Double Standards

 In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms—which I read for the first time only recently, as part of a magpie-like quest, in reaction to current events, to gather various war materials into a single mental lump—there comes a major plot turn when the protagonist decides not to return to active duty at the Italian front, but instead to break for the frontier of neutral Switzerland. He has become, in effect, a deserter (though not a deserter from a proper army, as his paramour Catherine Barkley consolingly reminds him, but "only the Italian army"). And when Barkley and he together make a thrilling run for the border by lake, dodging Swiss and Italian coast guards under peril of interdiction and refoulement to Italy, they have become, in effect, refugees. 

Hemingway's protagonist, Lieutenant Frederic Henry, is aware of this—and aware that Switzerland like other nations has been known to jealously guard access to its territory—so he makes inquiries as to what happens to refugees who manage to evade border guards and make it into Switzerland. Careful, he is warned, you will be interned. Lieutenant Henry is aware of this risk, but he asks what it would mean in practice. Are we talking outright detention, with zero freedom of movement? (Think of the concentration camps that would be used decades later in France to jail Spanish Civil War refugees.) No, he is told, nothing like that. He would probably just have to check in with police periodically. In the language of some advocates and official government euphemists, Switzerland circa 1919 apparently favored "community-based alternatives to detention."

Litost

 In the spring of my twenty-seventh year, about five years ago, everything in my life was going just right. I was leaving my former part-time employment; I was a few months into my first-ever full-time job, with benefits. Modest enough accomplishments, in the scope of human ambitions, but to my mid-to-late-twenties mind, they signaled that my adult life was turning out to be more normal than I had always expected, and that things might in fact be okay after all. 

To mark this moment of transition, my co-workers at my former part-time employment invited me out for an evening of bowling. Now, I had always loathed bowling, darts, table tennis, and all other party games that required even a small amount of athletic ability and hand-eye coordination. Why did I loathe them? Because I was bad at them. But in my newfound twenty-seven-year-old-everything-is-going-my-way confidence, I thought I'd give it a try. 

Mask Up!

When news broke the other week about a major scientific study shedding new light on the perils of "long COVID," you can be sure it quickly found its way into my inbox. One of my close friends is just slightly further than I am on the side of caution, on the great COVID precautionary measures continuum that stretches all the way from those still maintaining perfect isolation to those gleefully and voluntarily breathing and coughing each day into the faces of total strangers. As such, he is perpetually concerned that I am in danger of backsliding in the direction of a maskless, caution-less existence. He therefore sees to it personally that every new piece of bad news about COVID is brought to my attention. 

And this piece was indeed attention-grabbing, from the headline down. Even relatively "mild" cases of COVID-19, the article reported, could be associated with significant losses of brain tissue and cognitive functioning, and it was unclear how long lasting those effects might be or whether they could ever be reversed. 

They also serve...

 The other day, a friend and I were playing a video game in co-op mode and were having the hardest time clearing one of the stages. The game was in part a conventional platformer, and the stage that was giving us such trouble required leaping up a series of narrow ledges that kept rotating back into the wall.  

One of the quirks of the game's cooperative mode is that, so long as one of us was alive, the other could fall off the ledge to their presumed death and still be allowed to regenerate where the other was still standing. But for the first five tries or so, this fact did us little good, because we both kept charging toward the ledge at the same time and trying to leap the narrow gap. We failed, and each time we were kicked back to the earlier checkpoint several minutes earlier in the game.

Being Right

As we enter the third week of Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be a gathering awareness that one of the greatest barriers to ending this war and saving lives may be a counter-intuitive one: the very righteousness of the Ukrainian cause itself. If both sides were equally answerable for various crimes or misdeeds, after all, then arriving at a compromise and power-sharing deal would be a relatively simple matter to rally behind. The problem here is that the opposite is the case. Putin started it; he chose to unilaterally invade the sovereign borders of another country, and that country now has an unambiguous right to defend itself...

Yet, a country can be 100% in the right and still be militarily in the weaker position. Putin has the bigger war machine at his disposal. He can afford to prolong the conflict, and it is not his civilians, his people's children, his innocents, who are being butchered the longer he drags out the fighting. In order to de-escalate or end the conflict, therefore, Ukraine may have to give something up, even though, morally-speaking, they shouldn't have to do so; even though, in the domain of right and wrong, they are the injured party and shouldn't be forced to part with anything. 

How Does This War End?

 Just over a week into Putin's war in Ukraine, there seems to be general consensus that it hasn't gone very well for the invaders. Russian forces have still failed to take the capital; their confused and unwilling troops have been plunged into a war they did not choose; they have bombed and shelled civilian targets from the skies while still failing to establish effective aerial dominance over the country; their outdated equipment and methods of attack have been matched by a smaller but fiercer Ukrainian resistance...

Yet, for all the gloating some have felt at the ineffectiveness of the Russian war effort, and the genuine inspiration others have taken from the Ukrainian defense, every sober analysis still indicates that Putin can win the war. However poor and incompetent his strategy, he has the firepower, the numerical advantage, and the apparent indifference to and contempt for the fate of his own conscripted soldiers to eventually—emphasis on eventually—seize the entire country and decapitate its government.