we are in what you could fairly call the nascent hours of Acid Feudalism, and no structure yet applied should be taken as a promise. even so, i want to put down some record of things i’ve been reading and researching. it can serve as an archive and record of my reading, and a stream of consciousness for my overlapping corners of the web.
Strategic Military Deception, edited by Donald C. Daniel and Katherine L. Herbig, landed on my reading list. I caught a quote within it by Theodore R. Sarbin: “one's chances of gaining or holding an advantage are proportional to one's ability to predict the conduct of the adversary.”
a post by Andrew Sullivan on sex, gender, and identity. the author strikes me as habitually adversarial towards what some call “wokeness”, and in turn i’m wary of that impulse. there are a few ideas here— the statistics of LGBT identity, bisexuals claiming gay-adjacency, a separation between ‘gay’ culture and the LGBT umbrella, a two-sentence takedown of a ‘foucaltian’ gender deconstructivism identified vaguely with the trans community. this all feels related to the general, recent trend of a pushback of sorts against trans identity in the UK. if nothing else, this post contains a lot of the fundamental ideas backing this trend in the same manner that a piece of amber might contain ancient insects. otherwise, we will not view this properly until we view it as historians.
a useful resource on research in academia, from dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega, who has repeatedly proven able to dissect process in a manner useful to the autodidact and the pirate.
an essay on information warfare by Laura Rosenberger and Lindsay Gorman on Lawfare argues that America’s adversaries take the ‘long game’ when making influence attempts through online media, and that American thinking in the sphere has been cripplingly short-sighted. with writing like this, there’s a surface layer of bias that occludes any look into the real information held here, but it is a common sentiment in Washington that Russia and China are simply better at this game than the forces of ‘democracy’.
a report on the independence hopes of the region of Artsakh (formally Nagorno-Karabagh) from Azerbaijan. includes a good bit of 20th-century history of the nation, on which i was mostly ignorant. it has also done the service of making me aware of the existence of Armeniapedia, a website which amuses me.
Will Wilkinson, in an act of apparent self-defense, keeps alive the smoldering battleground on the periphery of Scott Alexander’s brush with the Grey Lady. he’s on the defensive for the entire length of the piece, which to me seems a bit unwise. my major takeaway is that Wilkinson didn’t used to write in the typical tone of a young-adult paperback, but he does now. the repugnant, but perhaps more entertaining Curtis Yarvin delivers yet another of his fusillades of wikipedia citations and old Polish wisdom, and if there were any neutral observers, i’m afraid he might outscore the battered old journalist. fortunately, we don’t have to worry about such things, and our old friend Mencius may as well be painting the asylum’s walls.
As you can see, dear reader—I love literary sniping. I think I’m okay at it. But every shot I fire is fired not to harm, but to save; not to bring pain, but enlightenment; not as an attack, but as an intervention. Only you can escape Plato’s cave; but I know the way.
look briefly— but only briefly— into the mind of a man who thinks he’s won. having identified Enemy and battled it, having caught its fiery gaze, having rallied a band of righteous co-conspirators, he fights a holy war. and he has breached into the cell-block hallway, with new fresh walls to make a grand canvas of.
the reason, of course, to expose oneself to such radiation is in the name of science. here can be seen an immense clockwork of intricate logic, all properly associated with its trendy Chanspeak diction, called to bulwark the IQ gap. though perhaps i’m being unfair, as Wilkinson offers one nearly as complete in defense of not thinking about it. both of them are speaking to you, the youth, though Yarvin’s idea of youth is Bronze Age Pervert and Wilkinson’s is the infant in the left of his breast. and to an embattled zoomer, the lesson is this: anything can be rationalized. the role of an independent thinker is not to judge an idea by the manner in which it is rationalized, therefore, but to pirate the cogwork of its human mechanism, which can then be put towards bricolage.
a CSIS report on the engagement of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on the South American continent, detailing the specifics of why and how China’s army (separately from their economic interests) are expanding into the region. note the pessimistic tone that a think tank uses to describe the aims and strategies of a rival power. like behaviorist psychology, it avoids any acknowledgement of ideological intentions with which a power backs its actions. for that reason one might miss that China views itself as the champion of the developing world, both an example to and a patron of the parts of the world neglected and exploited by the United States and Europe. of course, such a view is still subservient to the laws of self-interest and self-preservation— but it does us well to internalize the mindset of a nation so far removed from ours. and a sensational, but fun quote:
In the event of a prolonged fight in Asia, the PRC could persuade or intimidate one or more actors in Latin America to permit the PLA to use its ports, airfields, or other facilities in support of operations against the United States. Although difficult to imagine today, such permission could be less unthinkable in a future scenario in which the continuing growth, quality improvement, and operational experience of the PLA causes some Latin American and Caribbean governments to question the ability of the United States to prevail or to sustain a costly conflict. Such questions would be magnified if the United States were to suffer significant losses in the opening stages of the war, such as the sinking of multiple carriers and other capital ships. This would greatly impair the ability of the United States to quickly project power into the Asian theater, leading some to calculate that the United States might abandon the fight with the PRC short of a military victory.
if your certainty in US military hegemony just ticked from a 99.9 to a 99, you may be catching up.
Chas Freeman posted a warhead of a blog post earlier this month, outlining the adversarial position the United States has taken against China and the real costs incurred. nothing I say or quote can prepare you for it; I have it bookmarked.