Paul Krugman isn't much of an opinion writer, but he once had an interesting observation about the triangular dog-chases-tail relationship of important people: intellectuals, government workers, and the wealthy. Intellectuals want the power of the government workers. Government workers want the riches of the wealthy. The wealthy want to be thought of as smart like the intellectuals.
When I saw that 2:30 SBF spiel about effective altruism I was wondering who would actually be impressed by this crap. Still not sure what the answer is.
Nov 19, 2022·edited Nov 19, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
People do not have to thoroughly believe in anything...a low-energy conviction will do fine, especially if it helps them apply the therapeutic sociopathy of neo-liberalism blended with performative compassion.
Since we are all nothing but a nasty sack of chemicals, that need is fully understandable and socially useful. If we were to follow Pindar's advice genoio hossos esse mathon (become what you are, having learned what that is) the results might be shocking.
On the divisions in the Democratic Party, the way that plays out is, in many ways, dependent on how things play out in the Republican Party. Ironically, the presence of Trump and other "Trumpist" types in the Republican side has led to the Democrats tacking to a more "popularist" line, given that they think they don't really have to argue policy or values to win -- they can just argue "we are not Trump or his supporters" and probably win, even in an unfavorable political environment (as we saw last week). That means that the more the GOP is Trumpist, the more the "popularist" wing of the Democrats retains its sway, I think. Conversely, the more the GOP becomes removed from Trump, the more likely that the actual hard left wing (AOC, Squad, etc) of the Democrats will re-assert itself, as we saw it doing around the same time Trump was rising on the Republican side in the mid 2010s, in the wake of the failure of Occupy during a Democratic administration.
I expect that it will be quite some time before the Democrats, as a practical matter, stop making Trump the subject matter of the election, even if Trump isn't actually running (after all, he wasn't running in 2022). Even if he doesn't win the GOP nomination in 24 (as I personally expect him not to do given what happened last week), I think that the Democrats will still make the ideas that Trump's supporters tend to stand for the basis of their campaign so that they can kind of still run against Trump even though Trump isn't the candidate. That will almost certainly be the case if the GOP run DeSantis, who the Democrats will likely paint as a mini-Trump, or a Trump who has a different demeanor. So I don't think we're close to being done with the Democrats running on Trump, Trump and Trump (because it's just their most powerful electoral message by far, really -- far more motivating to people than policy pitches or, as the "popularists" point out, "values" pitches which are not likely to resonate with most voters anyway). That likely means that the popularists will maintain the power position in selecting candidates, because it plays into the strategy of appearing to be the moderate/centrist party and offering that up as the alternative to the Trumpian extremists. It's much harder to make that message stick if your own candidate is a far-left firebrand type, and you also don't happen to actually be running against Trump himself.
So I think the AOC wing likely has to wait its turn for a bit. In the meantime, it will be interesting to observe whether, as the calendar years slip into the future, the younger millenials and Zs remain as ardently left -- we shall see.
---
On Israel, this shift has taken place in Europe for some time really, probably because the Jewish population there is not as politically powerful as it is in the US. In the US the anti-Israel voices on the left have been largely silenced by the fact that historically most Jews supported both Israel and the American left, without perceiving this to be contradictory as some non-Jews on the left did. That has changed, as you point out, with many younger Jews moving leftward in their assessment of Israel as well, and becoming more critical of the idea of maintaining the status quo of Israel as a Zionist/Jewish home-country. The rise of Netanyahu, who is loathed by many American Jews, probably has something to do with that, as does the overall drift among the young, in general, towards more intensely and consistently left perspectives -- this has impacted American Jews as well, without question.
Of course that doesn't map to Israeli politics itself more or less at all. While the Bibi/Gvir coalition is largely reliant on the large and growing religious right, with its strong Haredi core, the secular Israelis on the coast are also rather Zionist. The idea of turning Israel into a pluralistic, US-style multicultural proposition state isn't really one with a lot of actual on-the-ground support in Israel, at all. So there will be a massive disconnect there between the rising generation of American Jews, on the one hand, and the mass Israeli population, on the other -- one that spans the political divide in Israel, as Beinart rightly points out.
If the Democrats aren't very careful about that, Israel could become a Republican issue entirely, which would have interesting implications both for domestic US politics (although most American Jews and especially younger ones would presumably remain Democratic loyalists in that scenario, not all would ... there are always the Bari Weiss types out there) and foreign policy (which has already been veering towards more colder and more distant US/Israel relations during Democratic administrations than Republican ones).
The Democrats win on ballots not voting. Ballot harvesting is literally the only issue that counts in national elections. Don’t anyone worry the Republicans will not stoop to this distasteful practice, it would stop the Donors money.
laserjets do not answer polls and care little for debate on policy..... as long as the mail trucks can drive up in the middle of the night democrats will use the laserjets and pollings will be wrong!
Academic cynicism is truly in a class all its own.
Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish novelist who had been a prisoner of the Nazis, visited Berkeley in the 60s. In the book in which described his take on it all (NOTEBOOKS OF A DILETTANTE) he wrote that the hippies and aesthetes in the Bay Area put him in mind of the SS.
SBF mother Barbara saying personal responsibility has corrupted the system.
The perps are born that way.
(And remember correlation isn’t causation, unless it is).
Perps aren’t to blame, its biology.
Unless it isn’t.
“Beyond Blame
The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.
Barbara H. Fried
Barbara H. Fried, William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, is author of The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement. She is also a member of the board of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.”
The ogres and villains in fairy tales are real, but they do not live in the woods. They are recognised experts on human behaviour. Only a fool would not feel frightened.
I respect Matt Stoller and I am part of his Substack. While I understand the role many Republicans played into the lack of regulation, the sheer amount of money poured into the Midterms on behalf of the Democrat party establishment against populist Republican and even some populist Democrat candidates cannot be ignored.
Yeah. When I see the numbers they went to democrats 2:1 or more. They still have to pay both side of course but given that his mom ran a PAC for democrat candidates, I think it’s not quite right to say both sides.
Worth mentioning much of Ryan Salame’s (FTX’s Co-CEO) political donations to Republicans actually went to his Obama admin-turned-Republican girlfriend.
Nov 19, 2022·edited Nov 19, 2022Liked by Niccolo Soldo
US/Israel relations are ultimately about geopolitics, not ideology. From 1948 to 1967 the US had extremely frosty relations with Israel. The first US foreign policy decision taken after Israel was created was to impose an arms blockade. The expectation in Washington was that Israel would be defeated by the Arabs (who were armed by Britain). In the 40s and 50s the US backed Arab nationalist coups in Egypt and Syria, mainly because the US wanted to drive the UK and French out and keep the USSR at bay. After '67 it all changed when Johnson decided that he wanted Israel firmly within the US/Western bloc.
The long-term future of US/Israel relations will ultimately depend on how interested the US remains in Western Asia.
Having said that, at the rhetorical/theatrical level US foreign policy is invariably 100% domestic politics. The issue of Israel will always draw a lot of heat in the US because people will use it as a means of defining themselves ideologically. Ethnonationalism is the great political taboo for now, but the US is not the arbiter of the world's fate or Israel's. Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Turkey all have their own ideological perspectives on the proper relationship between state and ethnos and these have little in common with American fads. The future of ethnonationalism within the West will be settled in large part by the fate of Europe. Which leads me to conclude that it is all up for grabs.
As for Israel, it will remain what it is: a Levantine Rorschach blot upon which people project their anxieties and obsessions.
Johnson was a wise man. By the early 60s it was clear that the CIA was a disaster. Truman, who founded it, wrote an article in the 60s arguing for it to be shut down.
Johnson was a pragmatist and the Cold War was on. Israel's success destroyed the credibility of the deeply entrenched view in the Pentagon and the CIA that Arab nationalism was the wave of the future and that Israel was doomed.
As for the USS Liberty, there has never been any proper explanation about what really happened. During the Suez Crisis in '56 the US Navy in the Mediterranean interfered with sonar and signaling of UK and French vessels, possibly Israeli ones too. My guess is that the Israeli commanders in '67 were convinced (incorrectly or correctly I do not know) that the USS Liberty was gathering signals intelligence and possibly sharing it with the Arabs (Jordan was very much in the Washington/London camp at the time and the CIA was always intriguing in or with Syria so the possibility of the US giving away such information was not paranoia). There is no other reason why they would have ordered such an attack. If the USS Liberty was up to something like this, it would have made perfect sense for Johnson to just shut the Israeli's up by bringing them into the US fold.
With all the talk from Shor types about “popularism,” I’m stumped about why Biden’s people haven’t been shouting at the top of their lungs about the antitrust moves the admin has been making (as covered by Matt Stoller, who’s mentioned above). It’s the rare issue that has quite a bit of “bipartisan” appeal (in the sense of: different tranches of the two parties’ bases).
The struggle between pragmatists and idealists may well be settled (at least provisionally) by the fallout from the emerging crisis in Silicon Valley. Musk's layoff are the start of a much larger restructuring that will have a huge effect on the employability and financial prospects of a key constituency for the Dems: Gen Z within high tech. It is too soon to say how the realities of unemployment in an era of austerity and mass immiseration will play out. Most likely it will further radicalise many, if not most, of them. The hippies of the 70s turned to the Right in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years because there was money to be made. It is unlikely that there will many opportunities to join the bourgeoisie any time soon.
The forces driving populism are also becoming more, rather than less, urgent. The Democrats either meet some of the populist constituency half-way or they will have no choice but to embrace a more vigorous authoritarian approach to crush it. As Americans get poorer, politics is certain to get rowdier.
In all seriousness EVERYTHING needs Code now, like Machinists?
CNC? Anyone?
Electricians: PLC, or even C.
Any of these gentle children heard of IoT? Internet of Things?
You might better call it the Industrial Internet.
Basically network and monitor everything including your lightbulbs and ceiling tiles (heating bills, not smart house but smart commercial buildings and data centers). Electricity is getting expensive. Very.
Its actually going to be the Internet of EveryTHING , meaning Things objects.
Granted thats not the same as monitoring /r / woke/ heresy or policing Facebook or Twitter, but its REAL WORK.
Philip - if we get poorer it will be because we couldn’t find enough skilled labor for
Re-industrialization.
There’s 72 jobs on the board down the road at ALSTOM, mostly machinist.
There’s 17 jobs in Elmira, HARDINGE, same.
Now the kiddos will find the work. Just in time because the survivors of the great outsourcing are still around to train them, I predict the workforce is going to have weird age shift of average 50s into average 20s, but there’s worse things.
Philip this little country place in Western NY is becoming City of Industry, and major industry is virtuous circle of more jobs (trucking, fuel etc). Retail improves with full time full paying jobs.
We’ll suffer but Just In Time reshoring has arrived. Regardless of Elite intentions enough of them realized that they actually Didn’t want to live in a 3d world 💩 heap.
The age disparity is perfect, providential in fact. People in the last stage of their careers have nothing to fear from the young ones. They will make reliable mentors/trainers.
As I see it, problems may well intensify in other areas. Today's skilled trades need maths, lots of it, and education in such is 'problematic' to use a term in vogue amongst the woke. If America is going to escape a descent into the shit-hole it will eventually need to hose out the primary and secondary education systems. The legacy of philanthropic and juristic intervention in education throughout the 20th c needs to be dismantled. There is no other way.
Making progress will be hard. The constituencies blocking this are large, varied and they will put phenomenal energy into undermining good work of all kinds and they have the 20 to 50 age cohort in the palms of their hands. I do not need to tell you any of this, I am sure. My guess is that the solution involves drawing the villains into the excremental zones (kind of like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) and keeping them chained there while the regions return to life. Something like this appears to be underway already. The Blue metropolitan areas are a honey-trap for SJW grads with a future in larping and welfare-mgt. They are perfectly adapted for life in virtual reality.
Glad to hear that regional New York is recovering. The next decade or so will be truly tough, but the trend is the thing.
Respectfully disagree. Some maths yes, but genuine proficiency of the kind needed for a lot of stuff requires more than that. There is no substitute for reliable and consistent quality education from an early age. The rationing of educational opportunity is an exceptionally sinister feature of the regime IMO. Furthermore, maths is useful for more than work. The dissemination of mathematical knowledge (practically a mania after Newton) gave England the decisive edge in warfare and industry in the 18th c: the mechanical means of determining longitude with accuracy was the technology that made it possible for the Royal Navy to establish dominance over the oceans, successfully colonise Australasia etc. The great advantage Russia and China have is their commitment to maths.
You are dead right about the need for men in education. The feminisation of education has been a full spectrum catastrophe for the young.
Could not agree more. And where we all are in the so-called Anglosphere is so close to f""""d that Bill Clinton would not bother to make the distinction. Admiral Hyman Ryckover (father of the nuclear sub programme) was seriously concerned about the weakness of the US education system in maths back in the 50s.
This youtube video may be of interest. It is an eye-opener.
I am interested to see how far the Gen Z types are prepared to go before they renounce fashionable (but expensive) morals in favour of hard pragmatism. Britain is crying out for competent skilled workers/tradesmen yet 50% of children are now going to University, many of whom study useless courses that will merely allow them access to unskilled admin jobs. It seems in America many are happy to vote for their politics even when the conditions in LA/NY become more and more appalling. In the middle of the last century many quietly left the large cities ('white flight') and even now ask for houses 'in good school districts' i.e. no blacks. Today it seems however that staying and putting up with it is the price of living somewhere with rainbow flags and BLM signs.
As things in the Anglo world become steadily worse how many will accept the reality facing them and switch to anti-immigrant populism and manual labour?
Spot on! With you 100%. My guess is that it will be variable. Some have woken up, some will do so soon, others will take a while and there are some who just won't. Ideas about status are remarkably enduring and the older generation (the parents) have expectation of vicarious achievement formed by experiences and influences that are no longer relevant. To add a nasty element to it all, there are plenty of influential people with a stake in the existing system who will bullshit the younger generation without any hesitation.
Mass higher education was integral to the Clinton/Blair project. It enabled them to offer upward social mobility through education as an alternative to welfare or gains in the standard of living for the working classes. The whole thing was road-tested by the Hawke-Keating government in Australia and was taken up with gusto in Washington and Westminster a few years later. It fit in perfectly with the class prejudices and personal obsessions of the politicians involved (Tony Blair was famously scornful of the fact that one of Harold Wilson's kids was working as a teacher, rather than as an investment banker or consultant).
The resulting skills shortages across the Anglosphere have been managed by immigration. We are now set for a perfect storm: an abundance of over-credentialled but unskilled workers radicalised by fashionable ideologies competing both politically and economically with native working-classes who for the most part have received limited, often poor, educations thanks to the mismanagement and neglect of mass education by the elites. Throw in industries' need for highly skilled technicians and surging immigration.
Have you seen the video of the girl slandering her dead father *at his funeral*? This (half-black) bitch called her father a Trump-supporter, 'cis', all the usual crap. This was a man who had married her black mother and brought her up in a house worth millions before going to a phenomenally expensive school. Despite all of this she still despised him. This is the level of damage to families that the Soviets dreamed of: I remember there being a statue somewhere to a boy who was murdered by his parents for turning them in to the authorities. In the end it was nonsense (no surprise) but to raise a statue to such a thing: sickening.
It also raises the question of why so often these half-caste children hate their white parents. I know of someone who was abandoned by his black father and was raised entirely by the white half. His father didn't even want to come to the poor fella's wedding. Yet he still has dreads, dances and speaks in a black American fashion. Why??
And they do this bc like all cults, they want to sever your roots and make you hate your families bc it makes you easier to control (also, many of those spoiled children are already desperate to find some way to injure their parents, so they are a good match.)
"It also raises the question of why so often these half-caste children hate their white parents."
I can only guess and it's hard to parse self-hatred even when you know the person, but I would guess is a form of survivor's guilt (that they get to have better lives than other black children), social incentive (hating Whitey is a high-status belief and becomes its own credential), plus the same reasons why the children of the 60s who joined groups like the Weather Underground were almost entirely suburban bourgeoisie: a public ritual of atonement, the need some children have to proclaim their "desire for a better world" by denouncing and destroying all they've been given.
In fact, that repulsive girl denouncing her dead Dad at his funeral for his crimes against humanity could easily have been in the Symbionese Liberation Army, with just a quick wardrobe and jargon adjustment.
You quite rightly point out the growing gap between Israeli Jews and Kwan Jews. But the conflict is not likely to be of great importance to the state of Israel because (liberal) American Jews, like liberals and progressives everywhere, are dying out. Their TFR and intermarriage rate will make it unlikely a sizeable liberal Jewish community will exist in 2100, whereas I know there will be a giant Israeli population then. I am very jealous of the Israeli people. They will still exist 100 years from now, whereas the French, Dutch, Germans and even Croatians cannot say this with as much certainty.
Speaking of Croatia, I will be visiting Split this coming February. Any travel advice?
Now I wonder if the top of mind response we all have with the Kalergi Plan is largely meant to obfuscate his Pax Europa ideas and his fervent wish for a new aristocracy.
1) That Larry David Super Bowl ad WAS pretty funny as ads go. Turns out we should have listened to the character and not the tagline.
2) In the type of law enforcement the DEA and counter-terrorism agencies do, the line between you and being a full blown criminal in the manner of those you're ostensibly pursuing becomes so thin as to be functionally nonexistent. It requires a moral and spiritual fortitude that is utterly at odds with the fabric of the very people who would pursue such a career. We will never have effective law enforcement in these spaces for this reason.
3) RE: Kalergi: "his father a mixture of several different European ethnic groups ranging from Flemish to Greek" In America we would refer to this simply as white and ignore the rest. This is something that always makes my colleague, a Russian Jew who grew up in the Soviet Union, and I, a Mormon kid from the Vegas suburbs, laugh.
Excellent, as always, sir. And congrats on the 1,000 subscribers. I hope that figure continues to rise exponentially.
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Paul Krugman isn't much of an opinion writer, but he once had an interesting observation about the triangular dog-chases-tail relationship of important people: intellectuals, government workers, and the wealthy. Intellectuals want the power of the government workers. Government workers want the riches of the wealthy. The wealthy want to be thought of as smart like the intellectuals.
When I saw that 2:30 SBF spiel about effective altruism I was wondering who would actually be impressed by this crap. Still not sure what the answer is.
People do not have to thoroughly believe in anything...a low-energy conviction will do fine, especially if it helps them apply the therapeutic sociopathy of neo-liberalism blended with performative compassion.
the greatest human need of all: to be opposite of what we really are!
Since we are all nothing but a nasty sack of chemicals, that need is fully understandable and socially useful. If we were to follow Pindar's advice genoio hossos esse mathon (become what you are, having learned what that is) the results might be shocking.
Loved this one - I wasn’t familiar with Kalergi, fascinating
Excellent as always. Proponents of "popularism" didn't receive the memo
On the divisions in the Democratic Party, the way that plays out is, in many ways, dependent on how things play out in the Republican Party. Ironically, the presence of Trump and other "Trumpist" types in the Republican side has led to the Democrats tacking to a more "popularist" line, given that they think they don't really have to argue policy or values to win -- they can just argue "we are not Trump or his supporters" and probably win, even in an unfavorable political environment (as we saw last week). That means that the more the GOP is Trumpist, the more the "popularist" wing of the Democrats retains its sway, I think. Conversely, the more the GOP becomes removed from Trump, the more likely that the actual hard left wing (AOC, Squad, etc) of the Democrats will re-assert itself, as we saw it doing around the same time Trump was rising on the Republican side in the mid 2010s, in the wake of the failure of Occupy during a Democratic administration.
I expect that it will be quite some time before the Democrats, as a practical matter, stop making Trump the subject matter of the election, even if Trump isn't actually running (after all, he wasn't running in 2022). Even if he doesn't win the GOP nomination in 24 (as I personally expect him not to do given what happened last week), I think that the Democrats will still make the ideas that Trump's supporters tend to stand for the basis of their campaign so that they can kind of still run against Trump even though Trump isn't the candidate. That will almost certainly be the case if the GOP run DeSantis, who the Democrats will likely paint as a mini-Trump, or a Trump who has a different demeanor. So I don't think we're close to being done with the Democrats running on Trump, Trump and Trump (because it's just their most powerful electoral message by far, really -- far more motivating to people than policy pitches or, as the "popularists" point out, "values" pitches which are not likely to resonate with most voters anyway). That likely means that the popularists will maintain the power position in selecting candidates, because it plays into the strategy of appearing to be the moderate/centrist party and offering that up as the alternative to the Trumpian extremists. It's much harder to make that message stick if your own candidate is a far-left firebrand type, and you also don't happen to actually be running against Trump himself.
So I think the AOC wing likely has to wait its turn for a bit. In the meantime, it will be interesting to observe whether, as the calendar years slip into the future, the younger millenials and Zs remain as ardently left -- we shall see.
---
On Israel, this shift has taken place in Europe for some time really, probably because the Jewish population there is not as politically powerful as it is in the US. In the US the anti-Israel voices on the left have been largely silenced by the fact that historically most Jews supported both Israel and the American left, without perceiving this to be contradictory as some non-Jews on the left did. That has changed, as you point out, with many younger Jews moving leftward in their assessment of Israel as well, and becoming more critical of the idea of maintaining the status quo of Israel as a Zionist/Jewish home-country. The rise of Netanyahu, who is loathed by many American Jews, probably has something to do with that, as does the overall drift among the young, in general, towards more intensely and consistently left perspectives -- this has impacted American Jews as well, without question.
Of course that doesn't map to Israeli politics itself more or less at all. While the Bibi/Gvir coalition is largely reliant on the large and growing religious right, with its strong Haredi core, the secular Israelis on the coast are also rather Zionist. The idea of turning Israel into a pluralistic, US-style multicultural proposition state isn't really one with a lot of actual on-the-ground support in Israel, at all. So there will be a massive disconnect there between the rising generation of American Jews, on the one hand, and the mass Israeli population, on the other -- one that spans the political divide in Israel, as Beinart rightly points out.
If the Democrats aren't very careful about that, Israel could become a Republican issue entirely, which would have interesting implications both for domestic US politics (although most American Jews and especially younger ones would presumably remain Democratic loyalists in that scenario, not all would ... there are always the Bari Weiss types out there) and foreign policy (which has already been veering towards more colder and more distant US/Israel relations during Democratic administrations than Republican ones).
Brendan Ross, astute judgement, impressive.
The Democrats win on ballots not voting. Ballot harvesting is literally the only issue that counts in national elections. Don’t anyone worry the Republicans will not stoop to this distasteful practice, it would stop the Donors money.
The rest of the “issues” are distractions.
We’re a one party country.
laserjets do not answer polls and care little for debate on policy..... as long as the mail trucks can drive up in the middle of the night democrats will use the laserjets and pollings will be wrong!
Exactly. The ONLY 2024 election issue is getting a ballot harvest system.
The mother of the cretinous turd Sam (SBF) is a Stanford professor specializing in ethics. Perfect: Matt Tiabbi says modern America is Rome.
The ironies just keep getting better and better. Mom should bring out a parenting book or offer executive coaching in ESG.
Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, said he knew SBF was on the level because his mom was a compliance attorney
That is either brain-damage in action or Beltway grade cynicism.
Phil, Meet mom, mama SBF
Barbara Fried
“The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.”
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/
Academic cynicism is truly in a class all its own.
Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish novelist who had been a prisoner of the Nazis, visited Berkeley in the 60s. In the book in which described his take on it all (NOTEBOOKS OF A DILETTANTE) he wrote that the hippies and aesthetes in the Bay Area put him in mind of the SS.
I don’t know what to say .
Don’t people know compliance is where the crooks hide?
Same with military IG,
Or Internal Affairs in the police .
I once knew of a fraud investigator who worked for the government who had been kicked off the police force for extorting free sex from whores.
SBF mother Barbara saying personal responsibility has corrupted the system.
The perps are born that way.
(And remember correlation isn’t causation, unless it is).
Perps aren’t to blame, its biology.
Unless it isn’t.
“Beyond Blame
The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.
Barbara H. Fried
Barbara H. Fried, William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, is author of The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement. She is also a member of the board of the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society at Stanford University.”
June, 2013.
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/barbara-fried-beyond-blame-moral-responsibility-philosophy-law/
The ogres and villains in fairy tales are real, but they do not live in the woods. They are recognised experts on human behaviour. Only a fool would not feel frightened.
I respect Matt Stoller and I am part of his Substack. While I understand the role many Republicans played into the lack of regulation, the sheer amount of money poured into the Midterms on behalf of the Democrat party establishment against populist Republican and even some populist Democrat candidates cannot be ignored.
Yeah. When I see the numbers they went to democrats 2:1 or more. They still have to pay both side of course but given that his mom ran a PAC for democrat candidates, I think it’s not quite right to say both sides.
Worth mentioning much of Ryan Salame’s (FTX’s Co-CEO) political donations to Republicans actually went to his Obama admin-turned-Republican girlfriend.
Did not know this!
US/Israel relations are ultimately about geopolitics, not ideology. From 1948 to 1967 the US had extremely frosty relations with Israel. The first US foreign policy decision taken after Israel was created was to impose an arms blockade. The expectation in Washington was that Israel would be defeated by the Arabs (who were armed by Britain). In the 40s and 50s the US backed Arab nationalist coups in Egypt and Syria, mainly because the US wanted to drive the UK and French out and keep the USSR at bay. After '67 it all changed when Johnson decided that he wanted Israel firmly within the US/Western bloc.
The long-term future of US/Israel relations will ultimately depend on how interested the US remains in Western Asia.
Having said that, at the rhetorical/theatrical level US foreign policy is invariably 100% domestic politics. The issue of Israel will always draw a lot of heat in the US because people will use it as a means of defining themselves ideologically. Ethnonationalism is the great political taboo for now, but the US is not the arbiter of the world's fate or Israel's. Russia, China, India, Indonesia and Turkey all have their own ideological perspectives on the proper relationship between state and ethnos and these have little in common with American fads. The future of ethnonationalism within the West will be settled in large part by the fate of Europe. Which leads me to conclude that it is all up for grabs.
As for Israel, it will remain what it is: a Levantine Rorschach blot upon which people project their anxieties and obsessions.
Interesting that Pres. Johnson was able to change in attitude towards Israel starting around '67 -- the USS Liberty bombing happened in 1967.
As did the '67 War (June of 1967) which we (I'm a dual citizen) won.
Everyone but Johnson including the Israelis thought they’d lose.
Johnson didn’t trust the CIA.
Johnson was a wise man. By the early 60s it was clear that the CIA was a disaster. Truman, who founded it, wrote an article in the 60s arguing for it to be shut down.
Johnson was a pragmatist and the Cold War was on. Israel's success destroyed the credibility of the deeply entrenched view in the Pentagon and the CIA that Arab nationalism was the wave of the future and that Israel was doomed.
As for the USS Liberty, there has never been any proper explanation about what really happened. During the Suez Crisis in '56 the US Navy in the Mediterranean interfered with sonar and signaling of UK and French vessels, possibly Israeli ones too. My guess is that the Israeli commanders in '67 were convinced (incorrectly or correctly I do not know) that the USS Liberty was gathering signals intelligence and possibly sharing it with the Arabs (Jordan was very much in the Washington/London camp at the time and the CIA was always intriguing in or with Syria so the possibility of the US giving away such information was not paranoia). There is no other reason why they would have ordered such an attack. If the USS Liberty was up to something like this, it would have made perfect sense for Johnson to just shut the Israeli's up by bringing them into the US fold.
With all the talk from Shor types about “popularism,” I’m stumped about why Biden’s people haven’t been shouting at the top of their lungs about the antitrust moves the admin has been making (as covered by Matt Stoller, who’s mentioned above). It’s the rare issue that has quite a bit of “bipartisan” appeal (in the sense of: different tranches of the two parties’ bases).
Fear of scaring party funders?
The struggle between pragmatists and idealists may well be settled (at least provisionally) by the fallout from the emerging crisis in Silicon Valley. Musk's layoff are the start of a much larger restructuring that will have a huge effect on the employability and financial prospects of a key constituency for the Dems: Gen Z within high tech. It is too soon to say how the realities of unemployment in an era of austerity and mass immiseration will play out. Most likely it will further radicalise many, if not most, of them. The hippies of the 70s turned to the Right in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton years because there was money to be made. It is unlikely that there will many opportunities to join the bourgeoisie any time soon.
The forces driving populism are also becoming more, rather than less, urgent. The Democrats either meet some of the populist constituency half-way or they will have no choice but to embrace a more vigorous authoritarian approach to crush it. As Americans get poorer, politics is certain to get rowdier.
In all seriousness EVERYTHING needs Code now, like Machinists?
CNC? Anyone?
Electricians: PLC, or even C.
Any of these gentle children heard of IoT? Internet of Things?
You might better call it the Industrial Internet.
Basically network and monitor everything including your lightbulbs and ceiling tiles (heating bills, not smart house but smart commercial buildings and data centers). Electricity is getting expensive. Very.
Its actually going to be the Internet of EveryTHING , meaning Things objects.
Granted thats not the same as monitoring /r / woke/ heresy or policing Facebook or Twitter, but its REAL WORK.
More-
Philip - if we get poorer it will be because we couldn’t find enough skilled labor for
Re-industrialization.
There’s 72 jobs on the board down the road at ALSTOM, mostly machinist.
There’s 17 jobs in Elmira, HARDINGE, same.
Now the kiddos will find the work. Just in time because the survivors of the great outsourcing are still around to train them, I predict the workforce is going to have weird age shift of average 50s into average 20s, but there’s worse things.
Philip this little country place in Western NY is becoming City of Industry, and major industry is virtuous circle of more jobs (trucking, fuel etc). Retail improves with full time full paying jobs.
We’ll suffer but Just In Time reshoring has arrived. Regardless of Elite intentions enough of them realized that they actually Didn’t want to live in a 3d world 💩 heap.
Here’s a link Philip.
https://reshorenow.org/
The age disparity is perfect, providential in fact. People in the last stage of their careers have nothing to fear from the young ones. They will make reliable mentors/trainers.
As I see it, problems may well intensify in other areas. Today's skilled trades need maths, lots of it, and education in such is 'problematic' to use a term in vogue amongst the woke. If America is going to escape a descent into the shit-hole it will eventually need to hose out the primary and secondary education systems. The legacy of philanthropic and juristic intervention in education throughout the 20th c needs to be dismantled. There is no other way.
Making progress will be hard. The constituencies blocking this are large, varied and they will put phenomenal energy into undermining good work of all kinds and they have the 20 to 50 age cohort in the palms of their hands. I do not need to tell you any of this, I am sure. My guess is that the solution involves drawing the villains into the excremental zones (kind of like ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK) and keeping them chained there while the regions return to life. Something like this appears to be underway already. The Blue metropolitan areas are a honey-trap for SJW grads with a future in larping and welfare-mgt. They are perfectly adapted for life in virtual reality.
Glad to hear that regional New York is recovering. The next decade or so will be truly tough, but the trend is the thing.
You can learn maths at work.
I did it, and I suck at the maths.
You learn how to do by doing, and by being shown.
Every lesson a man learns is taught by other men.
Wahmen don't realize this, prisoners of their instincts.
By the time they realize THAT'S why the children needed a father, too late.
Respectfully disagree. Some maths yes, but genuine proficiency of the kind needed for a lot of stuff requires more than that. There is no substitute for reliable and consistent quality education from an early age. The rationing of educational opportunity is an exceptionally sinister feature of the regime IMO. Furthermore, maths is useful for more than work. The dissemination of mathematical knowledge (practically a mania after Newton) gave England the decisive edge in warfare and industry in the 18th c: the mechanical means of determining longitude with accuracy was the technology that made it possible for the Royal Navy to establish dominance over the oceans, successfully colonise Australasia etc. The great advantage Russia and China have is their commitment to maths.
You are dead right about the need for men in education. The feminisation of education has been a full spectrum catastrophe for the young.
Yes but we start where we ARE not where we should have started.
Back to work , into the shops, they'll learn , if necessary by self study.
THEN they'll make damn sure their kids know maths.
Machinists to Engineers in 2 generations.
Could not agree more. And where we all are in the so-called Anglosphere is so close to f""""d that Bill Clinton would not bother to make the distinction. Admiral Hyman Ryckover (father of the nuclear sub programme) was seriously concerned about the weakness of the US education system in maths back in the 50s.
This youtube video may be of interest. It is an eye-opener.
https://youtu.be/VOjWBwPlbTQ
I am interested to see how far the Gen Z types are prepared to go before they renounce fashionable (but expensive) morals in favour of hard pragmatism. Britain is crying out for competent skilled workers/tradesmen yet 50% of children are now going to University, many of whom study useless courses that will merely allow them access to unskilled admin jobs. It seems in America many are happy to vote for their politics even when the conditions in LA/NY become more and more appalling. In the middle of the last century many quietly left the large cities ('white flight') and even now ask for houses 'in good school districts' i.e. no blacks. Today it seems however that staying and putting up with it is the price of living somewhere with rainbow flags and BLM signs.
As things in the Anglo world become steadily worse how many will accept the reality facing them and switch to anti-immigrant populism and manual labour?
Spot on! With you 100%. My guess is that it will be variable. Some have woken up, some will do so soon, others will take a while and there are some who just won't. Ideas about status are remarkably enduring and the older generation (the parents) have expectation of vicarious achievement formed by experiences and influences that are no longer relevant. To add a nasty element to it all, there are plenty of influential people with a stake in the existing system who will bullshit the younger generation without any hesitation.
Mass higher education was integral to the Clinton/Blair project. It enabled them to offer upward social mobility through education as an alternative to welfare or gains in the standard of living for the working classes. The whole thing was road-tested by the Hawke-Keating government in Australia and was taken up with gusto in Washington and Westminster a few years later. It fit in perfectly with the class prejudices and personal obsessions of the politicians involved (Tony Blair was famously scornful of the fact that one of Harold Wilson's kids was working as a teacher, rather than as an investment banker or consultant).
The resulting skills shortages across the Anglosphere have been managed by immigration. We are now set for a perfect storm: an abundance of over-credentialled but unskilled workers radicalised by fashionable ideologies competing both politically and economically with native working-classes who for the most part have received limited, often poor, educations thanks to the mismanagement and neglect of mass education by the elites. Throw in industries' need for highly skilled technicians and surging immigration.
If i could draw a chart, it would say:
the more $ your parents have and/or give you, the more likely you are to cling to your luxury beliefs;
the more you have to pay your own way, the more open you'll become to defecting from the Social Justice religion.
youth radicalism is almost entirely an indulgent-parent sponsored form of rebellion as personal expression (or vice versa).
it's like a finishing degree for the deracinated bourgeois child.
Have you seen the video of the girl slandering her dead father *at his funeral*? This (half-black) bitch called her father a Trump-supporter, 'cis', all the usual crap. This was a man who had married her black mother and brought her up in a house worth millions before going to a phenomenally expensive school. Despite all of this she still despised him. This is the level of damage to families that the Soviets dreamed of: I remember there being a statue somewhere to a boy who was murdered by his parents for turning them in to the authorities. In the end it was nonsense (no surprise) but to raise a statue to such a thing: sickening.
It also raises the question of why so often these half-caste children hate their white parents. I know of someone who was abandoned by his black father and was raised entirely by the white half. His father didn't even want to come to the poor fella's wedding. Yet he still has dreads, dances and speaks in a black American fashion. Why??
yes, i did see it, and it's one of those things that filled me so full of rage that i contemplated severing my internet connection.
what shameless disgusting behavior and the fact that no one stood up and put an end to it tells you how cluleless & indulgent the family must be.
she is one of many candidates for Social Justice Pavlik Morozov (Nikole Hannah-Jones also comes to mind):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
And they do this bc like all cults, they want to sever your roots and make you hate your families bc it makes you easier to control (also, many of those spoiled children are already desperate to find some way to injure their parents, so they are a good match.)
"It also raises the question of why so often these half-caste children hate their white parents."
I can only guess and it's hard to parse self-hatred even when you know the person, but I would guess is a form of survivor's guilt (that they get to have better lives than other black children), social incentive (hating Whitey is a high-status belief and becomes its own credential), plus the same reasons why the children of the 60s who joined groups like the Weather Underground were almost entirely suburban bourgeoisie: a public ritual of atonement, the need some children have to proclaim their "desire for a better world" by denouncing and destroying all they've been given.
In fact, that repulsive girl denouncing her dead Dad at his funeral for his crimes against humanity could easily have been in the Symbionese Liberation Army, with just a quick wardrobe and jargon adjustment.
Stalin on Pavlik “what a little swine, denouncing his own father.”
"...and yet how useful a pretext for my next purge." !!
Thank you for your thoughtful analysis. Perhaps we should be praying very hard that the truth prevails.
Great post as always!
You quite rightly point out the growing gap between Israeli Jews and Kwan Jews. But the conflict is not likely to be of great importance to the state of Israel because (liberal) American Jews, like liberals and progressives everywhere, are dying out. Their TFR and intermarriage rate will make it unlikely a sizeable liberal Jewish community will exist in 2100, whereas I know there will be a giant Israeli population then. I am very jealous of the Israeli people. They will still exist 100 years from now, whereas the French, Dutch, Germans and even Croatians cannot say this with as much certainty.
Speaking of Croatia, I will be visiting Split this coming February. Any travel advice?
I'll send you an email.
I'll be in the area too, for a bit starting in about a week. Any recs would be much appreciated
email sent to your address.
Would love to see a piece on the Reaspora
If we ☘️ move back to Ireland what do we call ourselves?
Re-Micks?
Surely there's a term in Gaelic, probably unpronouncable, that can encompass this behavior.
Now I wonder if the top of mind response we all have with the Kalergi Plan is largely meant to obfuscate his Pax Europa ideas and his fervent wish for a new aristocracy.
Three things:
1) That Larry David Super Bowl ad WAS pretty funny as ads go. Turns out we should have listened to the character and not the tagline.
2) In the type of law enforcement the DEA and counter-terrorism agencies do, the line between you and being a full blown criminal in the manner of those you're ostensibly pursuing becomes so thin as to be functionally nonexistent. It requires a moral and spiritual fortitude that is utterly at odds with the fabric of the very people who would pursue such a career. We will never have effective law enforcement in these spaces for this reason.
3) RE: Kalergi: "his father a mixture of several different European ethnic groups ranging from Flemish to Greek" In America we would refer to this simply as white and ignore the rest. This is something that always makes my colleague, a Russian Jew who grew up in the Soviet Union, and I, a Mormon kid from the Vegas suburbs, laugh.
Excellent, as always, sir. And congrats on the 1,000 subscribers. I hope that figure continues to rise exponentially.
Um. Is it wrong to be puzzled by Niccolo's opening photo mash .... as in "why is there a photograph of Trevor Noah next to the Alameda girl?"
Yeah, I might need to update the eyeglass prescription. (Have a laugh at my expense anyways.)