Big Think — Get to know!

For the 12th year out of 20, J. D. Power and Associates have chosen a Lexus.

There has been some debate, in my head, about whether this car, shown in all the (uncaptioned) photos of yesterday’s attack on the President of Ingushetia, was in fact the car the President was in. (He survived; two of his bodyguards were killed.) If this was his car, then why were there no photos of the other car—a Toyota Camry—that pulled up alongside him and exploded?

And I now think the answer is that there’s just nothing left of that other car at all.

This is why government officials in Russia mess with the lights and clog up traffic in order to speed through town. I think that’s a Toyota Land Cruiser. It was part of the government motorcade attacked this morning in Ingushetia by a Camry packed with explosives.

A summer Sunday evening around nine is a pretty good time to be on the road—but still there was a bottleneck in front of the Leningrad train station. Is this where Anna Karenina threw herself under a train? No. Not quite. Still, there was a small traffic jam.

“What the fuck?” said Igor. It really was a little puzzling. We crawled along, bit by bit. Finally there was some open space ahead, in another lane. Igor accelerated our Infiniti FX50 right into it, cutting off a sputtering old Moskvich. We saw the Moskvich’s driver, a man with a tan, weathered face and a little summer cap, as he looked reproachfully at us. “Kolkhoznik!” said Igor contemptuously—collective farm worker—and then we were free.

On summer weekends in Moscow, the traffic disappears. Cause for celebration? No. It just means the traffic has moved elsewhere, and you were not invited.

Moscow

Tehran

Moscow

I’ve often said that if the internet were a city, we’d be well within our rights to bomb it.

But reading Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal’s book about the first Chechen war, I see I wasn’t thinking right militarily speaking. Of the debacle of the invasion of Grozny in late 1994, in which the Russians threw a lot of tanks and other armored vehicles into the city only to have them be incinerated by a small, outnumbered, but mobile group of Chechen fighters, they write:

[Russian Defense Minister Pavel] Grachev was ignoring not only Russia’s experience in Afghanistan but also lessons from the historic battles fought on Russian soil in the Second World War. The epic struggles of Stalingrad and Leningrad had shown more than anything in military history that a city can only be taken with enormous cruelty and passion. Tanks were no good in a city, it needed a ruthlessly enforced blockade, and then very determined infantry. (202)

This seems like good advice. But how do we—the enemies of the internet—blockade the entire internet? I’m not sure. Clearly leveling the entire internet the way the Russians leveled Grozny is not the answer. Is it worth destroying an entire city block to get rid of one anonymous commenter? I don’t know. I mean, we can get our movie times elsewhere, as this Tumblr has demonstrated, but the international opprobrium would be tough to take.

I don’t like to brag about this Tumblr too much but I think we can all agree that one of the good things about it is that, when you come here, the Tumblr doesn’t start showing you hockey highlights in a window in the top right of your screen as if, 1) you could actually derive any enjoyment from watching a hockey player a quarter of an inch tall score a goal and, 2) that your internet connection is good enough to keep the little hockey players moving. This Tumblr knows that some of you live in Moscow or other parts of the former Soviet Union or in fact in Brooklyn and that you steal your internet from your neighbors.

I’m not saying that makes this the best Tumblr in the world but I think it’s a start.