blogjou
It seems like at least the European CORONA crisis is coming to an end, so I need another socially accepted excuse for never being around anywhere. A blog!Once, generals could accept the deaths...
Once, generals could accept the deaths of thousands in a single day’s carnage with, if not equuanimity, a conviction that this was what war mean. (While, as Lord Wellington is meant to have said when one of his artillery men had sight of Napoleon at Waterloo, ‘it is not the business of commanders to be firing upon one another’.) Now, things are different.
Offensives can as easily be launched...
Offensives can as easily be launched from a newsromm or a boardroom as a cabinet warroom. Your ‘soldiers’ may not carry your passport; they may not even know they are in a war, or on whose side they are fighting.
In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps...
In the shadow of the Nazi concentration camps, of 75 million dead and of the atomic mushroom clud, the United Nations was conceived, in the words of Dag Hammarsköld, its second secretary general, ‘not to lead mankind into heaven but to save humanity from hell’.
Besides, for the US in particular...
Besides, for the US in particular, when the 9/11 attacks generated a sudden and irresistable demand for intelligende support for the ‘War on Terror’, this was the only way an intelligence community that had suffered a decade of contraction could respond rapidly. You cannot train officers to speak Farsi or pivot them from Kyiv to Kabul overnight, but you can hope to hire that existing expertise. Short-term response become long-term dependency, though: as a 2007 presentation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put it, ‘We can’t spy … if we wan’t buy!’
Suddenly, everything can be weaponised...
Suddenly, everything can be weaponised as part of the expanding array (arsenal, even) of military metaphors all around us. The irony is that just as the language of real war is becoming blandly euphemistic (with ‘delivery systems’ causing ‘collateral damage’), civilian speech becomes more martial. Beyong the ‘War on Drugs’ and the ‘Battle Against COVID’ (British prime minister Boris Johnson even hailed news of vaccines as proof that the ‘scientific cavalry’ were ‘coming over the brow of the hill’), everything now seems couched in military terminology. In part this may reflect the new age in which a terrorist’s bomb or a rival’s sanctions could hit anyone, any time, leaving us feeling like reluctant conscripts on an invisible battlefield.
Close allies compete viciously...
Close allies compete viciously for trade deals and a technological edge, for precedence and prestige. If now we have no real enemies, the sad corollary is that we have no real friends, either.
A Swiss Army knife is a very fine instrument ideed...
A Swiss Army knife is a very fine instrument indeed, but if you insist on adding more and more tools to it, and take out the knife to make room for, say a bonsai rake and a magnifying glass, arguably you miss the point. Often it is better to use a different gadget, one specifically dedigned for the job, and not ruin your Swiss Army knife at the same time.
Even the UN hire private security companies...
Even the UN hire private security companies to protect its missions. In1994, when the genocide was being practised with murderous abandon in Rwanda and no governments seemed inclined to step in, the UN’s then-Undersecretary-General for Peacekeeping, Kofi Annan, considered hiring one of the biggest, DSL, to intervene. He ultimately ung back, saying that ‘the world may not be ready to privatise peace’, but it certainly seems to be willing again to privatise war.
The two-income family
Harper´s magazine in December struck a sombre economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity´s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and houswork, but rather what this would do to the man´s traditional standing as breadwinner. ´I´d be ashadmed to let my wife work,´ one man told Mavity tardly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not. Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws makin it illegal to employ a married woman.
Omar has proved a lot of myths to be wrong or misleading.
Omar has proved a lot of myths to be wrong or misleading. ‘Teams hoping to get promoted from the Championship should employ players with experience of playing in that league’ is not true if you look at the numbers. ‘Managers should get their teams to play more aggressively’ is an unqualifiable and meaningless statement. ‘The wage bill in the Premier League team determines results’ is only true for the gap between the ‘big six’ and the rest of the league. Teams outside the big six can do well on smaller budgets. ‘The success of Spain and Barcelona means that clubs should look for shorter players’ is no established by research. Instead, there is a risk that teams get caught up in a rush to follow fads. Myth after myth fails when Omar starts to do his statistical checks.