Weekly Grounding #41
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
“America (Still) Has No Industrial Policy”
Financial Times columnist Rana Faroohar writes that “At an intellectual level, it’s quite clear that there’s a big pendulum shift happening on the political left in America, and to a certain extent on the right, as well. Both have embraced tariffs, subsidies and other government interventions. The state will certainly be more dominant no matter who wins the US presidential election in November.” Despite this significant shift in discourse about the economy, Faroohar argues that “Rumours of industrial policy in America have been greatly exaggerated.” She continues: “America will still need to think more systemically, and strategically, about the challenges of the moment. When Europeans in particular criticise America’s move towards industrial policy, they should remember that the US is starting from ground zero. This is the land of privatised healthcare, gated communities, no labour representatives in the boardroom and very little sense of collectivism. Perhaps a bit more joined up thinking about where the country is going, and how to get there, would be good not just for America, but for the world.”
“The Rough Years That Turned Gen Z Into America’s Most Disillusioned Voters”
The Wall Street Journal interviews a range of Gen Z voters, who express more pessimism about the direction of the country and politicians than any other living generation before them. The Journal reports: “Young adults in Generation Z—those born in 1997 or after—have emerged from the pandemic feeling more disillusioned than any living generation before them, according to long-running surveys and interviews with dozens of young people around the country. They worry they’ll never make enough money to attain the security previous generations have achieved, citing their delayed launch into adulthood, an impenetrable housing market and loads of student debt.” 18-25 year olds have less confidence in almost all major American institutions than other generations when they were the same age:
“Russia’s Demonization Undermines Western Universalism”
In this extended geopolitical analysis for Asia Times, Henry Hopwood-Phillips of offers wide-ranging commentary on Russia and Ukraine after two years of war: “Russia’s threat perceptions may have been exaggerated yet what matters in diplomacy is how a protagonist sees the world and not how the West would like them to see it. Key Western players knew that Ukrainian entry into NATO – articulated as a goal in the 2019 constitutional amendment – would be the thickest of red lines for Moscow, a direct challenge to its interests, yet it has remained willing to flex down to the very last Ukrainian…In hindsight, the Cold War drummed an epistemic humility into the West that has long since evaporated.”
Hopwood-Phillips’ broader commentary on the roots of the Ukraine War is some of the most insightful I’ve read: “At the heart of the Ukrainian conflict is a tension over how politics is conceived. The Russians subscribe to an ancient order in which the res publica is born through a people’s readiness to kill or die on its behalf. The act of taking lives or giving them – hence the importance of sacrifice in most early-stage states – identifies a community: the people and its myths are to an extent the chicken and egg of sovereignty. At root, it openly relies on violence as a coercive tool. The West switched from this order towards a more peaceful one – which depends on far less violent forms of coercion – in the postwar period, eccentrically arguing that conventional conceptions of power were obsolete after devastation in two world wars and being partitioned in the subsequent conflict. It did so by exchanging the explicit strictures of the Christian faith for its soft patterning in the likes of Kant’s ‘Weltburgerbund’ and Habermas’ call for a cosmopolitan order which established a regime of ‘global governance without a world government’ – switches in register that made Western norms easier to export without inviting charges of imperialism. Rather than indulge in judgment on which framework is more true or morally laudable, it is worth highlighting that the West loses the moral high ground if it proves more willing to risk nuclear war than establish a framework that acknowledges the validity of concerns that stem from different political systems.”
“Taiwan Confirms US Troops on Front-Line Islands Near China”
In case American efforts to “flex down to the very last Ukrainian” are not enough, Newsweek reports that the United States has now sent troops to an island right off the shore of mainland China: “U.S. Army Green Berets from the 1st Special Forces Group are now permanently stationed at a pair of bases of the 101st Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, a Taiwanese army special operations force, according to Taiwan's United Daily News (UDN). These instructors were sent to the outlying island counties of Penghu and Kinmen. At its closest point, Kinmen is just barely over a mile from Chinese shores.”
“An American Who Has Helped Clear 815,000 Bombs From Vietnam”
The ease with which the Biden administration has fueled war in Ukraine and Gaza (in addition to dangerous escalations in the Taiwan Strait) is not just about the tragedy of the present and near future. This article at The New York Times chronicles the long-lasting horrors of war in Vietnam, where unexploded bombs continue to kill and maim Vietnamese people to this day. Fortunately, through the work of people like Chuck Searcy, the man profiled in this story, the threat has been reduced, but not eliminated.
“Altogether, Mr. Searcy said, almost eight million tons of ordnance was dropped on Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. Bombs that failed to detonate became de facto land mines, which the Vietnamese government estimates have caused 100,000 deaths and injuries since the war’s end.” His description of the American bombing campaign during the 1968 battle of Khe Sanh sounds eerily similar to the current Israeli assault on Gaza: “It was kind of pointless,” he said. “They just bombed and bombed and bombed until there were no targets left. That made no sense.”
Notably, Searcy states that “It is not guilt” that drives him to clear bombs in Vietnam. “Rather, it’s a sense of responsibility to try to remedy the damage his country has caused.”
“Is It Moral to Lock Writing Behind Paywalls?”
addresses the question of paywalls for online writing at : “I find books to be beautiful objects, almost sacred. Definitely not crass or material. And yet every book is paywall. In fact, that’s what a bookstore is—a bunch of physical paywalls laid out on the shelf for you. You have to judge if it’s worth unlocking the content based on the vibes of the cover, your knowledge of the author, a bookseller’s recommendation, or whatever strange alchemy makes a reader think this is the one.”Hoel continues: “And the vast majority of people everywhere don’t think bookstores are morally bad. No one protests them, no one sends the owners irate notes. Personally, I think bookstores are morally good, almost a miracle—people are willing to pay for beauty, for information. Therefore, for the exact same reason everyone seems to just accept the existence of bookstores, I think it’s totally fine for Substacks to paywall their content. While the perception is that by paywalling Substack authors get their hands dirtied by capitalism, it’s more like if an author gave away half their books for free and then sold the other half. This setup, as ungainly and frustrating as it occasionally is, equates to a reduction of paywalling by writers! The only real difference is that traditionally published authors get to have the illusion of clean hands.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.