The Bluestocking, vol 291
he got a special big onion
Happy Friday!
Happy “oh god, the weather’s gone cold, I really should get round to doing my tax return” season to all who celebrate.
I’m on Have I Got News For You tonight, which will be hosted by Bill Bailey and which features a musical segment I still feel like I dreamed.
Helen
Israel’s Strategic Crisis (Comment is Freed)
Without much optimism we can describe the first steps if a diplomatic path is to be followed. From Israel a cease-fire, if only temporary, to allow the humanitarian crisis to be addressed and work to begin on how the crisis can be managed over the short-term. Israel also has its own problems with hundreds of thousands of people moved away from the borders from Gaza and Lebanon, still some rocket attacks, and a level of military mobilisation that is costly and disruptive to maintain. So long as the rockets keep on coming, and the hostages continue to be held, it will be difficult for Netanyahu to declare a cease-fire.
The real challenge is to find an agreed political formula for Gaza which at least reduces Hamas’s political and military role. The only possibility I can see for the medium-term is one involving the Palestine Authority, as it is the obvious alternative government to Hamas, but this will require boosting its standing in the West Bank.
Lawrence Freedman, professor of War Studies at Kings College London, on the moving pieces of Israel’s response to the terror attacks by Hamas on October 7.
Why Uncontacted Tribes Want to Stay Uncontacted (The Atlantic)
This Victorian adventurer’s darker side emerges even in his scholarly publications, including the phrasebook of Andamanese languages that Portman compiled for other Britons’ use. The sentences that he chose to translate inadvertently reveal a great deal about his own high-handed interactions with the beleaguered natives whom he met in the far reaches of the island chain:
Take care, it is very heavy.
Some convicts have escaped, you must search for them.
Come and pick these ants off my clothes.
Get me that orchid.
Get me some oysters.
Dive for that coral.
Take me to your village.
Get a broom and clean this hut.
Have the people here been doing anything wrong?
How did this woman become blind?
How is this man so covered with sores?
The Sentinelese people are notorious in anthropology—living on a remote Andaman Island, there are between 50-200 of them, and they absolutely do not want to be contacted. (They killed a missionary who tried in 2018.) The newly discovered diaries of the British colonial administrator in charge of the islands—Maurice Portman, who took the photograph above—suggest that choice is not as obstinate as it sounds: “By the time Portman got to the Andamans, these natives were fast dying out because of disease, warfare, and cultural genocide brought by the British, who herded them into prisonlike “homes” and set them to forced labor.”
Quick Links
“This came after a minor Twitter beef with Nicki Minaj and amid a falling-out with Calvin Harris. It seemed as though the entire world had turned on her. Now, they said, it was clear that she had always been a fraud. Now, they said, it was clear that even her feminism wasn’t real; it consisted of lining up her pretty, mostly white friends onstage to take pictures or wear matching bathing suits on the Fourth of July.” Taffy Akner profiles the Swifties, exploring what they love so much about New Model Taylor. (New York Times)
This clip of an exhausted Michael Buerk asking Ian MacAskill why he cocked up forecasting a huge storm might as well have him saying, “Ian, you’ve lost the weather.” (Twitter)
‘In 1931, after Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity became famous, a pamphlet was published with the title “100 Authors Against Einstein.” Einstein replied, “Why a hundred? If they were right, one would have been enough.” One of the greatest pleasures of writing for the public is the pleasure of being right, and watching your readers resist you before they realize you are right.’ The last two weeks has seen some open letter stinkers—NYRB and your “people were killed”, I’m looking at you—so it’s time to revisit my colleague Graeme on why open letters are always bad (Atlantic).
I wrote about the leftists who think everything is dogwhistle towards genocide, except apparently for the Hamas charter, which explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews. (The Atlantic)
Vitalik Butalin of the cryptocurrency Ethereum organized a community of 200 like-minded people in Montenegro for two months. Such an interesting experiment: universities and monasteries and other small communities have always been amplifiers of knowledge. See also Paul Graham, of tech incubator Y Combinator, on the question: why wasn’t there a Milanese Leonardo da Vinci?
“What people can do is engage in a sort of deception. You can tell your war hero stories to a billionaire and he can pay you to keep your mouth shut when he tells those stories to others and pretends that he did those things. But the transaction here with you passing on stories (something that can be bought) plus an agreement to be complicit in a lie. The actual “being a war hero” doesn’t go anywhere.” What can’t be sold, and what shouldn’t be sold, asks psychology professor Paul Bloom (Small Potatoes, Substack).
Anton Howes on “one of history’s greatest spies,” a Jacobite called John Holker who defected to France and nicked a load of English industrial technologies (Age of Invention, Substack).
Straw poll: can the Keir Momentum make even this photograph of him with an unfeasibly big onion seem cool? Possibly not. See you next time!
Just finished listening to the Witch Trials of JK Rowling and was delighted to hear you on it. You’re awesome. Thank you for doing what you do.
Re: HIGNFY, I watched the Eurovision Song Contest once in the 90s, coming down off acid. This is the first time since then I’ve had a comparable experience.