A fun piece by Helen Lewis who is rather more fanged up about politians keeping their cards close to their chest and then moving decisively without warning than I am. Not that I’d be any good at that kind of caper, but I thought that a fair bit of that was pretty much a prerequisite of getting stuff done in politics.
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Starmer fritzes the brains of political commentators by doing things for a specific political motive but declining to supply the motive by narrating his actions (or letting his advisers supply the motive by briefing it out). …
Starmer, a man with a Jewish wife and kids, sat in Jeremy Corbyn’s Cabinet while Corbyn defended the mad mural, weathered the “English irony” storm, and was involved in a dozen other anti-semitism controversies. He didn’t resign in protest over any of those incidents. He stayed put—which allowed him to present himself as enough of a loyalist to win the race to succeed Corbyn.
As soon as Starmer had secured the leadership, though, the massacre began. His acceptance speech involved a swift pivot from thanking his “friend” Jeremy to promising to “tear out this poison by its roots.” Within two months, Starmer had sacked Corbyn’s favoured successor, Rebecca Long-Bailey, from the shadow cabinet. She hadn’t said anything anti-semitic herself, but had retweeted an interview with Maxine Peake lamenting the end of Corbynism and adding that that US police who killed George Floyd had learned their chokehold techniques from the Israeli secret service. That is a classic anti-semitic conspiracy theory—something bad happened, and so the Jews were probably involved—and Peake eventually retracted the claim, while Long-Bailey said she didn’t endorse “all aspects” of the article. It didn’t matter. She was chucked out. Starmer had clearly made the calculation that he could afford to sack Long-Bailey without tearing apart the party. He was correct.
I remember thinking at the time—June 2020—that this was kind of a boss move for a new party leader, but that was nothing. In October, Starmer suspended Jeremy Corbyn from the party on a technicality1. Again, ruthless. This was the man who gave him a Cabinet job after mere months in parliament. This was the man he had defended a hundred times before. (In 2016, Starmer did resign in the Great Walkout—but only after basically everyone else already had, and with a very low-key resignation letter. And then he went back into the shadow Cabinet in a much bigger role, as Brexit spokesman, only four months later.)
I still don’t know how I feel about this—and I’m absolutely fascinated to know what Starmer’s local rabbi thinks. Would it have been nobler to stay on the backbenches? Or to walk out of the party entirely, as Luciana Berger, Chuka Umunna and the other TIG group MPs did—straight into the political wilderness (and then public affairs jobs)? I half-deplore it and half-adore it. Ultimately, it suggests a man who has a vision, and is clear about what he will tolerate in pursuit of that vision. That’s pragmatism, something the Labour party sorely needs if it’s going to win elections. That’s ruthlessness.
Interesting explainer on the spectrum of responses to the setbacks suffered by the right in the US midterms. Running the gamut from anti-woke folks to the fruitcake wing.
The most interesting debates fall into three distinct, but interconnected, buckets.
The first is the question of how best to prosecute the culture war going forward. Some on the New Right sound surprisingly open to some tactical moderation in light of the midterm results — most notably by bracketing abortion or even softening the GOP’s position on the issue. It’s a debate that directly parallels the “popularism” conversation happening on the Democratic side, and one that speaks to deep sociological divides in the post-Trump coalition.
The second centers on 2024: whether Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis represents the movement’s future. Interestingly, the battle lines do not necessarily line up in the way that one might expect (DeSantis shoring up the relative moderates and Trump the radicals). The third centers on democracy. A minority of New Right thinkers responded to defeat by suggesting the electorate is too far gone for conservatives to ever triumph — and even questioning the value of democracy itself. “Democracy did not end slavery, and democracy will not end abortion,” declared Chad Pecknold, a self-described “postliberal” theologian at Catholic University.
My first destination was not Moscow but Kharkov, then capital of the Soviet Ukraine. I had friends living in that town, who had invited me to stay with them until I found my feet in the new world.... My idea of Russia had been formed entirely by Soviet propaganda. It was the image of a super-America, engaged in the most gigantic enterprise in history, buzzing with activity, efficiency, enthusiasm.... Only slowly does the newcomer learn to think in contradictions; to distinguish, underneath a chaotic surface, the shape of things to come; to realise that in Sovietland the present is a fiction, a quivering membrane stretched between the past and the future.
… Koestler was able to visit a number of friends in Kharkov and various other cities, and through them he gained a fairly direct perception of the conditions of repression under which Soviet citizens lived in the 1930s: bureaucracy, censorship, fear, arrest, and imprisonment.
When conditions become insupportable, men react according to their temperament in roughly three ways: -- by rebellion, apathy or self-deception. The Soviet citizen knows that rebellion against the largest and most perfect police machinery in history amounts to suicide. So the majority lives in a state of outward apathy and inner cynicism; while the minority lives by self-deception. (Part Two, section IV)
And he makes an important point about the role of the GPU, the omnipresent security police:
It is not the Terror, but the existence of this ubiquitous organisation without which nothing can be done, and which alone is capable of getting things done, that defines the structure of the totalitarian police state.
A Communist writer — a woman whom I greatly admired — once made an unguarded remark that has stuck in my memory. She was telling us, a small circle of Party members, about a clandestine meeting of her with a comrade in a forest in Austria. It had been spring, and despite the circumstances she greatly enjoyed her walk in the woods. When she met the other person, a Party official, he had launched at once into an ‘analysis of the difficulties confronting the movement and the means of overcoming them’. From that moment it had seemed to her that the birds had become silent, and the air had lost its fragrance. She was and is a devoted Communist, and this experience greatly disturbed her. ‘Why,’ she asked pathetically, ‘why is it that the leaves die wherever we go?’
My first destination was not Moscow but Kharkov, then capital of the Soviet Ukraine. I had friends living in that town, who had invited me to stay with them until I found my feet in the new world.... My idea of Russia had been formed entirely by Soviet propaganda. It was the image of a super-America, engaged in the most gigantic enterprise in history, buzzing with activity, efficiency, enthusiasm.... Only slowly does the newcomer learn to think in contradictions; to distinguish, underneath a chaotic surface, the shape of things to come; to realise that in Sovietland the present is a fiction, a quivering membrane stretched between the past and the future.
First, focus on the basics: if you're looking at a large financial company where there is no HR team, no accountant and no Board, try not to write multi hundred million dollar cheques. If the founder is regularly taking out absolute mountains of cash from the company to buy properties, donate to charity or blow it on burning a bit of capital for seemingly silly deals, that feels like bad governance.
See the fact is that VCs are … in the “dream business”. … The reason this is hard is because the job is to invest in narratives, because the thing they’re investing in hasn’t been built yet, and narratives are always lies. They can’t predict the future by doing due diligence just a little bit harder.
Second, don’t fall in love more than necessary: Try to internalise the following: “human ability is normally distributed but the outcomes are power law distributed”. … So if you’re investing in a “10x founder” it doesn’t mean that they themselves are 10x the capability of everyone else, but what it means is that their advantage, combined with everyone else’s advantage, can get you to a 10000x outcome. … The adulation we pour on top of some folks creates its own gravitational field, and makes others susceptible to falling in love. The most difficult task is to not let someone else control your decision making for you, which is what you give up. If your job is to get seduced by the right narrative by the right-seeming person, guess what you’ll get seduced by anyone who can tell a compelling narrative.
Do NOT make decisions thinking surely someone else has done their part. As the names get bigger, a new investor thinks “hey, surely Sequoia and Temasek and all these big guys would have done their diligence, this makes me comfortable”, which just isn’t true.
Three, zeitgeist investing can go explosively wrong. One of the weird benefits of the large decade of crazy bull market is the emergence of zeitgeist farming, which I described as "do no work, throw money blindly, and get rich". In the past several years the venture capital investing model, investing smaller sums of primary capital to make the future come true, climbed much higher up the capital stack with them competing with pension funds and hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.
The problem here is culture contagion. Because Sequoia is in the business of losing money on bets going wrong, we forgot that Temasek perhaps shouldn't be doing the same thing just because the cheque size went up.
This is not what a sovereign wealth fund’s investments are supposed to look like.
The job is to take risks, but not all risks are built the same. The risk you shouldn’t take is to ignore the pile of rubble strewn about you while dreaming about building Arcadia.
I don’t usually go for articles as tendentious as this, but I did rather enjoy the demo job with which jibed with my own view having tried to read some Dugin.
Millerman thinks that Dugin’s Western critics lack imagination; they focus on little things like war crimes and lose sight of the really important issues, such as Dugin’s theoretical dalliances with postmodern French theory. …
Millerman denies that Dugin is a fascist. He points out that Dugin condemns biological racism and even rejects nationalism because a “people and the nation are different.” Dugin prefers to think in terms of civilizations, not states. But this is entirely consistent with fascism. As Roger Griffin rightly notes in his book Fascism, not only did twentieth-century fascists often insist that a mythologized “ultranation” exceeded the boundaries of the nation-state; but they would also appeal to this myth in order to legitimate their wars of expansion and violence. Indeed the constraints of the nation-state were precisely what fascists rebelled against in their genocidal crusade for a new European order and lebensraum. …
Dugin envisions a renewed and expanded Russia serving as the cornerstone of a proud Eurasian civilization. Strategically allied with a colorful cabal of authoritarians, white nationalists, fundamentalists, and other charming characters, this civilization will go to war with the decadent West, defying its universalist pretensions. Indeed, it already is at war with the West as far as Dugin is concerned, since the Ukrainian conflict is just one front in this greater struggle.
Dugin likes to talk about destiny. The destiny of twentieth-century fascism was to cause immense suffering before being consigned to the trash heap of history. The question now is how much suffering twenty-first-century fascism will cause before it meets the same end.
