Category What I'm reading

• What I'm reading: Andor, homoploutia, Prussia

  Gabriel Winslow-Yost, The Revolution Will Not Be Star Wars, NYRB

  No spaceshiploads of refugees get turned away by neutral planets, no companies profit by selling the means of the massacre or buying up abandoned properties, no public grows bored of hearing about the deaths. The secrecy around it all protects the galaxy’s inhabitants from any question of complicity. How little, beyond the fashion, it resembles the Holocaust—or, for that matter, the genocide we’ve all been watching, or not watching, for the past year. Disney is in the business of fantasies, and this is genocide as we would dearly prefer it to be.

  And how could it not be? It’s Star Wars, after all. The point is not that Andor fails in its effort to depict political violence but rather that, for all the show’s intelligence and skill and ingenuity, major elements of its subject are simply incompatible with its nature. What it depicts most clearly is what Star Wars can’t show.

  Branko Milanovic, New Capitalism in America

  In contrast to the old-fashioned capitalists, the homoploutic elite feels that it merits its high incomes: they might conveniently forget the capital part of that income, and focus solely on the labor part for which they have studied hard and work hard. Three things are linked here: ownership of lots of capital, high level of education, and a highly paid job. Thus, instead of a class-based society of the old capitalism, we now have an elite-ruled society.

  Secretary of Defense Rock, America as Prussia in 1806

  Beneath that surface prosperity, however, the foundations were rotting—strategic clarity had vanished, institutions had become performative, and the elite was unable or unwilling to respond to a rapidly changing world. When the reckoning came, it was not gradual but immediate. The Prussian state collapsed in weeks. The lesson, as Clausewitz knew, was that apparent stability is often the most dangerous phase of decline, when a state still looks functional just before the storm.

  The civic and intellectual disconnection afflicting American strategy today is inextricably linked to the broader assault on the nation’s institutions...

  Posted 25 July 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Homeland

  JACKSON LEARS IN THE London Review of Books is one of those authors who I generally will click on instantly, stopping what I'm doing to read. His most recent article The Righteous Community is predictably very good, and you should read it immediately. Except. Except.

  The legacy of the war on terror ‘flourishes in America’s refusal to see the world as something other than a battlefield’, he writes. This aggressive stance promoted the eastward expansion of Nato, provoking Putin’s actions in Ukraine. As in the war on terror, the US was determined to take the offensive against the alleged aggressors – the Russians – who, despite their pretensions to civilisation, were in the popular imagination barbarians too. As Beck writes, ‘during the first two years of the [Ukraine] war, America’s response has been to escalate the conflict at every opportunity.’

  This is almost entirely wrong in every clause of every sentence: NATO's eastward expansion, as with that of the EU, has been driven by Eastern European and Baltic countries---and now Scandinavian ones too---acting as their own agents and preferring a European rather than Russian political future. American response to the 2022 invasion under Biden, instead of being escalatory, was at every stage reactive to Russian nuclear posturing; arms shipments (rockets, tanks, long-range missiles) that the Ukrainians asked to buy were delayed against supposed red lines which, year by year, have proved imaginary. American response to the 2014 annexation of Crimea under Obama was even more obliging.

  There is a certain critical American exceptionism that can only see the rest of the world reflected in American perfidy, as though every other country only ever acted because of the actions of Americans. Vladimir Putin needed no provocation to want to dominate what he has seen as former Russia, and he has always been clear that Russia's war is about Ukraine, not NATO. There is one country that can end the war in Ukraine tomorrow: it's Russia. But back to Lears:

  Those of us who seek to conceive an end to endless war must somehow learn to challenge embedded American fixations and fantasies, as well as habits of mind and heart.

  The most pervasive American fixation and fantasy is the one that keeps the United States on a special, exceptional, pedestal.

  Posted 17 July 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: smoky rooms and serious people

  Dan Davies, black boxes and smoky rooms:

  Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers.

  Ned Resnikoff, Serious People:

  As one prominent Sacramento YIMBY put it, “This election separated the wheat (people with sincere views on urban policy reform) from the chaff (people who use urban policy reform as a cudgel against their enemies).” Among those who genuinely care about housing affordability, Mamdani attracted support both from the left and (though not without reservations) from the center. The centrists who loathe the left more than they care about YIMBY policy reform denounced Mamdani, while the leftists who hate shitlibs more than they like winning elections did everything they could to make clear that shitlibs were not welcome in the Mamdani coalition.

  Posted 27 June 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: solitude and lies

  Ned Resnikoff, You'll Never Think Alone Again:

  What I’m really worried about is less an active plot than the terminal erosion of those habits of mind and cultural practices that sustain a mass democracy. We’ve arguably been in real trouble on that front since before Neil Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death. We wouldn’t have gotten Donald Trump and the present crisis without televised infotainment’s anti-democratic properties and potentialities. But reality TV and cable news look primitive when compared to devices that promise to fully replace your internal dialogue.

  John Plotz, Public Books, 'Lying in Politics': Hannah Arendt's Antidote to Anticipatory Despair

  In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.

  Posted 27 May 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: Qualifications Piñata

  Timothy Burke, Dispatches from the AI front:

  The punishing accumulation of bullshit work processes within the academy and the disconnects between them and the core labor of faculty. Visions of austerity slamming into teaching and scholarship while administrative ranks grow seemingly without end. It all has led to many students at large universities feeling as if the university and its curriculum is little more than a credentials pinata to be whacked until it gives up the candy, and GPT is only the best and biggest stick ever provided for that purpose.

  Ferdinand Mount, LRB, The Tongue Is a Fire:

  We need, I think, to get some feel for the pre-modern landscape of public speech to understand the huge distance we have travelled. The pre-moderns were painfully aware of the potency – and the perils – of unguarded speech. ‘The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’ warned the Apostle James. ‘The tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.’ Dabhoiwala points out that the saying ‘while sticks and stones may break my bones, words can never hurt me’ is first recorded only in 1862, but the contrary sentiment, ‘the stroke of the tongue breaketh the bones,’ is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

  Posted 13 May 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Laudato si'

  232. Not everyone is called to engage directly in political life. Society is also enriched by a countless array of organizations which work to promote the common good and to defend the environment, whether natural or urban. Some, for example, show concern for a public place (a building, a fountain, an abandoned monument, a landscape, a square), and strive to protect, restore, improve or beautify it as something belonging to everyone. Around these community actions, relationships develop or are recovered and a new social fabric emerges. Thus, a community can break out of the indifference induced by consumerism. These actions cultivate a shared identity, with a story which can be remembered and handed on. In this way, the world, and the quality of life of the poorest, are cared for, with a sense of solidarity which is at the same time aware that we live in a common home which God has entrusted to us. These community actions, when they express self-giving love, can also become intense spiritual experiences.

  Posted 21 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: corporatism and corruption

  Dan Davies, Corporatism with a flat cap:

  Either this cosy arrangement of mates, backhanders, off the books work and quiet words is the reason that nothing gets done in this town. Or … it’s the method by which everything gets done. If we want to think of an international analogy, do we look at some post-Soviet backwater where nothing gets done without blat, or some rapidly modernising part of China where everything gets accelerated by guanxi?

  Me, in this blog, earlier:

  Relationships of patronage and support, which are other names for corruption and nepotism, reward other virtues and talents than the ones our society values. Older, crookeder systems reward qualities like loyalty, attention to the needs of the institution, a strong sense of collective identity and goals, staunch support within groups and teams, talent-spotting and career development by superiors and bosses, protecting one's mates, and task orientation (just 'getting things done') as opposed to process orientation (making sure things are accountable). Those things aren't to be sneezed at either.

  Posted 17 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: Golfing Nero and the American Delian League

  'Presidents and Golf', Mary Beard, TLS Blog

  In other words, this story is not merely a jibe on the megalomania of the emperor. It’s raising the question of how the autocrat impacts on the traditional structures of the state, any state. Nero, after all, didn’t declare himself victor. He was declared victor by the usual authorities. What does that say about us, we should ask? Who dares to stand up to the emperor and say he hasn’t won?

  'The American Delian League', War by other means

  Any adversary of the United States can very easily see—like Brasidas once did—that the entire imperial project that the Trump Administration is engaging in could collapse in on itself by the clever act of peeling off our allies from us with nothing more than the promise that they could be free.

  Posted 9 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: Intellectual synonyms, and warrior seppuku

  Branko Milanovic: 'Do You Want To Be A Synonym?'

  I read a part of a book (I definitely could not stomach the whole book) of another famous economist that could have been written in 2000: the same clichés, the same authors, the same discussions interspersed with, for good measure, a mention of Trump here and there. Nonsense on stilts in today’s world.

  It makes you realize that intellectual influences are so crucially dependent on time.

  Kiran Pfitzner: 'A Modest Proposal For Restoring the Warrior Ethos'

  Pete Hegeseth has pledged to restore the warrior ethos to America’s military. The warrior ethos traditionally demands self-destruction as compensation for failure. The Japanese example is the most well-known, but it was also expected for honorable Romans to fall upon their own swords rather than suffer disgrace. If Hegseth wants to preserve his own honor and adhere to the warrior ethos, then there is a clear course of action open to him.

  Posted 2 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• What I'm reading: China

  Long Ling, 'Diary: In the new Beijing'. London Review of Books Vol. 47 No. 6 · 3 April 2025

  For the purposes of data monitoring, the city is divided into sections, called ‘grids’. Grid workers, employed at the lowest level of the civil service system, are required to know the households in the grids under their jurisdiction: they need to know which apartments have elderly people, which have tenants, which have pregnant women, which have family members overseas, which are in the middle of lawsuits, which have bad relationships between mother and daughter-in-law, which have frequent quarrels, which are rich, which are poor. Even an elderly woman who doesn’t know how to use a smartphone and doesn’t watch TV is constantly feeding data into this network by turning lights on and off, using the toilet or turning on the stove. ‘With this eye of wisdom,’ Li gestured to the building around us, ‘everyone will be looked after.’

  Howard W. French: 'Toffler in China'. New York Review of Books, 10 April 2025

  How competent or thorough these emerging online means for surveillance and political control will prove to be is still an open question. What is certain is that the enlistment of citizens in the policing of the population has venerable roots in China, dating at least as far back as the Mao period. At that time even family members were notoriously encouraged to inform on one another, and neighborhoods had their own resident inspection committees that reported on every aspect of people’s behavior, including whether or not women were missing their menstrual periods, a possible sign of evasion of strict birth control measures.

  The ambition of the current efforts, though, is beyond doubt. The embattled lawyers in Total Trust lay out its scope. “The system uses big data and human surveillance. It divides every community into grids and assigns an officer to each one,” one says. “Each grid officer is in charge of about four hundred households, or one thousand residents,” explains an officer. Equally clear is that the system under construction is not placing all its bets on technology.

  Posted 1 April 2025 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more