I was randomly selected from among those hundreds of people to be one of the first juror candidates, number thirteen. Everyone filled out a lengthy 60-odd-question pre-screening questionnaire. At voir dire, the lawyers for both sides asked almost everyone about something in their questionnaire. Nobody asked me anything until the last five minutes of the pharma lawyers' time. They picked out each of the juror candidates who hadn't been asked anything yet and just said “What do you think?”. I replied that the plaintiff had set out a story for how he might have developed cancer and that I'm sure they'd bring in lots of evidence and experts and witnesses to substantiate it. The judge would tell us what standard of proof to hold that case to, then I'd do my best to judge whether the evidence as a whole met that standard. There were no follow-up questions for me.

In the first round of juror challenges, many people were dismissed for cause, and both sides spent five of their six peremptory challenges. Everyone moved up in their juror numbers, and I ended up number seven. In the jury box! A new round of candidates was randomly selected to fill out the pool of candidate jurors & alternates There was a second round of voir dire, where only the new candidates were asked questions. Another batch of people were dismissed for cause. Then both sides had the opportunity to use their last peremptory challenge. The plaintiff passed, and then the defendant dismissed… me?

I don't know why. I do not think that the answers in my questionnaire suggested that I'd be anything but a fair and diligent juror. Certainly nothing that happened in court suggested otherwise: I was neat, quiet, polite, and attentive. I was barely asked a question at voir dire, and that question was so bland as to be meaningless, as was my answer. I can only imagine that the defense looked me up online and decided that I have secret biases which endangered their case. Up until that moment, I had genuinely and unabashedly believed that I would be a fair & reasonable juror on the case. I would listen to the experts, look at the evidence, and consider carefully whether I thought that this drug was the likely cause of this man's cancer in particular.

But the lawyers certainly know more about the case than I do. If they wanted me off the jury for secret reasons, that sounds like a very strong signal that I should want to be on the jury — for those very same secret reasons! I'm disappointed that I didn't get to serve, even though six weeks is a heck of a long time to serve on a jury. In the end, I'm glad that I contributed to the jury selection process, that I forced the defense to spend one of their six scarce peremptory challenges on me. In retrospect, knowing what I know now, I think it would have been even more useful to expend more of their voir dire time on me, without giving them a reason to dismiss me for cause. But of course, during voir dire I didn't know that they considered me a threat. I had no idea about that until the moment they chose to remove me from the jury. The only reason I have to believe that I might be biased is that the defense implicitly said so.

Like The Dictator’s Handbook, We May Dominate the World stands out for me because it offers a couple of new frameworks for understanding state action and reasoning about its consequences. However, those new frameworks are not trumpeted as the core insight of the work. They have to be teased out of commentary here and there, buried in a sea of names and dates for US interventions across the Americas.

Regional Hegemony through the Monroe Doctrine.

The concept of regional hegemony is not one I was familiar with. I understand a regional hegemon to be a state whose near abroad security threats are so limited that it doesn’t need to spend any substantial lear attention or material resources defending its borders, leaving it free to focus on other matters, like economic development and more distant entanglements. This is a fascinating concept, and one that I think has interesting implications not only for the US in the 19th century, but also for understanding the behavior of Russia & the USSR (and, thereby, the Cold War), and of post-Cold-War China. I’ll come back to this later.

The Monroe Doctrine was a US foreign policy position first clearly articulated and implemented by James Monroe, the 5th US president. The doctrine’s thesis is that the US is the only great power which may hold sway in the Americas — the legacy European great powers should get out and stay out. The US will consider any material great power intervention in the Americas a direct threat. I think of the Monroe Doctrine as a stronger, more universal declaration of independence. The US was a colony of a European great power; they fought and won independence. That earns the right to bar the colonial European great powers from their sphere of influence.

There’s also an element of shared liberty and values here — this is an ongoing but strained thread through the listed US interventions in the 19th century. The European powers are ancient monarchies, the US is a new republic. The European powers are colonial overlords, the US is a liberated colony. There’s an inflection that the US is standing up for its sibling states across the Americas, shielding them from the threat of European domination, and guaranteeing independent popular governance. (None of this erases the US’s extensive history of colonialism, or the colonial & racist dynamics of a European-offshoot power dominating the Americas. Nor does it erase the extensive limits to US “democracy”. But those are a stories for another time.)

Clearly these two things seem to go together well. It’s much easier to be a regional hegemon if other great powers keep their colonial sticky fingers out of your sphere of influence. Just think about how many fewer security distractions the US would have to think about if it were surrounded by stable, independent, productive states like Canada? But that’s not actually how the history of the Americas went in the 19th & early 20th centuries, because “stable” and “independent” could not always be used to describe other states in the Americas, and those two values were often in conflict.

Introducing: the Rosevelt Corollary.

Here’s the problem. The Monroe Doctrine is not self-enforcing. The US can tell other great powers to stay out of the Americas. But the Americas have so many valuable resources to exploit and so many non-white people to make into client states! And the other great powers have ships. With guns! They have gunships. So the Americas are just crying out for colonization. When you think about it (like a colonizer). So sometimes other great powers try to meddle. Just a little. Just some light resource extraction. As a treat.

And what’s the US going to do about that? There are two options: intervene, and don’t intervene. Really, it’s a spectrum of response from complete non-intervention, to strongly-worded letters, to economic support (“dollar diplomacy”), to staging detachments of marines near US embassies & businesses and saying “Gosh, it really would be a tragedy if anyone fired guns near these marines because if a US marine were injured, we’d really have to intervene. Probably with all of those marines.”, to having US gunboats float ominously nearby practicing maneuvers which look a lot like repelling European fleets, to directly invading and overthrowing governments, to annexing the Kingdom of Hawai’i. All totally normal non-colonial behavior supporting the rights of other American states to self-determination.

And that’s the problem. If the US doesn’t intervene, nothing’s stopping the Kaiser from waiting for American states to have a little instability and then doing a little light annexing. And if that instability was also caused by some predatory European loans in the first place, well, then this colonial resource extraction is really just legal debt collection, isn’t it? So the US has to intervene. Ideally before the European gunboats get their teeth into some juicy new dependencies. That’s the Rosevelt Corollary: if another American state looks a little wobbly, the US should intervene to “help” (in the colonial paternalistic sense) because better to have “help” from the US than domination from a colonial great power.

But when the US does intervene, it’s creating new and different problems. Any intervention starts you down the road of having vassals & protectorates & client states. The more you intervene to prop up a client state, the less independent it is. And the more you historically have intervened in a state, the less practice it’s had with the institutions and practices of democratic self-governance. It’s very hard to go into a state, fight little a war to kick out the Spanish, and then leave that state to stable independent self-governance. The more you intervene, the less stable it is, so the more it’s at risk of colonial domination, so the more you should intervene to stabilize it, so the less independent it is. It’s not a great cycle.

And this is basically what the US has been doing since reconstruction. From Venezuela at the dawn of the 20th century to Iraq at the dawn of the 21st, nothing has changed. The US has a habit of seeing an unstable state and thinking to itself “We must protect this unstable state from collapse and dominion by someone else!”, and then occupying/ruling that state for long enough to just absolutely erode the practices & institutions necessary for stable government and the security apparatus necessary for stability. Then the US leaves (or “leaves”) and suddenly there’s even more instability and revolutions and coups and warlords and strongmen and who knows what else. And every single time, the US is like shocked Pikachu, whomst could have predicted this?

If you think this is a vicious cycle, here’s another component of it. Remember regional hegemony? Well, as a regional hegemon, the US doesn’t really need to attend to its local security situation. (Though this is less and less true as military technology shrinks certain sorts of distances.) This leaves the US with lots of surplus security resources and attention that it can spend just sort of popping in to do little a “nation building” here and there. There’s a cycle of failure in the structure of US interventions and in the US ability to intervene.

If you’ve really been paying attention, you might want to point out a few major exceptions: Germany, the Marshall Plan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan’s Post-War Economic Miracle. What makes these interventions different? I do not know, and this book doesn’t talk about them at all, because it ends at the beginning of WWII. I think the difference is that these are US interventions in / conquest of states which were pretty stable beforehand. I think that those states had more robust institutions & practices of stable governance to begin with, so the US intervention wasn’t enough to wreck them. However, Europe, Japan, and South Korea are all more or less still US protectorates. Europe seems to be peaking its head out from under the US military umbrella, but none of those implied conflicts are anywhere near resolution. And this is very much me just freelancing rather than describing observations in this book.

This post originally appeared on Bookwyrm.Social in September 2024. 🐉

Categories: #bookreview #reading #history #policy #bookwyrm

I love reading and learning, but my eyes spend so much time looking at bright screens. Sometimes I want to curl up with a good book and let my eyes relax too.

Not every book, paper, epigraph, or long blog post has an audio edition. This is especially true of obscure and technical material. I've found this to be particularly true of my favorite queer works and books about Judaism. Making audiobooks is an expensive professional endeavor! It absolutely makes sense not to commit those resources when just getting something published can be such an uphill challenge.That's why I love Voice Dream. I really can't recommend it enough for people who use iOS & macOS for their main devices. Voice dream is like a little robot in my phone which can read aloud any PDF, ePub, or web page is truly magical. Even with specialist/technical vocabulary (or the weird proper nouns in that fantasy or sci-fi novel) you can add custom pronunciations. Everything runs offline on your device, but it supports iCloud to sync your documents and reading status between your devices.

You can select custom voices or use some of their incredible built-in options. I like Sharon from Acapela; it's incredibly clear even at very high speeds. That's another thing — listening to audio is one of the few methods consistently demonstrated to be able to increase your reading speed while maintaining comprehension & retention. And when I need to slow down the playback, that's a good signal that it's time to get ready for bed.

Still, even with the finest robots, human performances are so much better, especially for fiction. When someone has gone to the effort of recording an audiobook, I prefer to buy them from Libro.fm (referral link). They're a social purpose corporation, care about DEI, and let you support your local book store when you shop there. Most importantly, all your audiobooks can be downloaded as DRM-free mp3 files so you can archive them on your own, and use any audiobook player you like.

My current audiobook app of choice is BookPlayer which works great, and has a ton of flexibility and convenience. I'm thinking of migrating my book library to Plex and switching to Prologue. I love the convenience of Plex as a potential single place to store & access my whole media library. Unfortunately, it's very much focused on TV & movies, with music & audiobooks second, and text books/documents completely unsupported.

I'm not saying that you have to buy audiobooks! Your local library almost certainly has a huge selection of audiobooks available through Libby and Hoopla and probably other services too. Most libraries I've used are also really good about getting even obscure books if you ask nicely. There's no need to limit yourself to one library either. In California, loads of local libraries are open to any CA resident, so you can really stack up those library cards to give you access to a huge selection of books.

Voice Dream supports every type of document. It's pretty easy to send webpages there to be read aloud. But it's very much, uh, book-forward, I guess I should say? The organization and library management seems to be oriented around the dynamics of like books and papers and longer form materials rather than thousands of short news articles.

For shorter material, I use Reader. It's truly a fantastic combination of an RSS reader, read-it-later tool, and library manager. It even supports PDFs and ePubs, but kinda the inverse of Voice Dream, it seems more oriented around many shorter documents than like reading whole books.

Reader has built-in support for reading things aloud, and I use that all the time. Unfortunately, the voices they've picked don't work very well above “2x” speed — they just seem to skip words rather than actually speeding up. Their read-aloud system doesn't work offline. And there's no way to queue a couple of articles up for back-to-back reading as far as I can tell. Which is frustrating and makes hands-free reading pretty unsupported. But Reader is a pretty early product and they've been making huge improvements very quickly since release, so it wouldn't surprise me to see these foibles improved in months rather than years.

All of this is a huge accessibility step forward. I know that my vision isn't getting any better, so the more I can rest my eyes, the longer I hope to be able to use them. And I wear headphones roughly all the time to give me some semblance of volume control for reality. So it's nice to also use their audio playback features for something.

How do you read books? What are some of your favorite sources for DRM-free media? What accessibility, library-management, and playback tools make it easy for you to enjoy things and fit them into your life?

The illustration for this post is “I guess it makes sense for a robot to read an e-book” by brianjmatis, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Computers Reading Books Aloud was originally published on Medium in September 2023.

Categories: #Medium #Reading #Disability