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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4218 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

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So, what are you reading?

Still on Hurewitz' The Struggle for Palestine. Slow progress. The topic of education has stuck in my mind. Jews educated young Zionists in schools on the Continent, while Arab Palestinians couldn't help but be influenced by their local peers.

Zurayk made an interesting comment in his book The Meaning of the Disaster that Jews spent their youths being influenced by all kinds of "isms." If we pare down his evident outgroup prejudice (he includes Naziism), there was a point being made there. From an Arab point of view, the Jews were importing a great deal of the rest of the world's thought. But taken literally, it seems that the Arabs lacked the desire to empathize because they were busy berating their own people in a nationalist educational program.

Meanwhile, the "national home" of the Jews became a done deal, and because of the pressure for emigration from Europe and its underlying reasons, Arab maximalist goals, rightly or wrongly, moved further and further away from their grasp.

Last night I finally finished Bones and All. Highly recommend. I didn't like it quite as much as the film adaptation, but it's still a very impressive novel. Sad, tender, nauseating, nightmarish in almost equal measure.

Johannes Roland Raguel Tollkühn's Der König Kommt Heim.

Just kidding, I'm reading an English Kindle version, not my old German paperbacks. They're nice though, all green and avian, sitting on my shelf: https://amzn.eu/d/ht3mQPY

Still kinda comfy, even as the world is ending in the story, and everyone knows it. The Men of Gondor with years of preparation to fight their last stand, Theoden aiming to uphold his oath and at least go down fighting, the Hobbits well out of their depth but pushing on in the knowledge that there's no home to return to when the good guys lose. Eowyn likewise, riding to battle because dammit she's not going to wait at home until the bad guys come to burn it down. There's no real hope at this point, everyone seems committed to fight because that's the right thing to do, not necessarily because there's any hope for victory.

Nice. Much nicer than in the movies.

Just reread Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, set in a weird sci-fi alt history seen through the lens of adolescent relationship drama. Also a very hard hitting examination of mortality. But goddamn if Ruth isn't a bitch.

My girlfriend gave me this book earlier this year and I devoured it in two days. I was literally stepping away from my desk in work for ten minutes at a time because I couldn't wait to see what happened next.

In The Distance by Hernan Diaz, mostly as a primer of his writing style before attempting Trust. The book follows a Swedish man crossing the United States to find his brother in New York during the Gold Rush.

I'm about to start Pride and Prejudice, but my partner has told me that Austen was more of a pioneer than a great writer. After Little Women I'm hoping for something of similar quality, which absolutely blew me away. It was perhaps the best book I've ever read.

Anyway, curious if folks here have good classical novel recommendations they love?

Austen is actually a great writer, gender and pioneering aside. I think if you are interested in the period and enjoy (or feel like you might enjoy) the subject matter it’s unlikely you won’t enjoy Pride and Prejudice. It’s kind of like the best of Dickens (either Copperfield or Bleak House) in that you might dislike it for stylistic or genre reasons, but probably won’t dislike it because of its age or ‘because it’s famous’.

Austen is actually pretty enjoyable, I feel. I had a great time reading Mansfield Park, it never felt like a slog to me.

I could talk about 19th-century fiction all day. One book that I think maybe doesn't get enough love these days would be The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.

Bless me, I have finished The Count of Monte Cristo. I really admire the writing and vocabulary of Dumas (and, moreover, the anonymous translator), but I cannot in good conscience recommend this book. The imprisonment, escape, and discovery of the treasure are terrific, but the remaining 600 pages, comprised of palace intrigue, upper class French political and financial discussions, page-long descriptions of gardens, and all the rest make for a bit of a slog. I understand now why there are so many abridged versions of this book. I do like how the book ends, and I do like Dumas last sentence. He specifies two words that all humans should live their life by: Wait and Hope. Interesting bit of wisdom from the French master.

So. I am happy to be moving on. I have a handful of books that have been in my backlog. I plan to start with Dreamland which is a chronicle of the opioid epidemic. The opioid epidemic is a bit played out in the sense of literature and documentaries (it reminds me of the flood of books and movies about the Great Recession), but I always enjoy a good book about rich aristocrats taking advantage of the poor and vulnerable. Hoping it goes a bit faster than Monte Cristo!

I'd really enjoyed Monte Cristo when I read it (unabridged) a few years ago, and didn't find it a slog. I do agree that the first couple hundred pages go quicker than later on, but there's always enough to stay interesting in my experience.

The fact that Dumas was able to make 500 pages of conversation semi-interesting is indeed a feat. I just found myself unable to read long chunks at a time. I would fall asleep.

The anime adaptation Gankutsuou played a neat trick - they began with the palace intrigue, set the whole thing from the naif Albert de Morcerf's point of view with the Count as a mysterious but apparently benevolent figure, and then reveal the Count's backstory and goals bit by bit. It adds a LOT more suspense.

I can also strongly recommend gankutsuou, though I imagine it's even better for someone with litte or no knowledge of the original. But I'm also a sucker for unusual artstyles in anime.

It's funny - I think of that garden often and it even shows up in my dreams. I don't remember much of the plot of that section of the book, but I made quite a mental picture of that garden!

Is the book any good? I read some about the Arab Israeli conflict before but I am always annoyed how every author skirts around the central fact of the entire conflict: Jews are extremely competent again and again while Arabs are extraordinarily incompetent. It’s disturbing how every book casually takes it for granted that one idf tank battalion is worth about 3 Syrian battalions. I would love to read something that doesn’t try to blindside me to this reality

I read a fair bit of Why Arabs Lose Wars (the full book, not the forum post). What I recall is that Arab logistics were OK, morale was fairly high (consider all the Iraqis who fought hard even in 2003, even when it was clear how outmatched they were) but the officer corps were just not that good at leading, they weren't really professional or coordinated. They only wanted to send good news around, so commanders ended up with a dangerously unreal view of the situation. Communication was poor all around, Israelis could break through the gaps between Arab formations. It said that in '67 the Syrians decided to join the war because the Egyptians said they were massacring the Israelis, despite the opposite being true. In '73 the Egpytians did rather well but they didn't react quickly enough to the Israelis crossing behind them onto the West Bank, nobody was willing to admit they messed up until it was too late.

I think it's primarily an institutional issue rather than HBD: Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda are highly proficient despite lacking resources. Israel didn't do so well in 2006 and they certainly haven't covered themselves in glory in the current conflict.

I think cultural issues are more important in the middle eastern militaries over HBD/intelligence. There is a real inability for people to tell their superiors bad news or take personal initiative to address a problem (in the way that is encouraged in many western militaries). Also there is a lack of NCO corps that performs an important function in speaking truth to power. Also nepotism in commissioning or advancing officers.

NCO's were the best way of communicating accurate information up to the powers that be from the line level. You can't cut that out without a major impact on the effectiveness of an army.

This issue isn't purely within the military. You can see it within 'security' officers and also servile front line service staff in the middle east.

I've never been there, but I'm just running my mouth about second hand things I've heard about.

I understand the CW angle for that, but I almost want to believe it’s the norm for military history. Consider this devil’s advocate:

War is supposed to be one-sided. Forget materiel advantage—from a morale standpoint, it’s much easier to get people to the front if they expect to kill rather than be killed. Naturally, states want to stack up as many advantages as possible. Use drones, use fire, lie in wait, level the city. The less risk to your own humans, the better. A small advantage in technology, intel, or manpower can scale very fast.

But war isn’t one-sided. Or rather, if something is as one-sided as that one side would like, it tends to be fast and efficient enough that people are still debating whether it was a “special operation” or a “peacekeeping mission.” When it’s not, one of two things* has gone wrong. Either one of the parties has bad information, or the defenders had nowhere to go.

In other words, the default assumption for military conflicts should be a complete blitz like the six-day war. A properly prepared division is going to roll over a mediocre or poor one because combat is exponential in nature. Given that the IDF won the first fight, historians probably shouldn’t be surprised that they held the initiative through the 60s.

* Yeah, this really isn’t exhaustive. At the very least I’d include a category where everyone misjudged, including the people dying on the ground. When the state capacity for violence outruns the individual awareness of that risk, you get WWI trenches.

That central fact is kind of accepted by everyone. The ‘reasons’ are somewhat interesting but are beyond a general historical analysis; ultimately it’s some combination of HBD, vastly superior Israeli technology (due to downstream consequences of HBD including wealthy and influential diaspora) and structural weaknesses in modern Arab armies as noted by very many military analysts, international observers and so on over the last 60 years (eg this very famous piece).

Since the latter topic has been done to death (and is in any case less true today when more zealous militant groups in the region, and to a limited extent even the SAA have actually partially overcome some of those deficiencies) and the former topic is the big taboo (and the data was less available during most of Hurewitz’ career), that part of the analysis is less widely available. But I don’t think it’s a great mystery.

I'm not far enough to tell. It's one of the earliest books on the topic, and seems to have a solid reputation for insight and even-handedness. It's a good read so far, looks heavy on politics. From the introduction:

This book was first intended to be merely a study of the impact of World War II on Arab and Jewish politics in Palestine. But it soon became apparent that political developments in Palestine between 1939 and 1945 were understandable only in relation to the earlier history of the mandate, particularly to the period from 1936 on. Moreover, the political trends in the local Arab and Jewish communities had begun by that time to converge with world-wide currents. This book, then, turned out to be an analysis not only of Arab and Jewish politics in Palestine, but of political repercussions in the Arab and Jewish worlds, their growing involvement in Big-Power politics, and the consequent progressive breakdown of the Palestine Mandate. This is, therefore, a study of the Palestine problem since 1936 against the background of a world distracted by the ordeals of an approaching war, the war itself, and the fumbling for peace.

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