A sightseeing trip that resulted in 100,000 deaths, and saved 100,000 other lives
And other things I discovered while busy on the other side of the world
A new kind of activism
Above is the presentation I gave in London on the 15th called “Democracy: Doing it for ourselves”. It occurred to me in working on the slides that I was seeking to forge a new kind of activism. It’s activism rather than normal commentary in the sense that it’s trying to act directly on the political system without asking for permission from the existing incumbents in the institution — the politicians. But it’s not on behalf of some aggrieved group. It’s a non-partisan activism, an activism of the centre (or wherever it takes one!), an activism for the system. Anyway, see what you think. It was a great night. Martin Wolf had to go, but a huge number of the people in the audience stuck around chatting for a long time afterward.
Fluke: a meditation on contingency
Here are two arresting stories which introduce parts one and two of the introductory chapter to Brian Klaas’s new book.
On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson stepped off a steam train in Kyoto, Japan, and checked into room number 56 at the nearby Miyako Hotel. Once settled, they strolled through the former imperial capital, soaking up the city’s autumnal explosion of color, as the Japanese maples turned crimson and the ginkgo trees burst into a golden shade of yellow, their trunks rising above a bed of lush green moss. They visited Kyoto’s pristine gardens, tucked into the mudstone hills that frame the city. They marveled at its historic temples, the rich heritage of a bygone shogunate embedded in each timber. Six days later, Mr. and Mrs. Stimson packed up, paid their bill, and left.
But this was no ordinary tourist visit. The Stimson name in the ledger at the Miyako Hotel would become a historical record, a relic marking a chain of events in which one man played God, sparing one hundred thousand lives while condemning a similar number to death elsewhere. It was, perhaps, the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.
On June 15, 1905, Clara Magdalen Jansen killed all four of her children, Mary Claire, Frederick, John, and Theodore, in a little farmhouse in Jamestown, Wisconsin. She cleaned their bodies up, tucked them into bed, then took her own life. Her husband, Paul, came home from work to find his entire family under the covers of their little beds, dead, in what must have been one of the most horrific and traumatic experiences a human being can suffer.
There is a concept in philosophy known as amor fati, or love of one’s fate. We must accept that our lives are the culmination of everything that came before us. You may not know the names of all eight of your great-grandparents off the top of your head, but when you look in the mirror, you are looking at generational composites of their eyes, their noses, their lips, an altered but recognizable etching from a forgotten past. When we meet someone new, we can be certain of one fact: none of their direct ancestors died before having children. It’s a cliché, but true, to say that you wouldn’t exist if your parents had not met in just the same, exact way. Even if the timing had been slightly different, a different person would have been born.
Operation Mincemeat
I just saw one of the few plays that have made it up from the fringe to the West End last night. It’s about the deception operation in WWII by which the British convinced the Nazi (Shmazi) military that the allied invasion of Europe would start in Sardinia and Greece — when the obvious place to invade was Sicily. They plant fake invasion plans on the body of a dead man, deliver him by submarine to the coast of Spain who are relied upon to pass the dossier onto the Nazi(Schmazi)s.
The Nazi(Schmazi)s moved 90,000 odd troops from Sicily to the other targets greatly improving things for the Good Guys in Sicily. (In other news, a friend of mine with an Italian background tells me that Mussolini had more or less stopped the Mafia but the Americans reimported it as they invaded and moved up the southern Italian Peninsula.
Anyway, there’s a cast of three women and two men playing about seven identities each with frequent mismatches between the gender of the actor and their character. This is one of the highlights of the show. Everyone has been laughing away at the slapstick and (perhaps a tad excessively) hammed up hijinks. They have to write a letter to be found on the body of the man who has the (fake) secrets that will mislead the Nazi(Schmazi)s. It’s sung by a middle aged man playing a middle aged woman. The young secretary tries to write the letter, but can’t. So she takes over and dictates the letter. She’s been a stiff upper-lip pom until now, but the song reveals more. Sad, soppy, sentimental. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house!
Everything you thought you knew about Francis Bacon is wrong
Intriguing reinterpretation of Bacon which takes way too long to explain its thesis, which is indeed interesting. It come in the last few paragraphs which I’ve reproduced below. And having read it, you’ll be in a better position to read the essay than I was. (You’re welcome! I know, it’s a miracle I don’t charge for this service right?)
Francis Bacon does reveal something great and terrible in New Atlantis, but it is not the goal of his own scientific project or a prophetic vision of an inhuman future. Bensalem is an image of things that are not and can never be, not a model to be imitated. It works along the lines of James Madison’s “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” or Christ’s “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” But in Bacon’s case, the lesson is more unwieldly. It goes something like this: Let that society that sees all but remains invisible, has no need to make war and no trouble maintaining peace, is granted special revelation of divine truths, and governs a people without lust — let it found an institution dedicated to the effecting of all things possible.
Any other society would be wise to hesitate. Men are not angels, we are not without sin, and we have none of Bensalem’s advantages. But we are easily tempted. We want privileged, secret knowledge of the workings of the world and of the power to bend those workings to our will, even if, when we look this object in the face, we are rightly terrified. The ancient philosophers were well aware of this, so they hid the virginal ideal of perfect knowledge behind veils or cast it high up and out of reach. Bacon imitates their indirection, in New Atlantis, but in the end he lays bare what they concealed from view.
In an age where human beings can sail around the world in ships, print books that spread ideas across nations, and kill each other at a distance using explosives, philosophy has nowhere to hide.
Tribute to John Burnheim
Gaza
As I tweeted the third and fourth last sentences in the extract I made it clear I was quoting them because they provoke thought, not because I know what I think about them. I don’t.
The bitter truth is that the Palestinians are a defeated people. As Said argued at the time, the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s acceptance of a two-state solution via the Oslo Accords amounted to nothing less than a Palestinian Versailles, an abject surrender celebrated as a peace settlement by liberal internationalists—a peace that contained within itself the seeds of future conflict. The surrender of the Palestinian nation was the form that the world-historic defeat of the left took in the Middle East. No amount of humanitarian aid, online solidarity, mass protests in Western cities, war-crimes trials for IDF soldiers, or, indeed, atrocities committed by Hamas will ever reverse that defeat. Nor will any of it restore the global left.
Indeed, it is precisely the circumstances of this defeat that make the Israeli assault so cruel and aimless: The Israelis are punishing a people who are already fully in their power and at their mercy. The devastating character of the Israeli assault proves that Gaza only exists on Israeli sufferance—the Israelis will brutalize the Palestinians, but they won’t take responsibility for them. The fact that there is no political basis for an independent Palestinian state is the reality that we hide away from ourselves when we frame the conflict in humanitarian terms. Accepting that the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are incapable of forming a state is the first step the Israelis must take to reckon with the fact that they are the decisive victors of the Arab-Israeli wars. Reality can’t be indefinitely evaded. The sooner we all accept this, realists included, the sooner we can confront our political circumstances with sober senses.
Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler is a lovely painter, but this is just OK. Which means the bidding starts at just USD 30,000!
Dynasties: a sign of health or decay
Sign me up for the proposition that the dynasties in our own political systems are a sign of decay. But in other circumstances they might be a great strength. And how do you get your leaders to show consistently good judgement?
Interesting piece from Samo Burja.
It is hard to find a clearer outlier among developing countries than Botswana, a landlocked African country where 40% of government revenue comes from diamond mining and a quarter of adults are HIV-positive. Everything taught by a development economics department would suggest the country is set up for failure. But well-executed succession between presidents, and the resulting stability and good government, has meant success instead. …
The crucial variable is a sound government making well-informed, long-term choices. A low population density paired with abundant natural resources provides a reasonable standard of living even in the absence of administrative genius or favorable conditions, so long as governance provides stability.
Given these clear personal, political, and familial ties between the heads of state, it seems that Botswana is actually an unofficial adoptive monarchy around the old royal family, quite similar to the case of the Roman Empire, where the head of state picks the successor and gives him the junior position. …
The arrangement we see in Botswana—where the previous head of state publicly declares a successor—solves the problem of power succession. This both helps prevent organizational sclerosis and renders succession conflicts unlikely. Many post-colonial states struggle with the problem of succession. Civil wars and coups are endemic. It is open to discussion how much of this is the result of internally driven miscoordination, and how much is due to destabilizing foreign interventions, especially during the Cold War. But at least some of the instability is internally driven.
Botswana avoided Cold War–driven instabilities by aligning with the West, but positioning itself such that the USSR had no interest in overthrowing it. Botswana was a thorn in the side of South Africa, and useful to the USSR, by sometimes allowing the communist-aligned ANC to operate in its territory. The Soviets may have worried that a revolution would simply result in a South African invasion. Thus, the only communists active in Botswanan politics were small Maoist and Trotskyist groups.
Other countries having disunified elites—possibly as a result of foreign interference—contrasts with the relative high trust that exists between elites in Botswana. In various countries around the world, there is rivalry between civilian and military leadership.
What is the source of this rare good fortune? It seems it was good judgment by the ruling dynasty. Seretse Khama pursued independence in a much smarter way than had been done in countries like Zimbabwe. For example, his government bought half of the local branch of the international De Beers corporation, rather than seizing it. Seizure is disruptive and often destroys a company’s ability to produce as the best managers and engineers flee, while purchase ensures continuity and continued production.
Income from taxing or owning shares of such large companies can be used for patronage of political allies (Sheila Khama served as CEO of De Beers Botswana) as well as social programs that develop state power further. This reduces the pull of alternative institutions such as clans, radical religious groups, and ideological organizations. Another well-known example of this tactic is Saudi Arabia’s use of the Saudi Aramco oil company.
Retaining the friendship of the world’s diamond monopolist doesn’t hurt the important foreign policy necessity of maintaining good relations with Western powers. Further, not cooking the goose that lays diamond eggs makes expropriation measures aimed at prosperous minorities less attractive in the long run, as there is less financial need to do so. Expropriating De Beers might have interfered with its ability to maintain its monopoly, and thus high diamond prices, rendering the spoils much less valuable anyway.
A tale of two interests
These companies spent over $100 million to avoid accountability for drinking water contamination
Here’s a story in which industry is the bad guy, spending squillions on lobbying to prevent constraints in the interests of safety. What is not said is that on the other side are almost invariably institutions which aren’t that focused on the public interest either. They’re professionals who’ve got to the top of their trade (whether political or bureaucratic) and their main task is to avoid trouble. Obviously if one of these chemicals is looking bad enough, their incentives switch from “do nothing and look like you’re serious” to “do something and look like you’re serious”. We could do better — by following the advice given at a presentation I heard about that was given in London on the 15th November.
Between 2019 and 2022, chemical companies spent more than $110 million lobbying against rules to curb potentially harmful “forever chemicals,” according to a new study by Food & Water Watch (FWW). Known as PFAS, these man-made chemicals take years to break down and yet are widely used in everyday consumer goods like cookware, cosmetics, outdoor clothing, and food packaging. Scientists say there are “nearly 15,000” types of PFAS.
Its ubiquity, however, means that today “many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals and are present at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry states that most people in the U.S. have PFAS in their blood. Over time, repeated exposure to PFAS can cause some of these chemicals to accumulate in the body. Currently, the EPA says that drinking water is potentially a significant source of PFAS exposure. A government report concluded in July that at least 45% of tap water in the country contains PFAS. Another study found that PFAS contamination in water disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic communities.
Girls in our Town
Glad she mentioned this song as a highlight of her career in this profile, even though it wasn’t the kind of music she eventually became most fascinated with. A wonderful, wonderful song, wonderfully sung, wonderfully arranged.
An optimistic take on how Ukraine has united Europe. Let’s hope. We’ll see.