@strangemattersmag.bsky.social
A cooperative magazine of new & unconventional thinking in economics, politics, and culture Proudly worker-owned since our founding in 2020. ~ Pitch us: editors(at)strangematters(dot)coop ~ strangematters.coop
"The South Korean government has also recognized the power in cultural exports, investing millions of dollars into K-pop and K-dramas through its Ministry of Culture."
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This is a very cool article/🧵 that outlines the argument and evidence in my book, Divided Armies, about why prejudice and discrimination is bad for military effectiveness
With astonishing regularity, Lyall finds that ethnic supremacy directly correlates to military failure.
Flannery brings out 3 stories: the khanate of Kokand, Austro-Hungary, & (fascinatingly) the Madhiya of Africa, who resisted the British once but lost to them after falling into ethnic chauvinism.
Lyall's is a quantitative and not merely a qualitative study. He sifted through an enormous amount of data on wars fought across cultures, continents, and time periods. But always he asked a common question: how were minority ethnicities treated, & how effective were the armies in the battlefield?
War scholar @jaylyall.bsky.social conducted perhaps one of the most detailed comparative studies of military effectiveness. So why did Trump's cronies gag the military press over it?
In his review, Kyle Flannery answers: because he proves racists lose wars.
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"For those literate in the discourse of the Israeli religious right, the linkage made between Palestinians and the Amalekites means only one thing: extermination."
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Time to bone up on Steve Mann’s work for @strangemattersmag.bsky.social.
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This excellent report from @financialtimes.com can only mean one thing: severe generalized global inflation.
t.co/9zUqNAnwil
"These valuable gold deposits offer Russia strategically important access to foreign exchange, a fact of global geopolitical significance given the current sanctions in place against Putin’s regime."
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Whoa. This is big. "The U.S. Navy has refused near-daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts through the Strait of Hormuz since the start of the war on Iran, saying the risk of attacks is too high for now." www.reuters.com/world/middle...
"Protestants can say that Wilde said all Popes deserve the guillotine in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, and Catholics can point out that he was blessed by Pope Pius IX twice."
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@isaiahbishop.bsky.social and @roryjohnston.bsky.social are the go-to guys for understanding commodities and oil right now imo
"As others have noted, the most efficient route to decarbonization – though politically and socially unpalatable – would be through massive imports of Chinese low-carbon technology."
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"There is something obviously erotic – and tortured – about the fervor with which undercover policemen have pursued sodomy charges through the ages...They would wave around their erections in bathrooms and cinema halls to entrap homosexuals."
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@seanmcarroll.bsky.social Thanks for promoting Rose Novick’s Zhuangzi translation/commentary! Would you be at all interested in having her on the pod? If so we can get you in touch. Just let us know!
This reminds me of something Toni Morrison wrote.
"Debord and Lebovici commissioned a quartet of lavish metal sets...bearing a starkly modernist design cast in silver-plated copper. (Debord was absolutely the sort of guy who’d shell out $30 extra for the metal coins in John Company.)"
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If you want more non-Western philosophical classics, consider subscribing. Every dollar we get after expenses goes to our writers, whose brilliant work is piece by piece assembling the canons of the next century's integrated world culture.
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Don't miss the footnotes in this one. If the the base text is an eager student with no background, the footnotes are a learned scholar steeped in the philology & historiography of Chinese classical philosophy. The gossip is as delicious as the citations are thorough.
You think it's saying one thing -- suddenly it concludes the opposite. Everything transforms into everything else with time. Opposed views can both make sense, each at their own scale & context. Literary form & philosophical argument work together to shake us.
But what truly elevates things for the lay reader is Novick's commentary, where she adopts the perspective of an intelligent but "naive" reader encountering the Zhuangzi for the first time -- with all the surprises and delights that entails.
In this piece, Novick goes even further, boldly deciding to write a verse translation of the Zhuangzi. Though usually considered prose, its classical Chinese is highly poetic. Novick's odd line breaks & striking images highlight the text's literary dimensions & bizarre leaps.
Novick, a brilliant philosopher of biology with an abiding interest in the global history of philosophy, has spoken beautifully about the Zhuangzi before.
Her dialogue with her friend @lastpositivist.bsky.social is a hidden gem of philosophy YouTube.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIvv...
A classic of world philosophy, the Zhuangzi revolutionized ethics and ontology forever with its Dao.
Now, in our latest issue, Rose Novick brings this masterpiece to a new generation of English readers with her magisterial translation & commentary.
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"If you’ve decided you need to make steel, then...you’re going to need to make steel – and there’s a very good argument that socialist steel, capitalist steel, and fascist steel will all more or less be the same and come about by the same process."
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gave a guest lecture at Princeton today and ended up using the very scientific phrase “belt to ass” while discussing the recent NYC nurses’ strike
"When this wonderful social-democratic government creates its green industrial policy or its job guarantee or its sovereign wealth fund, who will have the expertise to manage those programs? Podcast hosts who have never managed anything more than their clout?"
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"I was asking why everyone’s laughing, and they told me it’s funny because he had come to kill the guy, and now they’re taking his family to the hospital. I’m sure that if you show this film in Iran, no one will laugh at that sequence."
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"Lines have until now quietly been drawn around a whole category of crucial government functions, from which boundary the hungry fingers of oligarchs and their pet economists are to be smacked away."
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