The New York Review of Books: NATO and the Myth of the Liberal International Order

Behind Trump’s bullying and bluster, though, the core message he delivered in Brussels was not that different from those given by previous administrations. Indeed, the same kvetches have recurred under every US government, Democrat and Republican alike, since the end of World War II. Even before NATO was founded in 1949, there were disagreements between the US and UK over how to divide the burden of the postwar transatlantic security architecture; Wallace Thies, in his 2002 book on NATO, Friendly Rivals, dubbed it “an argument even older than the alliance itself.” [...]

So why the sudden concern, if US complaints about their allies’ military and financial contributions are nothing new? Liberal anxieties about NATO stem more from discontent with Trump’s brusqueness and his discourteous tone—at a rally in Montana in early July, he said “we’re the schmucks paying for the whole thing,” and claimed to have told German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “I don’t know how much protection we get by protecting you”—than from the actual substance of US policy toward the alliance, which has remained remarkably consistent over time. Rhetorical differences aside, successive US governments have always been clear that NATO is not a gathering of peers. Its function has been to bind European states into an international order dominated by the US—and to do it on Washington’s terms. NATO communiqués talk about shared security goals, but it has always been the US that determines what those goals are; they are only shared after the fact. From that point of view, browbeating from Washington has been a structural feature of the alliance from the outset. [...]

NATO expansion was designed above all to enable the US to have a guiding hand in the post-Communist transformation of Eastern Europe. Much has been made in recent years of a growing threat to NATO’s eastern flank from a resurgent Russia. But it is important to register that this threat was of little account in the original decision to expand NATO in the early 1990s. On the contrary, the absence of a serious challenge to the West from a greatly weakened Russia was a crucial enabling condition for it. [...]

That prediction has certainly been borne out. In this sense, NATO expansion itself helped to generate the threat it was supposedly intended to counter. The rise in tensions between Russia and the West over the past decade, meanwhile, has highlighted the questionable wisdom of admitting to NATO the string of countries along Russia’s western border. Militarily, these new members were at best only ever going to make marginal contributions to the alliance. On the other hand, they have added significantly to NATO’s obligations for collective defense, under Article 5 of the organization’s charter. Indeed, while the alliance’s growth was notionally premised on the idea of extending the US security umbrella, it is not at all clear that Europe has, as a result, become any safer. Ukraine, where the US and Russia are effectively engaged in a proxy war, is a case in point: the deadly confrontation there has its origins in a contest between Washington and Moscow for Ukraine’s allegiance, which in turn developed inexorably out of the decision to expand NATO in the 1990s.

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Aeon: Against mourning

The Stoics trace their lineage to Zeno of Citium, who founded a philosophical school in Athens about 300 years before the birth of Christ. Along with Seneca, the Stoics are mostly known today by the works of Epictetus, an emancipated slave, and the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. Central to their worldview was the need to distinguish between what we can and cannot control, and waste no time worrying about the latter. In other words, we should conform our thoughts and behaviour to Mother Nature’s ineluctable course, which the Stoics believed was a major part of what it is to be good or virtuous. Among other things, they took this to entail that it is simply wrong to grieve after the death of a loved one. [...]

That is what is so different about their intuitions and ours. To put it simply, if you are not a Stoic philosopher – if you have not been training yourself, year in and year out, to calmly face life’s vagaries and inescapables – and you feel no hint of sadness when your child, or spouse, or family member dies, then there probably is something wrong with you. You probably have failed to love or cherish that person appropriately or sufficiently while they were alive, and that would be a mark against you. [...]

Therein lies the importance of mental preparation. It is a systematic means of freeing oneself from false beliefs, including wishful thinking about life and death. If, when we are free of such thinking, we still feel sadness when our child dies, that feeling will be in accordance with Nature – and hence something it is permitted to feel. [...]

In fact, the quality of their love for those closest to them might be even richer than ours – assuming that we are not Stoics – because in every moment they remind themselves how valuable that moment is. Then, after some shocking blow, though their souls might at first reflexively feel the sting of sadness, they can soon shift to reflecting fondly on those same enriched relationships. As Seneca says: ‘Let us see to it that the recollection of those whom we have lost becomes a pleasant memory to us.’

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SciShow Psych: What Does Pornography Do to Your Brain?

The New York Review of Books: ‘Silence Is Health’: How Totalitarianism Arrives

Sent by his German immigrant family to the Heimat for schooling at the age of nine, Darré later specialized in agriculture, the logical choice for someone with an Argentine background at a time when the succulent beef and abundant wheat of Argentina’s pampas made the country renowned as the “breadbasket of the world.” For a while, during the 1920s, he contemplated returning to Buenos Aires to pursue a career in farming, but that was before his writing caught the attention of Adolf Hitler’s rising Nazi Party. His 1930 book A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, in which he proposed applying selective cattle-breeding methods for the procreation of perfect Aryan humans, dazzled the Führer. [...]

Subsequently, in my work as a writer, I focused on how hundreds of Nazis and their collaborators escaped to Argentina. This made me painfully aware of how their presence during the thirty years between the end of World War II and the 1976 coup had numbed the moral sense of what was then an affluent, well-educated nation, with disastrous consequences for its people. Argentines’ forced cohabitation with Nazi fugitives resulted, I came to believe, in a normalization of the crimes that the German émigrés had committed. “He came to our country seeking forgiveness,” Argentina’s Cardinal Antonio Caggiano told the press when Israeli operatives captured the Nazi arch-criminal Adolf Eichmann and spirited him out of Argentina in 1960 to stand trial in Jerusalem. “Our obligation as Christians is to forgive him for what he’s done.”  [...]

With every turn, the billboard schooled Argentines in the total censorship and suppression of free speech that the dictatorship would soon impose. The billboard message was the brainchild of Oscar Ivanissevich, Argentina’s reactionary minister of education, ostensibly to caution motorists against excessive use of the horn. His other mission was an “ideological purge” of Argentina’s universities, which had become a hotbed of student activism. During an earlier ministerial term in 1949, Ivanissevich had led a bitter campaign against the “morbid… perverse… godless” trend of abstract art, recalling the Nazis’ invective against “degenerate” art. During that period, his sister and his nephew were both involved in smuggling Nazis into Argentina. [...]

To comprehend would-be totalitarians requires understanding their view of themselves as victims. And in a sense, they are victims—of their delusional fear of others, the nebulous, menacing others that haunt their febrile imaginations. This is something I saw repeated in the many interviews I carried out with both the perpetrators of Argentina’s dictatorship and the aging Nazis who had been smuggled to Argentina’s shores three decades earlier. (My interviews with the latter are archived at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.) Their fears were, in both cases, irrational given the unassailable dominance of the military in Argentina and of the Nazis in Germany, but that was of no account to my interviewees.

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Politico: Czech president under fire for skipping Prague Spring commemoration

Ivan Bartoš, the head of the Pirate Party, said he is not surprised by the president’s “sad” announcement considering his political worldview, a reference to Zeman’s close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Zeman has repeatedly defended Putin against criticism from the West, calling for an end to economic sanctions against Russia and even denying that Moscow has deployed soldiers in Ukraine. [...]

The tweet inspired a Czech political activist, Robin Suchánek, to lobby public broadcaster Česká televize to show a commemorative speech by Slovakia’s president, Andrej Kiska, which is being shown on Slovak television.

The broadcaster agreed. As a result, the major Czech event commemorating the 1968 invasion will be a speech by a foreign head of state, which will almost certainly be regarded as a black mark against Zeman’s statesmanship. [...]

The head of the Czech Communist Party, Vojtěch Filip, made few friends in the Czech Republic, for himself or Babiš, when he told the Guardian this month that Russia bears no responsibility for the invasion because the Soviet leader who ordered it, Leonid Brezhnev, was Ukrainian and “the major force of the invading armies were Ukrainian.”

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Curbed: 15 cities tackling pollution by curbing cars

As a result, cities like London, Paris, and Seoul are doubling down on car-free policies, aiming to decrease pollutants and make people’s daily lives better. Some regulations call for low-emission zones and the banning of diesel vehicles, since diesel cars are one of the worst sources of urban air pollution. In Germany, where diesel technology was developed, the country’s highest administrative court ruled in February 2018 that banning diesel cars in an effort to improve air quality was legal, opening the floodgates for German cities to go car-free. [...]

Amid all of the restrictions are other urban planning goals: Oslo, Norway; Bogotá, Colombia; and Hamburg, Germany are all betting big on bike lanes, converting boulevards into pedestrian plazas and creating bike “superhighways” that cater to people looking to ditch diesels and get on two wheels. If banning vehicles is one part of the puzzle, creating walkable cities and expanding public transit options are the other pieces to master. [...]

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is reconsidering its transportation future, paving the way for how shared, self-driving vehicles could be used in an urban setting. The city is also using its Great Streets Program to reinvigorate thoroughfares with art, pedestrian walkways, and plazas. And San Francisco has plans to ban cars and add bike lanes on Market Street, one of the city’s busiest streets. Elsewhere, rapidly growing cities like Charlotte and Denver are considering long-term plans that would emphasize pedestrians and multi-modal transportation over cars.

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Quartz: Egyptian archeologists have identified one of the world’s oldest cheeses—and it might be poisonous

The “solidified whitish mass” was first found a few years ago in the tomb of an ancient Egyptian mayor, at the Saqqara necropolis near Cairo. The tomb was discovered in 1885, only for its location to be hidden by shifting sands, according to The New York Times. It was rediscovered in 2010.

While archaeologists suspected the substance was food, they were only just able to establish it was cheese. Tests to confirm the sample were carried out by teams from the University of Catania in Italy and the University of Cairo and suggested the substance was a “dairy product,” likely created by mixing sheep or goat and cow milk. The full details of the find were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry in late July.

Tests on the cheese also found traces of the bacteria which causes brucellosis, an infectious disease caused by consuming unpasteurized dairy products. Brucellosis can trigger bouts of fever, headaches, and muscle pain. Given this, the researchers are hopeful that this discovery will contribute to a range of fields beyond archaeology, from “medicine history to the forensic sciences.”

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