Pessimistic talk in the West, the argument against confiscating Russian assets, medieval megafloods and de Beauvoir
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Richard Parkes Bonington, A Boat Beached in a Port at Low Tide, 1825.
Richard Parkes Bonington (25 October 1802 – 23 September 1828) was an English Romantic landscape painter, who moved to France at the age of 14 and can also be considered as a French artist, and an intermediary bringing aspects of English style to France. Becoming, after his very early death, one of the most influential British artists of his time, the facility of his style was inspired by the old masters, yet was entirely modern in its application. His landscapes were mostly of coastal scenes, with a low horizon and large sky, showing a brilliant handling of light and atmosphere. He also painted small historical cabinet paintings in a freely-handled version of the troubadour style.
Source: Wikiart
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A warning against “rash” aggression towards Russia
Nicholas Mulder’s first book was well timed, as it turned out — drawing on his PhD research, the young historian wrote The Economic Weapon, a history of the development of sanctions. It was published about a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine produced a wave of Western sanctions against Russia. Mulder has been a sharp, scholarly voice of scepticism. Now he has written an op-ed in the FT:
Continued aid to Ukraine is urgent. Yet as a justification for confiscating Russian state assets, the reprisals argument lacks compellent effect, is being invoked by wrong parties and undermines the rules-based order west claim to defend.
The push for asset confiscation is driven by domestic political difficulties in securing long-term funding for Kyiv. As an instrument of pressure, its utility is slight. Any confiscation of reserves that have been unavailable for almost two years will not compel Putin to end his war now. Moreover, the $227bn current account surplus that Russia recorded in 2022 has replenished a substantial share of that lost in the initial freeze. Expropriation exerts no meaningful additional economic pressure. Economic reprisals are the prerogative of injured states, not of third countries. Belligerents can also expropriate public and private property belonging to their opponents’ state and citizens. Ukraine exercised this right by seizing at least $880mn in Russian-owned property and businesses within its borders in May 2022. Yet Kyiv’s allies are not at war with Russia.
Progress and decline
A certain kind of old-fashioned idealism, the claim that ideas drive material historical developments, dies hard. In moments of material decline, it is common for the worried to thrash around for explanations and blame culture or prevalent ideas for degenerating. Now we have a fine model of that in the FT, where John Burn-Murdoch asks how progress talk in the Anglospheres v. Hispanic world correlated with relative economic growth since 1600 — claiming to find an explosion of optimism in pre-industrial Britain and so reaching for the conclusion that such talk played some role in causing massive technological transformation. Burn-Murdoch is drawing on new research from Almelhem et al, available in full here. Here is the image that sums it up:
The claim is a heavily ideological one. It takes discourse and the cultural environment to be determinative even though the evidence presented supports no such proposition; why is it not likelier that a set of social changes in early modernity, not least the growth of urban trade, settler colonial expansion and merchant capitalism generated massive discursive change and then industrial transformation? The important thing is how this historical argument sustains a claim about the present and the future. Techno-optimists and (to my surprise) Burn-Murdoch worry that the West is not talking brightly enough about the future:
Trump the car-killer?
This is a symbol of our complex and changing politics. Trump refigured the American Right as defenders of a traditional (white, male) working class attacked by woke conspiracy and neoliberalism — and the car is a firm image of the solitary and adventuring and polluting American buccaneer spirit, as Gramsci long ago knew. But now Democrats might have seized back the ground of industry by pioneering state assistance to green our tech, leaving anti-state Republicans in a mess.
“The question any Trump administration will have to face is: do they really want to be the authors of the downfall of the US auto industry?”
Carmakers have warned that tearing up the Inflation Reduction Act will hurt the growth of US electric vehicle sales, after former president Donald Trump’s advisers revealed plans to gut the country’s cornerstone green legislation if he is elected. The IRA is intended to drive EV manufacturing in the US by offering consumer incentives if they buy battery cars where certain parts are sourced from the US or its trading partners. The measure, which is intended to dissuade consumers from buying Chinese technology, has sparked tens of billions of dollars of investment into the US from battery and auto groups. But in November, Trump’s senior campaign officials and advisers told the Financial Times that he was planning to overhaul US policy during a second term. As the growth of EV sales slow, and carmakers pull back on some spending plans, industry executives now fear that without the incentives EV sales will stumble. General Motors chief financial officer Paul Jacobson said the IRA had “tremendous benefit” to the EV market, helping stimulate sales. “We don’t want to end up saying this vehicle program is really good with the IRA, only to have the IRA go away, and now suddenly, the vehicle can’t make money.”
Source: FT
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Israel spooked
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The coming battles over the sea
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Richard Parkes Bonington, The Undercliff, 1828
Medieval disasters
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Feminist essentials
Introduced as the author of the feminist Capital — that is, an ur-text, a moment of revelation — Simone de Beauvoir explains in a rare TV interview (in French) what she meant by the claim that nobody is “born a woman”:
Armies scared of art
German Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke the Elder barred his soldiers from viewing Vereshchagin’s Berlin exhibition in 1890, out of frustration and concern that Vereshchagin’s monumental Apotheosis of War might instill confusion in the newly unified German military.
The Apotheosis of War, the famous painting of piled skulls on a barren field and notorious confuser of German generals, was painted in the aftermath of the 1868 siege of Samarkand, one of countless bloody battles during the two-year long Russian campaign to occupy the region of Bukhara in Central Asia. Based on accounts of an ancient Mongol army piling the skulls of its vanquished enemies outside of conquered cities as a warning against resistance to Mongol occupation, history repeated with the equally violent Russian occupation. Tongue-in-cheek, Vereshchagin dedicated his painting "to all great conquerors, past, present and to come.” Today, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow displays Apotheosis,
Source: Nicole Dean, Strategy Bridge
How many million-dollar cars are there in the world?
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Richard Parkes Bonington, Paris, Quai du Louvre, 1828