Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: Ryan Avent: Mobs & Justice: ‘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…
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...
Noah Smith: Why Has the Gig Economy Been a Disappointment?
Without reading Cory's piece, the whole point of the gig economy is for investors to make a bundle by sidestepping all those annoying regulations businesses must follow, allowing costs to be lower and effectively undermine the competition while also allowing predatory practices on the gig worker. This is not new. What has changed is that investors have poured oceans of money into this approach to increase the impact. That the denouement may be both an undermining of regulated business as well as investors losing their shirts is no different from various market collapses over my lifetime as investors fail to see that their actions are bound to fail eventually.
Avent seems to be playing "whataboutism" as his approach to Applebaum's wokeness piece. It really doesn't matter what the issue is, the parties adhering to it tend to extremism. It is a version of Darwin's sex selection on memes. We see it in religion, politics, work practices,... Yes, there are other more serious issues to deal with, but that doesn't mean that the trend to extremism in wokeness shouldn't be raised, preferably to slow the slide to where it becomes truly oppressive, like religion. racism, etc., etc.
_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...
Noah Smith: Why Has the Gig Economy Been a Disappointment?
Without reading Cory's piece, the whole point of the gig economy is for investors to make a bundle by sidestepping all those annoying regulations businesses must follow, allowing costs to be lower and effectively undermine the competition while also allowing predatory practices on the gig worker. This is not new. What has changed is that investors have poured oceans of money into this approach to increase the impact. That the denouement may be both an undermining of regulated business as well as investors losing their shirts is no different from various market collapses over my lifetime as investors fail to see that their actions are bound to fail eventually.
Avent seems to be playing "whataboutism" as his approach to Applebaum's wokeness piece. It really doesn't matter what the issue is, the parties adhering to it tend to extremism. It is a version of Darwin's sex selection on memes. We see it in religion, politics, work practices,... Yes, there are other more serious issues to deal with, but that doesn't mean that the trend to extremism in wokeness shouldn't be raised, preferably to slow the slide to where it becomes truly oppressive, like religion. racism, etc., etc.