Pink and Greens New Deal

Pink and Greens New Deal Who are South Korea’s emoji provocateurs? Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing … … read about South Korea’s Emoji Provocateurs. From February to late March 2022, the 11 million South Korean financial app Toss users were treated with deliberately contradictory emojis. The pictographic font, dubbed Toss Face, specifically pertained to the display of certain existing characters from the over 3,500 emoji of the Unicode Standard. Emojis are meaning encoded into fonts, then rendered by the font reader on the user’s end. What that meant for Toss is that in its app, it could turn a universal tool of cross-platform communication to produce a markedly distinct answer instead. Most of these divergences, [report Emojipedia,]( held to either emoji representing technology or emoji specifically representing Japanese culture. So, for example, the fondue emoji would show a bibimbap bowl instead. On Toss, the emoji for a sake bottle rendered the Korean alcohol Makgeolli. Perhaps the most striking of the cultural changes were Japanese dolls, which traditionally offer an Emperor and Empress sitting, but for Toss showed two figures bowing. The tech updates, less overtly targeted at culture, included real innovation, like replacing a rickshaw with a quadcopter or a floppy disk with a cloud save icon. Ultimately, after a brief and flashy debut, the emoji in Toss Face were reconciled to more convergent forms. But the experiment shows that a company can make a splash by offering national variants on universal patterns with a little effort and graphic design. Noble Farce Triumphant NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a speculative market dressed in the trappings of the art world. With financial instrumentation and high visibility comes the potential for a spectacle that satirizes the market itself. That’s where Looty, the project of Nigeria-based artist Chidi Nwaubani, comes in. Looty “produces NFTs of looted objects in major institutions and sells them, with 20 percent of the proceeds going to grants for young African artists,” claims [ArtNet](. Whether or not Looty ends up paying out as promised, the project has succeeded in a major way by finding an avenue to monetize stolen artifacts. And in the process, it has further guilted the museums holding these items. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( An Army Marches On Its Carve-Outs In the 1990s, with the Cold War clearly behind it and the dawn of a century of peace and prosperity ahead, the Clinton administration triangulated its way into acting on climate change through the most unimpeachable part of government: The Pentagon. A new review by the National Security Archive dives into Clinton-era climate policy as run through the military. “By 1997, the Pentagon recognized the military’s role in environmental pollution and greenhouse gases,” [writes Burkely Hermann](. “There were calls to make the US military’s environmental programs more effective while using 'innovative technologies' to cut costs and improve mission readiness.” Ultimately, a desire for maintaining military functionality led to the Kyoto Protocol encoding military exemptions from standards on pollution. Unfortunately, this choice has left the military constantly promising it will act on climate without hard mechanisms to compel a reduction in fossil fuel usage. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE Civil warcraft: Part II When insurgency erupts in a state, how it operates and endures hinges largely on where it feels threatened. The history of insurgency in the 20th century reads like a history of rural rebellion. That is where insurgent forces like Mao’s communists or the Mau Mau in Kenya were able to operate for a long time. But, argues Anthony King in “[Urban insurgency in the twenty-first century: smaller militaries and increased conflict in cities,](” those 20th-century wars had major urban campaigns. Instead, they just ended in defeat for the insurgents because state security forces could use superior numbers and coordination to quash urban rebellions. King’s work looks at insurgency and counterinsurgency as a kind of arithmetic of brutality. For insurgents looking to oust a local government, operating in cities where the government is, especially capitals, is a path to victory. Suppose the insurgency is instead trying to drive out a foreign occupier. In that case, the ability to attack its bases in cities and threaten violence more distantly can allow them to increase the costs of continuing occupation. To some extent, all of this can be threatened through rural operations. But being able to occupy, hold, and control cities, or at least parts of cities, gives insurgents a powerful base of operations to acquire, maintain, and wield more advanced weaponry. To counter that, King points to the success of massive deployments of security forces, especially relative to the size of the city being contested. In Algiers in 1957, for example, the low estimate of security forces was 14,000 among a population of 900,000 or a ratio of 64:1. (Algiers may have had twice as many security forces, halving that). By contrast, in 2013, Syria’s government only had 7,000 security forces to Aleppo’s population of 1.5 million, which is 214:1. King argues that this goes a long way to explain the slow and brutal course taken by Syria in the years of the siege. While it is unlikely that many modern states will revert to conscription-heavy models in the face of new insurgencies, there’s an alternative to increasing the number of bodies patrolling and fighting: proxy forces. “Partnerships with local state, militia, or irregular forces have played an increasingly important role in urban conflict, providing additional mass,” writes King. “Weaker states fighting for their sovereignty, such as Iraq, Syria, and Ukraine, have been increasingly forced to mobilize irregular troops.” Understanding the labor needs of military efforts makes it easier to understand how and why they reach out to other groups of “armed friendlies” to bolster their numbers and fighting power. Urban warfare is dangerous and increases the shape of conflicts to come. While security forces, like armed militias or patrolling local police, may be unwilling to risk harm to themselves in the same way as professional soldiers, when the opportunity arises to inflict violence against perceived enemies, well, there can be strength and protective anonymity in numbers. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Bridget Moix [implored]( the Biden administration to use its leverage and influence to start guiding Ukraine and Russia towards a peace process. Emphasizing the sizable funding the US has provided for Ukrainian military equipment and the punishing sanctions levied against Russia, Moix highlights how US decisions have already shaped the conflict. Moix presents a compelling overview of US policies and actions that could change and steps Ukraine and Russia could take to end the war and suffering it caused. Pushing for the US to join the ICC so that Putin might be brought before it promises justice but might make a negotiated end further away. Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman [reported]( on Ghana removing protections from Achimota Forest, the last greenbelt surviving for the capital of Accra. Deliberately created a century ago under colonial rule, the preserved area has become vital infrastructure, providing a home to wildlife and offering the city protection and resilience against flooding. Daryl Bosu, deputy national director of conservation organization A Rocha Ghana, told Dini-Osman that “the decision to declassify the forest as a reserve casts doubt on Ghana’s commitments to climate action — especially in the area of adaptation.” Kate Kizer [excoriated]( the Biden administration's decision to return US troops to Somalia. Instead, they will continue to participate in an undeclared war that the United States has waged against various armed factions in the country for over three decades. Writes Kizer, “This recycling of past failed strategies once again misses why there is no US military solution in Somalia: a state’s legitimacy does not come from foreign military training, and it certainly won’t come from a security force trained by the very foreign military that continues to kill the very people Somali forces are supposed to protect.” [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED When the material in question is abundant gun supply, maybe the [simplest answer]( is the best. [EOD versus Adams Morgan]( I’m shocked, shocked to find that [politics is going on]( in this polis! I would do anything about guns, but [I won’t do that](. The first assassination is on the house, with [no charges](. [Kirb your reunification](. Checkmate, [Machiavelli](. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Kelsey D. Atherton with Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](