Briefly Noted: For 2021-06-28 Mo
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First: A Platonic Dialogue:
Polemarkhos: Look at this! Is this still true?
Glaukon: Yes it is…
Nikeratos: The grifters and the grifted—both are, to me, astonishing to watch.
Thrasymakhos: How so?
Nikeratos: On the one hand, the grifters say: Trump deserves 100% credit for warp speed, and Biden and the press are showing how despicable they are by not praising him every day. And the grifted buy it.
Polemarkhos: And on the other hand, actually getting a vaccine and so not being willing to fight the virus with your bare hands alone—that demonstrates that you are some kind of a… near-eunuch… what is the word they use?
Adeimantos: But if it is unmanly to take the vaccine, isn’t it even more unmanly to spend lots of money developing the vaccine? Doesn't that show that you are greatly afeared and not a manly man?
Thrasymakhos: It is not a coherent world view. The point is: different messages for different people. And modern media allows for segmentation of message. It doesn’t have to be coherent.
Adeimantos: I do not understand.
Aspasia: Suppose you are a wealthy and well-educated person who wants taxes low, and is looking for a reason that “Trump wasn’t so bad”.
Kephalos: Well, he wasn’t so bad: he decided to do Operation “Warp Speed” after all…
Aspasia: …then you get pitched the “warp speed” story. Exactly.
Alkibides: But suppose you are someone doing less well. Suppose that your superior patriarchal gender status as a danger-seeking manly man is your primary identity. Then you defend that identity by demonstrating your fearlessness—by rejecting masks and vaccines.
Polymarkhos: But Akhilleus demonstrated his manliness by fighting another human with a spear, and trained long and hard…
Aspasia: …not by refusing to allow his immune system to train up for the contest of fighting microscopic semi-alive particles.
Thrasymakos: You are thinking of the Americans as if they were a group of rational Greeks, capable of consistency, coherence, and analytic thought leading to agreement. You are forgetting the segmentation of the Republican base. If you care about keeping taxes low and staying alive; then you probably do not care that much about what happens to the “manly men” with COVID—the key is that Trump and his team worked hard to keep you rich and safe. You feel a little bit sad about the unnecessary deaths, but they could have taken personal responsibility and gotten vaccinated.
Alkibides: And if you can’t figure out a reason to say “Trump wasn’t so bad for me”, you need to face the unpleasant fact that Trump grifted you to. And that people are unwilling to do.
Thrasymakos: And if you are willing to sacrifice your health to signal your fearlessness and thus your right to manly male gender dominance—well, whether Trump was also working for rich people to help them keep more of their money is not such a big deal to you. The big deal is that Trump models fearlessness, and is willing to say what he thinks—while, in their view, the Democratic men are all p-----whipped, too scared of being scolded by Alexandra Octavio-Cortez to speak up…
Aspasia: And it’s not just white blue-collar southern and semi-rural men—the New York Times continues to pay Maureen Dowd, and her “Democratic men are unnatural because they are too empathic, and Democratic women are too unnatural because they are too assertive” has long been a great crowd-pleaser, at least with her bosses and the owners…
One Video:
Atlantic Council Front Page: A Special Event with Director of the National Economic Council, Brian Deese <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H92ivdaGy8I>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Adrian Goldsworthy: Augustus: First Emperor of Rome <https://books.google.com/books?id=3t8hBAAAQBAJ>
Wikipedia: Behistun Inscription <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behistun_Inscription>
Augustus: Deeds Done by the Divine Augustus <https://theswissbay.ch/pdf/Books/Ancient%20history/Augustus%20-%20First%20emperor%20of%20Rome%20-%20Adrian%20Goldsworthy.pdf>
Federation of American Scientists: 8341 Unit :: Central Security Regiment :: PLA <https://fas.org/irp/world/china/pla/8341.htm>
Wikipedia: Han Zheng <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Zheng#First_Vice-Premier>
Michael Spence: How Great Powers Should Compete <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-us-g7-zero-sum-competition-not-constructive-by-michael-spence-2021-06>
Scott Duncan: ’Glowing white hot over +40°C (104°F) widely all along the western side of North America.… <https://twitter.com/ScottDuncanWX/status/1408443318749564935>
Greg Sargent: _’People are missing… Biden gained in heavily blue-collar Middle Suburbs. Focus only on flipped counties misses ones where Biden gained but didn’t flip… <https://twitter. com/ThePlumLineGS/status/1341374507869745153>
Robert Farley: What Han Dynasty China’s Financial Relations With Rome Can Teach Us Today: ‘Systems of credit and debt are enormously consequential for trade, making the looming financial conflict between Beijing and Washington particularly worrisome… <https://thediplomat.com/2021/05/what-han-dynasty-chinas-financial-relations-with-rome-can-teach-us-today/>
Wikipedia: Seven Thousand Cadres Conference: ‘Liu Shaoqi… formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made mistakes… the far-left policies of the Great Leap Forward…. The policies of Mao Zedong were criticized, and Mao also made self-criticism…. Lin Biao, however, continued his praises of Mao at the conference… <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Thousand_Cadres_Conference>
Sangeet Paul Choudary: How to regulate Facebook and Google—Hint: NOT as Platforms: ‘The counterintuitive approach to regulating Facebook and Google…. What if we viewed Facebook and Google as pipelines, instead of platforms? Surprisingly, that gives us a rather compelling framework for regulating them… LINK: <https://platforms.substack.com/p/how-to-regulate-facebook-and-google>
Paragraphs:
Josh Marshall: Manchin Speaks on “Linkage” & GOP Whining: ‘There’s been a lot of fretting over the last couple days about whether a group of Republicans who had not actually committed to support the bipartisan mini-bill were no longer going to support it…. But… this has always been and remains an issue in Democrats’ hands—especially Joe Manchin’s hands. Republicans are just players on a chess board in which Democrats are making the moves. And Joe Manchin made this pretty clear this morning. Republicans have been trying to take control of the debate, suggesting they need to be convinced by Joe Biden that there’s absolutely positively no “linkage” or that he’ll agree not to pass any more infrastructure, hard or soft, with only Democratic votes. But Manchin seems clear. We have our mini-bill deal. Let’s take the win and move on. Of course we’re also going to do soft infrastructure through reconciliation…. We’re… going to have a lot more drama…. But [Manchin] is pretty clear that train isn’t stopping just because Republicans are doing their drama.
LINK: <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/critical-3>
Osita Nwanevu: The “For the People” Act Filibuster and the End of American Politics: ‘Everything you think you know about how our democracy functions is about to change…. As the writer John Ganz has noted, the conservative figures… are as reliant on totalizing, systematizing diagnoses…. The hidden forces pulling us toward degeneracy can be found not only within our perennially embattled public schools but also in the major corporations that loud voices on the right now denigrate as “woke capital” and the military, as well. The screeching about voter fraud and immigration is a cousin to all this—Republicans have come to believe that basic demographic shifts justify a structural assault on voting rights, obviating the need for political argument and persuasion…. The only force that might eventually transform those institutions is the transformation of the American electorate—a long project of ideological conversion that might gradually encourage voters to demand not the protection but the establishment of a system that we might reasonably call American democracy. A utopian aspiration? Yes. But our situation is what it is…
LINK: <https://newrepublic.com/article/162868/for-the-people-act-filibuster-democracy>
Steven Sinofsky: Creating the Future of Work. From Trauma to Opportunity: ‘What comes next for work?… We have learned a whole new and improved way many things can work, and it isn’t likely we will go back to our prior ways…. The post-pandemic world will provide the impetus and tools to rethink the Corporation, and more broadly innovation, and how work is structured and how individuals contribute…. Making things, extracting things, and moving them around the world remains remarkably difficult in its own right, but all of those businesses are now constrained and enhanced by software as a primary source of innovation and operation. Every business is now a software business…. The biggest change has been the move of technology from a supporting role to a central role. It isn’t just that messaging became more important or that video meetings began to work, but that people quickly realized these can actually be superior. The next step is to take these tactical lessons and apply them more broadly…. Those that believe things will return to normal except maybe for that one thing, or that we’ll do what we always did just with this one extra step, will be the ones that are ultimately disrupted…. We’re emerging from a generation-defining event and there’s every reason to think in the years to come that the reinvention of work and what it means to be a corporation will change as much going forward as those did in the period following the return from the War…
LINK: <https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/creating-the-future-of-work-449c66707e35>
Matthew Yglesias: “Future“ & the Future of Media: ‘The Paperclip Maximizer…. Facebook is… that but for human society…. Engagement-maximization mostly boosts rightwing populists pushing pessimistic negative-sum worldviews while giving a secondary boost to leftwing populists pushing a different set of pessimistic negative-sum worldviews. Oops! Peter Thiel… deeply involved… [thinks] billionaires can… ride in the slipstream of conservative populism, crush electoral democracy and political equality, and then keep the flame of technological progress alive as a kind of esoteric knowledge. I don’t think that works…. To make pro-tech, pro-markets, pro-innovation sustainable, you need a public culture that reflects those values. That means publications that propound them… [and] a distribution technology that isn’t constantly amplifying the most hysterical negative-sum overreaction to everything on the planet…
LINK: <https://www.slowboring.com/p/future-media>
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I noticed something interesting about the Trumpiness-vax correlation. I did a bit of least-eyeballs factor analysis and looked at the outliers from the curve fit. Western states were more vaccinated than their Trumpiness indicated; Southern states less vaccinated. Rugged individualistic Trumpies (the Westerners) are more open to being vaxxed than hierarchical Trumpy Confederates. Or maybe the Southern states are blacker and more rural. Damned if I know.