Afternoon Tea 3.16.2021 - Planetary Anarchy

It's not who is going to let me, it's who is going to stop me.

March 16, 2021

Biden becoming LBJ, Queens public defenders unionizing, Insta won’t let adults DM teens who don’t follow them anymore, the USA sells weapons to the whole damn world, protests in Haiti, Australia, and Central Park has a Coyote now. It’s Tuesday, March 16th 2021, and this is the Tea.

For better and worse, Biden is our LBJ (Peter Beinart) & Most of the World Has a Simple Vaccine Request. America Isn’t Listening (New Republic) The parallels to LBJ are apt, for both wonderful and terrible reasons.

Queens Public Defenders Win Unionization Vote (New York Focus) The union-busting, emotional abuse, firings, and flatly illegal anti-organizing tactics didn’t work. Funny that. Pro-tip, when you’re forced to rehire workers who were pro-union, don’t demand they accept a reduction in pay. Bad form y’all.

Instagram will no longer let adults message teens who don’t follow them (The Verge) Round of applause for Instagram doing something I think we all thought they’d already done. I’m struggling to understand how you build a system for humans under the age of 16 and allow them to just get DM’d by random weirdos.

US remains top arms exporter and grows market share (BBC News) We’re #1! U-S-A U-S-A! Wooo! Let’s blow some shit up to celebrate that we’re now selling weapons to 96 nations. I can’t name 96 nations, you might be able to, but I know someone who can:

Haitians barricade streets to protest insecurity after gang murders of police (Reuters) Haitians rightly believe they aren’t being protected by their police, as kidnappings and gangland crime escalates. The flashpoint looks to be a recent, botched raid on a gang led to the deaths of four cops and the injury of eight more.

Thousands March In Australia As Another #MeToo Wave Hits The Country (NPR) UK activists protesting Sarah Everard joined by compatriots across the world, as protests were prepped for 47 places around Australia. There was a serial rapist in the Scott Morrison administration, who attacked at least five women so far. #BelieveWomen

Israel Finds New Dead Sea Scrolls, First Such Discovery in 60 Years (Haaretz) New Scrolls just dropped, relating to minor prophets. Minor Prophets is definitely the name of my grunge metal cover band.

Google will face lawsuit over Incognito mode tracking (Engadget) & The Privacy Mirage (Mobile Dev Memo) Top Hypercasual games accumulated 6.3 billion downloads in 2020 (Mobile Marketing Reads) With Apple and Google starting to talk about cookie-less browsers and individual changes to tracking, one might be forgiven for thinking their internet experience is getting more secure. It’s not, and the mobile game industry isn’t exactly a fortress of security either. Candy Crush knows quite a bit about you. And those games are much bigger, sloping up from 280ish mb up to almost half a gig. To put that in perspective, that’s half of the HD space on my first desktop Gateway computer.

The Problem of International Anarchy (Foreign Exchanges) Thought provoking article from Daniel Bessner, reminding us that individual nations have institutions like the police, banking systems, etc. to ensure everyone works towards the same goals. There are no such institutions with any real power to do that on the planetary level:

Despite these lacunae, Blake and Gilman’s piece is a thought-provoking one that I implore readers to check out. In particular, it raises the question of “international anarchy,” which is perhaps one of the most pressing problems facing the US (and international) left, though it is one that I have rarely seen discussed on our side of the political spectrum.

As Helen Milner noted in a 1991 article, many scholars of international relations consider anarchy—the idea that because there is no global government, the field of geopolitics may best be understood as existing in a state of anarchy—“the central condition of international politics.” Because there is no world state, IR theorists (especially “realists”) claim, nations are required to act for themselves, which is a major reason why wars break out. (In IR parlance, the international system is a “self-help” system.) Put simply, unlike in a domestic setting, where various institutions of organized violence (the police, the military, etc.) usually prevent civil wars from breaking out, at the planetary level the lack of equivalent institutions makes it so that war is, if not inevitable, quite likely.

Song of the Tea: This one’s a mouthful, but absolutely worth it. The Robotberget remix of Silvia by Miike Snow has a particularly fun beat build for your Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday morning. Whenever you end up listening, check out the visualization in the video done by Daniel Teeny.

Change the dressings of your wounds, tighten your bandages, refuel, and recharge. We’re almost there.

Yours,