Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • What I'm reading

    James Meek, Nobody Wants To Hear This, London Review of Books, v46 n22, 21 November 2024

    Something like this is happening in the Kharkiv of 2024. Vladimir Putin is still the enemy, and shows no sign of losing; but more and more, the war itself, the instrument that was supposed to deliver Ukraine from Putin’s cruelty, is the enemy too. There is still reverence for the Ukrainian army, for its brave soldiers, as a noble ideal, but the perception has grown that the army is shackled to the selfishness and stagnation of Ukraine’s regressive side, the corruption, bureaucratic inhumanity and small-town cronyism that fermented in the 1990s with the combination of late Soviet decay and foreign biznes. That was the first obstacle to progress in post-independence Ukraine, long before Putin came along; it turns out still to be a force, a dead weight.

    Tim Judah, Ukraine Divided, New York Review of Books, 5 December 2024

    In the past, and especially after Ukraine triumphantly drove back the Russians from Kyiv, Kherson, and the Kharkiv region in 2022, most Ukrainians, taking their cue from Zelensky, were very clear: the war would end with victory, and victory meant the expulsion of the Russians from every square inch of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. According to opinion polls, that is still the case, although there is growing support for a freezing of the front lines. In my experience, Ukrainians overwhelmingly believe that an armistice along the current lines would not end the war, only pause it.

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  • Prices

    WE ARE ALL THATCHERITES in 2024. Neoliberalism may be on its way out in favour of a new mercantilist order, but the fundamental concept-order behind how we structure States remains. Ministers are the custodians of legislation, and of budgets, and of the administrative/regulatory state, and those three levers are all they have. Outside the State lies the market, the working of which determines prices and conditions. Simple dichotomy: on one side the rule of human laws, on the other side the rule of economic laws; a divide that makes sense so long as you don't know what economics is.

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  • Immoderation

    BLUESKY HAS BECOME THE happening place if what you want is to talk about Bluesky, as the well-trod joke goes. There's an ongoing exodus of people leaving twitter, as the result of the US Presidential election making stark, finally, what it is, to other microblog services (Bluesky, but also the fediverse), or to nothing. The experience of being part of a social network is always about the message you're receiving, by dint of membership, and sometimes, as is happening now, lots of people decide it's not very good. In 2022 I wrote that the then experience of twitter shared a lot with the 20th century experience of talkback radio, especially in the power of the choices producers made, to shape the message people heard out of the random chat:

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  • Role models

    IRONY IS A HARD form of humour to appreciate. Senator Ralph Babet (of the Clive Palmer franchise team United Australia Party) went on twitter to post a bunch of slurs. At one level, that's just twitter these days; and his content is no different to the garden variety of hate that everyone still on there stews in, but on the other hand, it is a notable thing for an Australian Senator to do. And what's ironic about it is that it shows a gigantic and secular shift in the way we culture war about values.

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  • What I'm reading

    David Sessions, ‘Against Bernie Would Have Won’, The Point, 7 November 2024

    Undergirding that logic was the classic left-wing belief that the working class is always right, always wants socialism deep in its heart no matter what it does on the surface. The strategic and ideological arguments fused together in a conviction that being ideologically correct—being pure—was the secret to winning. Voters wanted principle, they wanted ideas, they wanted Medicare for All. That was how to win.

    Zadie Smith, ‘The Dream of the Raised Arm, 5 December 2024

    For the past fifteen years we have—all of us—been subjected to a truly monumental network of psychological influence that our governments have failed to regulate in any real way whatsoever. Just as it was in the Thirties, our version of the propaganda megaphone is “subject to no legal or moral restraints.” Maybe it’s time that it is?

    James Meek, ‘What are you willing to do’, London Review of Books, 26 May 2022

    But the real danger might be that Trump and Republicans loyal to him cheat and lie their way to a victory that is accepted by Congress, federal power passes to an autocrat, and, after a period of mass protest, most liberals just put up with it, judging it not worth the blood and damage to fight for democracy. If it is a real danger that civil war may threaten democracy, it is also a real danger that democracy may die because its defenders refuse to start one.

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  • Weird Shit

    AMERICA IS A WEIRD society, in the full sense of the notion of weirdness. It is large, diverse, dynamic, but those are just cliches that everyone from Tocqueville on has observed. What it truly is is weird, in that its society doesn’t necessarily obey sensible or regular laws. Compare: anyone who has ever gone doorknocking for a political campaign in Australia will know that the spectrum of things that people believe is extraordinary, and well, well beyond the boundaries of what’s sensible or supportable by evidence, sometimes even what’s tolerable, but mostly there’s a lot of weird shit. If you start talking to people in unstructured conversations, you’re going to get very strange ideas bubbling up. People in Australian electorates are weirder than we think, maybe weirder than we can think. As odd as Australia can be, America is magnitudes stranger.

    The Lone Gunmen from the X-Files

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  • Ground floor

    BUILDING DESIGN SHARES A lot of similarity to the spread of memes on the internet. A successful configuration that resonates with people’s experience of the world, or to the experiences of some group of them, will reproduce itself in self-similar ways. Designs that become popular are that way because they respond to specific needs and desires, and carry symbolic meaning, not because they are intrinsically good. Surviving designs, like memes, don’t last because people like them, they survive because they’ve outlasted other worse ones.

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  • The Cheapo Stuff Wins

    DEAR EDITORS,
    “WHY IS Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.

    Letters to the Editor: The Cheapo Stuff Wins (Nplusone)

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  • The art of politics

    THE WIRE TAPS THAT captured conversations between Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian were extraordinary. At various points, Maguire complained about the Icac’s powers, warned Berejiklian they could be listening in on their conversations, and said the watchdog was “marginalising the art of politics”.

    This is actually right.

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  • Badges

    LAST WEEKEND I PUT on my uniform, for the volunteer emergency services of which I’m a member, and attended an awards ceremony. It’s a strange experience but also at the same time an oddly familiar one. Some people take these civilian honours very seriously. The world of uniforms and medals, of long service awards, citations for service, of badges and recognition, is strange—-it imitates military models unpleasantly—-but to me it also mimics a world I’m too familiar with: the academic world where titles and qualifications and baroque regalia are joked at, but also taken deadly seriously.

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