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Strategies are supposed to be the motives of generals. But I don’t believe any military expert would claim that the idea of attrition was invented by generals. It was indeed the operating principle of the war almost from the first day to
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Echoes of Marcuse's notion of machine civilization.
“When the well-disciplined soldier emerged from the mud of the trenches, he let himself be led to an anonymous death, meted out on an industrial scale. If an element of heroism could be recognized in this, it was simply on account of his capacity to slavishly endure the dehumanized horror, when the mutilated bodies of the veterans and the minds destroyed by trauma haunted a Europe fascinated by the spectacle of its own decline. The Arab warrior, on the other hand, was as capable of hatred as he was capable of love; his explosions of anger could follow his most magnanimous gestures. For him, war was still romantic, an ‘excitement’ whose tragic outcomes he accepted as a fatality inherent to life. In short, the Arabs were different from us, so different that ‘they have no objection to being killed’, as Hugh Trenchard, head of the RAF general staff, explained to the sensitive souls of the British Parliament.49 Arabs loved war precisely because it involved a confrontation with death, and as opposed to the effeminate Europeans, they did not make the flabby distinction between combatants and non-combatants. If you thought about it properly, not bombing them would almost amount to insulting their values.”
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
“while the impact of social class, ethnicity, and religious socialization on marital choice has been diminishing, educational homogamy has been increasing.35 In general, the college-educated population (which encompasses the upper-middle class as defined in the present study) continues to show a high degree of similarity in its cultural practices and attitudes over a wide range of areas.36 The fact that a college degree remains the best predictor of high occupational status suggests that the boundaries that this population builds between itself and others are particularly significant.37 These boundaries are likely to be more permanent, less crossable, and less resisted than the boundaries that exist between ethnic groups, for instance. They are also more likely to survive across contexts, i.e., to be carried over from the community to the workplace, and vice versa. We see again, therefore, the importance of studying in a systematic fashion the boundaries produced by college-educated people.”
― Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class
― Money, Morals, & Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class
“Richard Dawkins called bits of cultural information memes and treated them as transmitted and inherited in the same way as genes. But whereas genes can be understood in terms of chromosomes and the ACGT bases that form DNA, memes cannot. For example, is each technounit in a well-made arrow a meme or is the entire implement? Is it possible to regard the belief system of the Catholic Church as a super meme? Trying to reduce culture to bits of information is to miss the point of its agency in human activity.”
― Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History
― Settling the Earth: The Archaeology of Deep Human History
“Although few research projects have addressed the relationship between class origin and level of academic employment, the existing research shows, not unsurprisingly, that the higher the level of academic employment, the higher the socioeconomic origin. Working-class teachers will generally be found at the elementary and secondary levels (with women notably overpopulating the former). Academics with professional/managerial-class origins disproportionately constitute the professorate. Further, the more elite the institution, the higher the percentage of professors who come from the professional and managerial classes; working-class teachers who have managed to slip into the professorate will be more frequently found in community and state colleges than they will at Berkeley or Harvard.4”
― This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
― This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
“As spaces of promiscuous proximity, often lit poorly if at all, where existential fear suddenly was converted to the euphoria of being still alive and no longer having anything to lose, bunkers were also places of uncontrolled sexual encounters. The concern to discipline sexual conduct seems to have played a greater role in Great Britain than in Nazi Germany. Contrary to an idea born in the 1950s, according to which Nazism was marked by sexual repression, the anti-bourgeois dimension of the Volksgemeinschaft implied certain possibilities of sexual liberation.37 The British ‘people’s war’, on the other hand, was based far more strongly on a community founded on the bourgeois family and the need to repress sexual deviance, imputable both to women and the lower orders. As a clear sign of the particular role played by the family, the British authorities were initially against the idea of collective shelters, fearing that, in this mixing of classes, bourgeois virtue might be contaminated by the bad habits of the ‘lower orders’, leading to moral dissolution followed by a challenge to the social order. The middle classes were thus encouraged to build shelters in their gardens, which had the additional advantage of privatizing part of the costs bound up with air-raid precautions – something unthinkable in Germany, where the collective ideology of the Volksgemeinschaft was paramount.”
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
― Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing
Anusar’s 2025 Year in Books
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