Aaron Ross Powell and Brian Albrecht

Powell: I’m disappointed to see Substack giving prime promotional real estate to Robert Reich. Reich is probably best characterized as the progressive Ben Shapiro. He sounds smart and persuasive to partisans, and they like to think he’s “destroyed” the views of people they don’t like, but his arguments are thin, almost always misleading, and people with a deep understanding of the issues he’s talking about, even those sympathetic to his positions, generally view him as an unserious thinker. Progressives can do a lot better.

Albrecht: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I wonder to what extent it is reasonable to expect Substack to know the difference. They see who generates readers and subscribers. Can I really expect them to independently identify experts across fields?

P: Not in every case, no. But there are obviously cases where one really ought to know if someone purporting to be an expert in fact isn’t. “How could we have known RFK Jr. isn’t actually a well-regarded expert on vaccines?” But I don’t know how or where to draw that line. I was mainly expressing broader frustration at how many people don’t know that Reich is a charlatan.

A: That’s my frustration too.

Substack Speaks, defending Robert Reich 

This publication is a place for thoughtful discussion around writers’ work. Substack is also founded on the belief that writers and their work deserve respect.

We ask that writers keep conversations civil in the comments of this publication and other Substack spaces where we gather writers, such as events. That means respecting one other’s perspectives and life experiences in your conversations, and refraining from cruel or derogatory language. It is not a place for irrelevant rants or off-topic digressions.

As such we are disabling comments on this post. You can read more about our approach to the comments and community interactions in this publication here: https://on.substack.com/p/community-guidelines

These Community Guidelines only apply to spaces that we manage, like our company publications, events, and programs, and are completely separate and distinct from the Substack Content Guidelines, which outline what is and is not acceptable on the Substack platform as a whole as part of our hands-off approach to moderation that puts writers and readers in charge - https://on.substack.com/p/substacks-view-of-content-moderation.

Leighten Woodhouse is concerned: "Can someone at Substack explain why so many comments here were removed? I’m open to there being a good reason but on its face it looks a bit alarming." 

Specialist writing for a general audience at best is writing for an audience as you would like to imagine it, while trying not to be esoteric, obscure, needlessly technical or consciously high-brow.  Writing for profit can become writing for fans. It's amazing how much conversation on Substack revolves around either claims of censorship or bragging rights.

Artists are better than academics at negotiating the politics of popularity. Not that they don't mostly fail, but pedants fall hard. DeLong and Noah Smith are unbearable. Reich and Krugman are political figures and it's useless to pretend otherwise. But it's equally useless to pretend Substack isn't a publisher and that all the competition for hits is about impressing the techbro editors above. And it's interesting or not how much racial-rationalism tecbros approve. The moral indignation of Lorentzen and Taibbi are more related than one of them at least might want to admit. 

Ganz writes a piece on right-wing nostalgia for left-wing authoritarianism. 

"First off, Compact itself exists to peddle this sort of hybridization of Left and Right themes, which I have elsewhere called an “unholy alliance.” (As a quick aside, in a recent piece, Slavoj Zizek, who sadly is a contributor to Compact, used this very term in a recent essay, writing, “We live in an era of unholy alliances, a combination of ideological elements which violate the standard opposition of Left and Right.”)

As I point out in that piece, the attempt to find such a Left-Right synthesis is an old and dishonorable tradition."

You'd hope he'd have learned something by now—and this still makes me laugh. I reminded him that Sohrab Ahmari is a fan of Mike Davis.

...I devoured City of Quartz, and then I read everything else Davis had written up to that point, and I was left wanting more.

Ganz replied that he was too, which, after all was my point. I quoted T.J. Clark (see the link) and said as I always do that apocalyptic romance is where radicalism meets fascism, adding that if he read Davis as more than a passive writer of elegiac prose he would have at least when he was living in Bushwick spent some time at the end of a night in the back of a bodega with a last beer and a couple of tacos sitting with workers home from a late shift, or smoking a cigarette with a bakery worker on a break. But he's admitted that he has no social ties outside his scene. 

Ganz writes for dollars communing to his followers. Journalists write on Substack as a way to get things out and make some extra cash. They bring their own readers. I'm not quibbling. Milanovic just posts like an academic blogger, without a paywall. But this is what Substack was made for. Found via a "thank you!" from a writer recommended by Lorentzen.

A European monarch once awarded me a medal for extraordinary service, an oil baron unknowingly gave me millions of dollars to do some focus groups, and a Pulitzer Prize winner convinced me to buy a trailer park.

Oddly, the thread that ties these random random facts of my life together is a weird junior high school I went to that mashed 6th, 7th, and 8th graders together, didn’t have formal subjects, and emphasized writing as a tool to understand the world.

I didn’t realize how much I missed that experience until I started sifting the sands of Substack, unearthing writing that dissolved the boundaries that I thought existed between me and the world. 

My goal with my Substack is to help you feel more peaceful, more understood, and more human, by recommending my favorite Substack articles. I also hope that, perhaps once a year, something that I write will bring you bliss.

Pablum and happy talk, from and ex-congressional staffer now at the Pew Charitable Trusts. 

Milanovic

Van Bavel’s key idea is as follows.  In societies where non-market constraints are dominant (say, in feudal societies), liberating factor markets is a truly revolutionary change. Ability of peasants to own some land or to lease it, of workers to work for wages rather than to be subjected to various types of corvées, or of the merchants to borrow at a more or less competitive market  rather than to depend on usurious rates, is liberating at an individual level (gives person much greater freedom), secures property, and unleashes the forces of economic growth. The pace of activity quickens, growth accelerates (true, historically, from close to zero to some small number like 0.5% per year) and even inequality, economic and above all social, decreases. This is the period so well recognized and analyzed by Adam Smith. Van Bavel, in a nod to Braudel, shows that very similar “essors”  have existed in the pre-medieval Iraq (then the most developed part of the world), medieval Central and Northern Italy (Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa..) and on the cusp between the late medieval Europe and early modern period in the Low Countries.

But the process, Bavel argues, contains the seeds of its destruction. Gradually factor markets cover more and more of the population: Bavel is excellent in providing numerical estimates on, for example, the percentage of wage-earners in Lombardy in the 14th century or showing that in Low Countries wage labor was, because of guilds, less prevalent in urban than in rural areas.  One factor market, though, that of capital and finance, gradually begins to dominate. Private and public debt become most attractive investments, big fortunes are made in finance, and those who originally asked for the level playing field and removal of feudal-like constraints, now use their wealth to conquer the political power and impose a serrata, thus making the rules destined to keep them forever on the top. What started as an exercise in political and economic freedom begins to look like an exercise in cementing the acquired power, politically and economically. The economic essor is gone, the economy begins to stagnate and, as happened to Iraq, Northern Italy and Low Countries, is overtaken by the competitors.*

As this short sketch shows, Bavel’s theory has many links, or can be juxtaposed, to several contemporary views of economic history. Bavel is dismissive of a unilinear view that regards the ever widening role of factor markets, including the financial, as leading to ever higher incomes and greater political freedom. His view, although not fully cyclical (on which I will say a bit  more at the very end of the review) is “endogenously curvilinear”: things which were good originally, when they hypertrophy, become a hindrance to further growth. It is thus a story of the rise and fall where, like in Greek tragedies, the very same factors that brought the protagonists grandeur, eventually hurl them into the abyss.

...It is not only the plausibility of the mechanism of decline that gives strength to Bavel’s thesis; it is also that he lists the manifestation of the decline, observable in all six cases. Financial investments yield much more than investments in the real sector, the economy begins to resemble a casino, the political power of the financiers becomes enormous. The richest among the financiers either directly or indirectly enter politics, they become patrons of arts,  sponsors of sports and education,  and we witness simultaneously (1) oligarchic politics, (2) slower growth and lower level of real investments, (3) higher inequality, (4) domination of finance and (5) artistic efflorescence.  What the ancient writers describe as “decadence” clearly sets it, but, as Bavel is at pains to note, it is not caused by moral defects of the ruling class but by the type of economy that is being created.  Extravagant bidding for assets whose quantity is fixed (land and art) is a further manifestation of such an economy: the bidding for fixed assets reflects lack of alternative profitable investments as well as the expectation that, as inequality increases, there would be some even crazier and richer investors who would pay even more for a work of art, thus enabling the realization of a capital gain. 

I'm torn between nodding and saying no fucking shit, but it's a good description of the economic origins of apocalyptic romance.  Materialism is the least romantic worldview imaginable, but that's why a passive romanticism attaches itself. And though it should be obvious, that includes Gerhard Richter. 

I'm not immune, but I'm not immune to anything I've ever written about. Nothing human is alien to me. That's the point right? The last thing I said to Ganz is that I'm torn between art and politics. Art usually wins, but that makes me a bit cranky.

---

I really hate Lorentzen. His world is petty and pathetic. This is just sad. But he's managed to remind me that I shouldn't have turned down the job with David Salle in 1986—I didn't want to move the the Hamptons and I'd decided to go back to school. Lorentzen is nostalgic for a decadence that I'm closer to than he can ever be. But I kept my distance at the time, and what's replaced it is worse. I have so many regrets. I missed my chance. I missed a lot of fun. Then again I'd never had had the patience. And Salle's work was never what he thought or pretended it was.

A long now deleted comment at Zachary Carter's review of DeLong's book (mentioned previously)  We had a back and forth, and at the end of my last comment I said I was going to close my paid account because I didn't want to troll him. And then he deleted everything.

From your review in Dissent 

"For India, one price of expanded trade with the British Isles was the deliberate deindustrialization of the Indian economy. India ceased to manufacture its own textiles, and instead provided raw materials to Britain, which handled the factory work. Under the traditional free trade theory of comparative advantage, this process should have maximized the wealth of both countries."

The last sentence shouldn't have made it past the editor. There is no free trade between masters and subjects.  Everything Delong celebrates is founded of mountains of the dead among Europe's subject peoples. You could have at least mentioned the famines.

"DeLong’s story of hegemony as a driver of stability and growth is extremely compelling—but it’s also a nice way of saying that imperialism isn’t so bad when it works. The neoliberalization of the world that began in the late 1970s not only undermined U.S. fiscal policy management, it decimated America’s effectiveness as an international economic hegemon—a fact that is obscured by the expansion of American military operations over the same period."

Any historian of the of the violence of the post war era is left to shrug.

Korea. It's been called genocide. [the links are repeats]

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America’s own leaders. “Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — 20 percent of the population,” Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.” After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.

Cambodia 

The still-incomplete database (it has several “dark” periods) reveals that from October 4, 1965, to August 15, 1973, the United States dropped far more ordnance on Cambodia than was previously believed: 2,756,941 tons’ worth, dropped in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. Just over 10 percent of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having “unknown” targets and another 8,238 sites having no target listed at all. The database also shows that the bombing began four years earlier than is widely believed — not under Nixon, but under Lyndon Johnson.

The impact of this bombing, the subject of much debate for the past three decades, is now clearer than ever. Civilian casualties in Cambodia drove an enraged populace into the arms of an insurgency that had enjoyed relatively little support until the bombing began, setting in motion the expansion of the Vietnam War deeper into Cambodia, a coup d’état in 1970, the rapid rise of the Khmer Rouge, and ultimately the Cambodian genocide.

...To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history. 

Tooze in the FT is at least somewhat better

DeLong’s version of the 20th century is more parochial than either of those. [books by Hobsbawm and Milanovic] It is centred on the political battles that raged around the growth regime of modern American capitalism and continue to shape policy debate in governments and central banks today. This is, you might say, the in-house, post-Clintonian history of the 20th century....

Slouching Towards Utopia reads less like a history than a richly decked out time capsule, a nostalgic throwback... 

The so called serious American intellectual left—the class that used to scorn the NYT-has become more provincial than it was 40 years ago.  DeLong is an arch nationalist "A rising not a setting sun" was his tagline. He was famous for his attacks on the left, his fondness for Gregory Clark's racial Darwinism, and encomiums for war criminals  

"R.I.P. Jeane J. Kirkpatrick

...She was a good friend to my grandfather Earl. She was an American and a world patriot: her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world."

Jeane Kirkpatrick was not interested in liberty and prosperity around the world. She defended American power.

He replied. Substack forwards comments. I have the email.

You have based this comment on a 180 degree misunderstanding of that line. The entire point is that the traditional theory is wrong. 

He's referring to the line about comparative advantage, as if I were defending it.

I replied saying that most people still assume it's a bad idea to keep all your eggs in one basket, and that systems engineers—of mechanical systems not intellectual ones (the existence of "financial engineers" builds on the same fantasy)—know that efficiency and stability operate in inverse proportion, and that redundancy is key to long term survival, but that even if the logic of comparative advantage made sense it was irrelevant here, because there is no free trade between masters and subjects.

His reply, again from the email

If you'd prefer to say "specialization" rather than "free trade," fine. And you're right, I could have mentioned the famines. There were a lot of them with different causes, and I decided to stick to a simple critique of de-industrialization for brevity's sake, assuming that my audience was familiar with the general outline of British imperial history.

At this point I lost it. Again this is approximate.

I don't know what to say about discussions of the inequality that results from you breaking into my home, killing my father, raping my mother, taking everything we own and putting me and my siblings to work in your factory.  The history of European modernity is founded on European barbarism, mostly but not entirely elsewhere. The inequality that exists now is merely the result. And here we are today.

I added the transcript of Javier Blas, with Joe Weisenthal

Well, clearly the ability of Europe to tap the LNG market has really saved the day for Europe. If this had happened only 10, 15 years ago where the global LNG market was not nearly as developed as it is today. And the ability to reroute cargos was much lower, particularly on the spot market Europe would have had a big problem. And the dependency on Russia was much, much higher.

So the LNG market is offering a relief to Europe in so many ways. One of the things that we are seeing that to me is very interesting is Europe at the moment is outbidding everyone else on the market, taking the LNG. That's one of the reasons we have these very high prices in the market. I mean, on fundamentals as Alex was pointing out, we should not probably have 200 euros per megahour of gas because the inventories are building in the right direction and we should have enough gas if Putin was to keep the flows. But obviously we need to continue outbidding the whole market for LNG supplies.

And for that, we need to sustain very high prices in Europe for that to happen. What's happening there is that a number of countries that were starting to rely on the global LNG market for supplies, middle income and poor countries thinking the likes of Pakistan or Bangladesh, or even India... they're seen now that European nations and European utilities can pay much higher prices.

So they're not getting the cargos that they were expecting. Some of the cargos that would be going into Asia at the moment are rerouted into Europe. And we are seeing power supply problems in Bangladesh or Pakistan, which is affecting the textile industry. So in a way it may be a case where Europe avoids the blackouts that many of us have been talking, but only because the blackouts move somewhere else, where they cannot

really pay the price that Europe is paying for the LNG. And then the blackouts are happening in Pakistan or Bangladesh. And that global LNG market is allowing that arbitrage to happen. Without it, well, it will not be happening. And the blackouts would be happening in Europe because we will not be able to get enough gas

I added another comment that I didn't want to hang out just to troll him so I'd close my account in a day or two. I guess the snark was a bit much. 

He deleted the comment and the exchange that followed.  They're here

---

I left a long comment at Zachary Carter's post on DeLong's book. I kept a copy if he deletes it. 

Carter's review of DeLong in Dissent

Britain was not so generous with the rest of the world. For India, one price of expanded trade with the British Isles was the deliberate deindustrialization of the Indian economy. India ceased to manufacture its own textiles, and instead provided raw materials to Britain, which handled the factory work. Under the traditional free trade theory of comparative advantage, this process should have maximized the wealth of both countries.... 

By that traditional definition slavery should have maximized the wealth of slaves. The whole thing's a mess.

DeLong has a tag. Comparative advantage doesn't but Dani Rodrik and Angus Deaton do. That should cover it.

---

And I remembered this from the NYT on September 27th. The worst was deleted later.

The failure in Iraq marked a larger blow to America’s influence in the world than the loss of the Vietnam War, and the recent and humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, after an effort of more than 20 years of democracy building, did great damage, argued Stefano Pontecorvo, the senior NATO civilian in Afghanistan and one of the last to leave after the Taliban takeover.

At the height of the war, the United States spent $3 billion a year, and for nothing, he said. “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries,” he said. “You can’t impose your values — you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.”

From Isaac Chotiner and The Print

New Delhi: A New York Times article has removed a reference to colonial Britain’s alleged hand in building “democracy in India” over 250 years after a counterblast on social media.

The article published Tuesday quoted former NATO diplomat Stefano Pontecorvo as saying, “You can’t impose your values – you have to accommodate them to the values of the country. It took Britain 250 years to build democracy in India, and we had 20.”

The quote implies Britain’s 200-year repression of India had helped infuse egalitarian values in the country.

The quote on India is also prefaced with the observation: “The problem with exporting democracy is that it is not natural to these countries.”

The quote was first shared on Twitter by Carnegie South Asia director Milan Vaishnav and later retweeted by Observer Research Foundation director and son of India’s External Affairs minister S. Jaishankar, Dhruva Jaishankar.

The US was no more interested in bringing democracy to Afghanistan—or anywhere else—than the British were interested in bringing democracy to India.

We'll have to wait for an Indian or South Asian, non-white, non-European, "perspective" on DeLong's new book.

Do we all have a right to cross borders?

...But I think these philosophical arguments against a right to move are ultimately unconvincing. They fail to give sufficient weight to the essential interest that all of us have in being able to live, love, study, work and settle without being restricted by the coercive and often violent imposition of borders. In the context of massive inequality, the current border regime is even more unjustified, akin to the arbitrary and anti-human character of a global caste system.

Do we have the right to keep the jobs we were trained for?
---
The economics of open borders

On the first question, I’ll offer a bold Maybe. Kennan’s core assumption is that immigrant workers with a given level of education and (I think) experience will have the same productivity as already resident workers. So a move from a low productivity country to a high productivity country produces a big increase in their effective labor capacity. That benefits those workers, but also produces a shift in global income from labor to capital since the supply of labor has increased.

"with a given level of education and (I think) experience will have the same productivity as already resident workers."
Given the opportunity, immigrants will outpace them.
---
Nobel economist Angus Deaton on a year of political earthquakes

Over trout in Princeton, the laureate says he’s glad the Clinton era is over and it isn’t only Trump voters who feel ‘excluded’.

...Deaton is gracious about my bind and offers some advice. It helps that he looks like he has been plucked from central casting for emeritus professors: requisite tweed jacket, jumper and wire-rimmed glasses; white hair just unkempt enough to give a flicker of Ivy League eccentricity. He is also wearing a blue bow tie with vivid red stars that once belonged to one of his mentors, the late Richard Stone, fellow Nobel Prizewinner and the godfather of British national accounts.

Mistral is bright and airy despite the rain outside, and filled with music, cheer and the clanging of cutlery and plates. The noise forces us — two slightly rumpled large men — to lean across the small table to hear each other. I can’t help thinking that we are also, in the parlance of 2016, two “metropolitan elites”, sipping a smooth Oregon pinot noir and pondering death, pain and Donald Trump.

I can’t help thinking he's right.
---
Regional Policy and Distributional Policy in a World Where People Want to Ignore the Value and Contribution of Knowledge -and Network- Based Increasing Returns

All of this "what you deserve" language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute--that what your work adds to the pool of society's resources is what you deserve. 

This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance.

Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just "to each according to his work", and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors' accumulated knowledge and networks.

On top of this we add: Polanyian disruption of patterns of life--local communities, income levels, industrial specialization--that you believed you had a right to obtain or maintain, and a right to believe that you deserve. But in a market capitalist society, nobody has a right to the preservation of their local communities, to their income levels, or to an occupation in their industrial specialization. In a market capitalist society, those survive only if they pass a market profitability test. And so the only rights that matter are those property rights that at the moment carry with them market power--the combination of the (almost inevitably low) marginal societal products of your skills and the resources you own, plus the (sometimes high) market power that those resources grant to you.
...Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions to get everybody to understand that:

• no, none of us is worth what we are paid.
• we are all living, to various extents, off of the dividends from our societal capital
• those of us who are doing especially well are those of us who have managed to luck into situations in which we have market power--in which the resources we control are (a) scarce, (b) hard to replicate quickly, and (c) help produce things that rich people have a serious jones for right now.

• "Speaking as a card-carrying neoliberal and as a proud member of the Rubinite wing of the Democratic Party,..."
• "a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience."

new tags for Deaton, DeLong,  Quiggin, Noah Smith, also Dani Rodrik. It's easier than linking and relinking to earlier posts, and I'm not going to make a tag for economics.

DeLong

These are days of grave disillusionment with the state of the world. Sinister forces of fanatical, faith-based killing – something that we in the West, at least, thought had largely ended by 1750 – are back. And they have been joined by and are reinforcing forces of nationalism, bigotry, and racism that we thought had been largely left in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.

It's to be expected at this point that no commenter brings up the history of western support before and after 1945 for "sinister forces of fanatical, faith-based killing", religious conservatives against modernizers, and dictators against democracy. I could post the a google Ngram for postcolonialism, but it's unnecessary.

Someone should ask DeLong point blank if the lives of people in the west matter more to him than lives elsewhere. I won't be surprised when he says yes, but they will, and that's the problem.

"Liberal secular modernity" is described most often as Weberian. Weber's model, the Protestant model, has failed. Secularism is inevitable.

Henry Farrell: Brad Delong is not a philosopher king.

Someone who is rightly entrusted with the authority to choose among such options is not a technocrat under any reasonable definition of the term. Instead, he or she is an enlightened autocrat – ideally a three thousand year old human-sandworm hybrid with untrammelled power, who is both wise and disinterested enough to find a solution that is to the collectivity’s long term benefit, and cruel enough to impose it, regardless of how it hurts specific people. Unfortunately, even if you buy the idea that this is politically legitimate (I don’t), the political economy of autocracy in real life is such that enlightened autocrats rarely, if ever, exist. People with untrammeled power rarely have the incentive to employ it in the collective interest. And hence, I think that Brad, although right to note that the problem stems from disagreements between different European democracies, is wrong to suggest that technocracy is the solution. It isn’t a solution, nor, plausibly, is it even technocracy.

The political world is a world of political enchantments. No one is above politics.

A well-meaning idiot in The Atlantic:  "The Meaningless Politics of Liberal Democracies. The desire for theocracy in the Muslim world can be partly understood through the failures of Western secularism."

Ben Affleck has become an unlikely spokesman for a view on Islam held by many on the American left. In 2014, the actor made a now-famous stand against Bill Maher and Sam Harris in defense of Muslims, arguing that it’s wrong to make generalizations about the religion based on ideological extremists and terrorists. “How about the more than 1 billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punch women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, and pray five times a day?” he said.

In his new book Islamic Exceptionalism, Shadi Hamid—an Atlantic contributor, a scholar at Brookings, and a self-identified liberal—calls Affleck’s declaration a “well-intentioned … red herring.” Islam really is different from other religions, he says, and many Muslims view politics, theocracy, and violence differently than do Christians, Jews, or non-religious people in Europe and the United States.

Perhaps his most provocative claim is this: History will not necessarily favor the secular, liberal democracies of the West. Hamid does not believe all countries will inevitably follow a path from revolution to rational Enlightenment and non-theocratic government, nor should they.

The last link above is to a piece by Hamid. Pushing the book on twitter he whined that people who want to argue with him should at least read the book.

My response to that tweet is the bottom on the left. After my second tweet he responded that my points were in his book, and after the fourth he responded, "OK, never mind", then he deleted all three tweets. The right is an old exchange with Dawkins.



"He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time, those memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: "I've been around the world several times, and now only banality still interests me."

My value free science can beat up your ideology

"I’m a Weberian"

Brad DeLong has a post where he looks to be trying to resurrect the Left-neoliberalism wars, issuing minatory warnings about the dangers of a perspective in which:

There is a Movement, the Movement is good because the Movement is supported by the class whose interest is the general interest and by Correct Ideological Thought, and all progressives must support the movement.

He furthermore quotes an old post of mine so as to revive his previous suggestion that I’m a card carrying member of this purportedly disastrous tendency. I’m a genuine admirer of much of Brad’s work – but not of when he gets on his full Redbaiting (which usually seems to happen when he is personally exercised, or when someone says something that could be construed as being rude to Larry Summers). Some clarifications, in response to Brad’s post:

1) Contrary to Brad’s suggestion, I’ve never argued or even hinted that I believe there is a universal class whose interest is the general interest. Indeed, I vehemently disagree with the proposition. For better or worse, I’m a Weberian rather than a Marxist, and a social democratic squish to boot....

Delong

The technocratic view is that there will be a bunch of competing ideological views and material interests pulling and hauling, and that by always wading in and joining the tug-of-war side that has the better policy idea at the moment in the issue under dispute one will get better governance and higher societal well-being.

"The technocratic view" "the irrationalism of others"
And Shalizi

This is getting longer.

Varieties of anti-politics
3/4

Nobody Gives A Shit Who You're Voting For
2000 wasn't pre-internet, but it was proto-internet, and one genre it gave birth to was the long essay about WHY I AM VOTING FOR X (usually Nader). These weren't persuasion pieces, these were ME pieces. I question the effectiveness of most persuasion pieces at this point, but they're still a different genre. The ME pieces are just navel-gazers. Nobody cares. They're boring. Vote for who you want.

related/repeats

2/28

I suppose it's weird to be a political blogger and not have all that much to say about the Democratic primary. I just don't have any deep analysis that people who read this blog can't figure out by themselves. I don't like discussions of "momentum" or how candidate X needs to be up 5 points (or whatever) in Colorado (or wherever) in order to "remain viable." It all starts to sound like sports commentary (they really need to get some points on the board! he's got a hot hand!).

I don't really find any electability arguments to be particularly persuasive. That doesn't mean they're wrong, and you might find them persuasive, but I don't have much interest in engaging them. Clinton will likely win, Sanders will likely lose, and while anything is still possible, that's always been the case, though that is not an argument to stop working for either candidate if you are doing that.

God this blog sucks.

"pathologically opposed to ambiguity" "throw/s up his hands" "pathologically anti-intellectual" "know-nothing" Do a site search if you want.

I like Hillary Clinton. I worried a bit about some of the idiots she has surrounded herself with. But happy for her to run.

If he imagines it as cut and dried, he's happy to show contempt; if he imagines it isn't, he'll hedge. And then if he likes someone it all goes out the window.

DeLong on Jeane Kirkpatrick

her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world.

Todd

The powerful negative effect of the variable 'proportion of workers' on the number of demonstrators indicates, on the other hand, that the lower classes have now completely escaped from the ideological control of the culturally dominant classes. The geographical organization of society largely explains this negative liberty. With great realism, Christophe Guilluy has centred his depiction of French society on the way the lower classes have been relegated to the periphery. Forced out into the geographical margins of urban areas, the workers no longer turn out to demonstrate in the hearts of town and cities. They can no longer be mobilized on an ad hoc basis, just as they can no longer be controlled ideologically: witness the way large numbers of them vote for the National Front. It is true that Francois Hollande and the Socialist Party had, by refusing the National Front any place in the 'great republican demonstrations', implicitly designated NF voters as non-desirables in the heart of our cities. At a time when the neo-republican pact is being sealed, the perfectly real category of `workers' is no more welcome than the imaginary category of 'Muslims'.

More fun  (see previous)

ZM

dsquared,

“I notice that all the blokes opining away that everyone ought to do their own housework (and that housework is qualitatively different from any other form of labour; personally I think it’s disgraceful that people are too lazy to manage their own mutual funds or write their own novels) are …well…blokes.”

You noticed wrongly since I am not a bloke .

I also said housework should be equitably shared by household members not made to be a woman’s responsibility.

in public spaces of commerce, industry, or civics it is appropriate to have people employed to do the housekeeping and cleaning. In domestic spaces people should do their own housekeeping unless they have a disability and need assistance.

i hope with your argument that domestic housekeeping is a field suitable for paid labour you also think housekeepers should be paid the same as managers of mutual funds?

dsquared

"In domestic spaces people should do their own housekeeping unless they have a disability and need assistance."

… Because blah blah blah Thoreau. Apologies for getting your gender wrong but really, this is so much gasping rubbish that I can’t believe people don’t notice they’re mistaking a personal aesthetic preference (or more likely, a half remembered childhood rule) for an insight into morality

Every major mistake I've watched Daniel Davies make has been a mistake of social -intimate- empiricism. This was linked in the previous post. It ends with this. If the link ever dies I've saved a copy of the page.

Wiping piss stains off your own bathroom floor is not the same as wiping the shit off your own ass, but it's closer to it than most other jobs.

See also, Doormen. The reference on that post to "petty bourgeois" is funny, since it's clear now how little they know (the exchange between Farrell and Bhandari). I'm embarrassed by my own ignorance. Theirs continues to amaze me.

Krugman: "Pretty soon, we’ll be having serious, completely un-self-conscious discussions in major magazines about the servant problem."

If you have servants you'll have serious conversations about the servant problem.
I've linked to it twice before but somehow ignored the fact that he was linking to DeLong.

...you have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience. 

Bloomberg

The dethronement of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood party is giving rise to a new political power. The ultra-conservative Nour Party was the only Islamist group to support the military-backed plan to topple Mohamed Mursi and the Muslim Brotherhood organization that fielded him for office. The move has cast them as political power brokers, evidenced by their scuttling, at least for now, of Mohamed ElBaradei’s appointment as prime minister. 

“The Nour Party for the time being has a veto power over major decisions because the new order needs at least one major Islamist party on its side,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in the Qatari capital. “It’s never been so influential.”

AA

Does the fierce Saudi defense of the Sisi coup not give you any pause?

Sarah Carr
On Sheep and Infidels

Before I begin, let me state some facts, so that when people begin the ad hominem attacks they can try to rein them in within the following boundaries:

I voted for Mohamed Morsi in the second round of the presidential elections (to keep Ahmed Shafiq out).

I am one of the administrators of a blog called “MB in English” that features English translations of awful statements of a sectarian, conspiratorial or bonkers nature that the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) intends for domestic consumption only.

I am against army intervention in politics.

I state all this because Egyptian politics and society in general are currently split along identity lines in a way that they have never been over the last three years. This problem is so chronic that the merits or flaws of an argument are almost entirely determined by who is making the argument, considered through a haze of fury and suspicion. 

...On 4 July, the day after Morsi’s removal, I went to the Nasr City sit-in. There was a line of tanks about a kilometer from the entrance checking bags and bothering journalists. Behind the tanks, barbed wire had been put in place. Two men stood five meters apart in silence, both carrying pictures of Morsi.

A man went past them and began shouting. He was an engineer with a lisp who explained in a desperate tone that he did not take part in the 25 January protests but that these protests taught him “how to state an opinion and protect it.” He had voted for Morsi in both rounds of the elections, but insisted that he was at the protest not to support an individual, but “an idea.”

“I learned democracy from the elite. So I voted. But I have learnt that there is no revolution and no democracy,” he said.

As he was talking, a man nearby started screaming in the direction of the army while holding up a poster of Morsi. He was so furious that he succeeded in pulling his poster in two, at which point he crumpled into a ball on the ground and wept.

On Saturday I attended the somber and low-key funeral of Mohamed Sobhy, a father of two who was shot in the head outside the Republican Guards Officers’ Club. Eyewitnesses say that this happened after he put a Morsi poster on the barbed wire in front of some troops who seem to have gotten nervous. In total, four men died at the protest.

I saw his body half an hour later, covered in a sheet and surrounded by bewildered protesters. I tried to tweet the picture but the network was not cooperating and it would not send. So I tweeted that a man had been killed and his body was still here and that I was trying to send a picture for all those who I know would say I was lying.

The problem is not that people did not believe me after the first tweet (it is always good to be cautious). The problem is that they were disputing that a man had died even when the photo was uploaded. One man responded: “he doesn’t have Egyptian features.” Others suggested it was an old photo. When a video appeared and it was no longer possible to dispute the fact that a man had been shot outside the Presidential Guards Officers’ Club in Cairo at the same date and time as the pro-Morsi lot were alleging, attention turned to his injuries. Sobhy was facing the army when he fell to the ground, and blood gushed out of the back of his head.

The lack of serious discussion of world politics among US liberals is more than simply worthy of note.  The limits of normative debate, and curiosity, are more and more clear, and the arrogance of the elite is the worst of it. More and more arrogant the less they have to say. The world moves on.

Below is Crooked Timber's link list.

11D, 3 Quarks Daily, A Fistful of Euros, Atrios, Balkinization, Best of Both Worlds, Blood and Treasure, Brad DeLong, Cosma Shalizi, Corey Robin, Critical Mass, Daily Kos, Daniel Drezner, Digby, Ed Felten, Edge of the American West, Ezra Klein, Feminist Philosophers, Firedoglake, Glenn Greenwald, The Inverse Square, Jacobin, Jim Henley, Joshua Marshall, Juan Cole, Kevin Drum, Lawrence Solum, Lawyers, Guns and Money, Leiter Reports, Making Light, Marc Lynch, Marginal Revolution, Mark Thoma, Matthew Yglesias, Maud Newton, Michael Froomkin, Miriam Burstein, Naked Capitalism, New Left Project, The New Inquiry, Pharyngula, Political Theory Daily Review, Politics, Theory and Photography, Russell Arben Fox, Slugger O’Toole, Sociological Images, Steven Johnson, Steven Poole, Talk Left, Tapped, The Virtual Stoa, Tim Lambert, Timothy Burke, Uncertain Principles, Yorkshire Ranter

Beyond a few exceptions there's really not much there. The foreign policy types are American nationalists. Juan Cole is there for his writing on the Iraq war.  He's not an Arab, let alone an angry one, and they don't refer to him anymore, since he refuses to separate Israel from other issues in the region.  I've said all this before. There's a link to Jacobin but not Jadaliyya, to a journal about political ideas but not to one about politics as such, and culture.  It'd be too much to expects links to AbuKhalil, or Phil Weiss. They link to Marc Lynch, a knowledgable strategist of American power, but not Josh Landis. They link to two people at Foreign Policy, but why Drezner, and not Walt? The only excuse for that his friendship from the beginnings of blogging. That and the fact that Farrell likes to criticize Walt as a theorist while ignoring his observations on politics; we're back to ideas again. Their Greenwald link is outdated.  Following the link at the end of the previous sentence will remind you of the history.

Here's AA's July archive, full of links.  Arabist links to the NYT

CAIRO — As President Mohamed Morsi huddled in his guard’s quarters during his last hours as Egypt’s first elected leader, he received a call from an Arab foreign minister with a final offer to end a standoff with the country’s top generals, senior advisers with the president said. 

The foreign minister said he was acting as an emissary of Washington, the advisers said, and he asked if Mr. Morsi would accept the appointment of a new prime minister and cabinet, one that would take over all legislative powers and replace his chosen provincial governors. 

The aides said they already knew what Mr. Morsi’s answer would be. He had responded to a similar proposal by pointing at his neck. “This before that,” he had told his aides, repeating a vow to die before accepting what he considered a de facto coup and thus a crippling blow to Egyptian democracy. 

His top foreign policy adviser, Essam el-Haddad, then left the room to call the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson, to say that Mr. Morsi refused. When he returned, he said he had spoken to Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and that the military takeover was about to begin, senior aides said. 

“Mother just told us that we will stop playing in one hour,” an aide texted an associate, playing on a sarcastic Egyptian expression for the country’s Western patron, “Mother America.”

Academic distance in the name of "science" devolves into the passivity seen both in the powerful and the damned. Irony is the glory of slaves, but the irony of the powerful is perverse.  Daniel Drezner's tone is one of snide superiority and contempt: moralizing prurience. Like Yglesias and Holbo, he plays to an audience while fully aware his own sleazy mediocrity. Robin and Bertram are moralists, but very selective in their targets: self-preservation comes first.

repeat. Yglesias: "terroritories"

After the last depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories. [sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It's not like there's not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it's just that the other Arab leaders don't want to cooperate.

AP

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration wants to find a way to avoid labeling the overthrow of Egypt’s Islamist president a “coup” to keep crucial aid flowing to the Egyptian military without violating American law, U.S. officials said Monday.

While not directly ordering a pre-cooked outcome of a legal review into Mohammed Morsi’s ouster last week, the officials said Monday that the White House has made clear in inter-agency discussions that continued aid to Egypt’s military is a U.S. national security priority that would be jeopardized by a coup finding. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal administration deliberations.

The legal review being led by State Department lawyers has not been completed, but under U.S. law, a coup determination would require a suspension of all non-humanitarian aid to Egypt, including $1.3 billion that directly supports the Egyptian military.

John Quiggin refers to the Overton Window and Agnotology, without irony.


"Only elsewhere in the region"

I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state.

"Jimmy! Get the PHD!" [true story]

posted (by me) in comments elsewhere. mostly repeats.

Old conservatives went from "is" to an acceptance of a world of indulgence laced with shame. Modern liberals, following science, go from "is" to passive acceptance, laced with guilt (you're right about that).

Neoliberals, as modern liberals, lose the guilt.
Brad DeLong: "For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience."
After hurricane Katrina Tyler Cowen proposed letting swaths of New Orleans rebuilt as shantytowns, to foster a cultural rebirth, on the model of the corrupt and violent but vibrant New Orleans of 100 years ago. As another example he cited Kingston Jamaica, and the birth of Reggae. Interestingly enough he didn't mention the South Bronx and Hip Hop.  There's no accounting for taste.

Robert Reich goes from "is" to "ought".
Tony Judt argues against nature.

The woman who talked down killer last week in London was asked why she approached him. Her response was immediate and regarding the question itself, incredulous. "Better me than a child".
The woman has a strong and ingrained sense of moral responsibility. If she'd been more objective and less knee-jerk she might have realized that over the course of her career she would be able to instill that sense of responsibility in perhaps as much as 20% of her students, but that the odds of any children in the vicinity of the killer growing up to become like her meant that it would be better for society in the long run if she did not get involved.  But science lost out to morality. Reflex trumped reason.

"Scientific" and "disinterested" reason has shown that disinterested reason is in fact impossible in any engagements with the world.  That's your point, right?  We search for laws to govern our inevitably shallow self-interested behavior. And in our passivity we become even shallower. Delong attacks Alex Cockburn and William Safire in extremes of high dudgeon, but eulogizes Jeanne Kirkpatrick, closer to a war criminal than either of the others, as an old family friend.  Power corrupts. He can't even conceive of himself as a jackass.

"To the pure, all things are pure." From science to Saint Paul, from arrogance to stupidity. Technocracy expands and democracy fades.

"Reflex trumped reason" even if reason would defend the actions themselves as ideal.
"Tony Judt argues against nature." I shouldn't have to telegraph the irony.
Liberal idealism ends in perversity.

note taking my comments elsewhere.

"a class of people who are better than the rest of us, on whom we depend for our salvation and prosperity"

That sentence is a hoot. We're left to choose between the elitism of the rich or of economists and technocrats. Philosophy professors refer to "the folk". Somehow I doubt James Kwak and Mark Thoma would consider themselves folk. And DeLong?

It drives me nuts that our technocratic elite, with their fixation on ideas are so willfully ignorant of their own complexities, simply as people.

Logicians and moralists divide the world in twos, but the law of non-contradiction doesn't apply to books any more than people.  Nietzsche connects to fascism; a lot of people did and do. The problem he faced as we do is how to come to terms with the modern desires for "equality" and "liberty".  Hayek and Rand are secondary and minor figures facing the same questions.

The old aristocracy and the intellectuals around it were both anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist, and in their contempt for mediocrity in bourgeois culture they had a point, which is why so much of the cultural left over the past 200 years has been intellectually aristocratic.  Foucault learned from the Surrealists and Symbolists, Baudelaire, Stendhal and Tocqueville.  The flaneur is aristocratic observer. Technocracy qua technocracy, in service to itself, gets us this:

"Italian rules allowing candy makers to label their products as “pure chocolate” breach European Union law, the region’s highest court said.
Permitting chocolate made from pure cocoa butter to be called “cioccolato puro,” or “pure chocolate,” clashes with EU-wide measures which allow chocolate laced with vegetable fats to be marketed as chocolate, the tribunal in Luxembourg said."

That's not an important example but it's part for whole.
A focus on the mean puts downward pressure on the mean.

Robin mocks [links below]: “The ancients sought virtue, a life of excellence lived in and through the polis; the moderns (Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke) perpetrate ‘a lowering of aims.’ ”

If everyone is equal then its just a small shift to say we can refer only to averages: the average man becomes the benchmark for analysis by the new elite. And there is a new elite. What do you think it means every time Krugman says "it's a bit technical". Equality? No.  And of course experts can make stupid mistakes, and who's the first to get hurt? Any engineer can lecture you on efficiency, redundancy and stability, but somehow efficiency makes economics take on the character of a morality play. If I were less of a determinist I'd be shocked.

An exchange with Chris Bertram:

SE: "Arguments for the nobility of greed are a recent development."Bertram: "If, by “recent” you mean 1705, you may be right."

I wasn't raised to think of greed as noble. Yet somehow in the minds of technocratic liberals, facts became ideals, and actions became secondary, so we get elitists preaching equality, meaning the equivalence of everyone in the majority to each other, while taking their own superiority for granted. Technocracy is not democracy.

Democracy is founded on obligations before freedoms.  Libertarians are finally open in their dislike for democracy; maybe it's time defenders of democracy should develop a healthy skepticism regarding freedom defined as individualism. Freedom of speech serves the health of the polis.  And maybe compulsory education should extend over the course of a life.

If you pay attention to the culture that produced you, you'll understand your contradictions. If you think you're not contradictory, you're wrong. Too many liberals think saying "I'm a nice guy" makes it so. And of course, if I am what I say I am, others are what I say they are too.  According to Cory Robin, Nietzsche and Burke are bad guys.  Robin's arguments are based in simplistic assumptions about history, historical figures, and himself. His writing is shallow and obvious.  His primary politics is self-promotion.

US mythology includes puritans and drunks, Carry Nation and John Wayne; individualized self-righteousness is the only universal. Scandinavian mythology includes Janteloven. Social democracy wasn't the product of an idea; the ideas were the product of a culture.  If you want to debate social democracy, as I've it would make sense to read Henning Mankell before John Rawls, and read for contradictions and questions not ideas.
---

Responding to two comments:

1-"The wealthy are not better than the rest of us. The 1% have taken the opportunity of the past 40 years and managed all the gains in production…"

The US has 4.5% of the population of the planet. Think, just for a minute.

2-"I'm not particularly a Hayek fan, but bald statements like this are pitiful.
'Hayek cared about liberty for ultimately elitist reasons: liberty is not an end in itself, but a condition that enables the select few to make the world a better place'
How about a citation that doesn't require starting with an assumption of corrupt motives?"

Technocrats left and right refer to the need to foster "progress" and "innovation". What percentage of the population does that directly refer to? The majority are supposed to benefit from these policies only because as employees they've been given jobs. Pundits demand increased funding for education in science and technology for a new generation of leaders not for teaching all 5th graders, brilliant or not, the foundations of the Bill of Rights. A popular econ blogger (or at least one with a PhD in economics) says: 

"I'm not sure why people are surprised and even upset that some teenagers don't know who the hell bin Laden is." 

I won't even ask if they know anything about the Vietnam war, or any one before it.
But I'm sure his friends kids know something. They're the educated elite.

Another blogger, an academic whom I doubt any of you would read says:

"Yesterday, I asked 130 students in my American Government class: who has never ever heard of a country called Lebanon? Some 40 students raised their hands."

Leave it to someone born in another country to make the point a native born American would not. It's safe to say I won't be able to talk to most of you about economics for the same reason I won't be able to talk to you about foreign policy. One is no more or less based on science than the other.

The American Dream has done more damage to the world than born again Christianity, but American liberals defend one while being horrified by the other, as if they had no relation.

"They have the power. Look around and see what they have done with it."
Yes we do. And power corrupts.
---

Read the Krugman link above. It's not just wrong it's stupid. Krugman is fond of saying the economics is not a morality play, but the his defense of free trade is founded on cheap moralism.

Dean Baker complains that proposals to eliminate SS income for billionaires would be unfair. That's an argument from normative American morality, not logic.

The debate on blogs like this one is part of a debate among the elite in and out of power.
DeLong:

"R.I.P. JEANE J. KIRKPATRICK
Let me express my condolences to her two surviving sons John Evron and Stuart Alan Kirkpatrick, whom she loved beyond all measure.
She was a good friend to my grandfather Earl. She was an American and a world patriot: her counsel--even at its most boneheaded--was always devoted to advancing the security of the United States and the cause of liberty and prosperity around the world."

"Efrain Rios Montt." The three words you need to know this week.

Dani Rodrik's defense of his father in law, a Turkish General.

"The military has long set the ground rules of Turkish politics. Its hard line defending secularism has resulted in frequent clashes with political movements it views as "soft" on Islam, such as the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has governed the country since November 2002. Periodically, the military has intervened, bringing down governments and, on occasion, establishing periods of military rule, most recently from 1980 to 1983."

Kwak: "Corey Robin's fascinating article on nineteenth-century European culture".
That sentence is bizarre. It's written from the logic of an elite happily unaware of its place as an elite. "Oh, I don't know anything about power, I only deal in numbers and logic".

The logical foundation to any argument by American liberals is that other people are the problem. Just as American individualist liberalism is the product of American culture, "the Scandinavian anomaly" in economics is the product of Scandinavian culture. There is nothing new in Robin's article. What he adds is moralism.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal". DeLong doesn't believe that; Krugman doesn't believe that; Rodrik doesn't believe that; I don't believe that; and neither do you. Robin wants to pretend he does, so he needs to describe a Manichean world. He writes for a journal published by graduates of Phillips Exeter and Harvard and named for 18th century revolutionary terrorists. In 200 years another crew will name their journal "Hamas". It's safe to say I won't be able to talk to most of you about economics for the same reason I won't be able to talk to you about foreign policy, because that obvious point, a cheap observation about cheap politics, is lost on you.

"I like to walk about among the beautiful things that adorn the world; but private wealth I should decline, or any sort of personal possessions, because they would take away my liberty." George Santayana

Santayana was not a liberal. I am. But I learn from him as I learn from Burke. I learn from Nietzsche. I learn as much from Robin as I learn from Ayn Rand, or Hayek, or Likudniks and Salafists. I learn about fear and pathology.
---

Libertarianism isn't an idea it's an ideology, extended from ideas most of you share; that why you go over it as much as you do. Hayek is debated in American academia the way Islamic scholars in other countries argue over Sayyid Qutb. The myopia is the same.
In the end, all simply product of the times.

notes/various/posted (by me) elsewhere

Responding to DeLong  [once again he allows the comment, leaves it up for a week or more then removes it]

"Count me again as a vote after the fact for the Morgenthau plan, with the stipulation that the Rhineland would be ceded to the Jews. That alone might have almost made me a Zionist. The Conquest of Palestine certainly didn't." 

Responding to Corey Robin (with repeats)

“The ancients sought virtue, a life of excellence lived in and through the polis; the moderns (Machiavelli, Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke) perpetrate ‘a lowering of aims.’ ”

True enough.

_Arguments for the nobility of greed are a recent development._

If, by “recent” you mean 1705, you may be right.

When Bertram realized he was responding to me [the first line], the original comment was removed. He forgot to remove his own. [he also removed my response, where I said yes, that's what I'd meant]

Liberals and modern conservatives are individualists; conservatives of the older tradition are not. They may recognize self-interest as a given but they do not defend it as a good.

It continues to amaze me that American liberal college professors (as “intellectuals”) read all the Continental crap while ignoring the core arguments: the mockery of liberal self-aggrendizement and the liberal celebration of self-interest. Conservatism gave us grandeur and barbarism, pessimism and vows of poverty. Liberalism gives us optimism and the earnest morality of greed. You do understand that Foucault is mocking democracy?

Bertram

“First, I’m sympathetic, I really am, to the idea that people should work and consume less and that we should attend more to real life quality. But this doesn’t seem very realistic in my own life for two reasons: first, even if my employer were sympathetic (unlikely) I feel very hard pressed now to produce the level of research output necessary for me to stay competitive with other academics (not just in the UK, but elsewhere). I suspect this generalizes to many people in professional jobs: we couldn’t achieve the kinds of things we want to in our careers on those kinds of hours.

Pathetic.
“I’d live the life of the mind, but then I couldn’t afford cable.”

another comment (and again with repeats)

That’s no necessary defense of Levin. I’m reading the piece now. As far as Burke is concerned I wonder what he’d say of Levin’s opinion as to the colonization of Palestine. And the AEI’s definition of capitalism is fundamentally medieval. Still…

Daniel Callahan: “the research imperative”

Though unfamiliar to most scientists and the general public, the term expresses a cultural problem that caught my eye. It occurs in an article written by the late Protestant moral theologian Paul Ramsey in 1976 as part of a debate with a Jesuit theologian, Richard McCormick. McCormick argued that it ought to be morally acceptable to use children for nontherapeutic research, that is, for research with no direct benefit to the children themselves and in the absence of any informed consent. Referring to claims about the “necessity” of such research, Ramsey accused McCormick of falling prey to the “research imperative”, the view that the importance of research could overcome moral values.

That was the last time I heard of the phrase for many years, but it informs important arguments about research that have surfaces with increasing force of late. It captures, for instance, the essence of what Joshua Lederberg, a Nobel laureate for his work on genetics and president emeritus of Rockefeller University once remarked to me: “The blood of those who will die if biomedical research is not pursued will be upon the hands of those who don’t do it.”

War communism in the war on disease.

Modern conservatives are economic liberals; modern liberals defend social liberalism as measured by their own best intentions. Between Burke and Rawls I’d choose Burke. “Liberalism” and “Conservatism” are words floating in a sea of language, their meanings change over time and from place to place. Without a knowledge of history there’s no understanding of either. Decartes wrote “History is like foreign travel. It broadens the mind, but it does not deepen it.” Nietzsche’s professional title was not philosopher but philologist.

The only valid attack on liberalism from the standpoint of the old conservatism comes from the left. Better a Luddite than a Benthamite in the googleplex.

A contemporary Burkean quotes Oliver Wendell Holmes:

His account of the Communists shows in the most extreme form what I came to loathe in the abolitionists–the conviction that anyone who did not agree with them was a knave or a fool. You see the same in some Catholics and some of the ‘Drys’ apropos of the 18th amendment. I detest a man who knows that he knows.

That’s not the answer to John Brown, or Hamas, both of whom in retrospect seem necessary, though the latter has moderated as Israel has not. Zionists also know what they know, and they knew it first. Life’s a bitch.

one more

"In an essay published in early 1879 called ‘The True Reason of Man’s Happiness’, al-Afghani denounced British claims to have civilized India by introducing such benefits of modernist as railways, canals and schools. In his defense of India, al-Afghani was ecumenical, praising Hindus as well as Muslims. Echoing Edmund Burke, who had asserted that Indians were people ‘for ages civilized and cultivated -cultivated by all the arts of polished life, whilst we were yet in the woods’, al-Afghani dismissively asked why the English ‘who suffered for long ages and wandered in wild and barbaric valleys’ should presume to speak of the ‘deficiency’ of the glorious ‘sons of Brahma and Mahadev, the founders of human sharias and establishers of civilized laws.’

Al-Afghani went on to argue that the British improved transport and communication in order to drain India’s wealth to England and facilitate trade for British merchants. Western style schools, he argued, were meant merely to turn Indians into English-speaking cogs of the British Administration.”

Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire
ref. Nikki Keddie, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghani: A Political Biography.

To understand Brooks, this... 

is all you need to know.

On Obama's debate, a repeat from 4 years ago, and from another: Obama is a black man who's lived most of his life in a white man's world. He's a Prep School Negro. He's been a politician his entire life.

On whether Obama was at least partially "affirmative action hire":  After the election a story got linked around (an email to TPM[?]) about a man who went to vote before making up his mind, finally choosing Obama because he didn't want to be "on the wrong side of history". This was noted with approval.

On the hyped video. No one comments that both Clinton (Arkansas) and G.W. Bush (Texas) tailored their accents to fit their audience.

Obama, Rahm Emanuel and Jews as the highest of high yella. I've imagined Rahm's oration to his boss about how to play the game and win. "Keep your head down, motherfucker!"
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Agnotology, again, (and context).

A commenter at the second link: "STOP IT. This is becoming like a thread of vaccine deniers arguing about the doctors who are pooh-poohing them."

"Quiggin",  "The irrationalism of others", etc.

"...represents the worst of Crooked Timber, maybe their greatest exemplar of Taylorism and Fordism: a fundamentalist technocrat more left wing and less polished than DeLong."

Atrios:
Well Okay Then

The phrases they reach for.

Barbour offered a brief assessment of the Republican National Convention. “While I would love for [Chris] Christie to put a hot poker to Obama’s butt,” said Barbour of the RNC keynote speaker, “I thought he did what he was supposed to do.”

The difference between Duncan Black and Karl Rove is that Black was the smart fat kid who made fun of the kool kids who led the majority, but he stayed on the sidelines feeling superior, while Rove walked out into the playground knowing what he wanted to do. And Carville wasn't fat he was just ugly.

The advantage Republicans have over democrats is that they proclaim loudly and simultaneous the two poles of the American paradox: home and hearth and adventuring; stability and instability; family values and creative destruction. They lie about the first but that doesn't matter.
repeats of repeats of repeats of repeats:

"Rilly, I had no idea"

"What has happened politically, economically, culturally and socially since the sea change of the late ’60s isn’t contradictory or incongruous. It’s all of a piece. For hippies and bohemians as for businesspeople and investors, extreme individualism has been triumphant. Selfishness won."

"Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution."

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Interesting to read one against the other. Anderson refers almost entirely to the hippies, the middle class rebels. Guillebaud obviously has no option but to talk about both students and workers. Anderson puts "black president" and "multiculturalism" as two of the changes, but says nothing about class divisions within what he would call liberalism and the "left".

Guillebaud

It was the strike, not the student revolt, that truly paralyzed the country for three long weeks. The paradox is that these two movements never encountered each other. The students marching toward the factories to “meet the workers” found the doors closed. The unions didn’t want them: the workers found the students disorganized and irresponsible.

And the civil rights movement was the organized rebellion of lower middle class blacks.

Anderson

But what the left and right respectively love and hate are mostly flip sides of the same libertarian coin minted around 1967.

...In that letter from 1814, Jefferson wrote that our tendencies toward selfishness where liberty and our pursuit of happiness lead us require “correctives which are supplied by education” and by “the moralist, the preacher, and legislator.”

On this Independence Day, I’m doing my small preacherly bit.

And I'm going to reread D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin.

As democrats or "liberals" have gotten better at admitting their own weakness and moral failures, as they begin to feel more comfortable in their own skins, and with their own money, they've become better politicians.
Continuing from here, commenting on a post bemoaning "Eisenhower Democrats" and repeating the three quotes I use too often.

”After the latest depressing news from the Middle East I think we have to start asking just how inhumane it would be for Israel to just expel the Palestinians from the occupied terroritories.[sic] The result would probably be out-and-out war with the neighboring Arab states, but Israel could win that.
All forced population transfers are humanitarian disasters, of course, but so is the current situation. It’s not like there’s not any room in the whole Arab world for all these Palestinian Arabs to go live in, it’s just that the other Arab leaders don’t want to cooperate.”

”David Duke, president of Americans in Support of Palestinian Freedom…”

”You have to either live in the countryside or live in the city and be really rich to say that rubber tomatoes suck. For those humans who live in the city and are not really rich, rubber tomatoes provide a welcome and tasty and affordable simulacrum of the tomato-eating experience.”

The first quote above is Matthew Yglesias. The second is Duncan Black. The third is Brad DeLong.  It interests me that I doubt Rachel Maddow, or Jon Stewart would say anything in public quite as offensive as those three quotes.

All the quotes are available. Use google.