Anglosphere

Article Roundup

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Too busy to blog lately. As a father’s day gift, I am being granted some keyboard time. What follows is the merest surface-scratching on what could easily be ten or more meaty blog posts that will never get written.

I have been following with interest the discussions on Zenpundit, Coming Anarchy, TDAXP and Thomas Barnett’s blog. (I mentioned this “family” of blogs here, and I heartily endorse them all.)

One interesting subject discussed recently is the new book by John Robb, Brave New War, which I mentioned here. (Robb’s personal blog here, and his other blog Global Guerrillas, here.) It is a good, short, bracing read. Despite being too jargon-laden in spots, it is a cold analysis of what we might be facing in the next decade or so, in the form of a global “bazaar of violence” which generates networked and nimble sub-national enemies, jointly operating as terrorists and international criminals-for-profit. I will observe that the last section provides a sketch of what a “network commonwealth”, such as Jim Bennett has written about, based on a strong, networked civil society (“armored suburbs”), would look like in the security dimension. Barnett and Robb are sometimes portrayed as two sides of a yin / yang view of the future, with Barnett the optimist and Robb the pessimist. It is more complicated than that. Both see resilience as the key to success and survival in the years ahead. Robb sees the impact of blowback out of the “Gap” being greater, and the prospect of positive developments there as lower than Barnett does. Robb does see a happy future here in the Core, but only after a “time of troubles” has cleared away the dead of obsolete institutions. Nonetheless there is a fair amount of overlap between them as thinkers.

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So farewell then, Tony Blair

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Tony Blair’s so-called resignation was possibly the most inelegant exit made by any British Prime Minister. By no means the first leader to go before his term was up (of the post war ones Churchill, Eden, Macmillan, Wilson, Thatcher did), his was most the most prolonged and agonizingly dull. By yesterday morning, when the BBC Russian Service called to ask if I would take part in a discussion to be broadcast that afternoon, all I could do was to groan. Hasn’t he gone yet? We are waiting for the announcement, chuckled the producer.

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Genes and Culture

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This is, in part, a review of Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (hereafter SV&C), which I am carelessly posting here without even checking to see whether actual smart people, notably the ones over at Albion’s Seedlings (to say nothing of Gene Expression), have already written it up, mainly because they’ll have done a better job than me. Notice: “in part.” The book doesn’t take long to summarize, so after the genetics I’ll wander off into culture, including but not limited to linguistics.

Warning: spoilers. SV&C is, in a sense, a series of cliffhangers, and I’m going to reveal the ending.

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Stoic Warriors 2 — Where Risk, Pain, and Death Are Ignored

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In an earlier blog review of Stoic Warriors – The Ancient Philosophy Behind the Military Mind, I looked at some of the issues facing the American military as society changes its attitude toward individual suffering.

For several years past, I’ve attended the Banff Mountain Film Festival, which is a spectacular assembly of films on mountain subjects — usually relating to outdoor pursuits, natural environments, and exotic cultures. There, I found the same male appetites for adventure, risk, and camaraderie … with many of the same grim consequences of fear, trauma, loss, and sudden death faced by soldiers. But there was a difference. A big one.

The trailer (below) for a recent year of the Banff film festival runs about five minutes. It does contain advertising but the ads are as interesting as the film excerpts for giving a feel for the festival and, by implication, for the prevailing social ethos.

After the jump, my views on the difference …

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