Qantas goes from bad to worse, a Hong Kong court has ordered China’s Evergrande to liquidate with debts of more than USD300b, the Middle East continues to implode, Finland is headed to a run-off, and a “chicken from hell”… what?
Ne’er Shall the Twain Meet
One of the “core memories” of my four-year stint in the UK was understanding just how deprived formerly prosperous industrial towns have become. Taking a bus through Maesgeirchen, inadvertently I must add, was the sort of ethnography I never asked for but got anyway. Thatcher was often touted as the saviour of a Britain mired in 1970s inflation and economic stagnation; her neoliberal policies made her and the late Lee Kuan Yew mutual admirers. The trickle-down effect of union-busting and deindustrialisation is most recently seen in Tata Steel defending redundancies to Wales MPs, but the damage wrought 40+ years ago is almost impossible to reverse. Channel 4’s Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle for Britain casts that year’s strike within a larger socio-econo-political context. Highly recommended.
A Rose By Any Other Name
It seems that Brits weren’t the only ones enamoured with Greece. In 1941, Mao Zedong famously complained that many Chinese intellectuals knew more about Greece’s history than their own, and the Chinese have had multiple ways of naming and referring to Greece. Bandeira takes us through a fascinating whirl of this history-laden nomenclature.
The spirit is willing but the capabilities are weak
Plans rarely go to plan, which is why the EU’s plan to de-risk from China is a useful exercise in scepticism – they might want to, but are they actually capable of that? If you’re putting most of your eggs into a defensive basket, what happens to offence? As it turns out, the opponent was already doing it from the 1980s…
The Twain Have to Meet
What happens when two parties essential to propagating human life on earth (as we currently, medically manage it) are being torn apart by ideological differences? Could we chalk this divide down to youthful impulses rather than deep-seated convictions with major implications for how most societies order their family and home lives? This FT article has been rightly blowing up the Internet this past week. Worth a deep read to understand this phenomenon.