10 year anniversary

Geotrickster’s 10 Year Anniversary

/ geotrickster / 4 Comments
Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary

On the fourth of April it will officially be the 10 year anniversary of this blog. If it was another 10 years older backdated in time it would have been called part of the ‘Blogosphere’. Thankfully, that did not happen. I will be traveling on the fourth of this month, however. So instead I am going to upload this at a time when much of the world is in April Fool’s Day. It seems fitting. In that 10 years there have been 223 posts, well, now 224 I suppose. Not a bad clip.

My original purpose with this site was to serve the following purposes:

  1. Practice for policy idea writing.
  2. Working through issues I wasn’t sure about yet. A first testing ground so to speak.
  3. An online resume of sorts (see publications tag).
  4. To provide a repository for all the articles I either did not want to publish through someone else due to needing a custom tone or could not get published elsewhere (a formerly much more common arrangement).
  5. To be funny and casual about stuff treated with way too much seriousness elsewhere.

Once I began publishing externally much more frequently, the amount of analysis on foreign policy decreased massively, with domestic and philosophical posts growing, and even a few fiction pieces too. Aside from this though, the original 5 points seem to have largely stayed intact.

A lot has changed since Spring of 2015. Otherkin no longer rule the internet, replaced by a medley of domestic terror-coded ideological otherkin. A global pandemic ran rampant and unleashed the contradictions of late neoliberal breakdown. A carnival barker became President twice in a nonconsecutive manner, the first since Grover Cleveland to do so. In the interregnum between these terms a vegetative fossil held the presidency, but since much of the media liked him there was a coordinated conspiracy to pretend that this was not so. Greater multipolarity in world affairs, something that was basically inevitable from the Great Recession onwards, went from the primary world issue in the background to very much the forefront. The failure to establish a left populism, undone by postmodern moralism and puritanism and tied to the rotting corpse of a liberal establishment, led to the rise of a right populism which is far dumber than the left that should have been born from Occupy but wasn’t.

And then came signalgate to really ram home one consistent theme I have always hammered on this site: it is not primarily malicious competence that is responsible for so much of what you see, but a kind of autopilot incompetence. Notice too how a scandal that should be overwhelmingly directed against Mike Waltz in particular seems to be intentionally obscured by the very media that broke the story, likely because they find his uber-hawk establishment positioning the most palatable of anyone in the government and fear his replacement. Freedom of will? Human consciousness directing the species through rationality? These are the most overrated concepts in all of the humanities. We do not assign this special status to other species, and it makes our observations of their behavior far more objective.

So on the surface everything changed. But if you were paying attention nothing really unexpected happened at the macro scale. The empire was in decline when I started, it still is now. The planet is suffering under incredible loss of biodiversity and conditions of accelerating climate destabilization, same as it was then. Neoliberalism was a discredited force everywhere but finance and the media 10 years ago, and now its often even discredited there too. These things were always going to happen no matter what individuals or even specific countries were wielding the most power, though the rate of the change might differ between variables. Trump is an accelerant.

But just because real life is fatalistic doesn’t mean its predictable! Far from it. This site has the name it has because of my fascination with trickster figures in mythology. They remind us that the murky reality of moral ambiguity that we live in is random and fun in at least equal proportions to its more dire and tragic elements. To quote Dasha Nekrasova from before her podcast went fully unbearable: “Stay alive- something retarded might happen.” These are words to live by.

I would like to think that in these 10 years I have been consistent. Always willing to admit when I make a bad call (Russia won’t invade Ukraine outside of the Donbass/Crimea areas, Hillary will pull out a squeaker in 2016, Syria won’t fall to foreign states-*though in my defense I always carved out a Turkish exception to that one as a hedge, which sadly turned out to be correct). Want to dunk on me, those predictions are all still here. You can search for them. But I have had a greater number of correct calls too in the same time frame (A second Karabakh War with advantage this time for Azerbaijan, the always lingering dangers of the Israel Lobby on crafting viable foreign policy, US recognizing Moroccan rule over Western Sahara, the increased importance of Panama and the Arctic for geostrategy, other countries invoking their own form of R2P to justify war-no longer leaving this as an Atlantic only causus belli, and the missionary/military uses of social progressivism, to name just a few).

If there is one criticism anyone can rightly lob at me which I will proudly accept as true it is that I am a geographic determinist. I am. And if I am doing my job, other people will see why this apparently reductionist position is the pinnacle of material philosophical rigor and policy planning priorities. When accepting geographic determinism, people can virulently disagree on policy but still do so rationally and respectfully, knowing at least that all sides share a common physical reality. The animal is made by ecology.

So with a decade on here passed what are my favorite entries and which were the most popular?

Most popular is easy to prove as I have access to the data:

Oversocialization: An Alternative Social Media Theory, Geotrickster’s Official Rankings of DnD Editions, For Every Cheney Gained, a Million Voters Lost, seem to be the most consistent view getters, in some cases years later. I have even seen one of my lines from the most recent of these appear at random throughout the internet (the one about the party of FDR being replaced by a bunch of Patrick Batemans and the cast of The View).

Considering that there are hundreds I can choose from for my personal favorite I am just going to go with what hits the memory banks first as entries I am personally most proud of. These would be:

How to Write a Generic International Relations Article (from the first month no less and which apparently made my former doctoral advisor break out into laughter when he saw it during a meeting), Speculative Realism’s Mongolian Debut, Going Along With the Coyote Conquest, 17th Century Survival Tips for a Hysterical Age, Designing the Ideal International Relations Education, and Delving Down to Prospect (fiction!)

As for the future? I publish more often off this site than on it these days, but there will always be things that need a personal touch or that cannot be fiddled with by editors, things that fill the liminal spaces between clear cut genres and acceptable discourse, and books no one else wants to review. So long as that is the case, I will be here.

A Gay Girl in Dumbasscus, or, That One Time I Accidentally Met a “Syrian Lesbian Blogger.”

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

This June, to the month, marks the ten year anniversary of a story that took world news headlines by storm for about a week. It was my original intention to write about this on the exact anniversary of the exposure of it, but as I have work to do and am about to embark on a move, I figured I might as well do it now while I have time. It is also the kickoff of Pride month, a time I used to enjoy now thoroughly corrupted by neoliberal normies, obnoxiously woke ‘queer’ hetrosexual larpers, and megacorporations into something more cringe than valuable. So, while I have time, what better way to start off Pride Month than talking about that time I met Amina Arraf, the famous Syrian Lesbian blogger who changed the world…by being exposed as a heterosexual man from Georgia. A guy, it turned out, I had met the month before the story dropped and whose wife I had known for almost a year.

Lets reel it back to late April, 2011. I was a first year doctoral student at the University of St Andrews and still, at that time, based in the namesake town in Fife, Scotland. I had returned from an amazing road trip with friends to the Isle of Skye where we hiked the Old Man of Storr up its more challenging frontal face. After this I was given the charge I needed to complete the work I had to do early, and so by the end of the month I was newly free and took a rail trip down to London for a few days to visit with the friends I had living there (I had previously lived in London before moving up north).

The last day of my time in London two things happened simultaneously. My bank card decided to lock my account for some random mistaken reason which I cannot recall the specifics of today-leaving me with only the remaining cash in my pocket for my train trip back to Fife…and a massive windstorm descended on the UK and Scotland in particular. ‘No problem,’ I thought, ‘I’ll be back home in St Andrews where I can mooch off friends until the bank fixes this issues and unfreezes my account in a day or two.’

But the windstorm put paid to those plans. The historic and distinctive Forth Bridge, which was the only way the east coast rail line can go north of Edinburgh, was closed due to how intense the windspeeds were around it. The last station the train would stop at was Edinburgh itself. And while it is true that in slightly over a year I would be living in Edinburgh along with quite a few other people I knew, neither I nor they had moved there yet. With my bank card locked and about five pounds and change in my wallet, I frantically called people on a blackberry (remember those?) with a dying battery in a time before phone chargers on trains were common asking who they knew in Edinburgh. It is my favorite city in the world so the prospect of wandering its streets all night did not horrify me, but during a horizontally-cutting-rain-windstorm? No thanks. Surely there was a couch I could crash on. Fortunately, someone remembered an acquaintance from our program, Britta, and sent me her phone number. She, to my eternal gratitude, picked up and agreed to give me her address and let me crash overnight at their place.

Using my last handful of currency to hail a short cab ride (I’m normally a walker but once again, that weather) I made it to their place where I met, for the first time, Britta’s husband Tom. A guy about a decade older than me who I was happy to find shared some interests with myself about medieval history and Middle Eastern/Central Asian stuff in particular. We all got along well and they even covered some of my food costs since I had no money on me. I promised I would pay them back soon. I charged my phone at their place and slept on their couch.

The next day the bridge was open again, I was able to redeem my partially cancelled tickets and finish the train ride to coastal Fife, lucky to have been able to get through all of that without having to weather the experience on the street.

Fast forward about a month and a half.

Something one needs to know. St Andrews has one of the top Syria Studies programs in the world. Also, the Arab Spring had just begun and was gradually starting to mutate (already in Libya and just starting in Syria) into civil wars for some countries. Syria was big in the news for the first time since the Yom Kippur War for normies. While I was not part of the Syrian studies center or anything like that, Britta was, as well as a friend of mine whose book I previously reviewed on here before. So when the world media was taken by stories about the kidnapping by state security forces of the mildly famous author behind the blog ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’, I turned to some people I knew for some local updates. My friend Francesco told me that the Electronic Intifada had looked into this blog and suspected it was a hoax, so I went back to ignoring the story save as a cautionary tale about how easily led along the media can be by potboiler stories. Something that would become enormously clear yet again in another part of the world about a year later.

Anyway, a few days after this rise of the blogger Amina Arraf to international headlines, the other shoe dropped. The Guardian had exposed the whole thing as a charade. An American man living in Edinburgh was Amina Arraf. Certain details, like if his wife knew or what purpose, salacious or ideological or both, this blog was meant to serve, were up to question. I was texted the news by friends that morning and I thought they were joking about who it really was, considering that they might be alluding to the fact that the blogger fit the demographic of a guy we knew about in Edinburgh. But upon reaching the office I saw the interview with the news on streaming video and….yup, that was him.

Needless to say that because this was us and not most people once about 5 minutes of shock had faded we naturally and pretty much immediately came to find it incredibly fucking funny. It must have been terrible for the women ‘Amina’ was cyber-romancing, of course, but for us it was the capstone event of what had already been a wild and wacky year.

Both Tom and Britta disappeared after that. I heard Edinburgh University kept him on so he could finish his dissertation, but on the down-low. Britta, despite not being the blogger, just ghosted St Andrews and I have no idea whatever happened to either of them. Needless to say, I still owe them a couple GBP.

Obviously, I didn’t make this post to rag on them as they were perfectly nice to me. But 10 years after this event and we really do live in “Amina’s” world to some degree. People have taken to adopting oppressed identities that often do not belong to them in order to live some kind of vicariously interesting life. Much more importantly, Syria became a magnet for attracting strange North Atlantic pathologies. It would become the regime change cause-du-jour for a bizarre alliance of woke liberals, anarchists, neocons, and the like. A group I have taken to calling Anarcho-Neocons as a shorthand term. Hillary Clinton famously mentioned that regime change in Syria was her top priority in all three general election primary debates in the run up to 2016. Jihadists and European social justice missionaries stood side by side at rallies in Germany demanding that ‘we must do something.’ People whose connections to the country were either tenuous or nonexistent became intense advocates for knowing what is best for that land and how to bring it about. And, Turkey, the U.S., the Gulf States, and Israel, having failed to topple the government in Damascus ten years on now, have resorted to punishing and dangerous sanctions in order to cripple the country and prevent its rebuilding. And considering the enormous amount of foreign recruits and support masquerading as grassroots revolutionaries in Idlib Province today and through the ‘moderate rebel’ movement in general this past decade, I can really think of no more perfectly symbolic figure for the whole tragic farce than Amina.

And after all, she was arguably the first victim in a long line of those who fell to the ‘Assad Must Go’ curse.