The West's Withdrawal From Afghanistan Is A Shameful Betrayal And An Act Of Catastrophic Self-Harm

As Western troops withdraw from Afghanistan, follwing the lead of US President Biden, the country is on the verge of falling back under the control of the Taliban. Biden's decision, a rare instance of him maintaining the policy of his Republican predecessor, Donald Trump, appears popular among the American populace. The 2001 War In Afghanistan, which has seen a significant, if dimishing, presence of US and international troops in the country and vast expense poured into what has often appeared a black hole of corruption and directionless nation-building initiatives, has been a source of understandable frustration and embarrassment for the American people in particular at the myriad failures of reactionary post-9/11 policy.

Biden perhaps views the US withdrawal as a win-win. He can present himself as making a decisive, popular move while severing the sunk cost fallacy that the American presence in Afghanistan appears to be. Biden, for better or worse depending on your politics, is determined to build a new America. Departing Afghanistan, in all but a token presence, can be presented as his administration taking the nation forward, freed from its past mistakes. The decision to withdraw the troops by 9/11 is one of those garish pieces of useless symbolism which plays well in the part of the American psyche so constructed around sloganeered storytelling. Unfortunately, in common with so many decisions made since the West invaded Afghanistan two decades ago, a decision based on short-termist illusions of success, seemingly legitimised by domestic popularity, is likely to have destructive consequences not only for the people of Afghanistan, but the stability and moral authority of the West as well.

The Difference Between Condemning Booing And Condemning The Right To Boo

England's national football team this weekend returned from their campaign in the Euros, having fallen in characteristic fashion to a penalty shoot-out. Unfortunately, the ugly streak of national team support which previously burnt an effigy of David Beckham for his getting sent off in the 1998 World Cup reappared through racist abuse directed at the black players who missed England's penalties, and the defacing a mural of Marcus Rashford in Manchester. This prompted the UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to condemn the abuse, only for Tyrone Mings, an England player, to accuse her of having stoked such abuse through her prior position of criticising the players' kick-off stance of kneeling against racism, and her stated belief that it was the fans' right to decide whether to boo it themselves.

As cynical as Patel and this UK government in general are, in that specific instance she was correct that fans are as entitled to boo players making a statement as players were to make that statement in the first place. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the message or the medium in either direction, it should be self-evident that allowing one group of people (players, staff) to communicate their beliefs while denying that right to another group (fans) - particularly when, for the national team, those players are supposed to represent the nation as a whole - is wrong. If the right to boo should have been denied, and possibly punished, then those who cheered ought to have been subject to the same treatment. If the players had decided to stand behind a message that 'All Lives Matter', would the fans have been wrong to boo that as well?

Adam Curtis' Nostalgia For Radicalism Paints A Bleak Picture Of A World Changing For The Better

Adam Curtis released his latest documentary series, 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head', last week. All six episodes are currently available for UK viewers to watch on the BBC's iPlayer, while worldwide viewers can watch it here. As one might expect from Curtis, it is an expertly made visual collage with a superlative soundtrack, telling the stories of some fascinating figures largely forgotten to history, which Curtis ties together as part of his overall mission statement. This time, he is telling an 'emotional history' of how Western society embraced individualism to compensate for how the radicals of the past failed the change the world for the better, eventually leading to the rise of conspiracy theories and populism.

If that sounds familiar to Curtis' fans, it should: the documentary acts as something of a greatest hits of his previous concerns, ending up feeling almost as much of a retreat into Curtis' own history as that of the world. His signature phrases, '...And then something strange happened' and 'So they went back, into the passed' are trotted out in key moments much as how Marvel deploys beloved characters at unexpected moments for maximum fan excitement. It's as exciting, electric and eclectic as the best of his work to date. But then something strange happened: in going back, into his past, Curtis became infected with the very nostalgia-driven nihilism he attributed to others. In repeating his familiar refrains about our failures to improve the world, he missed how the world has been steadily improving in a different way to how he was expecting.

Donald Trump's Twitter Ban Is A Justified Action Which Sets A Terrible Precedent

Donald Trump's incitement of an attack on the Capitol in Washington DC represented the tipping point for social media companies to do what it felt as though they had been equivocating over for a long time and banned the outgoing President of the United States from communicating on their platforms. That it has taken them so long to do so demonstrates the seriousness of the action taken: his missives have been marked and limited, but never fully banned until now.

Many will say that it was a long time coming and few outside the President's most ardent cadre would deny that he has used the platforms as a means of spreading misinformation in the most cynical, self-serving way. There are many reasons to deny Trump access to such platforms, especially after his (and Rudy Giuliani's) direct role in inciting a mob to storm the heart of American democracy. In the here and now, it is an understandable decision to take. In the bigger picture, it sets a potentially catastrophic precedent in allowing private companies free reign to decide which voices to permit or shut down based on nothing more than their subjective criteria.

Positive/Negative - Two Interpretations Of Freedom Which Divide The Political Left And Right

In 1958, philosopher Isaiah Berlin delivered to the University of Oxford a lecture entitled 'Two Concepts Of Liberty'. In this lecture, he laid out two competing interpretations of the concept of liberty. Negative liberty, most easily remembered as 'freedom from', is defined by the absence of obstacles to achieve your desires, short of those desires conflicting with the freedom of others. Positive liberty, most easily remembered as 'freedom to', is defined by the ability to act in such a way as to become the best version of yourself.

Though the distance between these definitions appears small, borderline intangible, in general terms, the nuances differentiating them is as clear an example as there has ever been of the difference in outlook between those on the right of politics and those on the left.

Do We Really Want To Go Back To Normal?

If 2020 can be summed up in a question, that question would probably be: 'When can we get back to normal?' The problem is that 'normal' as is often imagined hasn't existed in a long time, if ever. The internet likes to declare the present year the worst ever and the COVID-19 pandemic alone has provided plenty of ammunition for that argument. The problem is that the issues of today make it easy to forget the issues of yesterday.

As devastating as the pandemic has been, it either subsumed or replaced much of what was complained about in 2019. To name but a few: the creeping ascendancy of the far-right in politics and far-left in culture; governmental incompetence in the UK and US; China using an extradition bill to crush the autonomy of Hong Kong; mass shootings in New Zealand and the United States, and a massacre of protesters in Khartoum. Just as every US election is declared the most important in US history (hint: it never is), so too does the freshness of recent disasters and controversies make it easy to convince ourselves that the present year is the worst ever and to long for a state of normality which exists only in our minds and disguises a refusal to seriously engage with the issues of the present.

James Bond's COVID-19 Delay Suggests It Could Be Cinema's Time To Die

James Bond has pulled a Lionel Hutz. With cinemas struggling to get customers through their doors on account of the COVID-19 crisis, the theatrical exhibition industry's hopes of survival were resting on the promise of a new Bond film to get them through a potentially fatal winter. The name, No Time To Die, was almost symbolic: cinemas would survive and James Bond would get them through it. With the movie having already been delayed numerous times since its original release date was set for October 2019, the marketing campaign kicked off again with the release of a new trailer, soundtrack listing, partner promotions... only for another delay to be swiftly announced, this time to April 2021.

It seems that Bond's promise to cinemas was not 'No Time To Die', but 'No, Time To Die!'

Donald Trump Proves True The Old Vulcan Proverb

According to the venerable Ambassador Spock, there's an old Vulcan proverb about the least suitable people succeeding where more traditional candidates failed: 'Only Nixon could go to China'. In the movie, Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country, Spock is referring to his decision that the man to escort the Klingon Chancellor to Earth to negotiate a peace treaty should be Jim Kirk, who has a profound hatred of the Klingons following the murder of his son. Spock knows that if the peace is to succeed, enmity must be overcome on both sides. Kirk is a legendary figure at Starfleet, having saved the Earth countless times over his long career. Spock is gambling that if Kirk can rise above his prejudice, it will be a powerful symbol for others to follow.

The Earth equivalent of the Vulcan proverb operates on a similar principle. President Richard Nixon's image among his supporters was so strong that nobody but he could have made a diplomatic visit to meet Chairman Mao in the People's Republic of China in 1972 without being damaged by it. Nixon's visit ended a twenty-five year communications shutdown between the two countries, leading to full diplomatic relations being opened seven years later. By any rational measure, the staunch anti-communist Nixon was a wildly unlikely candidate to achieve this breakthrough. Ironically, that such a man would even try is what gave his efforts credibility. Contrary to his detractors, Donald Trump's success in brokering an historic peace deal between Israel, the UAE and Bahrain shows him operating from a similar position.

Democrats Repeat Familiar Mistakes With Their Donald Trump Obsession

The US Democratic Party National Convention has been taking place over the past few days and anyone hoping for proof of the party having learnt from the mistakes of 2016 must be sorely disappointed. As the country struggles to contain the spread of COVID-19, the damage of millions of job losses and riots on the streets of several of their major cities, the stage was poised for the Democrats to offer a vision of a more compassionate future and a roadmap for bringing the hardships of 2020 to an end.

Instead, the Convention has eschewed substance and focused on almost all its time on attacking President Trump. Trump's handling of the COVID-19 outbreak has been disastrous, not to mention the myriad other failings of his Presidency, but at a time when the most important country in the world needs clarity and leadership above all else, the Democrats are continuing to indulge their failed strategy of making relentless personal attacks against the sitting President, focusing their 2020 campaign on getting him out of office rather than showing why they deserve to be there.

The Ideology Pandemic

There are two major world events happening right now which require opposing action from those involved to achieve their goals. The COVID-19 pandemic requires people to self-isolate and stay at home in order to prevent the virus from spreading. The Black Lives Matter protests demand people pack together on the streets in opposition to the continued existence of racism in Western societies.

Though the actions demanded by each event are in direct conflict with other, the spread of COVID-19 has highlighted how similarly viruses and ideologies propagate in our hyper-connected, politically polarised society. In Christopher Nolan's film, Inception, the protagonist, Cobb, is charged with entering a target's mind and implanting an idea in order to affect behavioural change in the real world. In order to make the idea stick, they dig deep into their target's subconscious for a point of personal vulnerability where, upon awakening, the target cannot dismiss the idea as a passing thought because it has been made intrinsic to his sense of self.

Vandalism, Violence And The Ethical Lines Of Protesting

Just as looting and arson have marred ongoing protests in the US by Black Lives Matter, following the killing by police of George Floyd, a similar story unfurled in anti-racism protests in the UK over the weekend. In London, 49 police officers were injured (numbers for protester injuries have not been forthcoming so far), including the hospitalisation of a policewoman after her horse was attacked, and a statue of Winston Churchill was defaced with accusations of racism less than a month after VE Day. In Bristol, a statue of the slave trader and city benefactor, Edward Colston, was pulled down and thrown in the River Avon.

As usual, reaction to the protests has been split down ideological lines. The right has condemned the violence, with UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, describing the vandals as 'thugs' who would 'face justice'. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, directly condemned the tearing down of the Colston statue as a criminal act. The left has been more equivocal, with the Guardian focusing on the protest's anti-racist message and largely ignoring the defacement of the Churchill statue in their extensive reporting. Meanwhile, the BBC has been criticised for downplaying the violence and cropping a protestor wielding a weapon out of photos. Whatever one's stance on the issue, an important question remains unanswered: is there a point at which violence and vandalism become ethically acceptable?

The Dominic Cummings Controversy Shows The Dangers Of An Ideologically Divided Media

In the UK, the recent news cycle has been dominated by controversy surrounding Dominic Cummings, a key aide to the government accused of breaking the lockdown rules he was part of implementing. Although the government has sought to draw a line under the affair, Cummings' refusal to apologise or resign for his actions has kept the story front and centre of every major British media outlet.

The story has attracted such public ire and his explanation raised enough questions that Cummings should take responsibility and resign, even if (from his point-of-view) only to preserve public faith in the government at an unstable time. In the bigger picture, though, the interest in the Cummings affair is grossly disproportionate to its real-world importance: he isn't the first member of the British body politic to ignore lockdown rules and even has a better (if still questionable) justification than others. The biggest concern raised by this controversy has been the press allowing ideological divisions to override their ethical responsibility to cover the world-changing stories happening elsewhere.

When Hypocrisy Is Necessary In Politics And The Law

A Twitter spat flared up last night over comments made by a  conservative US commentator, Ben Shapiro, in a clip from an interview with Dave Rubin. The comments in question centred around Shapiro raising the point that when it comes to assessing the impact and response of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a difference between the death of a young person and an elderly one.

I haven't seen the entire interview, nor do I plan to - neither Rubin nor Shapiro are commentators I am a fan of - so will confine myself to the short clip and not address any wider points Shapiro might have been making. Although Twitter predictably reacted as though Shapiro had suggested the elderly be abandoned to die, his point was that when deciding how much of the economy and people's long-term quality-of-life to sacrifice in preventing COVID-19 deaths, age has to be part of the calculation. His point is adjacent to arguments I made in an article from earlier this month weighing up the costs of sacrificing our freedom and the economy against the need to keep people safe, albeit focusing on age rather than personal liberty. This is an issue which can be debated ad nauseam, but the topic made me think of another issue glanced upon in my aforementioned article, about the occasional necessity of hypocrisy in stating a principle against applying it.

The COVID Conundrum: Safety vs Freedom

Having written several articles recently with a 'negative' slant (aka: arguing against something, rather than in favour), my intention for the next piece was something lighter and more positive, as my initially jocular J.J. Abrams piece was intended to be before the fatal mistake was made of doing research. I wrote the following as a comment in a debate about safety vs freedom on another site, though, and it seemed worth reposting here in expanded form as a summary of my current thoughts on the matter. Rest assured, more positive pieces, unrelated to COVID-19, are on the way.

To make absolutely clear from the start: COVID-19 is a highly infectious, potentially fatal illness for which there is no known cure. It has to be taken seriously and it is entirely correct that social measures and restrictions are taken to limit its spread. The question is how far those measures should go.

David Baddiel's Holocaust Denial Documentary Showed Why Evil Opinions Must Be Confronted

A few days ago, Jewish comedian David Baddiel aired a documentary on Holocaust denial on the BBC. Baddiel visited the sites of the many Nazi atrocities against the Jewish people, including the remains of the little-known extermination site at Chelmno, where he encountered a man who lived nearby at the time and spoke of the dreadful screams coming from the camp. He also spoke to Deborah Lipstadt and her lawyer Anthony Julius, who prevailed when David Irving sued Lipstadt for (correctly) calling him a Holocaust denier.

Throughout the documentary, Baddiel debated with himself whether his documentary would be complete without talking to a Holocaust denier in person. Baddiel's reticence was clear and understandable. When he posed the question to Anthony Julius, Julius was unequivocal in stating that such people should not be given airtime on the grounds that addressing deniers is simply giving them exposure, even if it is to refute them. Lipstadt believed it was sufficient to lay out their lies and destroy them, without going to the individuals responsible for them. In the end, Baddiel chose to speak to a denier, an man named Dermot Mulqueen who had trolled Baddiel's Facebook account earlier in the documentary. The result demonstrated why Baddiel's instincts were absolutely correct.

The Case Against Centrism

A commonly voiced refrain during times of intensifying partisanship and social division is the need to rediscover the political centre. There's undeniable appeal to the idea. Even as we are encouraged by social and legacy media to pick a political side and rigidly stick to it, if any consensus exists across both sides of the aisle, it is frustration at the anger and impulsiveness underpinning much of modern discourse.

Here we face a Catch-22. To minds radicalised in these polarised times, those with different politics are the enemy, to be destroyed at all costs, even though secretly we'd like to negotiate a truce. Unfortunately, as the other side is malicious and dishonest, the suggestion of conciliation would surely be seized upon to destroy us. Whether we admit it or not, this thinking is motivated by the knowledge that if our side were offered a truce, we'd seize the opportunity to destroy them, too.

Has The Media Been Apologising For Terrorism Since The Charlie Hedbo Killings? (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity. This piece has been updated with links to newer articles relevant to the subject matter, while one link has been removed as the article in question is no longer live at its original address.]

It has been long enough since the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris for the initial surges of sadness and anger to die down and be replaced by something resembling more considered reflection. There’s been considerable rumination on what the attacks mean for free speech and artistic expression, questions which eventually spawned a mini-debate of their own over whether Hebdo’s representation of Muslims could be classed as racist. Elsewhere, commentators haved raised the West’s perceived responsibility in helping cultivate radicalisation as a result of mismanaged military incursions into the Middle East, notably the 2003 Iraq War.

More recently though, in addition to questions about why the Hebdo murders attracted so much more media attention than the slaughter of two thousand people by Boko Haram in Nigeria, another debate seems to have been gaining traction. This argues that, by the media so consistently using the attacks to raise questions about the West’s actions elsewhere or to questions about the morality of the Hebdo covers at the root of the attacks, a process is taking place whereby the attackers themselves are having the responsibility for the murders lifted from their hands and transplanted into the laps of the culture and society which was attacked.

What The CIA Torture Report Says About Humanity (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity.]

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report into the CIA’s use of torture is finally being published, albeit in heavily redacted form. To begin, let’s focus on what little positivity can be gleaned from a situation in which even our most forgiving hopes of living in a moral, compassionate society are surely set to be torn apart, piece by piece. Whatever this report may reveal and no matter how little of it is actually made public – supposedly no more than 600 pages out of 6,000 – some credit is due to the American government for the report existing at all.

Where I live, in the UK, the idea of our intelligence services being subject to any sort of accountability, or their actions challenged in any meaningful way, feels like a pipe dream at best. All we get are excuses, usually that such activities were legal – as though there has ever been an atrocity committed by a government and its agencies in history which wasn’t – or ‘necessary’, though providing any sort of justification for that claim would supposedly endanger us all. If you thought that line about spies ending every sentence with “…but then I’d have to kill you” was nothing but a ridiculous joke, try listening to a British politician discussing defence for more than five minutes.

The Morality Of Big Game Hunting (Archive)

[These articles were originally written around 2014-15 for a separate outlet whose redesign has resulted in several of my pieces being lost. I'm republishing a number of my favourites on this blog for posterity. With the controversy surrounding Love Island contestant Ollie Williams' involvement with trophy hunting, this article seemed particularly timely.]

Anyone with an internet connection can hardly have missed the outpouring of grief which accompanied Walter Palmer’s murder of Cecil the lion outside Hwange wildlife sanctuary in Zimbabwe last month. The nature of Cecil’s death was particularly nasty, having been lured from the sanctuary with meat, only to be severely wounded with a crossbow bolt and finished off, almost two days later, with a bullet. He was then decapitated, skinned and his corpse left to rot in the sun. That those responsible allegedly tried and failed to then destroy Cecil’s tracking collar only adds to the sordid nature of the killing. Hunt guide Theo Bronkhorst and landowner Honest Ndlovu have both been charged with poaching by the Zimbabwean authorities. Walter Palmer returned to the US, but is now being sought for extradition.

The sordid business has reignited the debate surrounding the morality of trophy hunting, an industry, reportedly worth $190m in Africa, which revolves around people paying thousands of dollars to kill a wild animal under conditions guaranteed to ensure the hunter an easy, safe kill. That the hunters are almost invariably rich, white and Western adds an undercurrent of colonialist entitlement to the situation. For all the consensus on the nastiness of the act of hunting itself, reaction to Cecil’s death has peripherally raised other questions about the hypocrisy of selective outrage and the wider, often ignored problems of humanity’s role in selecting which species are permitted to live and which are not.