"There's a 'Stack In Everything, That’s How the Light Gets In" Edition
Hello,
Obligatory shilling. I wrote for The Critic about the unprecedented success of the Ukrainian PR campaign.
I wrote for my paying subscribers about the outpouring of charity in Poland.
Also, my book of short stories, Noughties, is now on sale 40% off (UK, US). Do check it out!
More war. The war continues, and the discourse must as well. Ed West writes about how Europe has united against Putin and reflects on open borders and brain drain. Edward Luttwak asks if Putin has overplayed his hand. Aris Roussinos opposes Western military involvement. Charlie Peters suggests not joining the Ukrainian army. Sam Ashworth Hayes cautions against demonising Russian culture. Edward Feser considers just war theory. Maurice Frank assesses the transformation of Germany.
Has Putin failed? I suspect that Russian military failings are overstated but the war does not have military ends. In the same essay where he correctly predicted war, Anatoly Karlin wrote, “Ukraine’s value is, forgive the triteness, in its people, or its human capital.” That is why initial attacks were so minimal in terms of firepower. Putin thought (hoped?) that the Ukrainian state would collapse without the need to stir up ill-will among civilians.
How is that working out? Countless civilians are taking up arms. A million more have fled. Russia has begun to level cities in order to take them. Protests have continued even in areas of Ukraine that Russia has occupied. A long guerrilla war is grim prospect. Such conflict takes a brutal toll on human life. But it seems clear that if Putin hoped to unify “Russian” peoples he has achieved the opposite. Russia and Ukraine have never been further apart.
Refugees. I hope to speak to some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled to Poland. (My reason for not doing so thus far has been that it strikes me as a bit exploitative to accost traumatised people as soon as they escape a war.) The Polish generosity in taking these poor people into their homes has been extraordinary. I fear, though, that it has somewhat obscured what a challenge it is going to be to house these poor people long-term. They cannot live with ordinary Poles indefinitely.
Warney. Shane Warne dying doesn’t seem like something that should be allowed. Great players die, of course, but great players from fifteen years ago? Well, people die in their fifties. People die in their twenties. But if Warne was in anything he was alive: laughing, joking, drink, smoking and displaying some of the most tremendous natural talent cricket has ever seen. We have too little of that lust for life nowadays. Rest in peace.
The creeping fakeness of everything. David Auerbach critiques the metaverse:
In the metaverse, everyone can potentially be a seller and advertiser in addition to a buyer, yet the power will chiefly lie with the companies. They will exert significant influence over group standards of conduct and will have a greater ability to steer those standards in profitable directions.
To see and to know. Paul Franz reviews a biography of Stephen Crane:
The Spanish-American War was notoriously a newspaper war; yet Crane, though sympathetic to the Cuban rebels, was not among its propagandists. To a degree his reports from the fighting are continuous with his early Maggie, whose achievement, for Auster, was to have created “a literature of pure telling, with no social analysis, no calls for reform, and no psychological reflections to explain why the characters do what they do.”
Have a lovely week,
Ben