What Just Happened #12
Welcome. Let’s see what’s going on out there this week. Today is Saturday, May 6th, 2023.
Scandal The Supreme Court has missed its best chance to avoid what’s shaping up to be a searing, summer long scandal. Some had vague hopes that conservative justices could diffuse all this by acting uncharacteristically contrite and adopting a code of ethics.
The fire hose of news this week doused those hopes. Now we’re going to have an explosive scandal all summer long and ultimately, I think Clarence Thomas is going to have to resign.
Yachts. Jets. Private school tuitions. Secret payments. Ginni Thomas deeply involved in all that plus a political scandal centered on insurrection. And now at the end of the week, Federalist Society President Leonard Leo is inelegantly exposed.
Former White House aide Kelleyanne Conway gave Ginni Thomas $25,000 on the instructions of Mr. Leo in 2012 and billed for his company $25,000 that day. My goodness, that looks like cleaning money for a Supreme Court justice.
Ms. Conway is complicit all the way down:
The general Thomas defense has been that Harlan Crow’s gifts didn’t morally compromise Justice Thomas in his professional role because Crow had no business before the Supreme Court. Leonard Leo is a different matter. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s tweet makes the point:
A summer of scandal ahead.
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(While I’m predicting, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. He’ll campaign for the presidency while defending himself in multiple courts. Alongside the scandal at the nation’s highest court, the spectacle of the Trump campaign for the nation’s highest office will further erode the country’s credibility everywhere every day.)
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Have you been practicing your Kılıçdaroğlus? How about your Ung Ings?
After elections on the same day, next Sunday, these could be the names of the leaders of a combined 155 million people in Turkey and Thailand. Kılıçdaroğlu is running to replace President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, while Ung Ing, aka Paetongtarn Shinawatra, is polling near the top in Thailand against Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha.
Prayut Chan-o-cha seized power in 2014 and leads the National Council for Peace and Order, a junta-like name if there ever was one. He fronted the coup to replace Yingluck Shinawatra, who is Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s aunt. Thai politics gets complicated.
Give Ms. Shinawatra points for a master stroke of metaphorical “mother of the nation” brilliance. Paetongtarn Shinawatra had a baby last weekend.
Meanwhile in Türkiye, Kılıçdaroğlu, Erdogan’s 74 year old challenger, is the consensus choice of a coalition of Turkish parties trying to unseat Erdogan.
Here’s sort of how to pronounce their names:
Kılıçdaroğlu, vaguely “killish da row loo.”
Then there’s Paetongtarn Shinawatra. That’s much simpler since she’s generally known by her nickname, Ung Ing. It’s mostly like it looks, say “oong eeng.”
(Worthy digression, speaking of junta names: The all time best junta name has to be the SLORC, for ‘State Law and Order Restoration Council,’ which debuted after a coup in Burma in 1988 and lived for nine years before its leaders decided it sounded more like some ghastly swamp creature than a self-respecting junta, and changed its name to the State Peace and Development Council. While alive, the SLORC, not so good at naming things, also changed the country’s name from Burma to Myanmar.
Burma has a distinguished history of being ruled as a backwater. Since British colonial rule people drove on the left side of the road - until on December 6th, 1970 they changed driving to the right. Why? Even now, no one is sure. Just about all cars had steering wheels on the right side. Now the driver’s seat had better views of the curb than of oncoming traffic. Plus, from one day to the next, buses starting dumping their passengers directly into the middle of the road.)
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With a week to go, the Turkish race looks like a real contest. See Soner Captagay’s Foreign Affairs article this week about Erdogan’s election prospects. Best quotes:
“Either Erdogan will lose, giving Turkey a chance of restoring full democracy, or he will win and likely remain in power for the rest of his life.”
“Erdogan’s comeback is characteristic of a politician who has repeatedly shown his skill at using state resources to his advantage and at dividing or neutralizing his opponents.”
and “Erdogan’s resilience shows how difficult it can be to unseat an illiberal leader in an electoral contest, even one who enjoys little support.”
and
“Erdogan’s greatest strength is his control of information. Given his overwhelming influence over the Turkish media and the fact that around 80 percent of the population is unable to read languages other than Turkish, shaping the message has become one of his most powerful tools for winning votes.”
Toward that end, the president is apparently proud enough of the Turkish built Anadolu, a helicopter carrier, that he sails it up and down the Bosphorus to be admired.
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Meanwhile in Scandinavia: Erdogan, at least through the election, has been keeping Sweden out of NATO. Now through next week, NATO & Sweden are showing their distress by war gaming Sweden’s biggest exercise in 25 years called Aurora-23.
Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, the UK and the US are participating in what one could view as a pointed shrug in Erdogan’s direction, and well as a signal to the Kremlin about NATO’s position on Sweden, Erdogan or no Erdogan.
The limited value of experts: Finland joined the NATO alliance last month and in just the few weeks since, an argument has developed along these lines:
“While surrounded by alliance members, as the only Nordic country outside NATO, experts say Sweden could become a strategic interest for Russia in the event of a conflict.”
I’m not buying it. Note that these “experts” are anonymous. Note too that Sweden is “surrounded by alliance members.” Note three that Russia has other, more pressing strategic interests just now.
More experts: at Al-Jazeera this week,
“experts caution that the power vacuum in Darfur, its western province, may attract fighters and weapons from neighbouring countries, including Libya, the Central African Republic (CAR), and Chad.”
We don’t need experts to caution us and this fighting will expand the ungovernable zone across the Sahel. It surely will.
Elsewhere in media, I saw a cable TV ad for something called Earth Breeze detergent that begins, “I know what you’re thinking. This is not a dryer sheet.” Promise, that is not what I was thinking. But it gives me an excuse to show you an unrelated photo I’ve always liked, of detergent boxes in Russia:
Last Sunday I read Maylis de Kerangal’s Eastbound, a novella of 127 pages, an easy afternoon’s read. If you’ve ever ridden the Trans-Siberian, it will revive your Siberia lust. And then I read this:
Pairing a good Russia memory with the country today moves you to profound sadness. The article says Russian propaganda works hard to promote the patriotic mobilization of its population. In the author’s estimation it’s about showing “a world in which individual names have been replaced by the collective self-identification of “we,” wherein no one can deviate from prescribed rules.” She laments the degradation of the Russian population its leadership requires for people just to get by. She writes:
“The basic strategies for such adaptation might be termed the illusion of unity, the rationalization of the “necessity” for the war, and the delegation of the sole right to determine national policy to the government …. Accordingly, the passive part of society will be ready to adapt in the same way to any government policies that might be implemented.”
Which apparently includes a back-to-the-future rise in
“the growth of denunciations.… Over the past few weeks, journalists and human rights activists have begun to talk about denunciations as a real epidemic. During the first half of the war alone Russians wrote nearly 145,000 complaints to Roskomnadzor, the main censorship agency. 63,500 of them concerned “illegal information,” including “fake news” about the Russian army.”
People denounce their neighbors, colleagues, teachers, students and even old friends.
It’s shades of the Stasi in Russia.
You look one way with fury at Russian war crimes and atrocities against Ukrainians. You look the other direction with horror at the daily debasement of ordinary Ivans in Russia, and whichever way you look, there in the background, slouching and smirking, sits Vladimir Putin.
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The week started with the traditional May Day protests across France. Officials low-estimated the number of protesters at 750,000, union organizers proclaimed a million plus. Meanwhile, the French are also having a moment overseas.
Hundreds of troops have been sent from Europe to the French overseas département of Mayotte to carry out a military operation called Wuambushu (“take back”), to try to evict predominantly Comoran settlers and destroy shanty towns. Some 1800 French troops are participating.
We’ve just been out to the separate French overseas département of Réunion, which is resolutely French and likes it that way. At a physical remove of sixteen hundred miles from the African continent, almost 600 miles east of Madagascar, the ethnicity of native Reunion islanders is a mix of Malagasy, Tamil, Gujarati Muslims and Chinese, descendants of imported workers.
Things couldn’t be more different in the (relatively) nearby French département of Mayotte, part of the Comoros island chain. Much closer to the continental mainland than Réunion (opposite northern Mozambique), Mayotte and the Comoros are correspondingly more closely tied to African ethnicity and culture.
In 1974 the islands held referendums resulting in independence for the Comoros, but Mayotte elected to stay French. As a result, while it’s still a poor place (it is “the poorest French department, with more than 80 per cent of its population living under the poverty line”) Mayotte nevertheless over the years has drawn away from the rest of the Comoros islands in standard of living, healthcare resources and so on resulting in immigration from Comoros, so that today some half of Mayotte residents are not citizens.
This produces periodic violence, including gang violence, and from time to time France, threatens deportation of immigrants back to Comoros, as is happening now with the Wuambushu military operation.
Meanwhile in the French Pacific:
French Polynesia votes for pro-independence bloc in historic elections
“Pro-independence parties lead by former French Polynesian President Oscar Temaru won the second round of territorial elections” last Sunday, and “this victory puts them in a strong position to negotiate a decolonisation process and a referendum on independence with the French government.”
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Travel news, Laos-China Railway Launches Crossborder Passenger Service. It runs 10-and-half-hours, one train a day in each direction between Kunming and Ventiane. First class tickets for the full journey are 760 yuan ($110).
Landscapes in southern China, really, the whole China/Laos/Vietnam border areas are gorgeous. Must be a fun ride. From the article, here’s the fancy new Luang Prabang station:
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Book review and interesting idea of the week:
In reviewing a book titled Liberal Capitalist Democracy by Krishnan Nayar, Branko Milanovic notes:
“Nayar argues that the success of Western capitalism in the period 1945-1980 cannot be explained without taking into account the pressure that came on capitalism both from the existence of the Soviet Union as an alternative model of society, and from strong left-wing parties linked with trade unions in major European countries. In that sense the period of les trente glorieuses which is now considered as the most successful period of capitalism ever occurred against the normal capitalist tendencies. It was an anomaly. It would not have happened without socialist pressure and fear of riots, nationalizations, and, yes, defenestrations. But with the rise of neoliberal economics after 1980 capitalism gladly went back to its original 19th and early 20th century versions which regularly produce social instability and strife.”
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Finally, in sports, my money’s on Arkdag! and all this week’s fun from Turkmenistan.
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That’s it for today. Every Tuesday CS&W publishes a travel column. This week it’s part two of travels among the non-humans. It’s a whole series of links to help you delve into animal arcana. Like these:
Vampire bats give other bats food to save them from starvation. •
Bumblebees will give up sleep to care for their hive’s young, and can remember good and bad experiences, hinting at a form of consciousness. •
Chimpanzees help each other get tools that are out of reach •
Swimming at speed, the bluefin tuna’s top fins retract into their bodies, and they swim at seventy kilometres an hour, faster than a great white shark. So perfectly evolved are they for powering through the ocean, Pentagon-funded scientists have used the tuna body-shape as a model for the US Navy’s underwater missiles. •
There’s lots more, Tuesday.
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Good weekend, see you Tuesday.