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founding

Did anyone else reread “They Tell Me the Cruelty is the Point” for Veterans’ Day? It was even better than I remembered. If anyone missed it the first time, check it out:

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-tell-me-the-cruelty-is-the-point

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Nov 14, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

inb4 more people accuse you of being alice

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Nov 13, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

I checked out Liz Phair's self-titled album after Freddie's article on it. Unfortunately, Spotify has now (mistakenly) assumed I enjoy it, and scared the hell out of me when "Extraordinary" started blasting while I was driving this week. So, uh, thanks Freddie!

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Nov 13, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

For what it's worth, your NOI piece is my favorite thing from you.

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An issue I see with the cultural Left is - they don't even know when they've won. That is, you agree with them that Rittenhouse should go to jail. (There is, in my opinion, scant legal justification for this, particularly in the aftermath of Grosskreutz's testimony, but the last thing the internet needs is another relitigation of a trial we're all able to tune into, so I'll leave it there.) That would be the preferred outcome for the Left - leaving aside any concerns of justice, it would doubtless have a chilling effect on such acts in the future, and would further cement the world of real-life activism as primarily Leftist. But because you opt to hit the brakes a bit on this, you're as impure and as much an enemy as Rittenhouse himself! You're defending him! You're aiding a hard-right, armed takeover of the country!

It's absurd. I understand purity spirals, I understand in-group loyalty, and yes, I understand that it's all displacement. But it's still absurd because *this battle doesn't need to be fought.* They don't even know they've won.

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I can't say enough with how much I enjoyed partaking in the book club this week. As a fictionphobe it really forced me to leave a comfort zone both in the reading and the talking about.

That said, a nonfiction version of the book club, as being teased here, is perhaps too much excitement to bear. I will look forward to it, even if it is not going to follow the same format.

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Oh man, I am halfway through The Dawn of Everything and it's just fascinating. I'm so, so glad we got this from Graeber before he died, since this might be his best work. Very, very excited to see discussion on this one.

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Aleem’s article is straight up bleak, but not nearly bleak enough.

There’s gonna be a three way civil war in Afghanistan soon: ISIS-K vs IEA vs NRF. Or rather, soon the minor skirmishes and ambushes and terrorist strikes will stop being small scale and haphazard and start being ambitious. We can expect the NRF and Taliban to start fragmenting into splinter groups marked by ethnicity and by internal networks of rivals to boot.

The very geography works against unified blocs- tall mountains with narrow passes, valleys that are immune to siege by growing their own food. The environment allows for small bands of locals to flip the bird to large armies. So any subsection of the Taliban or NRF can, if offended or resentful or in a backstabbing mood, take their ball and go home and no central leader can do anything about it. That’s how ISIS-K formed, with a subsection of the Taliban peeling off to chase the siren call of the Caliphate, and the full might of the US military with the tacit cooperation of the Taliban could not root them out of their strongholds.

China is famously described as “united, must divide, and divided, must unite”. That is not Afghanistan; “united, must divide” alone covers the pattern neatly.

But anyway, assume for a moment that power politics between warlords is cringe and you’re solely concerned with the welfare of the Afghan people. Food insecurity is not a solvable problem right now. Setting aside how the crops being sowed won’t feed every mouth, even shipments of food from foreigners will have minimum impact. Why? Same dynamic as above- the geography that prevents arms and armies from freely moving from community to community also prevent goods and food from moving community to community. Long haul truckers in Afghanistan have a pretty short half life in the best of years, and in a three way civil war (soon to be a 6 or 10 way civil war as the fragmentation sets in) a crate of calorie dense packaged goods can sit idle mere miles from a starving child and might as well be on Venus for all the good it will do her.

The economic catastrophe is downstream of the political catastrophe. Afghanistan desperately needs a legitimate government capable of suppressing the warlords to enable internal free trade between the valleys and the plains. So long as the ethnic and sectarian death struggles continue, mass starvation is inevitable. Approving an extra billion dollars in aid won’t even put a dent in the problem, it’ll just stack up more crates sitting in depots where no one can use them.

I resent, incidentally, the accusation that this is solely the result of America’s inane and bloody-minded war. We deserve every ounce of shame, guilt and humiliation that the 20 year slow motion disaster brought us. Our conduct of the war was as savage as it was thoughtless. But crucially, we were streaming in the exact same aid that Aleem asserts we owe the Afghans for wrecking their country. It wasn’t super effective, since corrupt middle men skimmed the cream off the top and allowed only a trickle to go the the actual people, but it was enough to stave off disaster for years on end. And now that the Taliban is in charge the parts of the country that aren’t waging insurgent warfare against their brand of reactionary fuckery, the disastrous civil war and imminent starvation is unfolding.

Our failure is not only in failing to set up a centralized government with legitimacy who can keeps the roads open and the food flowing, but in barely even trying to do it. Our failure was not in bombing Taliban strongholds, it was bombing Taliban strongholds with zero strategy other than generating pointless metrics for politicians back home to campaign on. Our failure was not in refusing to invest capital into setting up a self-sustaining economy, it was in insisting that the hundreds of billions of dollars go to carpet baggers and scalliwags meant to enrich the MIC.

And now that our failures have culminated in the worst case scenario, increasing aid just isn’t gonna work as a solution. I doubt that anything will work as a solution; monumental decisions made without long term thought or a moral compass in play will inflict their consequences no matter what.

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I could be totally wrong, but I just went and read the Alice Queens interview with her dad. It's so funny, insightful, charming...that I'll be honest- I don't think it's real. People in real life don't have perfect conversations like that.

Again, I could be wrong. But the larger point is similar to Freddie's about whether she is really a woman- who cares? It's a simply wonderful piece of work. That's all that matters.

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Glen Greenwald argues in his latest substack post your claim that the 2020 protests achieved nothing is "bizarre." He doesn't seem to understand that the protests and riots were a symptom of woke political trends, not the cause of them.

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I am so excited that you will be blogging about David Graeber’s new book! Graeber was one of my heroes, and I was planning to start his book just as soon as I finish Eyal Press’s Dirty Work (also highly recommended). See you all there!

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Take it you saw this review in Boston Review of Graeber/Wengrow new book...

https://bostonreview.net/science-nature/emily-m-kern-radical-promise-human-history

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That article from the archives is brutal. It's probably only gotten worse since then.

It does link to a 404 page though, which I imagine isn't fixable since the old.medium blog is dead

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