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8 Aug, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Why New Zealand, possibly the most self-righteous and certainly the least invadable country on Earth, continues to participate in the darkest parts of US intelligence as a full partner is something I have never understood. nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/afte…
New Zealand made a big fuss about not allowing nukes in the eighties, but stuck with the United States through the shadiest parts of the War on Terror. They event sent troops to Iraq! Why does New Zealand even have troops? How much more ocean do they need to feel secure?
If any countries had learned to say "pass" on sending troops to fight on behalf of foreign empire, it would be Australia and New Zealand. But they love being part of the big boys' club, and sending comically small troop deployments to Vietnam and Iraq has been the price of entry
Not joking about the Vietnam part. In possibly the most pointless military deployment in modern history, New Zealand sent troops there in 1967. Their sole military achievement was stealing medicine from a hospital. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zeala…
New Zealand is the giant panda of countries. Everyone loves it but I just can't stand the place.

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9 Aug
These windows of opportunity keep getting shorter, and the requirements more fantastical, but this Cassandra mode of climate journalism will continue. Emissions got nowhere near zero even at the peak of the covid shutdown. This is a call for absolutely radical, impossible change
I am critical of this mode of covering climate because I find it paralyzing and totalizing. Even a World War II scale transformation in the global economy, in a context of complete international agreement and cooperation, would not be enough to get to zero net emissions.
What we need instead is a climate version of the Serenity Poem. God grant us the courage to electrify the things we can, the serenity to accept emissions from the things we can't, and the wisdom to pursue carbon sequestration and geoengineering projects that make a difference.
Read 16 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
7 Aug
I attended one of these meetings (working on an article that later got spiked), listened to FBI, big tech, and privacy advocates all speak up, and was very impressed with how it was conducted. The issue is genuinely difficult. Alex Stamos's thread here is very much worth reading.
The ability to share images and video worldwide is unfortunately also a driver for child abuse. Every large site that lets people upload photos and video runs into this fact. The current arrangement (involving NCMEC, fingerprinting, and big tech companies) is a fragile tradeoff
The governance problem here is we have six or seven giant companies that can make unilateral decisions with enormous social impact, and no way of influencing those decisions beyond asking nicely for them to come talk to the affected parties before they act.
Read 11 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
6 Aug
I can't believe China had this flag and just gave it up in favor of the current snoozefest. This dragon may be playing with a ball, but he eats "don't tread on me" snakes for breakfast. Image
Five thousand years of history and you stuck five stars on a red rectangle
Russia had a similar downgrade. They replaced this bad boy with factory seconds from the French flag store Image
Read 6 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
6 Aug
There's a long tradition in the US media of treating Chinese government policy as subtle and inscrutable expression of grand national strategy, so it's particularly funny that the CCP put a guy in charge who is simply a Marxist-Leninist fundamentalist. wsj.com/articles/china…
Like, the answers are all spelled out in the official speeches, but they are so indescribably boring to read it creates a kind of armor against foreign analysis. So we see a lot of nugatory head-scratching about what the CCP's chess moves mean for tech, for markets, and so on
Sometimes as a journalist you just have to grow a pair and read the Party texts. If the Korean analysts can stand to do it, you have no excuse.
Read 7 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
4 Aug
If you ignore the ideological content of Jan 6 for a moment and look at the mechanics of the investigation, you get a good lesson in the threat social media poses to public protest. Retroactive forensic analysis in a surveillance society can have a powerful chilling effect
Two traditional aspects of protest are in tension—one is that it's a open display, and the other is that it's ephemeral. A world where police can track participants down years after the fact, maybe even after laws have changed, is a different world from one we've ever lived in
I think about this a lot in the context of Hong Kong, where someone was just put away for six years for displaying a political slogan that was chanted by millions of people over the course of 2019. That conviction wasn't retroactive, but it's just a small further step away.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
3 Aug
Hungarians being anti-immigrant is a great historical joke, since they themselves arrived from God knows where in Siberia and spent a good century inflicting misery across Europe before they got their wiggles out and bunkered down in the most defensible terrain they could find. Image
This is the kind of place you choose to live when you're nomadic horsemen who came out of the east to sack the shit out of Europe and don't want the playbook flipped on you by the next horde. They even hired Germans to build cities in the high passes, for early warning! Image
The other historical joke is that no one benefitted more from multiculturalism, tolerance, and ethnic pluralism than the Magyars, who punched way above their weight in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Read 6 tweets

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