Why Populism Continues to Rise, Degraded Hezbollah, Germany's Failed "Feminist Foreign Policy", Canadian Native Bands Do Business With China, Hunter S. Thompson
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1. Populism is an entirely understandable response by the 90% of the populace who are not oligarchs or PMC to an economic system rigged in someone else's favor, and to elites that hold them in open contempt. Hell, the rulers are more concerned with the chickens they eat than they are with 90% of their own citizens.
2. For supposed paranoids and congenital plotters, Russia continually gets suckerpunched. Russian impotence and incompetence again on full display.
3. Alt-media needs to stop living in fantasy world.
I think the problem with Streek and others' analysis or interpretation is the idea that businesses are created in order to give people jobs. Wrong. A business is built in order to provide a service or make a product that people are willing to pay for. There has to be a demand in order to supply the demand. Yes, modern media can create demand but business is not in the business of changing human nature. They exploit it. Just as if people are so weak and stupid to vote for race and sex quotas that discriminate against themselves, well, that's their problem, not the product makers or service providers.
The other problem with this analysis is they don't seem to ujnderstand that a business cannot survive without making a profit. If labor is a substantial percent of your production cost and your competitors can find labor at 1/10th to 1/15th of the amount you pay you are going to go out of business – unless you do the same thing. It's just a fact of life. Why the politicians don't explain this to the masses I don't know. Probably because the masses don't want to hear the awful truth and won't vote for them. Sadly, the world is what it is and you are guaranteed nothing by simply being born.
To the extent that Herr Streeck and his fellow travelers (including my former partner) believe the purpose of business is to create employment, they are indeed delusional. But for me that doesn't detract from his brilliant analysis paraphrased above.
I remain confused about Shiite/Sunni alliances between all the militant parties. (For example Hezbollah/Hamas.) That includes Turkey/Israel/Iran relations. Probably I just need to read more, but it only makes sense to me as a region where knives are drawn all around and alliances of contemporary convenience have become the norm.
I'm a little bit confused so I'll ask you to explain your perspective. What does it mean to be free in a warrior band? And what is that freedom that is precluded by civilization?
When times are good we can afford a little light larping about feminist foreign policy and letting the Natives act like they are in control of their own fiefdoms.
Like giving your little brother an Xbox controller that's not plugged in.
This is a recurring thesis of eugyppius, a German Substacker I heartily recommend to anyone who enjoys Niccolo's writing. America's generations-long security guarantees, he insists, is the reason German politics has been allowed to devolved into ridiculous clownishness.
Thanks very much for this, especially the Caldwell article. Trumps plan may be a middle way between continued neoliberalism and restoration of the worker protections from the postwar settlement. Some of his proposals are deflationary (increased commodity production, curbing / eliminating restrictions on free association, reducing transfer payments), some inflationary (tariffs and reshoring manufacturing), and some a wash w lean toward deflation (“migrant” removal, which may increase labor costs, but will definitely reduce housing, healthcare, education, and public safety costs). I think this will work in the USA but am not sure it will work in European countries that lack natural resources
Mixed feelings on Hunter Thompson. He thought of himself as street-wise and cynical but pursued the most naive, credulous politics possible. An innovator in form and prose but entirely conventional in his opinions.
In a way a tragic figure - he diagnosed accurately that something had gone wrong with American society but convinced himself that redoubling the same trends would set it right. He would have been happier as a stolid, flinty reactionary of the Robert Frost type, toting his shotgun and yelling at trespassers. I understand why he went the other way though - drugs *are* fun.
I think only his political opinions were conventional liberal/left. His opinions on other things were eccentric, as was his writing style. He was entirely a product of the hippie generational and believed in that New Left idea of "liberation". Those that didn't he believed were his enemies, politically and otherwise. HIs books are great though I have never read 'On The Campaign Trail'. I have been thinking for the last five years that 2010's reminded me of the 60's in it's politics. Might have to pick that book up and see where things might go from here.
"Drugs *are* fun"... as opposed to "meds", which all-too-often are not.
WRT "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", my favorite part was his description of Hubert Humphrey scrabbling for delegate votes at the DNC, in which he likened him to "a farmer with terminal cancer, trying to borrow money on next-year's crop." Prophetic.
I cannot help but smile whenever I think or read of Hunter S Thompson. Absurdist but incisive; an observer while a himself a spectacle. American. They broke the mold with him, and then he crushed it up and snorted it.
Thank you very much for your paraphrase of the NYT article on the amazing Wolfgang Streeck. That we are seeing such important truths promulgated from people at all points in the political Cartesian graph suggest, to me, the death of ideology might be imminent, and that would be a very good thing. It has recently come to my attention that Ana Kasperian, of all people, has experienced a public epiphany, and now rejects her former (rather mean-spirited) support of regime narratives. Events are moving rapidly.
I’m a little ashamed of my own benighted opinions as a younger man, but also rather proud of my progress away from ideological support for globalization at any cost. Though I started out blue collar, I parachuted almost by accident into the tech industry, and so was always a complacent beneficiary and supporter of globalist forces. For almost fifteen years I read the Economist cover to cover every single week, and never doubted the essential truths I found in the pages of the newspaper of the global elites.
Herr Streeck provides a far more nuanced explanation of what has been happening recently, phenomena that I attribute more simply to the divide between universalism and communitarianism. Globalists – and most leftists -- are universalist, and it was easy to support globalism because of the benefits it provided to impoverished populations in the developing world. This is how the people who gain from it the most (the investor class) sell it to the rest of us. And there is no doubt that millions of people in places like Asia and Latin America have seen their standards of living improve to an extent unimaginable to their parents. The busloads of Asian tourists at the Eiffel Tower, that didn’t exist in the 1990s when I travelled to Paris frequently, are all you need to see the proof of that.
But at what cost? And who pays the cost? As a callow youth it was easy for universalist me to consider that the improvement of tens of millions outweighed the change in prospects for certain of my countrymen. After all, they could bootstrap themselves to a better life just like I did.
Of course, that was selfish and stupid. And moreover, American blue collar communities weren’t simply disadvantaged, they were utterly destroyed.
Not only did I become a communitarian, but I was shocked and revolted by my awareness that political, social and business elites literally did not care what happened to large populations of their fellow Americans, regarding them as useless and indeed expendable “deplorables” (useless, that is, until you needed their votes).
Many, many of my fellow countrymen have made the same intellectual journey, and it is we who have joined with our working class brethren (of all races, BTW) to make “populism” (a dirty word in the Economist) the political and cultural force it is now. The scales have fallen from our eyes, and I’d like to think there will be justice, but I have my doubts about that.
Herr Streeck’s point about regulation is very interesting. I do believe America is over-regulated, but we must also recognize our current regulatory regime ceased being democratic long ago. Despite my antipathy to regulation, I accept that the voters (in the form of legislators doing their jobs) should be the ones defining the degree of regulation desirable and acceptable. This is not happening now, but a populist revival, combined with the recent overturn of the Chevron decision, might make an important difference here too.
Bobby Kennedy's comment about McGovern ironic considering the bulk of his campaign staff went with Muskie, who Nixon didn't want to face and helped to successfully sabotage.
With all of the instability in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, it seems to me there may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to make sweeping population transfers that leave everyone with more stabile, viable societies. Israel could accommodate Christians, Druze, and other small religions. Send a large majority of the Sunni West Bank and Gaza Arabs North. Syria and Lebanon can be rearranged into Sunni and Shiite areas. Time to give up the delusion that these people can live together as they are located now.
BTW, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a brilliant book and fun as hell to read. And while HST was certainly anti-Nixon, in the book he recounts in an astonishingly human way sharing Nixon's limousine during a campaign event. They discussed NFL football.
Does it count as femicide if parents learn their unborn child has XX chromosomes and so decide for an abortion? Some cultures greatly prefer baby boys...
There's been stories in the media the last couple of years about single women with IVF only wanting girls. Abortions being gender specific to eliminate males. And why wouldn't you if you were a PMC female? In countries where patriarchy is still present I would imagine parents would want boys. But that's completely gone in white and black and indigenous communities in the West. It's the complete opposite.
Kennedys were in a sense America's Gracchi
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Not sure of the reliability of these polls, but there was some evidence Trump got 2/3 of American Indian votes, oh yeah
1. Populism is an entirely understandable response by the 90% of the populace who are not oligarchs or PMC to an economic system rigged in someone else's favor, and to elites that hold them in open contempt. Hell, the rulers are more concerned with the chickens they eat than they are with 90% of their own citizens.
2. For supposed paranoids and congenital plotters, Russia continually gets suckerpunched. Russian impotence and incompetence again on full display.
3. Alt-media needs to stop living in fantasy world.
Fantasy is the whole point of the media. It exists to enchant and misdirect.
Alt-media claims to be something else, something different. It's just a different set of fantasies.
The debt "we owe" is to the gambling money used in stock markets and commodities markets.
If we default on the debt, it will basically deflate the wealthy as the working class has very little money in stocks and other gambling instruments.
END STAGE CAPITALISM
https://charleshughsmith.substack.com/p/slashing-2-trillion-from-the-swamp
Why am I getting an email notification, but not an in-app notification?
No idea. Anyone else having the same issue?
I think the problem with Streek and others' analysis or interpretation is the idea that businesses are created in order to give people jobs. Wrong. A business is built in order to provide a service or make a product that people are willing to pay for. There has to be a demand in order to supply the demand. Yes, modern media can create demand but business is not in the business of changing human nature. They exploit it. Just as if people are so weak and stupid to vote for race and sex quotas that discriminate against themselves, well, that's their problem, not the product makers or service providers.
The other problem with this analysis is they don't seem to ujnderstand that a business cannot survive without making a profit. If labor is a substantial percent of your production cost and your competitors can find labor at 1/10th to 1/15th of the amount you pay you are going to go out of business – unless you do the same thing. It's just a fact of life. Why the politicians don't explain this to the masses I don't know. Probably because the masses don't want to hear the awful truth and won't vote for them. Sadly, the world is what it is and you are guaranteed nothing by simply being born.
To the extent that Herr Streeck and his fellow travelers (including my former partner) believe the purpose of business is to create employment, they are indeed delusional. But for me that doesn't detract from his brilliant analysis paraphrased above.
I did my semester abroad in London in 1998, when the Euro was imminent. Seems like Streek's analysis is similar to what was being discussed back then.
Thanks for your comment but what is it about the analysis you find brilliant? Just curious.
Might explain why businesses are treated like pets.
I remain confused about Shiite/Sunni alliances between all the militant parties. (For example Hezbollah/Hamas.) That includes Turkey/Israel/Iran relations. Probably I just need to read more, but it only makes sense to me as a region where knives are drawn all around and alliances of contemporary convenience have become the norm.
Complex region with a long history of factionalism and back-stabbing.
So Forever. Since 619 AD when the Sassanids took Jerusalem there’s only temporary stability imposed by Caliphates or Empires.
It’s not possible with Tribes to have Civilization, unless they’re leveled by the likes of 19th century Americans, or 19th Century Russians.
The entire point of being in a tribe is to be a free man in a warrior band, civilization precludes freedom.
I'm a little bit confused so I'll ask you to explain your perspective. What does it mean to be free in a warrior band? And what is that freedom that is precluded by civilization?
The Warrior in a War Band answers only to the war band.
He can defend his honor with more than words, lawyers.
As to Civilization precludes freedom: read directly above.
Of course in our civilization the laws and police exist to defend criminals from men.
When times are good we can afford a little light larping about feminist foreign policy and letting the Natives act like they are in control of their own fiefdoms.
Like giving your little brother an Xbox controller that's not plugged in.
This is a recurring thesis of eugyppius, a German Substacker I heartily recommend to anyone who enjoys Niccolo's writing. America's generations-long security guarantees, he insists, is the reason German politics has been allowed to devolved into ridiculous clownishness.
https://substack.com/@eugyppius
💯
Natives are supposed to be in control of their fiefdoms and natural resources. But since when have colonialists respected their treaty obligations?
Thanks very much for this, especially the Caldwell article. Trumps plan may be a middle way between continued neoliberalism and restoration of the worker protections from the postwar settlement. Some of his proposals are deflationary (increased commodity production, curbing / eliminating restrictions on free association, reducing transfer payments), some inflationary (tariffs and reshoring manufacturing), and some a wash w lean toward deflation (“migrant” removal, which may increase labor costs, but will definitely reduce housing, healthcare, education, and public safety costs). I think this will work in the USA but am not sure it will work in European countries that lack natural resources
Mixed feelings on Hunter Thompson. He thought of himself as street-wise and cynical but pursued the most naive, credulous politics possible. An innovator in form and prose but entirely conventional in his opinions.
In a way a tragic figure - he diagnosed accurately that something had gone wrong with American society but convinced himself that redoubling the same trends would set it right. He would have been happier as a stolid, flinty reactionary of the Robert Frost type, toting his shotgun and yelling at trespassers. I understand why he went the other way though - drugs *are* fun.
I think only his political opinions were conventional liberal/left. His opinions on other things were eccentric, as was his writing style. He was entirely a product of the hippie generational and believed in that New Left idea of "liberation". Those that didn't he believed were his enemies, politically and otherwise. HIs books are great though I have never read 'On The Campaign Trail'. I have been thinking for the last five years that 2010's reminded me of the 60's in it's politics. Might have to pick that book up and see where things might go from here.
Run don't walk to buy a copy of On The Campaign Trail. It might become your favorite HST book.
"Drugs *are* fun"... as opposed to "meds", which all-too-often are not.
WRT "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72", my favorite part was his description of Hubert Humphrey scrabbling for delegate votes at the DNC, in which he likened him to "a farmer with terminal cancer, trying to borrow money on next-year's crop." Prophetic.
I cannot help but smile whenever I think or read of Hunter S Thompson. Absurdist but incisive; an observer while a himself a spectacle. American. They broke the mold with him, and then he crushed it up and snorted it.
"They broke the mold with him, and then he crushed it up and snorted it."
If you don't have pot, you make-do with pottery.
Thank you very much for your paraphrase of the NYT article on the amazing Wolfgang Streeck. That we are seeing such important truths promulgated from people at all points in the political Cartesian graph suggest, to me, the death of ideology might be imminent, and that would be a very good thing. It has recently come to my attention that Ana Kasperian, of all people, has experienced a public epiphany, and now rejects her former (rather mean-spirited) support of regime narratives. Events are moving rapidly.
I’m a little ashamed of my own benighted opinions as a younger man, but also rather proud of my progress away from ideological support for globalization at any cost. Though I started out blue collar, I parachuted almost by accident into the tech industry, and so was always a complacent beneficiary and supporter of globalist forces. For almost fifteen years I read the Economist cover to cover every single week, and never doubted the essential truths I found in the pages of the newspaper of the global elites.
Herr Streeck provides a far more nuanced explanation of what has been happening recently, phenomena that I attribute more simply to the divide between universalism and communitarianism. Globalists – and most leftists -- are universalist, and it was easy to support globalism because of the benefits it provided to impoverished populations in the developing world. This is how the people who gain from it the most (the investor class) sell it to the rest of us. And there is no doubt that millions of people in places like Asia and Latin America have seen their standards of living improve to an extent unimaginable to their parents. The busloads of Asian tourists at the Eiffel Tower, that didn’t exist in the 1990s when I travelled to Paris frequently, are all you need to see the proof of that.
But at what cost? And who pays the cost? As a callow youth it was easy for universalist me to consider that the improvement of tens of millions outweighed the change in prospects for certain of my countrymen. After all, they could bootstrap themselves to a better life just like I did.
Of course, that was selfish and stupid. And moreover, American blue collar communities weren’t simply disadvantaged, they were utterly destroyed.
Not only did I become a communitarian, but I was shocked and revolted by my awareness that political, social and business elites literally did not care what happened to large populations of their fellow Americans, regarding them as useless and indeed expendable “deplorables” (useless, that is, until you needed their votes).
Many, many of my fellow countrymen have made the same intellectual journey, and it is we who have joined with our working class brethren (of all races, BTW) to make “populism” (a dirty word in the Economist) the political and cultural force it is now. The scales have fallen from our eyes, and I’d like to think there will be justice, but I have my doubts about that.
Herr Streeck’s point about regulation is very interesting. I do believe America is over-regulated, but we must also recognize our current regulatory regime ceased being democratic long ago. Despite my antipathy to regulation, I accept that the voters (in the form of legislators doing their jobs) should be the ones defining the degree of regulation desirable and acceptable. This is not happening now, but a populist revival, combined with the recent overturn of the Chevron decision, might make an important difference here too.
We live in interesting times indeed.
Our regulation stopped being democratic with the Federal Register Act of 1934, which is administrative law. Congress works by exception.
Bobby Kennedy's comment about McGovern ironic considering the bulk of his campaign staff went with Muskie, who Nixon didn't want to face and helped to successfully sabotage.
With all of the instability in Syria, Lebanon, and Israel, it seems to me there may be a once in a lifetime opportunity to make sweeping population transfers that leave everyone with more stabile, viable societies. Israel could accommodate Christians, Druze, and other small religions. Send a large majority of the Sunni West Bank and Gaza Arabs North. Syria and Lebanon can be rearranged into Sunni and Shiite areas. Time to give up the delusion that these people can live together as they are located now.
😳
BTW, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trial ’72 is a brilliant book and fun as hell to read. And while HST was certainly anti-Nixon, in the book he recounts in an astonishingly human way sharing Nixon's limousine during a campaign event. They discussed NFL football.
” preventing femicide, legalizing abortions"
Does it count as femicide if parents learn their unborn child has XX chromosomes and so decide for an abortion? Some cultures greatly prefer baby boys...
There's been stories in the media the last couple of years about single women with IVF only wanting girls. Abortions being gender specific to eliminate males. And why wouldn't you if you were a PMC female? In countries where patriarchy is still present I would imagine parents would want boys. But that's completely gone in white and black and indigenous communities in the West. It's the complete opposite.
At least they won't be on the hook for a dowry.