Mehmet Oz Defenestrates Trump, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-07-26 Tu
I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:
FIRST: Mehmet Oz Defenestrates Trump
Is this defenestration of Trump just your standard Republican-soft-pedals-their-crazy-right-wing-allegiances-for-the-general-election? Or might it mark something more?
One Audio:
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson: International Relations in China: ‘What is the topography of international-relations theory in the People’s Republic of China? What is the “Chinese School of International Relations?” Astrid Nordin (King’s College, London), Yan Xuetong (Tsinghua University), and Qin Yaqing (Peking University) join the podcast to answer these – and other – questions about Chinese international-relations scholarship… <https://www.duckofminerva.com/2022/06/episode-24-international-relations-in-china.html>
One Image: Back at Full Employment
Although it is very alarming that for prime-age males, “full employment” is an employment-to-population ratio of 86%. What are the non-employed doing?
Very Briefly Noted:
Julie Segal: There Was Never Anything Wrong With Value <https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1z0py63rptnnm/There-Was-Never-Anything-Wrong-With-Value>
Mariana Mazzucato: Reimagining the State: Market Shaper, Not Market Fixer <https://email.hewlett.org/t/ViewEmail/t/96E9F1A78975D64B2540EF23F30FEDED/DAB6E0D407AFD3622018F019E6F15D33?alternativeLink=False>
Twitter, ‘Stack, & Youtube:
Eduardo Galeano: What Is the Use of “UTOPIA”?: ‘Utopia is on the horizon and I know I will never reach it./I will walk ten steps, then utopia will walk ten steps away./The more I will look for it, the less I will find it, because it is moving away. Utopia is used for this: to keep us walking… <
Steve Schmidt: JD Vance Is a Fascist Nut:
Francis Fukuyama: The Triple Justification for Liberalism: ‘It advances peace, prosperity, and human dignity…
Dan Pfeiffer: Why the 1/6 Hearings Have Damaged Trump: ‘I’ve done two 2020 Trump-voter focus groups since the Jan 6 hearings began. And something happened that’s never happened before: ZERO of the participants in either group wanted Trump to run again in 2024…
Damon Linker: Thinking About Fascism—Part 1: ‘The far left champions radical equality…. The far right… champions hierarchies…. In practice, the end results are quite similar…. Both effectively absorb civil society into the state, deploy secret police, punish enemies of the ruling party, undertake bloody purges, and commit atrocities and genocides…
Ryan Avent: The End of the Conservative Age: ‘From 1870 to 1970, the world was racked by violent change…. And then, around 1970, societies positioned at the frontier of human advance declared: enough. We went to the Moon; that was far enough. We grew tired of efforts to create utopia through our governments, and chose instead to enable the better heeled to consume the fruits of their labor by cutting their taxes…. The result has been a profound stasis… a market-oriented economism… a progressive conservationism…. In concert, the two facilitated a slow dismantling of society’s capacity to pursue and achieve grand aims…. It is high time that we grow out of it…
Saladin Ahmed: Launch Week: Don’t You Have Concerns with Some of the Other Writers Who Are Using Substack as a Platform?
Josh Barro: Public Health Officials Should Be Clearer About Who Isn’t at Risk for Monkeypox
Noah Smith: China Is Flailing
Dan Nexon Schedule F is Textbook Reactionary Populism: ‘Reactionary populists pursue neopatrimonial rule under the cover of restoring power to the people…. Political scientists have generally dropped the ball because we’re used to thinking about regimes mostly in terms of the autocracy-democracy continuum…. [Thus] the field struggles to make sense of regimes that combine electoral democracy with neopatrimonial governance: we tend to try to put their square pegs into the round holes of democracy and authoritarianism…
I greatly enjoy and am, in fact, driven to write Grasping Reality—but its long-term viability and quality do depend on voluntary subscriptions from paying supporters. I am incredibly grateful that the great bulk of it goes out for free to what is now well over ten-thousand subscribers around the world. If you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group receiving it regularly, please press the button below to sign up for a free subscription and get (the bulk of) it in your email inbox. And if you are enjoying the newsletter enough to wish to join the group of supporters, please press the button below and sign up for a paid subscription:
Director’s Cut PAID SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below:
¶s:
As I see it, the reason to worry about stack is not anything that it has done, but rather the pressures to aggregate, monetize, and then abandon its commitment to providing the infrastructure for a thoughtful public sphere in order to generate clickbait-rage. The hope is that that is only the failure mode of advertising-supported media. The fear is that it is going to be a constant feature of the attention economy. In that case, the only platforms that are actually good, for the world will be those that tie themselves to the mas and remain concerned only with covering their costs and attaining influence rather than generating money for investors:
Saladin Ahmed: Launch Week: Don’t You Have Concerns wiith Some of the Other Writers Who Are Using Substack as a Platform?: ’I have more than concerns, I have beef. I have skin in this game and it isn’t an academic question for me…. I’m intimately aware of the dangers of sharing a platform with dark forces. I’m talking about on a physical, gut-deep level…. [But] complicity is everywhere. How do you make good work that actually reaches people in a world like that without doing harm? How do you own what your labor produces and make sure those you work with are paid fairly? All of the answers have their grim side. That said, and to be perfectly clear, I completely understand and respect anyone not agreeing with the compromises I make…. There are valid reasons to take exception to—even to avoid—any of the several homes my work has found. I wouldn’t dream of insulting folks by telling them when and where to do so…
LINK:
The very sharp Josh Barro believes that the CDC is blowing it again – once again, treating the American citizenry like cattle to be misled, because that helps drive them in the right direction right now. And I agree with Josh that this is a horrible mistake, and they ought to have learned from Covid:
Josh Barro: Public Health Officials Should Be Clearer About Who Isn’t at Risk for Monkeypox: ‘A general pattern of dishonest framing by public health authorities…. If you’re at above-average risk, they’ll gladly tell you so, in hopes it will get you to focus on their advice. But if you’re at below-average risk, they don’t want to harp on that too much, because then you might not do what they tell you. And of course, it’s likely some gay men who actually are at elevated risk will see the messaging intended for the whole public, and they’ll come away misinformed and under-alarmed…. The main thing straight people should be afraid of is what this episode has shown about how little our government agencies have learned from COVID…
LINK:
In the old days, authoritarianism could be stable. The problems that society had to solve emerged slowly, and even an ossified system. Hostile to accurate information, could gradually adjust to deal with them, most of the time. Keeping your eye on the ball meant keeping the flow of resources to the elite going so that the elite would mobilize to keep the regime in power. Perhaps the piece of change became too fast for this to work starting with the French revolution. But the pace of change is much too fast now. And Xi Jinping's drawing on traditional Chinese patterns of governance is, I think, likely to bring an end to the Chinese development model. Noah Smith watches:
Noah Smith: China Is Flailing: ‘The leadership is frantically trying to fine-tune its economic policies, but it isn’t helping…. In the middle of 2021, China embarked on a series of policy experiments that have brought its economy crashing back to Earth… an arbitrary crackdown on the consumer internet… an attempt to curb the real estate sector… a “zero-Covid” policy…. China is probably now in a recession…. Heavy-handed crackdowns didn’t work, and neither did half-hearted reversals of those crackdowns. So what can China do to get growth going again?… [There] are… sensible policies…. The problem is that China’s decision-making process is currently impaired at the highest levels. Considerations like nationalism (in the case of vaccines), distrust of the private sector (in the case of IT), and a fear of being seen to shift course are silencing the government’s more reasonable voices. And to be honest, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that a lot of this is coming directly from the top…
LINK:
Tossing on the pile: https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=725114106069109021076070073096070074039034001032090029097070104029094014077031109025033036016025122120037081110116102007110127039072071083031122026004115077105024101095015081111102023104081072102100115082086024123024006064096068001003023021005112086089
"Business Retreats and Sanctions Are Crippling the Russian Economy"