In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I am a bit behind on this book.  Sylvia Moreno-Garcia is among the new stars of sci-fi/fantasy, and Gods of Jade and Shadow  was quite a hit a while back.  It took me a while.  We all have large stacks of reading.  Interesting book.  Flawed, as most books are, but it has a few clever tricks, and for this morning, let's consider the most fun element of the novel, which is what I think is its unintentional subversiveness.  Colonialism.  Anti-colonialism.  These are buzzwords in the current political climate.  Moreno-Garcia's politics, at the surface level, would seem to place her on the modern left, and yet a close reading of Gods of Jade and Shadow  reveal a sort of anti-anti-colonialist sentiment, that, if we count the negatives, by the rule of the double-negative, is almost colonialist.  Oooh.  Scaaary .  And fascinating in its shades of grey.  Grey as the outer boundaries of the Mayan underworld, Xibalba....

 Let's deal with something less bloody than Afghanistan this morning.  To link, or not to link?  That is the plagiarized question.  Whether 'tis smarter to pass a bipartisan bill first, or suffer the bad doggerel of blog post begun before the caffeine hits the professor's bloodstream, and oh, enough of this.  OK.  Here's the deal.  Remember I said passing anything was going to be hard?  Yeah, it's hard. There are two bills in Congress.  There is a bipartisan infrastructure bill, passing through the House and Senate through... regular... order.  [Checks notes.]  Um, yeah.  Also, your weather report suggests a danger of porcine droppings from the flying pigs currently occupying US airspace.  I am being particular in my wording  This is an "infrastructure" bill.  That means physical structures, but also expanded in generally accepted ways, such as broadband because work is conducted over the internet, meaning that i...

 HAP-py New Year!  Wait, what calendar do you use?  Gregorian?  Chinese?  Jewish?  I use the academic  calendar.  In my  little corner of the universe, the new year starts tomorrow, by which I mean, classes start tomorrow.  The 2021-2 Academic Year.  Which... I suppose is tied to the calendar built by those wacky monks, but whatever.  January 1 means nothing to me, except that it causes me to fuck up the year the first few times I write it.  The first day of an academic  year means something to me, and perhaps to you.  And tomorrow means something big. I haven't seen the inside of a classroom in a bloody year and a half.  Alas, there has been actual blood. If you look at business surveys, employees these days are polled on whether they would like to return to "the office," or continue working from home.  I have not seen these surveys break results down by job type, but some jobs just don't work quite as...

 There is a philosophy of historical analysis by which one cannot properly interpret any historical event without distance.  Perspective.  Time.  It is not merely that one cannot see how the consequences of an event play out, but that one needs separation in order to make detached judgments.  It is a compelling philosophy, in many ways, yet something is missing.  The very thing that we are observing now.  The essential tragedy of the thing. As we read, watch, analyze and discuss the decisions and implications of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a few points have begun to crystalize.  This is a Saigon moment.  Implicit in that comparison is the comparison between the US involvement in Afghanistan prior to withdrawal and US involvement in Vietnam.  This implies a reason to withdraw to correct a mistake.  In the case of Afghanistan, I think we are beginning to see the contours of a "debate," such as it is, about when the US should...

 Roland Kirk, from his pre-Rahsaan days.  "Fallout," from Now Please Don't You Cry, Beautiful Edith .

 This is horrendous.  That should go without saying, but if modern times teach us anything, it is that nothing really goes without saying.  Things need to be said.  That said, let's step back and try to look at this historic shitshow from a different perspective.  The withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan is drawing obvious comparisons to Saigon.  OK, let's think about that.  When we look at Saigon from something approximating a detached perspective, how do we assess the nature of the error(s)?  The Vietnam War is generally considered to have been a bad idea from the get-go.  We should not have been there.  The domino theory was wrong, it was a stupid proxy war, and we shouldn't have been there.  Our withdrawal was a moment of shame, but it wasn't just the withdrawal, which pales in comparison to the war itself.  How should we have withdrawn, recognizing that the war itself was something in which we never should have been in...

 Actually, I think that might have been, "Biden To Afghanistan: Drop Dead, Pussies ."  People say I'm cold?  Man, that  was cold.

 

 Afghanistan is falling to the Taliban.  This was inevitable.  One day or another, we would leave, and when that happened, the Taliban would reclaim the country.  If I had my druthers, our method of leaving would have been something closer to the following:  go around to every woman and girl, and say, "come with me if you want to live."  Too late now.  So we turn to the question I teased yesterday.  Why is Afghanistan a hotbed of such ideology?  Useful information can be found in some cross-country analysis conducted by Pew.  Here is a link to the full study .  It is a few years old at this point, but not old enough for the fundamental trends to be outdated, and it is the general contours that are important for the points I'm going to make this morning, on this rather distressing morning. Sharia law.  The term can mean a lot of things, but Pew asked respondents in muslim countries whether or not they believe their country shoul...

 I wish I could say that I am surprised by the rapid fall of Afghanistan.  If you want some understanding of why the Taliban can take root in Afghanistan, you need some understanding of where the "mainstream" of Afghanistan is.  Pew did a cross-country analysis several years ago .  The Taliban are not the center of Afghan opinion.  But they aren't nearly as far from the center as they would be in most countries.  Some discussion of this survey, coming soon.

 Let's wrap up this long and winding series.  Why are we even discussing "critical race theory?" According to the left-wing talking points, it goes like this.  At some point within the last year or so, a handful of right-wing demagogs decided that they didn't want the real, full history of America being taught in our schools.  But how would they stop it?  Here's what they did, sneaky bugger(er)s that they are.  They went digging around in law reviews , because that's obviously  what you'd do here, right?  They came across this thing called "critical race theory," from authors like Derrick Bell, and Kimberle Crenshaw, and while these articles are not being assigned in K-12, they decided to turn this thing called "critical race theory" into a boogeyman to stop the teaching of true history in K-12.  Of course!  It's so simple ! To quote Homer Simpson, wait.  No, it's not.  It's needlessly complicated. That's because it isn...

 I guess I'm going with Tigran Hamasyan again.  "The Collapse," from Shadow Theater .

 How far back does your political memory extend?  Does it extend back to the days of yore, and the Great Obamacare Freakouts of 2009 and 2010?  There were, and are many practical and principled objections one could offer to the Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act.  And then... there's the crazy shit.  The crazy shit can be placed on a spectrum, from "death panels" on one end, to the primarily disingenuous on the other.  Let's take a moment to examine one of the objections offered to the ACA that was somewhere towards the disingenuous end of the bullshit freakouts.  Dishonest, but not full-blown, Palin lunacy. Remember the furor over "rationing?"  We shouldn't "ration" healthcare?  Um... we have always  rationed healthcare.  Every system does.  Mostly, we have done it based on money.  Prior to the ACA, if you didn't get insurance from your job, being a veteran, or just bein' old, you were rationed out of gettin' he...

 Right now, Congress is doing something very strange.  It's called... "something."  For Congress, that's strange.  The big "something" right now is the pair of spending bills consisting of an actual infrastructure bill, being passed with... [checks notes]... bipartisan [checks notes again]... support.  Um, really?  OK, sure, yeah.  The second bill is a budget reconciliation bill which uses reconciliation rules to prohibit filibusters in the Senate.  Thus, if the Democrats can keep every Democrat on board, including Manchin, they can pass the bill without any Republicans.  They are calling it "infrastructure" by using the modern, lefty trick of redefining the word, "infrastructure," and calling basically everything , "infrastructure."  A floor is a chair because you can sit on it.  Therefore, even if you have no furniture, you have furniture.  Your floor is a chair!  See?  All you have to do is redefine every word...

 Fair warning:  I will grumble about this book.  I have gushed about several books lately, but this time, I'm-a-gonna grumble.  Anyway, Yoko Ogawa first published The Memory Police  in Japanese in 1994, but the English translation didn't become available until 2019, so from my perspective, it is recent, and I just finished it.  It is highly regarded, but I did not like it, as you may infer by now.  That does not mean I have nothing to say about it, in my political scientist voice, but I'm gonna have me a little rant. You know those books that grab you by the lapels and yell, "I AM ART!"?  This is one of those books.  A book can be art, and indeed, high  art, whatever that may mean, without the lapel-grabbiness and yelliness.  A book can be highly enjoyable without being high art.  Last Sunday, I wholeheartedly recommended Space Opera , by Catherynne Valente, which had no such pretensions.  But the "I AM ART!!!" thing?...