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(via The visual style of The Wire)
This is awesome… if you’re into people talking about TV as an art form.
"More than for any perceived security benefits, Israel’s nuclear project was conceived for psychological comfort in face of the unthinkable quintessence of all Jewish and Israeli fears: a second Holocaust. For millennia, life in the diaspora was an uninterrupted struggle for survival. Enslavement, persecution, and systematic annihilation have had a profound impact on the Israeli approach to national security. This fundamental sense of insecurity, a siege mentality that results in the assumption that the country is under a constant existential threat, predisposes Jerusalem to seek absolute security. At the core of Israeli strategy rests the notion that the country can survive and politically engage its neighbors only from a position of military superiority; symmetry in conventional and nuclear affairs is unthinkable."
Why Israel Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb | Foreign Affairs
A great article on Israel’s contradictory nuclear strategies - The “Samson Doctrine” which resembles conventional Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory and the “Begin Doctrine” which seeks absolute security and the destruction of any adversaries nuclear weapons.
The quote above is great on why this is but read the whole thing.
I wanted to add that some commentators who favour a pre-emptive strike against Iran contradict themselves as well.
They favour a strike because the Iranian regime is irrational and will not obey the laws of MAD once it has a nuclear weapon, but also think a US-led strike will not have serious consequences because the Iranian regime is rational enough to carefully calibrate its response.
"Skagway in winter is eerily quiet. On Broadway the store windows are papered over, and the wooden boardwalks, frozen solid, creak and crack and pop under the rare pedestrian’s weight. The bright painted facades of the town’s historic buildings—one-time saloons and brothels, now seasonal shops hawking T-shirts, fudge and jewelry to cruise ship tourists—are so cartoonish, so Ye Olde, that you could imagine you’ve shrunk down to Lilliputian size and wandered into a child’s toy Wild West Towne, left out in the yard and abandoned, after the first snow, until spring."
The String Theory
tetw: What happens when all of a man’s intelligence and athleticism is focused on placing a fuzzy yellow ball where his opponent is not? An obsessive inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of tennis.
By David Foster Wallace
"Quality, though, is not the issue—that Lurpak ad is beautifully shot and edited—tone is. If this is the result of an industry-wide lurch to the uncanny then I’m all for it. But if it is, as I worry at my darkest, least charitable moments, more a symptom of a culture-wide tendency towards signing up any celebrity for any task that any unknown could do just as well, then it’s a damned shame."
On odd pitchmen in British ads.
BTW and FYI, “The Awl” tags posts on Britain with “Knifecrime Island.”
The graph on the left is RIDICULOUS.
(via Why “Generation Why Bother” Doesn’t Care - Sarah Green - Our Editors - Harvard Business Review)
