Photographs of various shrines I've seen. A shrine here is basically anything I consider to have spiritual significance.

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• History Has Begun, by Bruno Macaes (2020)
• War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics, by Emile Simpson (2012)
• Arabian Satire: Poetry from the 18th Century Najd, by Ḥmēdān al-Shwēʿir , Jane Tylus (Foreword), Marcel Kurpershoek (Translator) (2020)
• Savage Theories, by Pola Oloixarac (2008)

• Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientialism, by Zachary Lockman (2004)
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• Ghostwritten, by David Mitchell (1999)

• Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood – A History in Thirteen Centuries, by Justin Marozzi (2014)
• Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami (1988)
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• Religion and Nationalism in Global Perspective, by J. Christopher Soper and Joel S. Fetzer (2018)
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• Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career, by Scott Young (2019)
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• A PhD Is Not Enough: A Guide To Survival In Science, by Peter J. Feibelman (1993)
• How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers, by Sönke Ahrens (2017)
• Ottoman Refugees, 1878-1939: Migration in a Post-Imperial World, by Isa Blumi (2013)
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• Spiritual Subjects: Central Asian Pilgrims and the Ottoman Hajj at the End of Empire, by Lâle Can (2020)
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• Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War, by Robin Yassin-Kassab (2016)
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Buenos Aires is big, but developed in a way that's largely sensible. The subway and bus systems work, and large portions of the city and beautiful and have developed nicely. I imagine this is what Baghdad is like if there weren't any war scars.

Notably, I've only been in BA since the economic crisis started, which means that everything for me was insanely cheap. I would usually take a Buquebus boat from Montevideo or Catalonia to BA for a shopping weekend.

There's sections of Buenos Aires that feel like you're in the bones of an massive empire, which Argentina actually was on the path to preceding 2001. The financial crisis of 2001, which was resulting from the aftershocks of the Asian Financial Crisis, left it with impressive infrastructure but a myriad of social problems.

Argentina (at least until Milei) was largely run by a political force named Peronism. At the risk of too many Iraq comparisons, it feels like to me Peronism is similar to Ba'athism. In the words of Elana Shever²:

One cannot understand events in Argentina since the 1940s without understanding Peronism, and this is true of oil politics as much as anything else. Peronism is a social movement, a political party, a cultural force, and a popular social identity that is organized around the figure of Juan Domingo Perón but far transcends him.

You see effects of this everywhere, I went to a bar named Peron Peron Vivo!, which had shrines to honor Juan Domingo Peron and Eva Peron.

The city metro is great, a testament to how absolutely shitty the NYC subway system is. Trains run more frequently than NYC, and don't take insane detours on the weekends.

Cultural life is relatively good, while Argentinian food I could take or leave, given my time in Uruguay, the benefit of Buenos Aires is that BA has a much more distinctive cultural life. The Chinatown in BA is huge, with tons of other cuisines and effects available. I specifically always end up going to Sultan in order to buy tobacco for my shisha.

In comparison to Montevideo, it seems like dedication to greengage is less common here in BA. While Montevideo seems to have a strong commitment to having a tree on every street, in front of every building, BA seems to take it a little differently, where there are significant areas of pure concrete.

It's important to understand that in the last decade, the cultural power of Argentina has overshadowed the culture of Uruguayans. In Tierra del Fuego, an Argentinian that I was chatting to mused that Uruguay probably has the same food as Argentina, which shocked me, coming from Uruguay. Uruguayans in recent years live in the shadow of Argentina, all the movies, TV shows, and music typically arrive from Argentina just purely due to the sheer difference in population size, resulting in a US/Canada like situation, where the Uruguayans constantly think about Argentina while the Argentinians barely think about the Uruguayans.

Despite both Argentina and Uruguay sitting on Rio de la Plata, Argentina has no beaches outside of a city called Mar De Sur. As a result, Argentinians who have money usually go to Uruguay for beaches, especially a resort town called Punta Del Este, often abbreviated as PDE. This is somewhat of a meme in Uruguay, with people talking about how rich Argentinians will usually stash their money in Uruguayan properties, as the currency in Uruguay has been much more stable than Argentina, creating an almost Hong Kong like situation.

My guide dog on the east side of Tierra Del Fuego.

Ushuaia is the southernmost "city" in Argentina, in the province of Tierra del Fuego (land of fire). I would hesitate to call it a city, although @pinboard wrote about his experiences there and had a similar experience, Ushuaia is small, organized around a central tourist area, with bleak rates of domestic abuse and depression. On the flip side, it's home to some incredible natural beauty, ranches, and most importantly of all, penguins.

The isle of Tierra del Fuego is split between the Chilean side and the Argentinian side, although I only visited the Argentinian side. However, I met a few people that took a 12 hour boat from Punta Arenas, a city further north in Chile.

The island itself lies on two continental plates, with Ushuaia nestled among the mountains created by the plates. This means that, if you head east, the land becomes flat and filled with ranches.

Cabo San Pablo, about two hours east of Ushuaia, has a large grounded boat, which the government frequently ponders removing but ultimately has been left as a tourist attraction. The federal government exempts the province of Tierra del Fuego from taxes, which my friends in Buenos Aires contend is the only reason to live there. There's some hiking to be done around the beach, but I found myself often being the only human in a square mile, with my guide dog as the only companion. It's an excellent place to think.

Taking a boat south crosses you through the Beagle Channel, which takes you to the main attraction of Tierra del Fuego: penguins. You'll find them on many of the islands, which are shockingly green in the summer, with penguins waddling along the sands.

Argentina is undoubtedly in an economic crisis, with a fluctuating exchange rate and tons of semi-formalized exchange shops. Coming from Baghdad, this was all stuff I was used to, but what I was really struck by was how much more functional Buenos Aires was than Baghdad. Organized protests were also much more active, owing to their history here. It's a beautiful country, with bountiful natural resources and friendly people.

Photographs of various shrines I've seen. A shrine here is basically anything I consider to have spiritual significance.

On the map, each point represented by a green circle was taken in the spring, gold squares were taken in the summer, orange triangles were taken in the fall, and blue stars were taken in the winter.

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This year was significantly worse for my reading than last year, I think I'll barely manage to make it to 30 books this year, instead of the 58 I did last year. However, the most significant books I read this year were:

• Secession and Security: Explaining State Strategy Against Separatists by Ahsan Butt - Butt provides an interesting model to view crackdowns by going through the lens of the likelihood of future war. There are two paths from this: if future war is not likely, then border changes are more likely to be accepted and negotiations are more likely to be started. The other path is that war is very likely, which leads the state to limited policing, militarization, or collective repression, based on the support of third parties. Butt goes through Pakistan, India, Sweden-Norway, and the Velvet Divorce, and provides a nice historical background. The main problem I have with the book is that it doesn't really explain the substate actors who do not want to achieve an independent state, such as the Maoist insurgents in Nepal, or the various militias we see today.

• The Great War Civilization by Robert Fisk - Fisk is definitely a crank these days, especially given his views on the Syrian civil war, but it'd be foolish to disregard his previous non-crank work. This book is a slog (including some self-gratifying bits about his father you can skip through), but its ultimately an engrossing volume. There's a fantastical story about how when Fisk was captured by the Soviets, he was asked for his map of Afghanistan, since the Soviet soldiers didn't have any as they were invading.

• House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox by William Foege - Bill Foege pioneered the treatment of smallpox through what he calls a "containment" strategy: rather than inoculating everyone, you ring the people around the infected with vaccines. Foege chronicles how well this worked in west Africa, and then goes on to explain how, with the combination of technological advancements, they managed to eradicate smallpox in India. The sheer scale and impact this operates on is awe-inspiring, and it's really an uplifting story about one of the greatest accomplishments in human history.

What's interesting is how close this is to Truman's Point Four or JFK's "development decade". Truman's Point Four was largely a response to the physical realities of the expansion of the Marshall plan. As money ran out and demands for a "Marshall plan for the Middle East" and "Marshall plan for Asia" grew, Truman beat back those desires by outlining a system of technical assistance¹. While funds were finite, American technical expertise was infinite, an endless frontier to be explored. It's not surprising that the research Braben identifies as critical are largely clustered around this period of the 40's to the 70's, the assured belief that a better future could be rendered through enough technical expertise and funding provided significant scientific freedom.

Modernization theory, the concept that nations all followed the same path from 'traditional' to 'modern' societies, ran the field around this time, especially with regards to the Middle East. Following WW2, "Turkey served as both the template Modernization theory was based on and the object on which it was enacted"². Turkey's development had a decidedly positivist orientation: knowledge existed in the world, and that understanding that would allow us to harness the world. In Iraq, the Dujayla land project, a massive irrigation project now consigned to history, provided a class of Iraqi trainees that "became leading technocrats involved in later development projects, including the ongoing reform of rural and urban family life, while lessons learned on the settlement were taken by foreign specialists to new locations"³.

Tim Mitchell coined the term 'economentality'⁴, which largely describes the rise of post-1948/postwar development thought. His concept is that a variety of tools and more information gave rise to this idea of a singular "future". While pre-1940's economists largely thought forecasting was too unreliable, a new deluge of information, combined with the assured belief of new frontiers of science and technical expertise, gave the US government the belief that the future could be predicted, if not shaped. In other words, to understand the future, one must be able to accurately measure the present.

This distinctly positivist line, that with all this new, accurate information the future can either be predicted or controlled, naturally provides fertile breeding ground for conceptions of scientific freedom. Scientific freedom is, at its heart, the idea that scientists be allowed to explore all the data around us. When we start to believe that the future can be tamed with enough data, it becomes an imperative for us to analyze every piece of data.

By making the rise of scientific freedom coincident with modernization theory, we can also begin to see why scientific freedom begins to be curtailed around the same time modernization theory collapses in the late 70's. Braben identifies this as well, although he hesitates to make a guess as to why the funding structures for scientists change, lamely stating that the bureaucratic imperatives have shifted. Ultimately what Braben identifies is a change in value, postwar development used to quantifiably value scientific freedom, giving scientists more money.

What Braben and Mitchell both fail to identify is the change in value in contemporary times. From how I see it, there's largely three stages:

The "Quantifiable Present" period is the most obvious, value (either monetarily or otherwise) is directly tied to what you hold in the present. FDR states⁵:

Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt. Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land… We are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people… Clearly, all this calls for a re-appraisal of values. A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, an organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help… Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand… of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people. [Quoted in M, p. 5]

FDR foresees a dark future because he sees value as being tied to the land, the industrial plant, and things that are physical. As this runs out, FDR forecasts that all that is left to do is to become stewards of these resources.

The "Quantifiable Future" period is the one Mitchell and Braben identify. With the endless frontier of knowledge and technical expertise, Truman's Point Four kicks off a golden age for scientific freedom. The future is thought to be bright and tamable. Economic value here is no longer tied to the physical resource, rather it's tied to the knowledge and expertise. Because the future is known, the thinking goes, knowledge now can be directly translated to physical things in the future. It's as if you can always predict when you need a paper towel, so you never need to bother finding storage for unused paper towels in your home. This frees up additional space in your home you can use for other purposes.

"Quantifiable Possibilities" is what I believe we currently live in, and the rise of financial derivatives is emblematic of that. "Quantifiable Possibilities" states that the future is roughly predictable within a certain extent, but there are many futures. In other words, the probability mass function of all the futures can be constructed. This is where financial derivatives come in: the only reason a financial derivative has monetary value is because the bank's conception of what the future is differs from your conception of what the future is. A financial derivative gains its value from the delta between different potential futures.

James Bridle identifies "Quantifiable Possibilities" as the "New Dark Age", where he states that the abundance of information has not caught up with the increasing chaos of the world. While I would agree to some extent, especially with regards to climate change, I think what Bridle identifies is a shift in mentality as well: the future was only "bright" because we were so self assured of a singular future in the postwar period, while now there are far too many futures for us to enumerate. The curtailing of scientific freedom, now driven through large bureaucratic processes, is largely a response to this shift in mentality. When the future was assured, scientists could be allowed to work on whatever they had in mind, since they would all end up at the same spot eventually. When the endless possibilities of the future overwhelms us, scientists must be micromanaged and directed, lest they walk down undesirable paths.

Ultimately, the revival of scientific freedom is something I believe in, and I think time will bear that out. As Bridle says⁶:

We have been conditioned to think of the darkness as a place of danger, even of death. But the darkness can also be a place of freedom and possibility, a place of equality.