Armas Weekend Reader
30 April - 1 May 2022
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This week: the new conservatives, Shanghai in collapse, Seattle in collapse, the war in Europe, victory at sea, French elections, and NATOWave. Let’s go —
1) “For a long time, I balked at Trump daring to call the media ‘the enemy of the people,’ but it is becoming impossible to ignore that the media’s motives reflect an ‘Us’ vs. ‘You’ mentality.”
2) “[E]ven by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books.
3) “What happened to Seattle? The answer, of course, depends on your politics … What follows is a cop’s-eye view of Seattle’s undoing.”
4) “NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s ‘radical young intellectuals,’ as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s ‘terrifying future,’ as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.”
5) “Shanghai is a city in collapse. These past few weeks have left me with a constant fear that I might lose my freedom. That I might not survive this. I can’t quite believe that a person like me — full of life, full of dignity — was forced to live like someone on the run.”
https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/shanghai-zero-covid-lockdown-food-escape-restrictions/