Tristan > Recent Status Updates

"Thomas Friedman is a New York Times columnist. One does not associate either intelligence or depth with a New York Times columnist."

In any case. Also interesting to read about his connections to the FLN and the PLO, since the war on terror it's incomprehensible that left-wing writers & academics in America would have any direct contact with armed movements.

lack of correspondence btwn goodreads pagination & actual pagination is a nightmare. anyway very depressing reading interviews from the 90s about how india and pakistan could use a deal for kashmiri autonomy as a chance to normalize relations.

i guess most of us only know the really good ones because some of these are like "if a mean person gets angry they're even meaner" or "if you rebel you will be punished" followed immediately by "if you're servile you will suffer"

In which we get an eye-rollingly generic critique of the humanities in the university, & also a kind of fun account accusing American liberal democracy's of having built-in mechanism for inhibiting the people's ability and willingness to Do Democracy, & continuity in this between the Founders and the New Deal Progressives.

"States make money even if they do not do so as they please" flames bro

"the great financial crisis was caused by the financial equivalent of hookup culture" is an all-timer why did I never hear about this. also I think Deneen maybe thinks you shouldn't be gay.

so far aggressively fine & inoffensive (imo lots of the critiques read like something your woke anthropology prof would say) and definitely cogent at points but hysterical that for a while we were all supposed to pretend that this kind of catholic communitarianism & classicist virtue theory had anything to do with like Trump etc. other than the support of the writers

it is the 1920s. you are an american war planner convinced the new technology of bombing will bring a swift and decisive end to future wars. it is the 2020s.

in this section Grossman feels at once heavy handed and somewhat directionless and it is hard to discern if this is subtlety of skill or not. again the external narrative of the dissident writer overtakes the actual text in places - how to read an SS officer's "we're not so different" speech to an old and still committed bolshevik if not as some small indictment of the very idea?

somewhat odd book because its written w a certain kind of grandeur and he uses words like Valiant with seemingly no irony but also is mostly about how the highly symbolic purported goals for Verdun promulgated by its protagonists on both sides after the war were not the actual ones, those apparently being really quite unremarkable & highly integrated small gears in an overall strategy.