Biden Becomes Third POTUS to strike Syria
Americans and the rest of the world have had enough of endless wars | #TC89
Welcome to Third Cultured – a foreign policy and LGBTQIA+ politics newsletter – published by yours truly, Kyle Borland. My goal is to highlight the unique role Queer people play in the politics of the United States and the world-at-large.
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This edition:
Global Commentary
Hot Spots
Global Commentary
Worse yet, Biden and our allies are making it crystal clear Afghanistan won’t end anytime soon either, let alone by May 1 as agreed upon. The Blob won’t quit.
Stay safe and healthy, beautiful people. And, thanks for reading.
xoxo,
Kyle (@kgborland)
PS – Here are some great reads worth your time.
1 in 6 Gen Z adults are LGBT. And this number could continue to grow. (WaPo)
Biden Administration Inches Closer to Allowing “X” Gender Markers on Federal Documents (them)
Forever War Culture War Forever (Wars of Future Past)
That the United States can continue to fight the War on Terror, or the Overseas Contingency Operations, or whatever new name the war gets, is a function of the freedom the US has to act, and also, a function of the threat not actually being an existential one.
Just as the war cannot be won, it cannot, really, be lost.
German court hands down historic Syrian torture verdict (DW)
Groups ask SCOTUS to declare all-male military draft unconstitutional (WaPo)
It Didn't Have to Be This Way (Foreign Exchanges)
My own preference would have been for something like Scenario 3—a very limited and targeted manhunt, combined with deliberate but sweeping foreign policy changes—with perhaps a measure of that pacifist self-confidence. The 9/11 attacks became a turning point for America because Americans, and in particular some very powerful Americans, decided it would be. But we could have said simply, “This was a horrible tragedy. We will find those who are responsible, we will tighten security where it is necessary and reasonable to do so, and then we will move on.” Instead, America’s choices have led to two decades of bloodshed, with most of the ultimate price paid by civilians overseas, and the United States is now a tenser, grimmer, unhappier place than it was before the attacks.
Also, check out: Wars on Terror, with Alex Thurston
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet, ‘spiritual godfather of the Beat movement’ and founder of City Lights, dead at 101 (SF Chronicle)
Two years later, City Lights became a publishing house. The first release under its Pocket Poets Series imprint was his own “Pictures of the Gone World.” It was followed by “Howl,” the incendiary work by Allen Ginsberg, introduced at the famed Six Gallery reading on Fillmore Street in October 1955.
Ferlinghetti himself did not read at Six Gallery, but the next day he sent Ginsberg a telegram offering to publish Ginsberg’s graphic poem. “Howl & Other Poems” was released by City Lights in 1956, and Ferlinghetti stood by it during an obscenity trial that gained North Beach national exposure as the home of the Beats.
Anyone interested in bohemian San Francisco came to City Lights to look for Ferlinghetti, who was invariably dressed in a button-down professorial manner, compared with the Beats and musicians who hung out there. The front sidewalk under the awning and the alley alongside were the locations of two of the most famous group photos in San Francisco lore, both taken in 1965. One is Larry Keenan’s “The Last Gathering of Beats, Poets, and Artists,” the entire bohemian tribe, including Richard Brautigan in a stovepipe cowboy hat. The other is of ultra-cool Bob Dylan with Robbie Robertson, McClure and Ginsberg.
LGBTQ people face higher covid-19 risks. But no one knows the true toll on the community. (WaPo)
The Sports Arena Became Conservatives’ Favorite Anti-Trans Battleground (Gen)
The United States, China, and Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War (CFR)
"People attacking Asian Americans during the quarantine ... are not fearing contagion from disease but assigning blame for it. Asian Americans are ... alleged to be culpable for sins ranging from the Vietnam War to an invisible infection. We are guilty by association even if our grandparents lament our alienation from their traditions."
—Frank H. Wu, president of Queens College, City University of New York, in a recent report on the targeting of Asian Americans in New York (Axios China)
"When President Trump began and insisted on using the term 'China virus,' we saw that hate speech really led to hate violence," Russell Jeung, creator of the Stop AAPI Hate tracker and chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University, told USA Today.
But Trump "could not have rallied the kind of hatred that he did without this country’s long history of systemic and cultural racism against people of Asian descent," writes Princeton professor Anne Anlin Cheng in a Feb. 21 essay for the New York Times. That history includes:
In 1871, at least 17 Chinese residents of Los Angeles were killed by a mob of 500 people.
In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese laborers from entering the U.S.
In 1885, white residents set fire to Chinese-owned businesses and expelled the Chinese residents of Tacoma, Washington.
During World War II, Japanese and Japanese Americans in California were forcibly interned in camps.
Hot Spots
Australia vs Facebook: Zuck won, and it wasn’t close.
Chip Shortage: Know how we all spent the last 40 years seeing “Made in China” on everything? Well, that’s come back to bite something in the ass DC actually cares about: semiconductors (aka microchips). Fun fact: China owns 90% of the global supply chain’s rare earth minerals.
First, the order directs an immediate 100-day review across federal agencies to address vulnerabilities in the supply chains of four key products.
APIs are the part of a pharmaceutical product that contains the active drug.
Critical rare earths are an essential part of defense, high-tech, and other products.
Semiconductors and Advanced Packaging.
Large capacity batteries, such as those used in electric vehicles: For example, while the U.S. is a net exporter of electric vehicles, we are not a leader in the supply chain associated with electric battery production. The U.S. could better leverage our sizeable lithium reserves and manufacturing know-how to expand domestic battery production.
Second, the order calls for a more in-depth one-year review of a broader set of U.S. supply chains. The one-year review will include:
A focus on six key sectors: the defense industrial base; the public health and biological preparedness industrial base; the information and communications technology (ICT) industrial base; the energy sector industrial base; the transportation industrial base; and supply chains for agricultural commodities and food production.
COVID Drop: As the US crossed the 500,000 deaths from COVID, life expectancy in pandemic-ravaged America dropped by a year to 77.8 – the worst since WWII.
Carrying all 500,000 people would require a caravan of 9,804 buses that would stretch 94.7 miles
If the Vietnam Veterans Memorial contained 500,000 names and if a similar structure of the same length were to list the names of the 500,000 killed by the novel coronavirus, it would soar to 87 feet tall.
Infrastructure: The U.S. economy would grow by $2.70 for every dollar spent.
LGBTQ+ in Ghana: Queer Ghanaians saw their primary community hub raided by National Security as anti-LGBTQ+ opinion and legislation grows. Donate here to help our Ghanaian LGBTQ+ family. #LetItBeKnown
The Equality Act: The House passed the Equality Act (again) with a bipartisan vote of 224-206, which would add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 if/when passed by the Senate.
