseller list. This has given this newspaper columnist, whose occupation is even humbler than that of tree-pruner, an idea for a new, timely bestseller, the title of which – The Dao of Blockchain – neatly embodies two buzzwords for the price of one.

Let me explain…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

• 27 Meaningful Ways You Can Help Ukraine Link

• You can also donate to the Disaster Emergency Committee (My own preferred route.)

• Other good ideas for support from The Ukrainian Institute in London

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Nothing is perfect

A gable-sized mural spotted yesterday in a Cambridgeshire village.

On reading, writing and reviewing

I read too much. And then, the moment after typing that sentence, I think, No! I don’t read enough — because I’m continually humbled by regular discoveries of books I ought to have read, but haven’t. Since there are only 24 hours in the day I try to compensate by seeking out reviews of books that fall into that category. I try to be choosy — in terms of looking for reviews by people who are informed and whose judgement is sound. But finding such people is sometimes an imperfect science.

I’m current reading Helen Thompson’s new book — Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century.

It’s terrific — deeply serious and learned, but not something one can skim, because she thinks we need three different kinds of history to understand how we came to be in the mess we’re currently in — histories that she then provides in depth. And as I wend my way through it — currently resisting the temptation to read other people’s reviews of it — I found myself thinking, Thank God I’m not reviewing it!. Which suddenly reminded me of a thought that Virginia Woolf once confided to her diary, and so I went looking for that.

Ah, here it is! The entry for Saturday 18 February, 1922, when she is recovering from a long (six-week) bout of influenza that knocked her out for a while.

She’s been reading La Princesse de Cléves, which Wikipedia describes as “a French novel which was published anonymously in March 1678. It was regarded by many as the beginning of the modern tradition of the psychological novel and a great classic work. Its author is generally held to be Madame de La Fayette”.

Woolf thinks it’s wonderful but also hard going. And then she writes:

Thank God … I am not reviewing it. Within the last few minutes I have skimmed the reviews in the New Statesman; between coffee & cigarette I read the Nation: now the best brains in England (metaphorically speaking) sweated themselves for I don’t know how many hours to give me this brief condescending sort of amusement. When I read reviews I crush the columns to get at one or two sentences; is it a good book or a bad? And then I discount those 2 sentences according to what I know of the book & of the reviewer. But when I write a review I write every sentence as if it is going to be tried before 3 Chief Justices: I cant believe that I am crushed together and discounted. Reviews seem to me more & more frivolous. Criticism on the other hand absorbs me more and more.

I so love Woolf’s Diaries. But now I really need to get back to Helen’s book…

Quote of the Day

“Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow-creatures is amusing in itself.”

• J.A. Froude, 1886

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Emmy Lou Harris and Mark Knopfler | Why Worry

Link

The song ends at 4’40” into the video — the remainder is just slow-scrolling titles.

Long Read of the Day

Communities of Extraction

As panic about the implications of a boycott of Russian oil and gas increases, stand by for massive lobbying by the extractive industries for a more relaxed regulatory attitude towards fracking proposals.

This striking paper by Wyatt Sassman of the marvellous Law and Political Economy Project provides a graphic illustration of how the politics of fracking exacerbate local inequality and pollute politics. In Colorado, for example, those politics

concentrated harms closer to people without meaningful oversight of industry siting, raising obvious distributional risks. There is perhaps no better example than the massive project located behind the Bella Romero Academy’s middle school campus. Denver-based company Extraction Oil & Gas had originally proposed to drill dozens of wells next to Frontier Academy, a school serving a largely white community in Greeley, Colorado. When the community organized against the project, Extraction relocated it next to Bella Romero Academy—a school serving a comparatively low-income, Latino community outside of Greeley in unincorporated Weld County, Colorado.

As a patent example of environmental injustice, the project received national and statewide attention. In a story run in the New York Times, one Bella Romero parent explained: “It’s like they said, ‘Put it where the Mexicans live, over there it’s O.K.’” Supported by environmental and racial justice groups, parents and nearby community members organized to oppose the project. Yet Extraction maintained that this was its preferred location, and the socio-legal structures fell into place: permits were issued, hearings denied, lawsuits filed, injunctions denied, wells drilled, wells fracked, and appeals lost. Weld County commissioners unanimously approved the project, publicly “blistering” its opponents as alarmist and opposed to the county’s economic growth.

There’s more shocking detail in the piece, which is what makes it well worth reading.

Big Tech is racing to swallow other companies before the Biden regulators strike

Google’s $5.4 billion bid to buy cybersecurity firm Mandiant is the latest in a string of high-dollar acquisitions by Big Tech.

• Microsoft announced a $68 billion deal for video game company Activision Blizzard in January.
• Amazon is under regulatory review for its $8.45 billion purchase of Hollywood studio MGM, announced last year.
• Meta (then Facebook) bought Kustomer for $1 billion and Giphy for $400 million in 2020, just a few months before the FTC sued the company over past acquisitions.

Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, says: “The new generation of antitrust enforcers will not be bullied.”

Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter warned in a January speech that he’s skeptical of conditions imposed by regulators that are meant to “fix” mergers — and instead will seek to block deals likely to reduce competition.

Why frantic Ukrainians are having such trouble getting British visas

I thought it was just the Foreign Office’s incompetence. Turns out that’s not the whole answer. It looks as though a better explanation might be that the government outsourced the visa process to an outfit called TLSContact, another one of those ‘service’ corporations that leech off the public sector.

Here are a few excerpts from openDemocracy’s report on the scandal:

It was claimed yesterday in Parliament that TLSContact’s visa centre in Rzeszow, Poland, had turned away applicants who had queued in freezing temperatures for hours, saying it had no slots available until the end of April. Reports on social media claimed the firm had been pressuring Ukrainians to pay for extra services beyond its basic free appointments.

The Labour MP Clive Efford slammed the situation as “complete chaos”.

Now it has emerged that the home secretary was told by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration in November 2021 that TLSContact was so hell-bent on making profit that its use posed a risk of “reputational damage” to the UK. The firm has been handed government contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds since 2014.

I’ve just looked at the Report. Here’s a sample from its conclusions:

Inspectors recognised that AVS [Added Value Services], provided by the CPs [Commercial Partners], are an important revenue stream for those companies and provide customers with an element of choice within their application process. The Home Office made it clear to inspectors that AVS are optional for applicants. However, respondents to the CfE indicated that, due to the complicated nature of the available guidance and the way AVS are “packaged” on the website, they were uncertain as to whether they should purchase these services to ensure that the Home Office viewed their application favourably. This view was supported by stakeholders, who were particularly concerned about the vulnerability of customers who may pay more in an attempt to influence the process. Customers who are not represented by agents face further uncertainty as to what services they should be purchasing and may end up paying for services that they do not require, adding to their financial burden.

Now back to openDemocracy’s story…

Staff working in UK diplomatic missions overseas have also expressed concern about the reputational impact of this “upselling” of AVS, particularly considering this may be the first interaction an individual has with the UK immigration system.

“Its sole focus is income generation. The human aspect is not at all valued,” one British Embassy whistleblower told the chief inspector.

The whistleblower added: “There are applicants being persuaded to buy unnecessary additional services at the [visa application centres]… The most recent contract with external commercial partners has meant that it is through ‘upselling’ these additional services that partners make their money.”

A British man who fled Kyiv with his Ukrainian family told openDemocracy he had been given a waiting time of 13 days for a visa appointment at TLSContact’s Budapest centre.

So how much does TLSContact get paid for their ‘services’?

It turns out that its parent company, Teleperformance Ltd, was awarded a £167m contract by the Home Office in 2014 to run the UK’s visa centres across Europe under the TLSContact brand.

And if you think that name rings a bell, then it should: The company was also paid nearly £259m by the UK Department of Health to run call centres for its dysfuntional Test and Trace programme during the pandemic.

It’d be nice to think that this was just an outlier, but actually it’s the new normal for a British state whose capacity has been hollowed out by decades of neoliberal outsourcing of critical tasks to private corporations.

My commonplace booklet

Cognitive Dissonance Rules OK

I sometimes think that the biggest single problem with us humans is our capacity for cognitive dissonance — the ability to believe two (or more) contradictory things at the same time. For example:

• A recent Pew survey reveals that a majority of Americans want to be carbon neutral but are unwilling to back the economic and political steps needed to achieve that.

• Likewise many if not most Internet users say they are worried that their privacy is being undermined by social media. But they continue to use said media. When challenged, they shrug and say they don’t have any alternative.

• Similarly, the claim that nobody who learns how animals are slaughtered for human consumption would ever eat meat again seems to be false.

• People (including British ex-pats) who voted for Brexit are infuriated when it turns out that their freedom to own houses and take vacations in the EU is severely curtailed.

And so on and so on.

As they say in Yorkshire: There’s *nowt so queer as folk.*

(Oh — and since you ask, I too suffer from cognitive dissonance.)

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Venice by night

Quote of the Day

“All the clever people end up in the Cabinet Office, all the ****s end up in the Foreign Office and all the brain dead morons end up in the Home Office.”

• An unnamed UK government official, in a text to Politico yesterday on the Home Office’s catastrophic failure to address the needs of Ukrainian refugees seeking entry to ‘global Britain’.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Beethoven | Symphony No.9 | Ode an die Freude (Ode to Joy)

Link

The Kyiv Classic orchestra played this in Maidan Square yesterday. I couldn’t find a recording of the entire performance, but I thought that this flash-mob performance from (I think) Spain fitted the mood. And of course it’s also the EU’s anthem, which makes it extra poignant. Watch the video and marvel at the children’s responses to the performance.

Long Read of the Day

The Dawn of Uncivilization

Remarkable essay by Peter Savodnik about Western (and particularly US) hubris, post-1989.

Here’s a sample from his time as a post-Soviet-collapse American reporter in Russia.

On one of those reporting forays, I wound up in Khabarovsk, seven time zones away from Moscow, where I’d gone to write about a Ukrainian stripper and her husband, an American G.I. who’d gotten himself in trouble. On my last night in town, I went to a dinner party in a microscopic, poorly lit Khrushchyovka, one of the countless apartments built under Nikita Khrushchev.

Toward the end, after all the vodka, the herring, the soup, the dumplings, more vodka, black bread, more vodka, one of my hosts, an older gentleman who had been a professor of literature, told me, as so many Russians had, “You can give up writing philosophical articles about Russia. You will never know it.” Ah, yes, this again. My outsiderness. “My sunny disposition doesn’t prohibit me from writing about your country,” I said, a bit too earnestly, in very stilted Russian that I had spent years slaving away at. Speaking slowly to make sure I didn’t miss anything, he replied: “It’s not your sunny disposition. It’s your frame of reference. Your frame of reference is America. But Russia does not want to be America. Russia exists in a parallel universe.”

At the time, I thought, Russia doesn’t know what it wants. There was little doubt by then about Vladimir Putin’s orientation, but Russians were another matter. It wasn’t just that they liked American popular culture—everyone did. It was that there was too much interaction between us and them. Too much business, cultural exchange, hop-scotching between New York and Moscow and Los Angeles and Vladivostok. We were connected now. Was that not validation of the Great American Promise?

In retrospect, the professor saw something—everything—that I did not.

We were not at the start of something brilliant and beautiful, but in the middle of a very short in-between…

There’s lots more like that. It’s a very interesting piece. And it has a chilling closing para:

Vladimir Putin knows how much daylight there is between hard geopolitical reality and American rhetoric. But we prefer to hew to the old platitudes. They make us think that we can rewind or undo or make things better if we just say the right things. It is time to imagine what our president seems incapable of: a new order, jungle-like, shot through with the fevers and hatreds of the world as it had always been before. Uncivilization.

The new Silent Majority — people who don’t tweet

In the findings of a fascinating survey by the Pew Foundation on social media use in the US there’s one amazing discovery: only 23% use Twitter — which means that over three-quarters of American Internet users have never tweeted.

This has all kinds of interesting implications, of which the most important is that old and new media should stop treating what appears on Twitter as representative of society as a whole. It’s actually a weird and unrepresentative subset of humanity — the part of it that has short attention spans and a tendency to outrage, over-excitement, virtue-signalling and sometimes hysteria. And the fact that something is ‘trending’ on Twitter tells us nothing other than that particular subset of humanity is excited about it.

I’ve used Twitter a bit ever since it first appeared (I’m @jjn1), and for a time I celebrated it as the newswire service for the ordinary person, not just the mainstream media. I understand that some of my friends and colleagues put it to very good and serious uses, and admire them for that. But most of the time I can only tolerate Twitter in short purposeful bursts. And I found my feed became a good deal less annoying when I found a way of turning off retweets.

More on the Victorian “gauge wars”

One reader was unimpressed by Patricia Fara’s piece that was yesterday’s Long Read. He writes:

Patricia Fara’s ‘History Today’ piece badly exaggerates the duration of the dispute over railway gauges. She herself says: ‘The 1846 Act decreed that future tracks should all be narrow gauge, but it permitted the broad track ones to remain and – crucially for Brunel – to be extended.’ The only new broad gauge lines built after that were contiguous with the existing routes. Making them narrow gauge would have inserted two extra changes of gauge, for example crossing from Plymouth into Cornwall. She continued, ‘Brunel kept building and kept fighting, although by the end of the century he had admitted defeat.’ Actually, he died in 1859. From then on, the difference of gauges was a problem for the GWR, which spent 30 years and a lot of money changing its tracks and its trains to standard gauge. It thus fell behind other railways in improving its routes and services for the growing traffic of the 1860s-1880s. And she fails to make a crucial point about lessons for today, that HS2, by being built to different standards (but not a different gauge) is not properly compatible with the existing network. As for Queen Victoria, the only reason for going from Portsmouth to Aberdeen via Gloucester could have been that she wanted to enjoy the scenery: it would have been (and still is today) shorter and quicker to go via London – all on standard gauge.

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Redirection done right

Seen on a wall in Aups.

Quote of the Day

”Fighting fire with fire only gets you ashes.”

• Abigail van Buren

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Limerick’s Lamentation

Link

This is a very old Irish tune which derives its title from the siege and fall of the city of Limerick to the English forces of Ginkel in 1691, at the end of the Williamite Wars. The tune is sometimes known as “Sarsfield’s Lamentation” from the name of the commander of the Irish forces at Limerick. Seems appropriate to a day spent watching footage of Ukrainians being forced from their homes by Russian shelling.

Long Read of the Day

The Battle of the Gauges 

A nice diversionary piece of railway history by Patricia Fara in History Today:

Queen Victoria was definitely not amused. Whenever she travelled from her estate on the Isle of Wight to her castle at Balmoral, she encountered the inconvenience of twice changing trains, once at Basingstoke and again at Gloucester. She had no choice: even royalty was obliged to mind the gap between railway tracks of different widths. Stations were regularly plunged into chaos as angry passengers and their cumbersome luggage were transferred between two sizes of train, while disgruntled manufacturers repeatedly protested about the delays and expense caused by the transition from one gauge to another. The Railway Clearing House estimated that each track shift added the equivalent of 20 miles to transport costs, but the business titans in charge refused to yield. By 1866, despite numerous attempts to impose conformity, there were still around 30 stations in Britain where the rails abruptly altered width.

This clash of wills and technologies – soon dubbed the Battle of the Gauges – lasted for decades. The major conflict was between supporters of narrow gauge and broad gauge tracks, which might sound as farcical as the episode in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, when the Lilliputians argue about whether boiled eggs should be opened at the big end or the little one…

Personally I always open mine at the larger end and regard anyone who does otherwise as potentially a bad egg.

The essay calls to mind the age-old dispute over VHS and BetaMax. And the Victorian dispute was resolved the same way. Sometimes history does repeat itself.

Does Wordle prove that we can have nice things on the Internet?

I’d seen the fuss about Wordle but had paid no attention to it until the New York Times paid its developer, Josh Wardle, a million bucks for it. Yesterday, I dug it out on my phone and played the game for the first time. I can now see why it’s popular and a bit addictive. But I won’t be playing it for the simple reason that life’s too short.

Still, I was interested in its developer, so when when I came on this New Yorkerpiece by Andrew Marantz, I stopped to read.

The first time I met Josh Wardle—four years before he invented the simple game that would make his last name, or a slant rhyme of it, unexpectedly famous—he was in Reddit’s San Francisco headquarters, in a state of near-panic, wondering whether one of his online experiments was about to descend into chaos. It was March 31, 2017. Wardle’s experiment was called Place: a blank canvas, a thousand white pixels by a thousand white pixels, which Reddit users could digitally deface in any way they pleased. I was on assignment for this magazine, reporting a story about Reddit, where Wardle then worked as a product manager. The central question of my story was also the central question of Wardle’s work, if not of the Internet itself: Can online spaces be designed so that the benefits of frictionless mass participation outweigh the costs?

Wardle had run such experiments before, and he’d learned a few lessons, the simplest of which was “keep things simple.” He had designed Place with a time constraint—each participant could change the color of one pixel every five minutes, no more—which would, he hoped, encourage collaboration. Other than that, there were essentially no rules. When such unbounded experiments go well, we tend to describe them using words like “democracy” and “freedom”; when they don’t, we more often invoke “entropy” or “mayhem.”

Do read the whole thing. Wardle is an interesting chap.

My commonplace booklet

 How To Best Use Twitter. Useful advice from Zvi Mowshowitz.

My own tip is to turn off retweets. Luca Hammer (Whom God Preserve) has a guide to how to do it.

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Open Vincent

The gates to the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh in Arles.

Quote of the Day

”Everything is funny, so long as it’s happening to someone else.”

• Will Rogers

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sting | Russians

Link

Sting has resurrected this song, written under the shadow of another nuclear confrontation. Fits the mood of the present perfectly.

Many thanks to Neil Sequeira for alerting me to it.

Long Read of the Day

Space and Time

This is an unmissable analysis of the current state of the Russian invasion by Lawrence Freedman, one of the foremost scholars of warfare. The basic thrust of the essay is that Putin is running out of options as the ($500m to $1B a day) costs of the war mount and his army is apparently in disarray, at least in the North.

The decisions of numerous individuals will determine how this war ends. Can Ukrainian civilians remain steadfast in the face of merciless Russian bombardment? Can the apparently high Ukrainian morale be sustained through a major setback? And on the Russian side, what happens as people realise that they have been misled about the war’s purpose and that their young men have died in an exercise in futility? How are soldiers, many conscripts, responding to the frightening and unexpected situation in which they find themselves? What about officers, alarmed about their lost men and equipment and lack of reserves, unable either to fulfil their orders or to retreat? How do Putin’s courtiers, aware that the war is going badly, explain to their leader the dire consequences of the current strategy? And then there is Putin. At some point will it dawn on him that he has failed in the greatest gamble of his career?

If Freedman is right and Putin is ultimately destined to be cornered, that’s not necessarily good news for the world, though. Not all cornered animals have their paws on a nuclear button.

On the other hand… Politico had this interesting take on it yesterday:

Former Russian Foreign Minister Andrei Andrei Kozyrev tweeted a fascinating assessment of Putin’s military objectives and rationale last night. Kozyrev believes Putin “is a rational actor” who made three major “miscalculations”: he “started to believe his own propagandists” that Ukraine was led by Nazis … his military advisers lied to him about the state of the Russian army … and he believed his own propaganda that U.S. President Joe Biden is “mentally inept” and the EU “weak.” This leads Kozyrev to argue that Putin is not mad, but “wrong and immoral.” He adds: “Given that he is rational, I strongly believe he will not intentionally use nuclear weapons against the West … The ultimate conclusion here is that the West should not agree to any unilateral concessions or limit its support of Ukraine too much for the fear of nuclear war.”

And another thing… All those speculations about whether Putin is unhinged may actually be suiting his purposes. As Tim Harford observed at the weekend, Thomas Schelling’s book The Strategy of Conflict contains this interesting thought:

“It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.”

And for once… I find myself agreeing with Ross Douhat:

We don’t need to take wild nuclear risks to defeat Putin in the long run. The voices arguing for escalating now because we’ll have to fight him sooner or later need to recognize that containment, proxy wars and careful line-drawing defeated a Soviet adversary whose armies threatened to sweep across West Germany and France, whereas now we’re facing a Russian army that’s bogged down outside Kyiv.

We were extremely careful about direct escalation with the Soviets even when they invaded Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Afghanistan, and the result was a Cold War victory without a nuclear war. To escalate now against a weaker adversary, one less likely to ultimately defeat us and more likely to engage in atomic recklessness if cornered, would be a grave and existential folly.

WAR 101

If, like me, you’ve been wondering what it must be like to suddenly become a soldier, then this guidance from an American combat veteran might be helpful.

You’re a 22-year-old Ukrainian who has just been handed a Kalashnikov, four magazines of thirty rounds, a helmet, and body armor. Last week you were studying architecture at Kyiv National University. Now you’re standing in the lead rank. An officer counts off and puts a hand on your shoulder. “You’re a fire team leader.” He points at the next three people in your rank. “That’s your team.”

There are three people behind you. You’ve never seen them before. They await your command.

Generals are not, contrary to popular belief, the most critical decision-makers on a battlefield. The leaders of the fire teams are. The fire team is the smallest unit in battle, usually made up of three people and a leader…

Read on. It’s an eye-opener.

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