A modest suggestion to avoid Armageddon
And other things I found on the net this week
A modest suggestion
(Don’t be the first to blow us all up. Is it really that hard?)
I completely agree with John Quiggin and have supported this proposal forever as the most basic commonsense. John says that America’s military “never saw a weapons system it didn’t find essential”. I thought they just made a routine of not agreeing to any constraints on anything they might feel like doing in future. Like committing war crimes. Like assassinations in other countries.
I’m no poetry head. But I completely loved this podcast and listened to three episodes the first night I happened upon it. It’s presented a guy with a glorious Irish accent. Lilting, a little comical actually, but soft and lovely. So thoughtful and gentle, and yet, it seems without preciousness.
He reads the poem, then talks about it and then reads it again. As the shownotes say:
An immersive reading of a single poem, guided by Pádraig Ó Tuama. Unhurried, contemplative and energizing.
I completely loved it when I first heard it and it’s become part of my routine since. Two early faves were “What you missed the day you were absent from fourth grade” and “The drop off”.
Dems to go down in the mid-terms?
Tyler Cowan on the new right’s tendencies to Brazilianisation
Recommended
Brad DeLong on Francis Fukuyama
Brad DeLong puts out a substack a little like mine, though more frequent — with lots of summaries of pieces he’s found. He’s also got a compelling turn of phrase. I didn’t need to go to Fukuyama’s original post, because Brad had given me the guts of it — and I had more fun reading it in that way.
Yes, History Goes Barrelling Along—or Perhaps Continues Its Circle…
This is not the kind of essay you feel you have to write if you are in fact at the End of History. This is the kind of essay you write if you had thought you were at the End of History, but then history ignored you, blew past the sign, and kept on going—perhaps at increasing speed:
Frank Fukuyama: More Proof That This Really Is the End of History: ‘Over the past year, it has become evident that there are key weaknesses at the core of seemingly strong authoritarian states…. The concentration of power… all but guarantees low-quality decision making…. The absence of public discussion and debate… and of any mechanism of accountability, means that the leader’s support is shallow…. The long-term progress of modern institutions is neither linear nor automatic. Over the years, we have seen huge setbacks to the progress of liberal and democratic institutions, with the rise of fascism and communism in the 1930s, or the military coups and oil crises of the 1960s and ’70s. And yet, liberal democracy has endured and come back repeatedly, because the alternatives are so bad…. Celebrations of the rise of strong states and the decline of liberal democracy are thus very premature. Liberal democracy, precisely because it distributes power and relies on consent of the governed, is in much better shape globally than many people think….
Liberal democracy will not make a comeback unless people are willing to struggle on its behalf. The problem is that many who grow up living in peaceful, prosperous liberal democracies begin to take their form of government for granted…. The Russian invasion of Ukraine… may serve to remind the current generation of what is at stake…. Ukrainians… understand the true value of freedom, and are fighting a larger battle on our behalf, a battle that all of us need to join….
Now that really IS cute!
The slap: Stanley Kubrik’s road to the movies
Kubrick soon became known for his innate ability to tell stories through his pictures, indicative of his future career as a filmmaker. The first of these “story-telling” series, titled “A Short-Short in a Movie Balcony,” shows of a fracas between a movie-going couple that ends with the female counterpart landing a ferocious slap upon the face of the amorously advancing male. This is an interesting choice of narrative, as it shows that Kubrick’s fascination with violence (as seen in such films as his A Clockwork Orange and The Shining) was artistically with him from a young age.
Delicious
I tweeted this:
And Sam Roggeveen sent me back this!
Why the Elizabeth Warren Pipeline Goes Left and Far Right
Interesting post:
The anti-China alarmism is not even the real story here. The tweet is signal-boosting Bridge Colby, a guy who is not just a political appointee from Trump’s Pentagon who defended Senator Josh Hawley’s solidarity fist-pump on the day of the Capitol Insurrection. He’s also a guy who literally makes a living off of promoting his singular obsession—preparing for and winning a war with China.
The convergence here between the far right and an anti-monopolist with some progressive credentials is illuminating. Hawley and Colby represent a strand of conservative foreign policy I’ve been calling the “nationalist militarists.” They’re not interested in alliances or nation-building or democracy promotion. They’re critical of liberal internationalism and globalization, which have been mutually constitutive the past 40 years.
But crucially, the nationalist militarists are interested in a large national security surveillance state, and are happy to bust some heads in the street if those heads are BLM protestors. They are interested in military primacy, just without the obligations of imperial maintenance. And they are interested in racially tinged clash-of-civilization politics, which puts both Iran and China in their crosshairs while Russia sort of gets a pass.
Unproductive schooling, counterproductive reform
My father attended the University of Chicago in the early 1950s. (I was recently doing some research for an essay “Another neoliberal, another neoliberalism” on Michael Polanyi and discovered that Dad would have been there just as the University of Chicago was being hijacked by intellectual activists from Hayek’s Mont Pèlerin Society — Milton Friedman, his brother in law Aaron Director with some help from George Stigler.)
There he sat in lectures from five people who went on to become Nobel Laureates, among them Theodore Schultz. Dad used to tell a story against himself which is that as a young postgrad he said to Schultz that the idea of human capital was attractive, but he didn’t think it would go anywhere. Schultz won the Nobel for it in 1979. All of which is to introduce this article from the indefatigable Dean Ashenden who thinks Dad might have had a point. He is mightily unimpressed with human capital theory, or more specifically with its clumsiness as a concept when thinking about how education works, what’s wrong with it and how to improve it.
In the almost seventy years since then, human capital theory has been rejected outright by some and revised and refined by many others, none of which seems to have reached the commission. Education, it declares, is the source of no less than a fifth of labour productivity growth in recent years “and will become increasingly important in maintaining future growth.” Moreover, education “benefits both individuals and society” — by boosting earnings, increasing fulfilment, improving health outcomes, reducing crime, and lifting social and economic mobility.
As I wrote introducing the last article I referenced by Dean, I’m no education scholar. I’ve also not read the Commission’s report. So I may be being unfair. But his writing conforms with my priors. Indeed, his review of the Commission on education here reminded me of my own reaction to the Commission on evaluation. Where I was struck with how little the Commission knew about the field of evaluation, even as it issued hundreds of pages of report on it, Aschendon shows how little the Commission seems to know about specific educational initiatives which have been and sometimes gone, despite their close resemblance to initiatives the Commission suggests.
Hard to disagree
I received this screenshot from a friend with the heading “Hard to disagree”
Update from the moral panic
Abigail Disney, the grand-niece of Walt, was the executive producer of a documentary, The Unredacted, she described as “brilliant”. This reviewer agrees, reporting on how it challenges one’s assumptions and humanises those one might imagine are unhumanisable. Still, then the trouble started. And this is what Disney said after the shit hit the fan:
Adding to the weight of two years of pandemic trauma, a nation that seems to be melting down around us, and bone-deep exhaustion and anger over centuries of racist patterns, systems, assumptions, and practices was never my intention but that has certainly been the outcome … I failed, failed, and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are. That was a failure of empathy and respect on my part—and therefore the gravest of failures.
