Occasional recommended readings, listenings and viewings

#1

Some good essays at http://www.thebaffler.com

A good starting essay: http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/americas-long-holiday

Every American has been immersed since birth in the propagandistic
reassurance that he or she is the most superior citizen on earth, simply
by virtue of coming of age in this model capitalist democracy, the
endpoint, in our eyes, of national and human evolution. This propaganda
has produced a kind of nationalism so pervasive and misguided that most
Americans wouldn’t even know to call it nationalism—it is, for us,
simply the proper order of things. So, as is the case with other
undiagnosed neurotic disorders, we lie to ourselves to sustain it,
whether about the poverty of millions of our stateside neighbors, or the
historic crimes committed against Native Americans and black Americans
at home, or the casual mayhem we’ve visited upon Iraqis, Afghans, and
everyone else abroad.

#2

Financial Times article about an pro-Morsi Arab Spring activist from Egypt, turned ISIS guy: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/97130d46-7952-11e4-9567-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3NcL7aUng

For more ISIS insight, this Guardian article provides a good insider’s view: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story

#3

Via my wife - short comment piece on Hong Kong attitudes to domestic helpers: http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1716295/hongkongers-attitudes-domestic-duties-create-conditions

#4

From the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/19/stop-calling-for-a-muslim-enlightenment

To suggest that the Muslim world’s experience of modernity has been severely deranged by the repeated incursions of western imperialists and post-imperialists is to restate one of the truisms of our age. When Britain and France invade Egypt with the aim of protecting their loans (literally in the case of Gladstone, with his heavy personal exposure to Egyptian government bonds) and Sykes and Picot split the region into British and French zones under cover of the first world war; when the western nations award land to Zionism that isn’t theirs to give and when the region is thrust into a cold war not of its making, with a harvest that includes Saddam, Mubarak and the Assads – with all this happening in the space of a few decades it would be optimistic to expect the reordering of cultures and societies to go without a hitch.
…
Few westerners have considered how bruising it is to be constantly reacting to another’s invention, statement or action: always being told to “catch up” or improve. This is the situation that so many Muslims have found themselves in over the past two centuries. But this is the backstory that has made Islam’s engagement with modern values more suspenseful, more despairing, more suffused with the “simultaneity of spring and autumn”, than anywhere else in the world.

In the light of adverse politics and history, the surprise is not that modernity has been a tortuous experience for some Muslims, but that it has been adopted so widely and with such success. (Many millions of Muslims live in harmony with the modern values of personal sovereignty and human rights: another self-evident truth in need of reiteration.) With immigration from the Middle East and north Africa to Europe, the Mediterranean culture that ended with the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492 has been revived. Our world is even more interpenetrated than the communal gallimaufry of the Ottoman empire. Talk of European values that exclude Islamic values will be barren for as long as
millions of Europeans regard Islam as an important element in their lives. Talk of teaching them Voltaire is a joke as long as they cannot teach us back. The much-touted choice facing the “Muslim community”, between modernity and obscurantism, between “here” and “home”, is false. Here is home. Life is modern. All we can do is negotiate.

#5

[BBC World War One podcast][1]

I’m only one episode into this and it’s pretty good.

I suspect that many people studied WW1 in high school and think “OK, I know it, it’s Gallipoli + Verdun + trenches + trench foot + shell shock + poison gas = industrial murder, everyone was to blame for the causes of WW1, with Russian revolution on the side”. Particularly those who did Modern History for their HSC.

It was only later when I read Rommel’s Infantry Attacks I got a sense of a more fluid war. And a sense that high school World War One was taught with a very “World War One was a stupid and unjustified conflict launched by 19th century upper class political views” agenda. Which is not entirely wrong, but is certainly not the entire story.

The BBC podcast does a pretty good job in checking that agenda. At least in the one episode I’ve listened to.

EDIT: Perhaps I spoke too soon. The first episode is great on politics and preconceptions, but the next 10 or so episodes I’ve listened to are much more about the home front issues which are more familiar ground. What is interesting is comparing the mass psychology of Britain in the early days of the war to modern reactions to terrorism.

In both cases, there were attacks on “home soil” (WW1 - zepplin attacks that hit British residential areas and killed people, naval shelling of some British coastal towns). How people reacted to that is interesting, particularly as this is possibly one of the first times Britain had experienced foreign attacks on its home soil (as compared to home waters) since the Norman invasion. In a few decades time, I can imagine a historian comparing this to Anglosphere reactions in WW2 (eg Blitz, Pearl Harbour, Darwin) and terrorist attacks in the post-2000 era. How much do the reactions in WW1 and WW2 illuminate how we’re reacting now?

However, I’m not sure that insight justifies listening to “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag” over and over multiple times.
[1]: http://%20http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ww1

#6

I’ve cued it up for a less depressing listen than Australian politics.

I think listening to live Australian parliament may be leading to mental illness.

#7

The good stuff is in the Michael Portillo stuff. Most of that is titled “Month of Madness” and covers the lead up to the war.

#8

Portillo also did a BBC podcast series on Britain in 1913 ie the climate in the lead up to war.

It’s an interesting political period. I’m reading a book written in the 1930s about the 1910 - 1914 period, The Strange Death of Liberal England by George Dangerfield.

Abebooks link: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=dangerfield&sts=t&tn=strange+death

It features some young Churchill action.

Particularly interesting stuff on the Irish home rule movement. You learn that Ulster Protestants have always been arseholes.

#9

Sent this to Wibbly earlier today. Lovely China bear stuff. Not good for an Australian economy that wants to dig stuff out of the ground and sell it into the China growth story. EDIT: Not good for anyone in the short term, really.

And the full slide deck: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4QF4MBBMA0kUHk4WWllNnVJOFk/view?pli=1

Of course, the huge rally in the Shanghai stock exchange and big inflows into Hong Kong stock ETFs (eg the Hang Seng H-Share Index Fund) indicates the “wisdom of crowds” thinks the outlook is good for China.

#10

A good video which explains nicely the impact of credit on economic cycles and the longer term leveraging/de-leveraging cycle.

It starts with pretty simple concepts you likely understand already, but builds that up very well to explain a much more complex topic. I’m a banker and I learned a lot from this.

Ray Dalio, the man behind this, also authored a freely available book on economic principles and debt cycles. The book takes a deeper view into the subject covered in the video, including interesting analysis on the badly handled deleveraging in the 1920s Weimar Republic.

There’s also interesting discussion on the impact of human nature on the economy, such as his section on “The Life Cycle of a Typical Empire”.

The book also has a short section on Australia.

The book is available here: http://bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/research/how-the-economic-machine-works/ray_dalio__how_the_economic_machine_works__leveragings_and_deleveragings.pdf

#11

Thanks for the Ray Dalio …

This a good read on trade deals:

#12

Like a man trying to read the latest War Nerd, I hit a paywall on that link.