Robert Strati turns broken plates into expansive landscapes.
In praise of long sentences.
Interesting review of The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which Eric Hoel wrote for Scott Siskind's book review contest. Great overview of the issues surrounding why and how inequality arose and become entrenched. It would have been even better if Hoel knew anything about ancient history or classical philosophy; in particular, the habit of using imaginary outsiders to critique one's own culture was common in the classical world, and Tacitus one of its most famous practitioners.
Scott Siskind on Piblotko, a sort of panic attack/psychotic episode that outsiders thought was common among Inuit in the early 1900s, but now seems to be rare or nonexistent. Was it a part of traditional culture that has faded out due to westernization? Or maybe a response to contact with westerners? Something else?
Photographs from New York City's Easter Parade, 2023. NY Daily News, NY Post.
There is a new "trend" in China, which was already a "trend" in Korea a decade ago: young people quitting their high-stress white collar jobs to take up blue collar work. (NY Times) Posts about this go viral online, but nobody knows how many people actually do this, and I suspect it is not many. But it makes a nice fantasy for people who hate their stressful office jobs, which maybe points toward more long-term problems in the corporate cultures that have made East Asia rich.
A claim that one reason the US military can't fulfill its recruiting targets is that potential recruits can no longer lie about their medical pasts, because of an automated system that checks their records.
In May, 2021, a boat full of dead bodies drifted up to a beach in Tobago, in the Caribbean. AP reporters tracked the boat back to Mauritania in Africa, and identified the men as migrants trying to reach the Canary Islands. (Which are part of Spain.) According to activists, at least 1,100 Africans have died trying to reach the Canaries. The lure of migration to the North and the danger of the trek is one of the great and terrible narratives of our time.
The happiest dogs in America might be the border collies with Geese Chasers, who get to spend their days chasing geese away from parks and golf courses. Nice to get paid for doing your favorite thing. (Incidentally the owner of Geese Chasters told the NY Times that he tried using Labradors but the geese weren't afraid of them.)
Short clip on Twitter from Jorge Luis Borges' interview with William F. Buckley on Firing Line, explaining why he prefers English to Spanish. Complete interview on Youtube.
Intact Etruscan tomb from the 6th century BC found, still contains complete funeral meal. Can't wait to find out what was in it.
CSIS wargame finds China unable to conquer Taiwan in any of their scenarios, but says US losses would be heavy. (News article, 2-minute video at Youtube, CSIS)
Analysis of 3,000-year-old hair from Menorca in Spain has yielded evidence of atropine, ephedrine, and scopalimine, which are delirium-inducing drugs that likely came from plants in the nightshade family. I already wrote about the remarkable cave burial sites from which this hair came, back in 2015.
And now for a new weekly feature, a random past post from this blog: Frugal Sexy, 2010.
Ukraine Links
The Oryx count of lost Russian weapon systems has reached 10,000, including 1928 tanks, more than 3400 other armored vehicles (827 AFVs, 2284 IFVs, 304 APCs, 44 MRAPs), 26 bridge layers, 40 floating bridges, 29 mine-clearing vehicles, 194 towed artillery pieces, 383 self-propelled artillery, 192 rocket launchers, 104 SAM systems, 29 radars, 12 naval vessels, 79 jet aircraft, 81 helicopters, and 2400 trucks. These are visually confirmed losses; one of the things revealed by the recent leak of secret US military briefing slides was that the US military's estimates of actual losses are up to 30% higher for some types; also that Russia has fewer than 550 tanks in Ukraine, when they started the invasion with around 1,200. Those losses have hurt.
Speaking of the leak, the briefing slides show that the US military has this estimate of casualties: "Russian forces had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties as of February, including as many as 43,000 troops killed in action. Ukraine, meanwhile, had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with up to 17,500 killed in action."
Brief Twitter summary of a London Times article on Ukraine's failed special forces attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in October.
French President Macron: "The weather is military now." Macron's attempts to open avenues for negotiation, whether with Russia or China, make some in Ukraine and the US nervous, but so far France has stayed firm on helping Ukraine reverse the 2022 Russian invasion.
And via Marginal Revolutions, a Twitter analysis of how some western media outlets have been mistranslating Macron to make him seem soft on China and Ukraine. If you understand the subtleties of diplomatic speech, he is dragging China over the coals.
LPR volunteer Murz denounces rosy propaganda about the attacks near Avdiivka, says that sector is such a meatgrinder that everyone now just calls the brigades involved "meat."
Summary of a report on the problems with trying to rapidly increase US defense production.
What the fighting is like in Bakhmut: "Russian forces captured an elevator and a building today in Bakhmut. However the AFU managed to defend High value targets like the railway station public bathroom containing 5 toilets, and the John Deere repair shop with extensive schematics of tractors."
Without enough forces to man battalion tactical groups, the Russian have switched to company-sized Storm-Z units.
Opinion among military experts seems to have coalesced around the view that the most important revelation in the US briefing slides leak is that the US military has little confidence in Ukraine's ability to mount a major offensive. I have to say that I agree; unless they can find a weak spot like the one they exploited last September, Ukraine's forces are likely to make only limited gains at high cost.
I loved that review of The Dawn of Everything. To me, the absolutely brilliant part is the last four sections, which require no knowledge of ancient history or classical philosophy. There, Hoel raises the issue of the Sapient Paradox: why, if humans were cognitively modern tens of thousands of years ago, did human life remain essentially the same for so long, until sometime around 12,000 years ago? The answer, in Hoel's view, is that human life in that pre-Neolithic period was essentially one long bout of gossipy high school: lots of bickering and backbiting and cutting down anyone who tries to show off, unstable rule by the most popular, lots of social enforcement by shaming and exclusion and poor opinion, rather than formal structures of law or moral teaching. He argues--and I think there's much truth in this--that while this may be miserable in many cases, especially for those who are shamed or excluded, or just aren't that popular or verbal--it is, on the whole, a state that humans find absorbing (to the exclusion, although he doesn't say so explicitly, of directing much effort toward questions about how to better our material lot, or what life is all about, or where we come from, etc.).
ReplyDeleteHoel suggests at the end that social media has reintroduced a kind of collective immersion in this sort of sociality that is superseding the achievements of civilization. I think there's something in that.
Highly, highly recommended, especially the last four sections.
(Incidentally the owner of Geese Chasers told the NY Times that he tried using Labradors but the geese weren't afraid of them.)
ReplyDeleteThis surprises me not at all. Labradors are retrievers - the job they were bred for is to locate and then gently pick up downed prey and bring it back without damaging it. They have a gentleness in them that I'm not remotely surprised the geese can pick up on and then decide the dogs aren't a real threat.
Border collies, on the other hand, are herding dogs - bred not only to corral livestock, but also to protect them against wild predators. While normally quite calm and personable toward people, such herding breeds can bring out a rather fierce aspect of themselves when they feel a reason to, in a way that retrievers typically cannot or will not, and it makes sense to me that this would make them better at intimidating geese.
Notably, border collies are well known for the use of intense direct eye contact for intimidation, both against livestock and predators; whereas Labradors are inclined to let their gazes wander more, as they were bred to seek and find across a wide area - as well as be on alert for instructions from their owners - rather than to focus on a single animal and cow it.
Lentamente its like a slomo photo… it starts high and travels slowly, with no hurry to end…
ReplyDeleteRápidamente on the other side make every syllable going so fast that it looks as if going to tranple each other…
But its Borges, and I dont know neither the English language nor castellano as Jorge Luis Botges
@anonymous- somewhere on this blog I also criticized Graeber for fantasizing that modern people might give up their civilization for something simpler and more authentic. Not going to happen. But I think he is right about the lack of simple directionality in history. We have many, many cases of people who lived as farmers but then went back to hunting and gathering, or who took up "civilization" with cities and monumental architecture but then gave it up and went back to village life (Many of the Maya, for starters.) Chinese civilization went through several cycles from strong central government to decentralized systems of weak states and back again.
ReplyDeleteRe long sentences - the writing forum which I peruse often advices the same - remove unecessary words, shorten them etc. After a while I think it's an advice which should be given _to the beginners_ and which should be forgotten by people who can already write. The beginners in the forum are way too eager to indulge in monstrosities which are simply impossible to read, or which are beautiful only to the one who wrote them. The beginners love baroque styles, ornamentary sentences - and with Polish being much more talkative than English, it's way easier for them to build long after long sentece, torturing the reader with each new coma-inducing paragraph. The largest danger of building long sentences is that it's quite easy to be enamoured in them, to become uncritical of them, and to lost the meaning one wants to convey.
ReplyDeleteMy texts were in particular heavily critiqued by collegue of mine, who was crossing out each adjective, breaking the sentences and demanding shorter, action-packed paragraphs. I think he _helped me_ with writing, but he was wrong to be so fundamentalistic about it.
Obviously - it also depends what you want to write. Mainstream prose is somehow more forgiving than SF/fantasy.