Lost in a dance of reactivity. Recalling some modified adages from previous notes:
If a country shows you who they are, believe them.
and
Combine Occam’s Razor with ‘if it looks like a duck…’ to make:
If it looks brutally stupid and/or stupidly brutal, then that is most likely what it is.
To which can be added:
Fool me first term, shame on you. Fool me second term, shame on me.
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A ‘golden temple’ approach to international trade and US leadership:
In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Yukio Mishima used the real life arson of Kinkaku-ji in 1950 as source material for his fictional work. On reaching the idea to burn the temple down, Mizoguchi, the protagonist, explains:
If I burn down the Golden Temple, I told myself, I shall be doing something that will have great educational value. For it will teach people that it is meaningless to infer indestructibility by analogy. They will learn that the mere fact of the Golden Temple's having continued to exist, of its having continued to stand for five hundred and fifty years by the Kyoko Pond, confers no guaranty upon it whatsoever. They will be imbued with a sense of un-easiness as they realize that the self-evident axiom which our survival has predicated on the temple can collapse from one day to another.
Great educational value. Indeed.
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Part of the contemporary predicament is the prevalence of beanbag leaders: no backbone, no chest, changes shape, easy to sit on. Institutions run and staffed by a beanbag elite have little hope of facing a world of tough choices and hard decisions.
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In The World After Gaza: A History, Pankaj Mishra offers a powerful account of the ethical hollowing and voiding of institutions: ‘For some time now, our exalted ideas about our countries … have been in a state of collapse.’ He continues that, ‘political, corporate and media institutions show, this time across a broader swathe, a contemptuous face to individual conscience, to judgements of right and wrong.’ Mishra powerfully writes of this loss and failure:
It is Gaza that has quickened their understanding of a decrepit world which no longer has any belief in itself, and which, concerned merely with self-preservation, tramples freely on the rights and principles it once held sacred, repudiates all sense of dignity and honour, and rewards violence, lies, cruelty and servility.
Consider the IPC special brief on Acute Food Insecurity and Acute Malnutrition in Gaza (April - September 2025):
Goods indispensable for people’s survival are either depleted or expected to run out in the coming weeks. The entire population is facing high levels of acute food insecurity, with half a million people (one in five) facing starvation.
The plan announced on 5 May by Israeli authorities for delivering food and non-food items across the governorates is estimated to be highly insufficient to meet the population’s essential needs for food, water, shelter and medicine. Moreover, the proposed distribution mechanisms are likely to create significant access barriers for large segments of the population. In light of the announced large-scale military operation across the Gaza Strip and the persistent inability of humanitarian agencies to deliver essential goods and services, there is a high risk that Famine (IPC Phase 5) will occur in the projection period (11 May – 30 September). The latest announcements suggest that this worst-case scenario is becoming more likely. Immediate action is essential to prevent further deaths, starvation and acute malnutrition, and a descent into Famine.
Alex de Waal, ‘Engineers of Calamity’, Boston Review (November 2024):
Famine is a societal catastrophe. Those who inflict it do so with knowledge, sometimes with genocidal intent. Famine is a memory that endures among survivors, a shame that lives on among the perpetrators. … inflicting starvation causes moral decay among those perpetrating the act.
There is a general lesson here. Just as torture will, in the end, destroy the humanity of the torturer, so too will starvation corrode the moral fabric of the society inflicting, condoning, or denying it. Perpetrators become victims of their own crimes. Famine zones are ethics-free zones, and those who lord over them lose their own humanity in a deathly cycle.
One can assume moral decay works the same as in other complex systems: it is non-linear, with feedback loops and tipping points that trigger abrupt and/or irreversible changes. Simply put: moral decay deepens, it spreads at a quickening pace.
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Joshua Craze, ‘Sudan’s World War’, NLR Sidecar (April 2025):
The Sudanese civil war is at once too local and too international to be addressed by a diplomatic process that focuses on the two belligerents, which have a shaky hold over the militias they have enlisted, and whose businesses profit from the war. The forces breaking apart Sudan are structural, and have parallels elsewhere in the region: the collapse of state capacity, military forces backed by mercenary state- and non-state actors, and the fragmentation of the body politic, are also characteristics of conflict in Yemen, the Central African Republic and Somalia. Increasingly, it seems as though the pieces won’t be put back together. In the Horn of Africa at least, the epoch of the nation-state seems to be closing, and the contours of a new 19th century are emerging, in which sovereignty gives way to disarticulated countries controlled by external interests, and fragmented by local dynamics.
If there is a Global War Regime emerging, as Hardt and Mezzadra have suggested, it will not have two poles, as during the Cold War, but multiple co-ordinates. … There is no geopolitical logic of alignment at work here: each country functions like a joint stock company, taking its profits where it can, even if the consequences are politically incoherent. Trump’s transactional politics have long been the MO of the middle-power countries whose ranks America seems determined to join.
Conditions of subpar and subprime multipolarity, a world of rivalrous forms of incapacity and vulnerability. The weak do what they can, the weakest do what they must. Or is that simply weak logic?
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If this is the end of ‘US exceptionalism’, hopefully this extends to thought and voice. Far worse than any ‘woke mind virus’ is surely the American content monster. The constant, never-ending eliding of American concerns with that of the world’s.
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In a world of apparent - and real - hyper agents, it is worth recalling Tolstoy’s depiction of Napoleon at the Battle of Borodino:
‘They want more!’ Napoleon croaked hoarsely, with a scowl. ‘Give them more.’
As things stood, without any orders from him, what he wanted done was being done, and he carried on issuing instructions simply because he thought it was expected of him. And back he went once again into his old world of artificiality with its fantasies of greatness, and once again (like a horse on a treadmill that thinks it’s doing something for itself) he humbly resumed the cruel, unhappy, burdensome, inhuman role that was his destiny.
And this would not be the only hour or day of his life when darkness afflicted the mind and conscience of this man, who had assumed more responsibility for what was going on than any other participant, though he never, to the end of his days, had the slightest understanding of goodness, beauty, truth or the significance of his own deeds, which were too far removed from truth and goodness, too remote from anything human for him to be able to grasp their significance. Unable to renounce his own deeds, which were highly praised by half the world, he was forced to repudiate truth, goodness and everything human.
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What do tariffs and trade wars mean for valuations? Is the bottom in? We must wait for the answers to such questions. What is more readily evident: there is a high likelihood we have entered a sustained bear market for humanity.