Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
Every dream I have I'm either running away from someone or fighting someone. I have to exhaust myself by not sleeping for long periods of time because I don't have dreams that way.
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Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"You have to feed the right cow with the right grass to get the right cheese. If you train your “AI” on normie posts from Reddit with an average IQ of 105, you will not get artificial intelligence, you will get artificial soyjak."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"For some reason fear is more important to the right wingers than knowledge. They can explain how leftist economic policies destroy the economy, social policies destroy society, etc. But WHY is the left the way it is, the right answers unsatisfactorily: "idiots on the top", "they want to destroy the white race", "karmic punishment for abandoning tradition". Basically, "everything is bad". they should consider that maybe leftist politics are good, but for some other purposes than they have imagined. Right-wingers for some reason believe "leftists" when they say that their goal is a "bright future", and try to explain them that the bright future must be built differently. But the Left always lies. No one is even talking about a bright future."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"He knows that he is a miracle worker and can work any miracle he wants, but he doesn't do this. They throw him out of his apartment. He knows that all he has to do is wave his finger and the apartment will be his, but he doesn't do this, he meekly leaves the apartment and goes to live in a shed outside of town. He can turn the shed into a beautiful brick house, but he doesn't do it - he continues living in the shed and finally dies, not having performed a single miracle in his life"
Kharms, "Old Woman"
Kharms, "Old Woman"
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"A democratic, 40-million-strong England, as a free republic, could easily become an organic part of a Prosperous and Great Europe. A Europe that is not engaged in political terrorism, feudal obscurantism, and drug trafficking, but a Europe that is the cultural, economic, and scientific center of human civilization."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
Started to read "Imperial Defence: The Old World Order, 1856–1956", may post quotes I found interesting
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Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"So, while bureaucratic donkeys and missed chances, muddling through and “it’s all right on the night” are often pejorative ways of explaining the British Imperial Defence administrative system, such is done in ignorance of the complexity and power of the vast machinery. It was a system of ideas and beliefs that had the courage and power of its convictions, as well as the muscle, metal and money that these ideas and convictions created.
These ideas were the most powerful form of imperial defence. Peace groups, imperial promoters, poets, artists, journalists and academics all plied the troubled waters of Imperialism in the hundred years under review. Missionary zeal, educational reform, the introduction of civil, fiscal and criminal law, as well as the introduction of medicine, technology and outlawing of centuries-old customs, were all part of the process of imperial defence. Certainly race was a key issue, and thus racism was a form of communication and identification. It was a value that needed defending and a fact of international relations that created strategic mental maps, flavoured strategic assessments as well as investment strategies and resource allocation. For many intellectuals and academics, as well as politicians and administrators, the view was that Great Britain had established between itself and its subject peoples a bond of moral responsibility, a kind of imperial strength that no other empire enjoyed: a sense of Britishness."
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Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
I lied.
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"The small number of politicians who served as Foreign Secretary in the nineteenth century underscores the exclusivity and relative autonomy of the post. Their previous political and administrative experience is also indicative of the wider imperial context of British foreign policy. During the period 1856–1914, there were only 11 Foreign Secretaries. Most of them served several times at the head of the FO: Salisbury four times; Clarendon and Granville three times; and Derby, Malmesbury, Russell and Rosebery twice each. Only Grey, Iddesleigh (whose brief spell at the FO was the exception during this period), Kimberley, and Lansdowne held the office once only. With the exceptions of Malmesbury and Rosebery, all had previous diplomatic or imperial experience, though the latter had at least served in a Cabinet post before his elevation to the foreign secretaryship. Some, like Clarendon, Granville and Kimberley, had held diplomatic posts. Russell, Derby, Granville and Kimberley had previously been Colonial Secretaries. There were three former India Secretaries among the FO chiefs in this period: Derby, Kimberley and Salisbury. Russell and Lansdowne had
held the War Office. The latter had also held senior positions in imperial administration as Governor-General of Canada and Viceroy of India. And finally, Derby, Granville, Kimberley and Grey had served their political apprenticeships as Parliamentary Under-Secretaries at the FO. Two Foreign Secretaries, Salisbury and Rosebery, succeeded to the premiership, and Derby might have done so. At the same time, the FO was seen also as an appropriate office for the former Prime Minister Lord John Russell."
"Imperial concerns were also reflected in the FO’s administrative structure and the career patterns of senior officials and diplomatists. Of the seven permanent heads of the department in the period covered here, five had been connected with Anglo-Russian relations prior to their appointment: Charles Hardinge and Arthur Nicolson as ambassadors at St. Petersburg; Edmund Hammond as senior clerk of the Oriental Department; and Philip Currie and Thomas Sanderson as heads of the Turkish Department and its successor, the Eastern Department, respectively. Thus, the personnel arrangements at the Office reflected the significance of the Russian factor for Britain’s foreign and imperial policies throughout the nineteenth century."
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Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"Salisbury at the FO, forcefully aided by Disraeli, pushed through Cabinet the decision to acquire Cyprus from Turkey in April–May 1878. Obtaining a foothold in Ottoman territory was deemed to be vital as a means of blocking Russia’s further advance in the Near East, as well as a means for controlling what might some day become the great highway to India through northern Syria. It is suggestive of the ill-defined borders between foreign and colonial affairs at the time when the FO initially administered that island under the supervision of Philip Currie, senior clerk of the Office’s Turkish Department and a future Permanent Under-Secretary. In a similar manner, territories north of the Zambezi River, including the British Central Africa protectorate, and later Uganda were originally under the Office’s administration. No such interdepartmental border disputes arose when in 1898 Salisbury and the FO decided upon the acquisition of the northern Chinese harbour of Weihaiwei as a strategic counterpoise to recent German and Russian seizures of Chinese ports as well as a sop to a critical press at home. It was symptomatic of the absence of a proper policy coordinating mechanism that the decision to take Weihaiwei was driven by Salisbury and senior officials at the FO without prior consultation of the Admiralty or the embryonic Cabinet defence committee. Indeed, the navy department was anxious to rid itself of Salisbury’s gift base, and, having administered it jointly with the War Office from 1899, both service departments decided in 1901 completely to divest themselves of their joint responsibilities by passing the leasehold into the care of the Colonial Office."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
Interesting how the leading role in the British Empire belonged not to the elected government, the army, or even the navy, but to the colonial departments, offices, and administrations. Big difference with, for example, Russian Empire, where the army was the core of the state.
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"Relations between the Foreign and Colonial Offices were, if not close, at any rate not distant. Frequently, colonial problems could only be solved within a wider international context; and this required closer coordination of efforts by the two ministries. One such instance was the settlement in 1906–7 of the future status of the New Hebrides islands, the last remaining territories in the South Pacific unclaimed by any of the Powers. While British diplomacy aimed to moderate French claims in the question as well as to block rumoured German ambitions on the islands, the Colonial Office worked on the government of the Australian Commonwealth to accept the terms of the Anglo-French convention. Contacts between the two Offices also extended to personnel exchanges."
"Relations with the India Office (IO) were more complicated. To an extent, this reflected the somewhat anomalous position of the Office among the other great departments of state. As Lord George Hamilton, who held the seals of the IO several times, later reflected in his memoirs, it was ‘a miniature government in itself’. The characterisation of the Office’s departmental remit by its long-serving permanent head Sir Arthur Godley, the later Lord Kilbracken, bears repetition: ‘it is concerned with all the affairs, great and small of a gigantic empire, and contains under one roof some eight or nine departments, corresponding respectively to the Treasury, Board of Trade, the FO, and so on’."
"The bulk of this communication consisted of copies of despatches to and from the British embassy at St. Petersburg and reports by the Indian government’s military intelligence branch. The two departments also had joint responsibilities in Asia. In India’s central Asian security glacis, some British consular officials were directly responsible to the Indian government, such as the agents at Kabul and, perhaps most famously, Sir George Macartney, the consul at Kashgar in Sinkiang, China’s most westerly province. In addition, the India and FOs jointly subsidised a number of consulates and legations in the region around the Persian Gulf, where the two departments also shared areas of joint jurisdiction. Thus, the consuls at Aden or the political resident in the Gulf at Muscat were recruited from the Indian Political Service but were responsible to the British minister at Tehran."
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Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"Nevertheless, in normal times relations between the two departments ‘were carried on with great formality and some jealousy’, especially where international politics were concerned. To an extent this reflected profound differences in the ‘official mind’ of the two departments. With India’s security usually not under immediate threat, the IO and the government at Delhi and Simla tended to stress longer-range developments and policies, usually with a view to formulating an early ‘forward’ action to preempt possible actions by foreign Powers. The FO, by contrast, moved in a much more dynamic and fluid environment, where differences of interest with other governments always had the potential of escalating into crises."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
The idea of "brake pedal" and "gas pedal", influencing government policy, can also be found in the British tradition of two-party system with "conservatives" and "progressives".
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"A further group of officials close to the centre of the foreign policymaking process were the members of Britain’s nascent intelligence services. Following the release over recent years of nineteenth century secret service files, and the pending release of further intelligence-related material, this formerly ‘missing dimension’ can now be more fully incorporated into analyses of British foreign and imperial policy."
"At Peking, for instance, the British minister there had established a British hospital in the Chinese quarter of the capital at the end of 1902, paid for out of the secret service fund. The real purpose of the establishment, however, was not so much the administration of medicine to ailing Chinese, but to serve as a kind of ‘safe house’, an innocuous meeting place for native informants and the Chinese Secretary of the legation."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"Ironically, although the senior diplomats appreciated the significance of intelligence, the Office guarded its preserve against interlopers. Attempts by the intelligence service to use Britain’s consular officials as additional sources of operational intelligence led to constant friction with the FO."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"From the turn of the nineteenth century, there was also a growing bureaucratic awareness across Whitehall that a major war was then a realistic eventuality. This heightened an awareness of the need for properly organised intelligence gathering. The absence of such organisation or, indeed, intelligence sources was keenly felt during the Boer War. Bureaucratic and parliamentary pressure resulted in a series of official enquiries into various aspects of Britain’s armed and intelligence services. Responding to such pressure, the new Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, who had himself become increasingly disturbed by the inadequacy of the Cabinet’s existing defence committee, established the CID in December 1902. This body never had any executive authority, and its wartime functions were dispersed among other organisations. But its formation created a new interdepartmental forum, chaired by the Prime Minister, for the discussion of strategic questions affecting foreign and imperial policy. It was an attempt, in the contemporary spirit of ‘national efficiency’, to apply a broader and more systematic approach to defence planning; and the CID was to prove the principal advisory body on imperial and home defence matters until 1939."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
"The impact of the Russian and imperial factors on FO decision-making during the July crisis of 1914 is a contentious point. Keith Wilson has advanced the argument that the British decision to go to war was based on an imperial set of priorities, that Britain went to war to protect her Asian interests and that the perceived need to maintain good relations with Russia was the determining consideration rather than concern about a German threat to the balance of power in Europe. The implication is that prior to 1914, Britain pursued some form of ‘appeasement’ of Russia and that a major European war was a price well worth paying for the protection of Central Asian interests against a future Russian menace."
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
Aaaaand the "The Foreign Office and defence of empire, 1856–1914" by T.G. Otte is ended. Good essay. Many things I knew, but this is the first time I read about FO and IO friction, very interesting.
Ree Vannin
2024 oldGOD
Reading "The Foreign Office and the defence of empire, 1919–1939" by Keith Neilson from this book. Not as interesting as the first essay.
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