The Lie of Nation Building

The Lie of Nation Building | by Fintan O’Toole | The New York Review of Books

Fintan O’Toole in fine form.

The great question of America’s twenty-year war in Afghanistan was not whether the Afghans were fit for democracy. It was whether democratic values were strong enough in the US to be projected onto a traumatized society seven thousand miles away. Those values include the accountability of the people in power, the consistent and universal application of human rights, a clear understanding of what policies are trying to achieve, the prevention of corrupt financial influence over political decisions, and the fundamental truthfulness of public utterances. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the American republic was fighting, and often losing, a domestic battle to uphold those values for its own citizens.

Critics of the war argued that the US could not create a polity in its own image on the far side of the world. The tragic truth is that in many ways it did exactly that.

The easiest way to cope with the reality that the longest war in US history (longer than World War I, World War II, and Vietnam put together) has ended in defeat and an ignominious and deadly evacuation is to fall back on the belief that the Afghans were never capable of creating or sustaining a modern nation-state. The US, after all, spent $143 billion on “nation building” in Afghanistan. Adjusted for inflation, that is more than it spent on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe after World War II. Why did it not achieve similar results? The problem, it is comforting to conclude, must lie with the Afghans themselves: too backward, too poor, too inextricably entangled in medieval tribalism and obscurantist religion. [emphasis added]

Worth reading in full.

The next five years will be worse

The next five years will be worse for English universities than the past five years have been. And the five after that could be worse still.

Alison Wolf writing in 2015. And don’t think this is all to do with Covid.

Can higher education’s golden age of plenty continue? | Times Higher Education (THE)

Things will be even quieter here than usual. Summer is here, and I have some long form writing to do. Take a break.

A comment on this article on the WONKHE site. Scale matters, but not in the way that the C-suite want.

It has been salutary being an insider-academic doing visit days. It has confirmed my long held view that one of the most important things for a would be student is to get on a smallish course irrespective of subject wherein they will be personally known and recognized by their lecturers, not just an allocated ‘tutor’ or ‘supervisor’.

In my personal, and anecdotal, admittedly, experience, of family members, and of teaching undergrads this has determined more than anything how well students do, in terms of academic performance and personal development. It is not wholly related to RG vs post-92 either. The latter seem to do really well, if the cohort is small.

The Long Now

Which living thing is the best ‘mascot’ for long-term thinking? – The Long-termist’s Field Guide

Richard Fisher:

Perhaps the most famous one is about the oaks of New College, Oxford. The tale goes that, sometime in the 1800s, officials realised they needed replacement beams for their main hall. To their surprise, they discovered that the college’s founders had planted a grove of oaks in the 1300s to supply the job. The story is often told to illustrate the virtues of long-term planning – even the former British Prime Minister David Cameron recounted it once during a Tory party conference speech. However, it is apocryphal. “I am amazed that this myth still continues: long-term tenacity if not long-term thinking,” the college archivist Jennifer Thorp once told me.

Such a shame. I always loved the story.

A university is a gym not a hotel

(source ?)

Regulatory subventions

Pluralistic: 02 Jun 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Uber’s main project has always been regulatory, not technological: that’s why it funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into passing California’s Proposition 22, a law that legalized worker misclassification and banned unionization.

The irony? Uber is a “bezzle” – JK Galbraith’s name for “the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it.” Uber is a scam and it will never be profitable.

I give you the tea bag and Tractatus!

A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy for ever | The Economist

Of all the innovations that sprang from the trenches of the first world war—the zip, the tea bag, the tank—the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” must be among the most elegant and humane.

That the book ever made it into print was miraculous. Before the war, as a student at Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s talent was clear to his contemporaries, who begged him to put his many thoughts into writing. He refused, fearing that an imperfect work of philosophy was worthless. His mentor, Bertrand Russell, made a habit of taking notes when the two spoke, lest his protégé’s genius be lost to memory. Wittgenstein himself had other preoccupations, principally suicide.

 Now I don’t have to feel so guilty

Letter: Socialist historian foresaw Covid work habits in 1967 | Financial Times

Anyone who has read the socialist historian EP Thompson’s article “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, written in 1967 and collected in Customs in Common in 1993, will recognise his account of pre-industrial work habits in Pilita Clark’s article about modern workers’ reluctance to engage on Mondays (Business Life, May 17).

Thompson identifies a work pattern composed of “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives”. He remarks that the “pattern persists among some self-employed — artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with students — today [1967], and provokes the question whether it is not a natural human work-rhythm”.

Michael Williams, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK.

Arithmetic matters

Summer reading 2021 | Science

From a review of “The Ascent of Information” by Caleb Scharf.

Every cat GIF shared on social media, credit card swiped, video watched on a streaming platform, and website visited add more data to the mind-bending 2.5 quintillion bytes of information that humans produce every single day. All of that information has a cost: Data centers alone consume about 47 billion watts, equivalent to the resting metabolism of more than a tenth of all the humans on the planet.

Scharf begins by invoking William Shakespeare, whose legacy permeates the public consciousness more than four centuries after his death, to show just how powerful the dataome can be. On the basis of the average physical weight of one of his plays, “it is possible that altogether the simple act of human arms raising and lowering copies of Shakespeare’s writings has expended over 4 trillion joules of energy,” he writes. These calculations do not even account for the energy expended as the neurons in our brains fire to make sense of the Bard’s language.