This Week’s Posts
Monday, August 1st - Where Should Affluent People Live?
Gentrification, digital nomads, displacement, white flight, the brain drain, oh my!
Tuesday, August 2nd - If You're Traveling, Hire a Tour Guide
It’s a lot of fun and not too expensive!
Friday, August 5th - It’s Funny, I Don’t Feel Fragile (subscriber only)
Exploring the concept of white male fragility.
We also had the first Book Club entry for The Giver and a couple new chapters of my serialized novel, which will draw to a close next week.
From the Archives
Song of the Week
Non-Garbage Online Reading
I can see rejecting the Jacobin model - I would actually say that the more salient critique is that Jacobin has been a bit all over the place, post-2020 - but deciding Bhaskar Sunkara is part of the problem is very weird to me.
Book Recommendation
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Thomas Ricks, 2006
Thomas Ricks is kind of a dweeb; he’s frequently guilty of old-school Very Serious Person thinking and evinces normie centrist politics that too often excuse America’s terrible foreign policy record. But this is a strong piece of history that details in frequently head-slapping detail what a, well, fiasco the Iraq invasion was, what stupid pretexts undergirded the effort and how poorly the counterinsurgency efforts were handled. It disturbs me how quickly our country seems to have moved on from what was truly a world-historical crime, and I think it’s important to go looking for texts from the time to reinvigorate our outrage.
Comment of the Week
My mom's a tour guide! Hire Elka Ganeva. (seriously tho the amount of shit she and her tour guide friends know is nuts. Basically, it's very smart, curious people who can't sit still and this is the only work for them) Definite recommend. - Tana Ganeva
That’s it. See you next crime.
I think I owe Freddie and the commenters here a thanks. My piece I submitted for the subscriber writing got featured by Substack. I assume I owe it to y'all. For someone who got fired from his day job last week this is quite the needed boost of amazing. I know the comments section can occasionally be problematic but I really appreciate the community we've built here.
I am going to get that Iraq book from the library. Without prejudicing it, I wonder if the author isn't asking the wrong questions. If Russia/Ukraine is any guide, actually winning a conflict seems to be very much a secondary goal, if a goal at all, for the United States, and instead war for the sake of depleting opposing forces and making profits at home are the two motivating factors. From WMD to 'greeted as liberators', the Iraq conflict didn't meet its stated goals. You can almost, if you squint and fudge a bit, see something resembling a multi-ethnic democracy in Iraq, but only in the most basic form, and one punctuated weekly by atrocities. Afghanistan, we don't even need to look at. Russia/Ukraine, the jury's out but it's not looking good for a free, democratic Ukraine from Odessa to Mariupol. (For one thing, they'd need to be a properly free democracy first.)
Yet the appetite for war among the elites and even the public is arguably greater than ever, at least since Korea. It's hard not to reach the conclusion that winning wars and doing them "right" isn't something that particularly animates our regime. It's just having them that matters.