Tuesday, 10 January 2023

random music bits

Beck - everybody's gotta learn sometime

The Korgis - Everybody's gotta learn sometime – wait, this is the original??

Laibach - Tanz mit Laibach (I trieed their Novakropola album, but couldn't appreciate it much anymore. Also, the home-burned CD was rotten...)

Echo and the Bunnymen - "Crocodiles"

Unseen Guest - "Let Me In" – don't think I've heard this before. Is good. Sad evening violin lyrics.

Koop ft Ane Brun - "Koop Island Blues"

Decemberists - "We both go down together"

Harold James - "Geopolitics is a loser's buzzword"

https://aeon.co/essays/geopolitics-is-a-losers-buzzword-with-a-contagious-idea


I'm not sure I follow this completely.  The phrase was coined in Sweden around 1900, then people like Haushofer - who some think was basically the mastermind/writer behind Mein Kampf - took it and made it an excuse for "lebensraum", as later Putin would blame geopolitics on the breaking up of the Sovjet Union...?




As in the interwar era, geopolitics has become a buzzword that brings with it a contagious idea. Geopolitics should be recognised as what it is: an attempt to understand the world by people and countries that believe they are losing out. As in post-1919 Germany, it looks like an appealing way of explaining a newly chaotic world to the confused. The real danger is that this mode of thinking appears so attractive that it poisons everyone else’s politics too. The haunted world of Haushofer, and of the Hartschimmelhof, is a monument to a confusing response to confusion: and a grim warning.