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Kilcullen's book is deeply problematic, but also a mirror image of imperialist foreign policy. His (and the US/NATO/EU's) approach to "counterinsurgency" is rooted in a conservative, militaristic worldview that prioritizes the use of force and the suppression of any dissent. His ideas are based on flawed assumptions about who the "insurgents" are, but also of the efficacy of military intervention and the ability of foreign powers to impose their will on other nations.

Kilcullen's emphasis on "winning hearts and minds" is particularly troubling, as it is often used as a justification for imperialism and the suppression of local resistance movements. His strategies for counterinsurgency are often geared towards protecting the interests of Western powers (money).

Overall, I found "Counterinsurgency" to be a deeply flawed and troubling book, but to be treated as a manual of the methods and arguments colonialist "peacekeepers" use to subjugate and harm. We're supposed to trust them while he emphasises we definitely shouldn't trust Afghan children because they're "resourceful" and "explosive".

Had to stop a few times with long gaps between reading sessions because it's such a disgusting book, especially because it's true.

A finite history of infinities.

From Pythagoreans, the Kabbalah, Galileo, Bolzano, Gauss, Riemann, Weierstrass, to Cantor. From Cantor to Gödel, Zermelo, and the eugenist Bertrand Russel.

Philosophers and mathematicians, some of them utterly entranced by the concept, like moths to the flame. Some of them completely oblivious a world war was tempestuously unravelling around them — that someone is Gödel, who was no longer a part of this dimension, narrowly escaping being drafted in some army, having to cross Siberia to arrive to the US. Like Cantor before him, his mental and physical health were quickly deteriorating, along with his trust for people around him. This is also one of my criticisms, the author goes at length to put an equal sign between studying set theory and developing mental health issues, which only serves to create stigma(s).

The book also talks about the axiom of choice — the statement that a Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty. Set theory. Any collection of sets, from each containing at least one element it's possible to construct a new set by arbitrarily choosing one element from each set, even if the collection is infinite.

Like infinity(-ies), this book doesn't really know what it is, it doesn't have a linear progression, it doesn't feel planned. It feels like a patchwork, but overall a good patchwork, and I hope people are inspired to read other books as they encounter all the tangents.

This is a book everyone, especially white people, should read. I read it in English, which has an addendum about how the translator & editor were going back and forth regarding certain words like 'colonised' → 'colonist', trying to more accurately represent the state pushed onto those people by the white colonizers. Even the word 'colonizer' gives power to people that shouldn't have it.
This version also tries to simplify the "1950s pompous writing style", as the translator writes, to make it easier to understand for younger generations.

Truthfully it's been difficult to read it. Some chapters I read twice because of their immense importance and... relevance, ~60 years later. Other chapters I read with a knot in my stomach, especially those that describe in detail methods of torture the French state was conducting in Algeria, just... awful.

But it was in that chapter I learned in more depth about the psychiatric effects of racism, from his time as a resident psychiatrist at Pontorson, Mont Saint-Michel, dealing with victims of racism but also torture — on both ends, which I found fascinating. Although I have zero empathy for police, it has a few stories about the trauma those pieces of shit also felt from the immense amount of people they tortured, day in, day out. Hope they rot in hell forever. I piss on their graves.

But anyway, here's a good quote:

“The truth is that colonization, in its very essence, already appeared to be a great purveyor of psychiatric hospitals. [...] Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: Who am I in reality?”

I loved the sprinkled parallels to Palestine throughout the book, but also zooming out and pointing out how deeply rooted racism is on the whole planet. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

The one thing I hated with a passion was his speciesism. He talks about slavery but casually writes a story about solidarity — how poor families should lend their only donkey to transport revolutionaries into battle. And if the donkey gets gunned down they should not get mad, they should only ask if the revolutionary survived. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.