"I Can’t Link If Linking Is Without You" Edition
Hello,
It feels like the summer is ending almost as soon as it has begun. It has rained frequently and aggressively in Poland. I am not someone who really likes autumn and winter. Yes, I like crunchy red leaves and crisp cool air as well, but can you sit next to a lake for hours drinking ice cold Tyskies? Well, you could, but you might catch pneumonia. One of the things about the amateurish photos that I illustrate these posts, though, is that I can look back at newsletters from November and February and find that those seasons can be beautiful. I don't read the words, though. God knows what I was thinking.
Obligatory shilling. For my paying subscribers I reflected on Western failure in Afghanistan and mused on Silesian history.
A Hitch in Time. Angus Colwell attacks the legacy of Christopher Hitchens:
Hitchens confessed to remaining a Marxist right throughout his neoconservative turn. The two are not entirely incompatible: both share a certainty that history moves in a direction and that the good will out. ‘I will venture a prediction,’ he wrote, ‘the Taliban/al-Qaeda riffraff, as we know them, will never come back to power.’ If Hitchens were still alive today, he – like Fukuyama – would certainly be surprised by history’s newest chapter.
It is a fiery and compelling piece but I will register one note of disagreement. I do not believe that Hitchens was that utopian. No Trotskyite could fully think that righteousness need prevail. He defended the Iraq War at its most catastrophic. His belief in worthy causes did not depend on success. Sadly, a cause is often rightly judged by its consequences - especially when their effects are experienced by people who were not their architects and advocates.
Coronoptimism. Philippe Lemoine makes the case that most of us can stop worrying about COVID-19.
A fragmented world. Wessie du Toit reflects on the art of Jon Rafman, and social media perversity:
What looks at first like a glimpse into the perverse fringes, is really meant to be a portrait of online culture in general: a fragmented world of niche identities and uneasy escapism where humor and pleasure carry undercurrents of aggression and despair.
A comic's comic. The great comedian Simon Evans memorialises the great comedian Sean Lock:
Sean was, as his friend Harry Hill put it, the Comedian’s Comedian, certainly. But he had somehow, almost despite that commitment to his craft and his indifference to fame and celebrity, become one of the nation’s favourite comedians too. It was an incredibly rare instance of everyone getting it right.
I'm not sure I appreciated Lock enough because I tend to avoid panel shows. There are good reasons to avoid them. But I should appreciate that talented comedians appear on them because they do not have a lot of other places to earn money. After all, a comedian could easily feel as cynical about “webmags”.
Learning from defeat. Tanner Greer of The Scholar's Stage begins his reflections on Afghanistan, which I am sure will be worth reading:
…in this chronicle of shame the American intervention in Afghanistan stands exceptional. There is no partisan dodge that escapes it. There is no domestic rival to pin blame on. There is nothing to shield any of us from the sting of this defeat. Yes, events of this week reveal enormous and largely unnecessary failures in intelligence, logistics, operational planning, cross-government coordination, public communication, and broader strategy on the part of the sitting administration. Yet we must see these humiliations for what they are: the final chapter of two decade long disaster.
For all of these disasters, which are real, we should be wary of excessively exceptionalising the US failure in Afghanistan. Why? It's Afghanistan. I say that not as an insult to proud Afghans but because it has proved itself to be exceptionally unwilling to accord with external ambitions.
High crimes and misdemeanors. Micah Meadowcroft decries the lack of accountability for the American opioid crisis:
So, justice probably won’t be done. The record for catastrophes and crimes on this scale does not inspire confidence. Too big to fail (except upward) is the rule in contemporary American life.
A meeting of the minds. Tim Chapman meets Christopher Hitchens:
It is the sort of environment that gentler, weaker men feel fear in. But for men like me and Christopher, no strangers to that second bottle of wine, it is an environment in which we thrive.
“Let people enjoy things.” I apologise for linking to the hideous reanimated corpse of Gawker but this is a good essay by B.D. McClay on fan culture:
As much as I’d like to make the “let people enjoy things” problem about adults who enjoy comic books, it’s more deeply rooted: it is a pathological aversion, on a wide cultural level, to disagreement, discomfort, or being judged by others.
Have a lovely week,
Ben