Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Derek Gregory has a new post about counterinsurgency (COIN) and the cultural turn here. He makes some very good points about COIN and the academic response, as well as providing some useful references:

When I wrote “Rush to the intimate” (DOWNLOADS tab) the new field manual FM 3-24 had just been released, and I was interested in how this – together with changes in pre-deployment training, technology and the rest – described a ‘cultural turn’ of sorts that seemed to be addressed as much to the American public as it was to the American military.

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There is indeed something odd about a mode of military operations that advertises itself as ‘the graduate level of war’ (one of Petraeus’s favourite conceits about counterinsurgency) and yet describes a ‘cultural turn’ that is decades behind the cultural turns within the contemporary humanities and the social sciences.

This is an interesting point…

I stumbled upon this greatly thought-provoking video on the longevity of plastic shopping bags (“rubbers”), pollution and environmental impacts. The video, aptly titled Plastic Bag, is a short biography; for 18 minutes, viewers see plastic bags from their own perspective, and we follow one’s journey from its first use (just after conception) to…well, not death, because most plastic bags like this one aren’t biodegradable. The video episode is one of a number produced by FutureStates, a television “series of independent mini-features [that] explores possible future scenarios through the prism of today’s global realities.”

My takeaway: the durability and longevity of plastic bags (given it takes about 500 to 1000 years for one to disintegrate) can be its greatest curse. It can even outweigh its convenience; it’s a compelling moment when the plastic bag itself says it would like to tell its maker, “I wish you had created me so…