Often referred to as the North Korea of Central Asia, Turkmenistan is simply a desert of contradictions. A nation where you memorize poems to get your driver's license, where the president raps on TV, and where many Guinness world records are broken; but more importantly a nation of starving people on top of the 4th largest gas reserves in the world. We go deeper into this reclusive society and talk about their abandonment of Moscow and their newfound masters in Beijing, as well as how this country tries its best to stay neutral in a very dangerous geopolitical neighborhood. Guests this week are Peter Leonard (Eurasianet) Naz Nazar (Radio Free Europe) Alexander Cooley (Harriman Institute).
12 June 2020
UnHerd: Will Macron dump his Prime Minister?
The constitution and conventions of the French Fifth Republic provide for a double-headed, or chauffeur-driven, government. The president is in power but not at the wheel; the prime minister runs the country day-to-day. The president controls foreign and defence policy and sets the course for the nation. In Charles de Gaulle’s conception of things, it was the prime minister’s job to deal with “events, dear boy,” and become unpopular. The president should remain aloof, monarchical and — in theory — adored by his people. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, in becoming the object of blame for the death of a semi-wild cat, was doing more or less what Le Général had intended. [...]
The age of Facebook and Twitter, the decay of the traditional media, and the decline of deference, has made the notion of wholesale power without detailed responsibility unsustainable. The French people now take the view that they elect a president to run the country — not just to represent and guide the nation. If things go wrong, even if they do not go very wrong, it is the president in the Elysée Palace that they blame; they tend to be forgiving, or indifferent, towards the man (there has only once been a woman) in the Palais Matignon, the home and office of the prime minister. [...]
There have been opinion polls showing prime ministers to be more popular than presidents in the past — but an 11 to 13 point gap is exceptional. Macron has received the blame for what has gone wrong in France’s response to the Covid crisis, even though France has got many things right. Philippe, who has been in day-to-day control and was personally responsible for at least one bad decision, has prospered in popular opinion. He is seen as a likeable man and a safe pair of hands. [...]
Meanwhile Philippe made a series of very competent appearances at press conferences and on the TV news, painstakingly explaining the science and the logistics of the Covid crisis. Overall, France has coped better than most similar countries but, unlike Germany, failed to test widely and rapidly. The government initially misled the nation on the reasons for this failure. Philippe and his ministers made more mis-statements than Macron, but Philippe has attracted less of the blame.
Aeon: Money and modern life
Time is no longer governed by the seasons or celestial bodies, but is abstracted and measured. The city also compresses space, social and geographical. Diverse classes, strata, cultures, linguistic groups and vocations are brought into close proximity. This is why, as Simmel observed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached against the city bitterly: it threatened to subsume his noble individualism into a mass.
While Simmel was a deep reader of Nietzsche and shared his romantic attraction to ‘an endless succession of contrasts’, he took an urbane distance from the latter’s aristocratic radicalism. Instead of seeking extremes in the mountains of Sils Maria, Simmel found them in the metropolitan crowd, where one can feel the uniquely modern loneliness of passing a thousand faces without recognising a friend. Nietzsche’s peaks and valleys produced noble heights and abject depths. Simmel’s metropolis instead cultivated blasé citizens who, afraid of being subsumed, distinguish themselves with externally cool indifference. [...]
Instead, he concluded that ‘truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’. Simmel saw that the individual’s quest for truth would inevitably fail, revealing itself to be as perniciously circular as the movement of money. Thus, relativism – a doctrine of constant flux – was to be the only viable absolute. Simmel presented this as liberating: ‘the expropriator will now be expropriated, as Marx says of a process that is similar in form – and nothing remains but the relativistic dissolution of things into relations and processes.’ But there is also an element of tragedy here: to love truth is to love something we feel duty-bound to seek, even though it remains always out of reach. Like Herman Hesse’s protagonist in Steppenwolf (1927), Simmel chased an elusive absolute.
UnHerd: America is the greatest story ever told
Why, if people in Britain feel that they have a moral responsibility to march against Donald Trump, are they not also breaking the lockdown to protest the crushing of liberty in Hong Kong — a city that was, unlike America, a British colony as recently as 1997? Why, when the death of a black man in Minneapolis can provoke such anguish among minorities here, has the detention of a million Muslims in Xinjiang — and a systematic attempt by the Chinese government at cultural genocide — failed to provoke a matching storm? [...]
Britain has been in hock now to American narratives for at least a century. Sharing as we do a common language with Hollywood, we have always been readier than other nations to be seduced by its mythologies. Today, in an era of computer games and box sets, these mythologies have become more potent, more influential than ever. If it is true, as Bruno Maçães has brilliantly argued, that life in the United States today “continuously emphasises its own artificiality in a way that reminds participants that, deep down, they are experiencing a story”, then the challenge of disentangling fiction from reality becomes all the more difficult. The racist cop, the innocent victim, the violence-shadowed city: these are stories that we experience simultaneously as reports on the news and as series on Netflix. [...]
Steeped in the language of intersectionality and postcolonial studies though the protests may be, the slogans derive ultimately from a much more venerable source. A dread of damnation, a yearning to be gathered into the ranks of the elect, a desperation to be cleansed of original sin, had long provided the surest and most fertile seedbed for the ideals of the American people. Repeatedly, over the course of their history, preachers had sought to awaken them to a sense of their guilt, and to offer them salvation. Now, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, there are summons to a similar awakening.
UnHerd: Our demeaning obsession with Madeleine McCann
And so, she was punished. Seventeen thousand people signed a petition requesting that Leicester Social Services investigate why the children were left alone; did they want her to lose her remaining children? Did they, in the thrill of mystery, forget that someone else — and not she — had taken the child? No, it was never condolence. It was a public expiation of shared fears, and a judgement of the parents. People read about Madeleine McCann for a jolt of terror, and to feel comforted. Because the children we love are here, and she is not. Our children are not safer because we judge Kate and Gerry McCann. It just feels that way. [...]
If the suffering of little children interests people, I wish they would also read child poverty statistics. I wish that they would campaign, too, to reverse them, and pray for the return of all lost children. But that is too much to hope for. Reading about Madeleine McCann is easy; caring about children you have not been forced into imagined intimacy with by media cynicism and parental despair is something harder.
CNN: Satellite images of Wuhan may suggest coronavirus was spreading as early as August
The study, which has not yet been peer-viewed, found a significantly higher number of cars in parking lots at five Wuhan hospitals in the late summer and fall of 2019 compared to a year earlier; and an uptick in searches of keywords associated with an infectious disease on China's Baidu search engine.
The reseachers note they can't directly link the traffic volume to the virus; even if there was an increase in traffic to hospitals, it doesn't mean a new virus was the cause. There has been no other evidence to show the virus was circulating in China in the late summer. [...]
Using images from October 2018, the researchers counted 171 cars in the parking lots at one of Wuhan's largest hospitals, Tianyou Hospital. Satellite data a year later showed 285 vehicles in the same lots, an increase of 67%, and as much as a 90% increase in traffic during the same time period at other Wuhan hospitals. [...]
"The data is actually especially compelling because we saw increases in people searching for gastrointestinal disease -- diarrhea -- which were increasing at a level that we hadn't seen at all, historically, and we now know now that gastrointestinal symptoms are a really important marker for Covid," he added. "A huge percentage of people that actually end up testing positive in Wuhan actually had presented symptoms of diarrhea."
Politico: Swedish prosecutor says local man killed Prime Minister Olof Palme
The prosecutor leading the investigation, Krister Petersson, told a news conference he was satisfied Engström, who died in 2000 and was long regarded as a mere witness to the killing, was in fact the murderer. Petersson said the investigation would now be closed, despite Engström’s death meaning the accusation can never be tested in court. [...]
He identified a raft of inconsistencies in Engström’s testimony to police at the time of the murder, which raised suspicions that rather than trying to help efforts to save Palme’s life after the shooting, as he had claimed, he had in fact carried out the killing and fled before using information from the media to create an alibi. [...]
While there appear to have been some focus by police on Engström early in the case, he was soon discounted as interest shifted to other suspects, including a group of members of the Kurdish group the PKK, and agents for the South African secret service.
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