Þere Is Something Wrong wiþ Þose Who Claim "Wokeness" Is þe Major Threat to Democracy; + BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-09-01 We
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
First:
Ryan Avent: Mobs & Justice: ‘Liberalism isn’t just about what you can do, but also what you should do for others: “A growing illiberalism, fueled by social media, is trampling democratic discourse,” reads the homepage tagline on a new essay in the Atlantic, by Anne Appelbaum. “The result is a chilling atmosphere in which mob justice has replaced due process and forgiveness is impossible.” The piece, you may be surprised to learn, is about the woke mobs which occasionally roam across Twitter and other platforms calling attention to people accused of (or adjacent to those accused of) intolerance toward various disadvantaged groups or, in other cases, sexual harassment or assault. It could have been about other kinds of illiberalism trampling democratic discourse, or indeed democracy…. A frustrating essay…. A useful one in the way that it illustrates the problems with popular arguments about the meaning of wokeness. The piece is built around extensive conversations with the victims of the woke mob…. Appelbaum plays with a few different historical analogies in the piece, including a number drawn from totalitarian states… but the one which frames the essay is that of Hester Prynne, the central figure of The Scarlet Letter. The woke are The New Puritans…. The essay stuck in my craw… an unfortunate lack of perspective. The fact that there is a much more virulent and imminent threat to a liberal America has been noted. The woke mob did not besiege the capital building in an attempt to lynch lawmakers and overturn an election, it isn’t threatening political violence day in and day out or working systematically to undermine American democracy, it doesn’t have the full support of the leaders of one of the nation’s two parties, and so on. That doesn’t mean that one can’t still complain… but perhaps it is possible to do so without using, say, the tagline quoted above…. My jaw fell open when I read the closing paragraph: “Worse, if we drive all of the difficult people, the demanding people, and the eccentric people away from the creative professions where they used to thrive, we will become a flatter, duller, less interesting society, a place where manuscripts sit in drawers for fear of arbitrary judgments. The arts, the humanities, and the media will become stiff, predictable, and mediocre. Democratic principles like the rule of law, the right to self-defense, the right to a just trial—even the right to be forgiven—will wither. There will be nothing to do but sit back and wait for the Hawthornes of the future to expose us…” The right to self-defense? The right to a just trial?… Wokeness… exploded… when white people finally began to pay serious attention to the fact that cops were killing black people with impunity…. People in power actually being racist is, historically, a pretty significant cause of flatness and dullness and manuscripts in drawers…. To imply that there hasn’t until now been an oppressive, illiberal culture denying opportunities for expression or justice to “difficult” people, such that the net effect of the recent push for social justice is, thanks to its occasional excesses, a stultifying one seems to me to massively mischaracterize what’s been happening…
LINK:
One Video:
Gary Gorton: Recent Changes & the Future of the US Financial System <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE1_bF8B5zY>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Evelyn Sakakida Rawski: The Last Emperors: A Social History of Qing Imperial Institutions<https://archive.org/details/lastemperorssoc00raws/page/6/mode/2up>
Daron Acemoglu: Why Nation-Building Failed in Afghanistan: ‘The tragedy playing out this month has been 20 years in the making. From the outset, America and its allies embraced–and never reconsidered–a top-down state-building strategy that was always destined to fail… LINK: <https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/afghanistan-top-down-state-building-failed-again-by-daron-acemoglu-2021-08>
Martin Sandbu: The West has Paid the Price for Neglecting the Afghan Economy: ‘Per capita incomes flatlined over the past decade and corruption is endemic…. Total amount of bribes paid by Afghans to state officials at $2.25bn…. The corruption of the Afghan state is to be blamed on its financial and security guarantors: the US-led coalition… <https://www.ft.com/content/4f9b452f-d80a-4a37-bec5-bb73674aeadb>
Luke Nathan Phillips: What Is an Example of a ‘Good Patriot’?: ‘Loving your country because of its past and loving it because of its potential are two different, legitimate ways of loving America… <https://www.deseret.com/opinion/2021/8/18/22628911/opinion-are-there-different-ways-to-be-a-good-patriot-braver-angels-america>
Jeet Heer: Madison Cawthorn’s Threat: ’Congressman says he dreads taking up arms against fellow citizens but…
Paragraphs:
Alan Cole: The Mountain Lions: These Nine Cities Boomed in the COVID Era: ‘The 2017 tax law… limiting tax breaks for owning expensive housing… the COVID–19 pandemic changed peoples’ lifestyles and thereby shifted their housing preferences. These seemingly unrelated events both made housing in the most expensive metropolitan areas less attractive relative to housing elsewhere. That created an opening for a second group of cities that provided attractive amenities at more reasonable prices…. Boise, Spokane, Austin, Phoenix, Tucson, Colorado Springs… Salt Lake City, Ogden, and Provo… had a variety of advantages: reasonable prices, a growing high-tech economy, good weather or natural beauty, and relatively lower state and local taxes… strong appreciation in property values.…
LINK: <https://fullstackeconomics.com/the-rise-of-the-mountain-lion-economies/>
Stefan Nicola: VW & Daimler Going Electric Overwhelms German Auto Suppliers: ‘Germany’s $94 billion car-parts industry is struggling with the once-in-a-generation shift…. After spending decades perfecting the production of crankshafts, diesel injectors and other components not needed for electric motors, the industry is now scrambling to adapt as its traditional products become obsolete sooner than expected. From global players like Robert Bosch and Continental to the hundreds of small- and medium-size companies, parts makers are key to Europe’s biggest economy. Roughly 75% of the value-add of a car made in Germany comes from this supply network, which employs more than 300,000 people. Many of those jobs are dependent on how swiftly the sector can change. Doing so will be a bit like merging onto a crowded autobahn at high speed…
Eric Posner: COVID & the Conservative Economic Crack-up: ‘Two prominent economists, both former Trump administration officials… veered into incoherence: A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal exposes the dark hole into which conservative economic thinking has sunk…. Casey B. Mulligan and Tomas J. Philipson… used the COVID–19 pandemic to make the case for abandoning what they see as the conventional wisdom among economists: “that the purpose of government policy is to correct market failures”…. The “government-bad-market-good” argument had a good run back in the 1980s. But it was dealt a body blow by the 2008 financial crisis, when “good” government, led by the US Federal Reserve, rescued financial markets from self-destruction caused by the deregulation promoted by free-market advocates. Another blow has come with the pandemic…. Trump’s major achievement was using government to create the conditions for rapid vaccine development; his major failure was not going further and undermining efforts by state and local governments to control the pandemic. Mulligan and Philipson… take the worst market failure in decades as an opportunity for arguing that markets solve the problems created by government. Redefining a massive government intervention as “getting out of the way of business” seems at best an effort to rationalize their former boss’s political opportunism…
Jeet Heer: The Establishment’s Afghanistan Mythss: ‘Richard N. Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and thus as emblematic a representative of the American national security establishment as one could want. On Friday, he commented about the ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan, “The alternative to withdrawal from Afghanistan was not ‘endless occupation’ but open-ended presence. Occupation is imposed, presence invited. Unless you think we are occupying Japan, Germany, & South Korea. And yes, withdrawal was the problem.”… In advancing this consensus, ghouls who should have been discredited for their advocacy have been dug up and given prominent platforms: not just John Bolton and Paul Wolfowitz but even that ultimate undying security state vampire, Henry Kissinger. The basic argument goes something like this: Until Joe Biden came along, Afghanistan was a manageable problem. It was on path to becoming a Japan, Germany or South Korea, a country that would have a permanent American military presence under stable conditions with little or no loss of military life…. This establishment myth… is clearly designed to scapegoat Joe Biden for problems that are not caused by the withdrawal but are in fact inherent in bipartisan policy going back two decades in four administrations. To gauge how fantastical the establishment party line is, it is worth reading “The Afghanistan Papers,” a blockbuster Washington Post report by journalist Craig Whitlock that ran in 2019 (which will soon be available in expanded form as a book set to be released next week). Unfortunately, “The Afghanistan Papers” were largely ignored by the rest of the media and by the political elite. Yet it stands as the best and most clear-cut account of the failed American war…. The debacle is… the fault of… an entire national security establishment. In creating the myth that “withdrawal was the problem”…
LINK:
Noah Smith: Why Has the Gig Economy Been a Disappointment?: ‘Maybe because traditional companies still have a good reason to exist…. Uber… prices have gone way way up… wait times… have also risen…. Cory Doctorow has a long article about the situation, and while it’s too polemic, it does make some good points…. Uber is still losing money…. The company is also cash-flow negative. It releases an “adjusted EBITDA” metric that looks better but really just excludes a lot of expenses that shouldn’t be excluded (like stock-based compensation). This can’t continue, of course. But what will stanch the bleeding? The idea that self-driving car breakthroughs will save the company was always wrong…. One hope was always that investor subsidies would allow Uber to drive competitors like Lyft out of the market, and then jack up prices… Uber got a lot of people to start using the service by subsidizing rides, but that didn’t hook people into becoming dependent on ride-hailing…. Uber and Lyft will survive… [as] boutique services for the well-heeled…
LINK:
(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:
There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)
_even the right to be forgiven_
No one has any right to be forgiven. No one has any expectation of forgiveness for anything, ever.
This reads like someone has been into the Jesus-juice to excess and decided to apotheosize social norms into the inefable and illimitable love of God, because heaven forfend they themselves should ever have to acknowledge error.
People want to be told nothing has to change. This is weakness.
Duty is what you do so you like yourself in the future.
Necessity is what you do so you are in the future.
No matter how mighty the empire, no matter how rich or famed or beloved, of necessity all things must now change. Complaints about wokeness are no more complex than a demand that someone tell them they're not going to have to change. Which is petulant, inept, and ineffective, as well as cowardly.
Electric cars have much lower parts counts than ICE cars. Most of the parts industry is going to go away, which is one reason it's been policy to not go electric. (China has decided to go electric, and they're a big part of the car market, and they're not being even slightly shy about excluding foreign companies from it for not following their regulations. I think COVID has thrown off the schedule, but expect a ban on ICE cars in China in the not-too-distant, and for the ripple effects to be extensive.)
Afghanistan is a failure because the political consensus has consumed vast quantities of ur-fascist kool aid and believes you can do something with an army other than break things and kill people. You can't. If you want ethnogenesis, you must give people a positive reason to change their identity. "We will kill you if you don't" is not much like a positive reason. Germany and Japan and South Korea came out like not because of armies, but because of aid intended to better the lot of the least and last and lowly. Any such thing is today regarded as foul by the mammonites in control of the machinery of the state, and no one even pretends to suggest it. (Remember that at least four-fifths of the spend on Afghanistan was on contractors, money that came back into the US.)
As Jeet Heer notes, the Afghanistan War was a miserable failure and yet the supporters continue to want to pursue it. The BBC has now run 2 programs that show what the context. UK wannabe PM Rory Stewart did a wonderful documentary explaining Afghanistan and why the approach was unlikely ever to work. This was made in 2012 and has proven prescient. Then there is the BBC's latest: "9/11: Inside the President's War Room". It ends with G W Bush saying his war in Afghanistan was the right call...