I’ve been a neglectful Crooked Timberite – not keeping up old school blogging duties – but today I have something to share!

I’ve completed the initial story arc of “On Beyond Zarathustra”, consisting of “A Great Day For Down!” Parts 1 and 2. A mighty graphic novel, 120 pages! (More, when you add in fake “Peanuts”.) Please, feel free to check it out & share with anyone who might find it edifying or amusing.

I’ve been chipping away at the thing for years now. Goodness how time passes! (Comics is hard!)

I always wondered how Z could fly around, with his Eagle and Snake! I finally worked out the aerodynamics!

I promised those of you interested in Hilary Cottam’s Radical Help a booknote – but oh my goodness, I’ve been so slow this Summer. I guess I am not alone – if I can go by the stories of many (international) colleagues who are all very tired after trying to keep all balls in the air during the pandemic (in fact, with homelearning more balls than before). So I’ve tried to be foregiving to myself for missing various deadlines, including the self-imposed ones of the books I’d wanted to talk about here. I will get to chatting about that book before too long, but not this week.

In the meantime, I had to think of Crooked Timber while walking in the Belgian countryside two weeks ago – in particular to this photoblog by Chris in which he captured a swift in full action. I smiled when I saw these birds sitting, and though: I will make a picture of some swifts the easy way.

This Summer, with all the nasty events unfolding in the world (which leads to worries, sadness and anxieties, because it’s not easy to see how we can make a significant change), and with all the long-term fatigue from the pandemic, it seems so much better to try to take it the easy way. Ten more days, and then the third academic year in the pandemic will start.

The chaotic scenes now playing out as the Taliban take over Afghanistan have unsurprisingly drawn comparisons to the collapse of the South Vietnamese government in 1975. But there have been many similar instances, though most were a little slower: the end of Indonesian rule in East Timor (now Timor L’Este), the French withdrawal from Algeria, and the earlier Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The common feature in all these cases is the attempt by an external (sometimes neighbouring) power to impose and then sustain a government of its choosing, usually in the hope that it will ultimately secure the support of the majority of the population along with international acceptance. The usual outcome is a long period of relatively low-level conflict, during which it can be made to appear that a successful outcome is just around the corner. In some cases, actual fighting ceases and is replaced by a ‘frozen conflict’, in which life proceeds more or less normally most of the time, but without any final resolution.

Very occasionally, these attempts succeed (the US invasion of Grenada is one example, and I expect commenters can come up with more). But far more commonly, the external power eventually tires of the struggle and goes away. Alternatively, frozen conflicts can continue more or less indefinitely, as with Israel-Palestine.
If successful interventions are the exception rather than the rule, it’s natural to ask why they are so popular? Certainly, the military-industrial complex benefits from war and lobbies for it, but the same is true of any activity that involves spending a lot of public money. Then there are psychological biases which seem to favor both starting wars in the expectation of an easy win and persisting when the conflict drags on.

But learning takes place eventually. After taking part in centuries of bloody conflict, all around the world, Europeans seem mostly to have tired of war. And in the US, weariness with ‘forever wars’ seems finally to be eroding the belief that armies can solve complex problems in other countries

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!

Back in the day, we at Crooked Timber had fairly regular exchanges with Todd Zywicki of the Volokh conspiracy group blog (which still exists, now hosted by Reason.com). So, I was interested to learn that he was taking his employer, George Mason University, to court over a requirement to get vaccinated against Covid-19.

The factual part of Zywicki’s case is that having had the disease and recovered he is already immune. More interesting is the claim that the requirement violates his right to privacy under the 9th and 14th Amendments to the US Constitutional. I Am Not A Lawyer, but this claim seems almost identical to that used in Roe v Wade, which seems certain to come before the Supreme Court soon. However, Zywicki’s brief does not mention what seems like the most relevant precedent.

My guess is that finding a majority willing to both reaffirm a constitutional right to privacy and second-guess the authorities on pandemic protection will prove too difficult. However, as Zywicki is asking for urgent relief we should find out soon.

I’m in the UK now, having spent the last (lovely) six weeks in France, an EU member-state with a much more functional government than we have. When we left for France in mid-June, it was on the UK government’s “amber list” and had just started admitting visitors from the UK with proof of full vaccination and a negative COVID test. To get such a test in the UK we had to pay £80 to a private provider. We also had to pay for additional travel insurance to travel to a country that the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office advises against travel to, the advice having rendered our existing travel insurance inapplicable. All went swimmingly on the journey out apart from a 30-second hiccup when a French border guard thought a different set of rules applied to us, requiring urgent reasons for travel, but a colleague set him right.

Our plan had been to stay in France until the UK government moved it to an easier category not requiring quarantine. But the opposite happened. Ostensibly because of a surge in the Beta variant in France, the UK moved the country to an enhanced “amber plus” category, requiring 10 day quarantine even for the fully vaccinated. This measure against France was quite inexplicable, since there were other European countries with higher incidences of Beta, and becauce the French cases were actually overwhelmingly on French islands in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps there were other, more political, reasons behind the change, or perhaps the British government is bad at geography but couldn’t lose face by backing down once the error had been pointed out? Who knows? Rumour has it that France will be taken out of “amber plus” this week, and that the fully-vaccinated will be allowed quarantine-free admission to the UK from France this week, as visitors from the US and most of the EU are. That’s no good to us. (And note this is at a moment when nearly all internal restrictions have been lifted in the UK.)
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A funny thing happened in the culture wars the other day. After taking steadily more extreme anti-vaccination positions over many months, leading rightwing commentators and Republican politicanss suddenly jumped ship, announcing that everyone should be vaccinated as soon as possible.

Bought at the market in Pézenas, France. I could hardly not take a photo of it, could I?

As announced a few weeks ago, here is the first of a series of book chats – starting with Mariana Mazzucato’s Mission Economy. The idea is that this post opens up a space for anyone to talk about any aspect of the book they want to discuss (under the general rules that apply to discussion on this blog), as well as raise questions of clarification that we could put to eachother.

Mission Economy is about rethinking capitalism and rethinking government. Perhaps it is even more about rethinking government than about rethinking capitalism. Both need to be rethought in order to redirect the economy into what Mazzucato calls ‘a mission economy’, which will allow us to tackle problems facing humans and the planet that are currently not properly addressed: climate change, insufficient high-risk long-term investments in the real economy, real wage growth that is much lower than productivity growth, and so forth.

Mazzucato argues that right now we (that is, our governments) ask “how much money is there and what can we do with it?” but instead we should be asking “what needs doing and how can we restructure budgets and design innovation and collaborations between the government, industry, academia and other groups so as to meet those goals?” [click to continue…]

With its unsubtle allusion to an Australian cult classic of the 1980s that’s the headline for my latest piece in Independent Australia. Key points

Nothing has changed in the basic physics that makes space travel, beyond the minimal scale achieved in the 1960s, essentially impossible. On the contrary, advances in physics have shut off every theoretical loophole that might have permitted us to exceed the limit imposed by the speed of light. Nor has there been any reduction in the massive amount of energy needed to propel even a single person into space.

The world is facing challenges that threaten our very existence, from pandemics to climate catastrophe to nuclear war. We can’t rely on fantasies of escaping into outer space. Nor we can afford a system that delivers a huge proportion of our collective income to a handful of irresponsible adventurers.

Another open thread, where you can comment on any topic. Moderation and standard rules still apply. Lengthy side discussions on other posts will be diverted here. Enjoy!