Friday, September 03, 2021

The Joy of Six 1024

"Biden labelling Afghanistan 'the graveyard of empires' is, at best, historically illiterate and, at worst, utterly self-serving. It not only negates thousands of years of Afghanistan’s history as a flourishing centre of civilisation, but also - in an act of supreme imperial hubris - shifts the blame for U.S. failures there onto the land and people of Afghanistan themselves." Alexander Hainy-Khaleel takes issue with the Western perceptions of the country.

"As in many other countries, most of the research funding in Norway comes from the government. Thereby, the government funds all stages of research production, but must then pay again to access the research results." Martin Hagve explores the strange economics of academic publishing.

Emma John exposes cricket administrators' regular claims that the game faces ruin and the uses they make of them.

Callum Marius reports moves to reopen York Road tube station to serve the King's Cross Central development.

Jade King traces the development of the artist Graham Sutherland.

"As great as it is to be able to choose whatever you want on Amazon, sometimes what you really want is to have no choice at all." Mark O'Connell makes the case for bad bookshops.

2 comments:

nigel hunter said...

The US licking its wounds over the country. Wiser for NOBODY to interfere with the country but to support it.Would it not be far more sensible to supply its needs as in amini 'Marshall Plan' from after WW2.To swallow pride and trust that the new Taliban has learnt some lessons from its previous mistakes.Only time will tell

SJ said...

It is certainly the case that Afghanistan has now given a bloody nose to the US, the USSR, and the UK (three times), the Sikh Empire, and Persia. However, I think that Alexander is right to say that this probably tells us more about the overconfidence of these empires, and the perennial belief that the secret to securing imperial security lies in expansion with the aim of controlling peripheral threats or to induce other people to attack one's rivals, rather than retrenchment to ensure that things are going well within ones own borders. In any case, the US's views about Afghanistan are surely soon to become irrelevant, it will be China's turn soon enough and all the evidence is that they are just as incapable of learning from the folly of past empires as the US, Russia, Britain, or any other imperial power before them.