J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 325

700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative

Michael Greshko: 700,000-Year-Old Stone Tools Point to Mysterious Human Relative: "Someone butchered a rhinoceros in the Philippines hundreds of thousands of years before modern humans arrived���but who?...

...The eye-popping artifacts, unveiled on Wednesday in Nature, were abandoned on a river floodplain on the island of Luzon beside the butchered carcass of a rhinoceros. The ancient toolmakers were clearly angling for a meal. Two of the rhino's limb bones are smashed in, as if someone was trying to harvest and eat the marrow inside. Cut marks left behind by stone blades crisscross the rhino's ribs and ankle, a clear sign that someone used tools to strip the carcass of meat.... The carved bones are most likely between 631,000 and 777,000 years old....

���It's really, really exciting���it's now becoming increasingly clear that ancient forms of hominins were able to make significant deep-sea crossings,��� says Adam Brumm.... The list of possible toolmakers includes the Denisovans, a ghost lineage of hominins known from DNA and a handful of Siberian fossils. The leading candidate, though, is the early hominin Homo erectus, since it definitely made its way into southeast Asia. The Indonesian island of Java has H. erectus fossils that are more than 700,000 years old. Ingicco's team suggests that the butchers may have been Luzon's version of H. floresiensis, which may have descended from a population of H. erectus that ended up on Flores. Over millennia, the H. erectus there may have evolved to live efficiently on a predator-free island, shrinking in a process called island dwarfism...

#shouldread

Zeronowhere: On the context of Marx's 'I am not a Marxist...

Zeronowhere: On the context of Marx's 'I am not a Marxist' quote: "As far as I know, the MIA cites it as opposing Guesde on the matter of the economic section of the program for the French Workers' Party...

...(the section was written by Guesde, and mainly, though not entirely, approved of by Marx). However, as far as I know, the quote is only found quoted by Engels, and I can only find it in two documents:

Now what is known as ���Marxism��� in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product���so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ���Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.��� -Letter to Bernstein, 1882.

And if this man has not yet discovered that while the material mode of existence is the primum agens this does not preclude the ideological spheres from reacting upon it in their turn, though with a secondary effect, he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about. However, as I said, all this is secondhand and little Moritz is a dangerous friend. The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French 'Marxists' of the late [18]70s: 'All I know is that I am not a Marxist.'-Letter to Schmidt, 1890...

#shouldread

Doyle McManus: There is no 'civil war' between progressiv...

Doyle McManus: There is no 'civil war' between progressive and centrist Democrats: "Democrats may be locked in a struggle for the soul of their party, but that���s been true in almost every election cycle since 1828...

...What���s striking this time is how strangely polite they���re being to each other, beginning with Ocasio-Cortez. ���I am absolutely proud to be a Democrat,��� she said after her primary win. ���The Democratic Party is a big tent, and there are so many ways to be a Democrat.��� Asked by a reporter whether she plans to support Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the Democrats��� leader in the House next year, Ocasio-Cortez diplomatically ducked the question.���I���m not going to get bogged down in Democratic infighting,��� she explained in an interview with Jacobin, a socialist magazine. ���Not because I���m trying to do the establishment a favor, but because we have a movement to build���...

#shouldread

Sunday Morning Twitter: Functional Finance/A Better World Is Possible Tweeting...

A better world���a better twitter���is indeed possible...

Suresh Naidu: I will stake my fancy economics job on this: Nothing in @Ocasio2018's policy program is inconsistent with a 2018 understanding of economics.

Wojtek Kopczuk: I missed it before, by my favorite colleague to disagree with. Congratulations on tenure @snaidunl!

Suresh Naidu: Sigh you drew me out. Tell me which policy is infeasible and not addressing some market failure?

Wojtek Kopczuk: They are inconsistent with the government budget constraint. And her MMT support is definitely inconsistent with mainstream economics.

Suresh Naidu: MMT is totally consistent with lots of mainstream macro when the economy is demand constrained (and fiscal theory of the price level when its not). it is unfortunate its adherents dont see that. And budget constraints are endogenous.

Ivan Werning: What do you have in mind?

Suresh Naidu: Oh crap a real macroeconomist. I think stripped of mysticism, MMT is really boils down to "fiscal mutipliers greater than 1", which could be true in demand constrained economy.

Ivan Werning: Let's not call that MMT.

Arindrajit Dube: Core propositions of MMT seem hard to differentiate from old school (���paleo��� Keynesianism) in most likely states is the world ... maybe a difference is whether literally any level of public debt can be sustained at a non-accelerating inflation. Paleo Keynesians may say no.

Brad DeLong: MMT is Abba Lerner's Functional Finance with bells & whistles & some confusions. Manipulate G to stabilize Y & ��, manipulate M to get an i to make debt finance sustainable, and rely on �� to tell you if your policies are sustainable... If ����� need G���

Suresh Naidu: Clearest exposition of MMT in a tweet. Fight me deficit owls!

Ivan Werning: Interesting. I thought idea was broadly to use a feedback rule and push back against fixed doctrines.

Brad DeLong: Yes, but in some ways MMT or FF is the fiscal theory of the price level: if your government debt strategy moves in a long-term unsustainable direction, the FTotPL raises prices now. Hence successful stabilization of Y & �� now guarantees no LR debt sustainability problem. Relies a little too heavily on the efficient markets hypothesis in the form of the FTotPL for my taste...

Ivan Werning: Seems wishful. Basically, I can't imagine how it plays out in any of the debt crises scenarios (which is where we should test it!) I know of, but maybe that is very "local" in my thinking.

Brad DeLong: Continuous-time fiscal theory of the price level kinda the wrong model for debt crises. Lots of Gennaioli-Shleifer "Oh f---! Why was I thinking that yesterday? We need to dump our entire portfolio now" phenomena which CT RE & FTotPL do not handle well...

Ivan Werning: Is there any relatively modern rendition of these Lerner ideas you recommend? Dynamics, stable steady states, and all?

Brad DeLong Haven't seen one. In one sense, it is too easy: in the fiscal theory of the price level, every G, T, M, & thus D path that stabilizes �� satisfies LR government budget constraint. Add an exp Phillips Curve & Y, u are fine too. 3 instruments, 1 target, 2 policy degrees of freedom

Ivan Werning: People who think these things, have they ever visited latin america, say?

Brad DeLong: big distinction in fiscal running room between reserve currencies with exorbitant privilege, and all others. If MMT or MMT-light applies, applies only to 1st...

Wojtek Kopczuk: The reserve currency status is not given for all eternity

Brad DeLong: touch��... if we reelect Trump here, we may find we have some identifying variance on this question...

Arindrajit Dube It���s probably not accidental that US w/ reserve currency exhorbitant privilege is where MMT arose: it���s the easiest to imagine it in this setting. One has to move substantially away from current equilibrium before it seems totally absurd.

Brad DeLong: But MMT does perform the valuable function of reminding people that, for the US (and Germany, and Britain, and Japan), r_{short-safe} < g, in which case government debt as safe asset provision is not a drag on but rather a financing mechanism for substantive government programs.

Brad DeLong: Sunday morning twitter threads like this remind me that we could live in the Republic of Plato rather than the Sewer of Romulus as far as social science and public policy are concerned, and that the internet can be an intellectual force multiplier rather than a hive of scum and villainy... A better world is possible! Toilers of all lands, unite! The full product of labor to the workers by hand and brain, with appropriate deductions for the social welfare function Lagrange multiplier for the temporary scarcity of produced means of production!!

(Early) Monday Smackdown: Bard College Has a Quality Control Problem Here: Roger Berkowitz Needs to Learn to Quote Fairly and Accurately

I think that almost every discussion about "cultural appropriation" should be, instead, a discussion about: "don't be a d-ck". Clarifies matters immeasurably.

The brilliant national treasure Roxane Gay is, in my opinion, 100% correct when she writes: "stay in your lane.... The great thing about writing is that you can develop new lanes through research, immersion and effort..." That is not "being a d-ck". But When I read these exchanges (and Jennifer Schuessler's piece), I think Jennifer, Nina, and Burleigh are all being d-cks���especially Roger Berkowitz, who I think is being a major a--hole here, and doing so while claiming to be the heir and channeler of Hannah Arendt:

Jennifer Schuessler: "I wrote about the controversy over @thenation ���s publication of a poem by a white poet using black vernacular, with a little bit on the long debate over what counts as literary 'blackface' (looking at you, Vachel Lindsay & John Berryman)..."

Nina Burleigh: "Probably shouldn't wade into this but, by @rgay 'stay in your lane' logic, every entitled male screenwriter-white or black-should be banned from writing female characters of any race. I'm actually all for that, but piling on to crush the career of a young poet? geez..."

Roxane Gay: "Well, Nina, this is the problem with journalists taking tweets out of context and using them in their articles, instead of asking people for a more fully fleshed out statement. My tweets are my opinions...

...They are not bans and, frankly, it is absurd to frame a tweet as a ban.

The reality is that when most white writers use [African-American Vernacular English] they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy. And using AAVE badly is lazy, so I am entirely comfortable suggesting that writers stay in their lane when it comes to dialect.

The great thing about writing is that you can develop new lanes through research, immersion and effort. There was none of that.... And to criticize that poem is not a pile on. He is a young, healthy white man with a book coming out from a great press. Guess what? He will absolutely be fine.

Slippery slope arguments are a rhetorical waste of time but if you want to go there, fine. Most male screenwriters write women terribly. And the whole of current cinematic offerings bear this out. The Bechdel rule is still a thing because men write women badly. Until men can write women with nuance and depth, they should stay in their lane.

And to lay the crushing of a poet's career at my feet? When I have never tweeted about his little poem? You will note that my tweets about AAVE were not made in regard to his poem. How dare you?

Roger Berkowitz: "While Gay suggests that even she cannot use AAVE, it is solely white people who use AAVE who are racist...

The reality is that when most white writers use AAVE they do so badly. They do so without understanding that it is a language with rules. Instead, they use AAVE to denote that there is a black character in their story because they understand blackness as a monolith. Framing blackness as monolithic is racist. It is lazy. And using AAVE badly is lazy so I am entirely comfortable suggesting that writers stay in their lane when it comes to dialect....

There is a difference between criticizing a poem and policing who is allowed to imagine a fictional reality that offers insight.... The demand that certain opinions expressed by certain races and sexes are to be banned and condemned as racist and the demand for apologies and mea culpas is the kind of imposed social conformism that Hannah Arendt worries about.... It may be that what we need today is fewer people who know their lanes and more of us willing to imagine ourselves traveling new roads...

Berkowitz's cutting his quote from Roxane Gay off after "stay in their lane when it comes to dialect..." when her very next sentence is: "The great thing about writing is that you can develop new lanes through research, immersion and effort..."���that is much more than simply being a d-ck. That is being a major, major, a--hole.

And as Roxane does note, it is distinctly odd that she is being accused of being too confident about her opinions, and is being held up as some authority over what is and is not legitimate to publish. It is (still) a free country. People can do what they want. People need to understand how their work is going to be read, to be able to handle those readings and the responses they generate, and to think about whether all of that together is moving the ball downfield.

Again: Just my opinion. You can be as much of a d-ck as you want. (Still) a free country. But do consider whether your actions and the responses they trigger are moving the ball downfield. And remember : "Don't whine. That is all."

#shouldread

Weekend Reading: Geopolitics, World Trade and Globalization: Learning from the Wise Kevin O'Rourke and Ron Findlay

Hoisted from the Archives: Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press): "A feature of the book that may strike some economists as odd or surprising, but will seem entirely commonplace to historians, is its sustained emphasis on conflict, violence, and geopolitics...

...When economics students are first exposed to the study of international trade, they are asked to contemplate two countries, A and B, who have each been endowed with a certain amount of the various factors of production���land, labor, capital, and so on���as well as with a given technology which translates those endowments into consumption goods, together with a set of preferences over these goods. The two countries then trade with each other, or not as the case may be, and the consequences of trade are derived for consumers and producers alike.... The summit of unpleasantness attainable in such models is the use of tariffs, quotas, and other trade policy instruments that will benefit some individuals or groups (and possibly nations) but lower the utility of other domestic or foreign residents.

If only life were like this. As we point out below, the greatest expansions of world trade have tended to come not from the bloodless t��tonnement of some fictional Walrasian auctioneer but from the barrel of a Maxim gun, the edge of a scimitar, or the ferocity of nomadic horsemen. When trade required more workers, parental choices regarding quality/quantity trade-offs could often safely be ignored, since workers could always be enslaved. When trade required more profits, these could be earned via plunder or violently imposed monopolies. For much of our period the pattern of trade can only be understood as being the outcome of some military or political equilibrium between contending powers. The dependence of trade on war and peace eventually became so obvious to us that it is reflected in the title of this volume.

Politics thus determined trade, but trade also helped to determine politics, by influencing the capacities and the incentives facing states. The mutual dependence of ���Power��� and ���Plenty,��� so well evoked by Jacob Viner (1948), will thus be a key feature of this book. The phrase itself comes from the first lines of Michael Drayton���s Poly-Olbion, first published in 1612... the frontispiece to that volume... Albion, or Britannia, here appears to be ���prosperous and triumphant and for the only time in her long career, notably young and beautiful.��� Bedecked in pearls, secure on her island stronghold, and holding both a cornucopia and a scepter, she appears to be serenely contemplating not just her enjoyment of Plenty, but her exercise of Power as well.

As we shall see, this nymph-like creature would soon become the battle-hardened ruler not just of the English Channel but of the oceans of the world, and no history of international trade can ignore the causes or the implications of military exploits such as these... the use of force involves the allocation of scarce resources as well, and imposes costs and benefits both on those who use it and on those against whom it is used, as well as on third parties....

If all this may appear to have been less true over the course of the last two centuries, this is because of the overwhelming influence of the Industrial Revolution on all subsequent economic history. The nineteenth-century globalization that followed this breakthrough was unprecedented in many ways, and as we will see perhaps its most clearly distinguishing feature was its largely technological underpinnings (although even in this period imperialism still had an important role to play, and was itself facilitated in many ways by the new technology). The new technologies not only brought markets closer together than ever before, but opened up enormous income gaps between regions that remain with us today, and produced a stark division of labor between a manufacturing core and a primary-producing periphery.

The big questions ever since then have been: How can developing countries catch up with the core? Should they do so by exploiting their natural resource advantages, as was successfully tried in the nineteenth century, or does this leave them excessively vulnerable to fickle international markets, as the interwar experience might suggest? Should they decouple themselves from international markets, as many did after 1945, or reintegrate with them, as they have done over the past two decades? These questions, and related ones such as how the West should adapt to the rise of India and China, have only arisen because of the asymmetries created by the Industrial Revolution, and are thus fundamentally historical in nature...

And:

Ron Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke: Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press): :The Industrial Revolution... can only be understood as the outcome of a historical process with multiple causes stretching well back into the medieval period, and in which international movements of commodities, warriors, microbes, and technologies all played a leading role...

...Purely domestic accounts of the ���Rise of the West,��� emphasizing Western institutions, cultural attributes, or endowments, are hopelessly inadequate, since they ignore the vast web of interrelationships between Western Europe and the rest of the world that had been spun over the course of many centuries, and was crucially important for the breakthrough to modern economic growth....

Like most mainstream economists, we view inventiveness and incentives, rather than sheer accumulation, ���primitive��� or otherwise, as being at the heart of growth, but this does not imply that European overseas expansion should be written off as irrelevant. Plunder may not have directly fueled the Industrial Revolution, but mercantilism and imperialism were an important part of the global context within which it originated.... Violence thus undoubtedly mattered in shaping the environment within which the conventional economic forces of supply and demand operated....

When we say geography, we mean geography: mountains, rivers, and all. If Genghis Khan had been born in New Zealand, he would have left no traces on world history. The Irish might have enjoyed holding the rest of Europe to ransom by controlling access to Southeast Asian spices, but never had the opportunities which geography afforded the rulers of Egypt. A European seeking direct access to India might well head westward and stumble across the Americas, but no Chinese sailor would have been foolish enough to seek an eastern passage to Arabia....

The three great world-historical events of the second millennium, in our account, are the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the differing responses to it, the ���discovery��� and incorporation of the New World into that of the Old at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the nineteenth... no single region was solely responsible for any one of these three transformational episodes, let alone all three. The first resulted from the Pax Mongolica, established by the nomads of Central Asia but consolidated and actively participated in by all of the other six regions. Western Europeans were the first Eurasians to sail to the New World, but it was Africans, against their will, who produced many of the commodities that it exported to the Old. The Industrial Revolution occurred within Western Europe, and more specifically in Britain, but the essential raw material that its leading sector required was produced by Africans in the Americas, and the final products were sold in markets around the entire world....

Before asking the reader to plunge into one thousand years of history, it behooves us to provide a brief guide to the terrain that lies ahead. We begin in the first chapter with a consideration of basic methodological issues, and the delineation of the seven ���world regions���... Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Islamic World of the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.... The second chapter analyzes the trading and other relationships between these seven regions and an eighth, sub-Saharan Africa, at the turn of the second millennium... the only region in sustained direct contact with all the others at this time was the Islamic World, then undergoing its ���Golden Age��� under the Abbasid, Fatimid, and Umayyad caliphates based in Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordoba, while the one with the least contact with the others was Western Europe. The third chapter is a broad analytical survey of the evolution of the world economy from 1000 to 1500... the forging of the Pax Mongolica... stimulated long-distance trade from the Atlantic to the Sea of Japan; the devastating consequences of the Black Death... the subsequent expansion of population, output, and prices across the world, particularly in Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

This sets the stage for the launching of the Iberian voyages of discovery... the worldwide trade in silver... the long struggle for hegemony in the emerging world economy between the Dutch Republic, Great Britain, and France... the hardly less momentous overland expansions, from opposite ends of Central Asia, of the Czarist empire of the Romanovs and the Chinese empire of the Manchu Qing dynasty. One major theme of this chapter is the extent to which Asians were not just passive actors during this period, but adopted new military technologies, with similar political effects to those experienced in Europe; another is the mercantilist economic policies pursued by the leading states of the day.

The sixth chapter... the breakthrough to modern economic growth... Great Britain, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution... is the fulcrum around which the rest of the book turns.... [W]e do not see the Industrial Revolution as springing up suddenly, like ���Athena fully armed from the brow of Zeus,��� purely as a result of the creative imaginations of a group of inventors... we see it instead as the culmination of a long historical process involving the interaction of all the world���s regions.... This is not to deny the vital contribution of Great Britain, and more broadly Western Europe, but to provide a consistent and coherent explanation of why this event was so transformational in nature, rather than evanescent, as had been all the earlier ���efflorescences��� (Goldstone 2002) in the history of the world economy that we describe.

On one level, the economic history of the past two centuries can, as already noted, be viewed as the working out of the consequences of the Industrial Revolution: a ���Great Divergence��� in income levels between regions, as the new technologies diffused only gradually across the globe; a ���Great Specialization��� between an industrial core and a primary-producing periphery; consequent pressures to protect agriculture in the core, and manufacturing in the periphery; and, finally, a gradual unwinding of these trends as the Industrial Revolution spread to encompass an ever-increasing proportion of the globe... the evolution of these trends was not smooth, but was profoundly marked by the political consequences of three major world wars: the French and Napoleonic Wars that ended the age of mercantilism, World War I, and World War II....

Chapter 7... focuses on the ���nineteenth century��� from 1815 to 1914... Pax Britannica and European imperialism... the railroad and the steamship... a new sort of globalization, manifested by a significant narrowing of intercontinental price gaps for bulk commodities... the ���Great Specialization���... the industrialized countries of Western Europe, eventually to be joined by the United States and Japan, exported manufactured goods to Asia, Africa, Australasia, and Latin America in exchange for primary foodstuffs and raw materials, with Europe also exporting capital to all these regions, and people to the Americas and Australasia. The end of this period was marked by the beginnings of a ���backlash��� against globalization.... This first ���golden age of globalization��� was of course brought to a tragic and abrupt end by the outbreak of World War I.

The interwar years from 1918 to 1939, covered in chapter 8, were dominated politically and economically by the aftermath of this catastrophe....

World War II and its aftermath are the subject of chapter 9... the Pax Americana and the associated framework of multilateral international institutions... the spread of Communism and then by its collapse... decolonization of areas in the Third World that had become imperial possessions of the European powers. We stress that the combined effect of these trends was to further disintegrate the world economy, with OECD liberalization constituting a regional exception to this general rule, until some time in the 1970s or 1980s. It was only then that Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where the bulk of humanity reside, started to open up to trade and investment with the rest of the world.

Economically, the late twentieth century was to a large extent dominated by the attempt of newly independent countries to industrialize through policies of ���import substitution.��� However, the period also saw the unprecedented expansion of world output and trade as a result of trade liberalization and growth in the industrial countries, and technological diffusion to ���newly industrializing countries.��� This eventually led to the rapid growth of manufactured exports from these countries, particularly China and India, and to the beginnings of a narrowing of the huge per capita income gaps that have separated these once prosperous regions from Western Europe since the Industrial Revolution....

The reader will have noticed that our successive eras... have been demarcated mostly by the outbreaks of major wars or imperial expansions. Each era can be seen as one in which trade is conducted within a geopolitical framework established by the previous major war or conflict...

#shouldread
#weekendreading

David Rothkopf: "A brief note to my Republican friends (a...

David Rothkopf: "A brief note to my Republican friends (and other supporters of the president): Keep your eye on the penny. It is about to drop...

...I'm reminded of a story when, back in 2001, my company had the 7th largest company in America as a client.

It was an innovative, high-flying energy company, full of people who seemed to have figured out the future. Then, rumors started to fly about problems with the company and some mysterious practices there. We tried to help our clients think these through. But the stories got worse.

I would speak regularly to a very senior guy there. Finally, one day, I called him and said, "Look, you have to get in front of this. If you did something wrong admit it and that will give you the credibility you need to deny the other stuff, the unfair accusations."

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Then, the guy said, in a very quiet voice, "Look...here's the problem: We did it. We did it all." It was clear his focus had shifted. He realized he was personally in trouble. He realized the company was going down.

The company of course, was Enron. The rest is history. But I'll never forget that moment when the penny dropped and it became clear, something very very bad was happening at this place & that these guys were in way over their heads. That's happening now throughout the West Wing.

It is starting on Capitol Hill. The people who realize what's happening may be able to save themselves, move to the right side of this story. Do some good. Those who continue to deny will only become collateral damage. Trump is the Enron of presidents.

He did it. He did it all. He did more than we know.

The penny is dropping. How you respond will define your careers, for some it may define whether you even have careers in the future. Or freedom. Or reputations. Time to wake up...

#shouldread
#politics
#moralresponsibility
#orangehairedbaboons
#acrossthewidemissouri

(Early) Monday Smackdown: New York Magazine Has a Huge Quality Control Problem with Andrew Sullivan. It Needs to Fix It...

Quo usque tandem abutere, Newyorkmagina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos1 eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia?Andrew Sullivan (2014-12-22): Excuse Me, Mr Coates: "Dish readers know how comfortable I found myself in that liberal tradition...

...Airing taboo stuff and examining and critiquing it has been a running feature of this blog from its beginnings. It is an axiom of mine that anything can be examined and debated ��� and that the role of journalism is not to police the culture but to engage in it forthrightly and honestly. Again: I respect those who believe the role of a magazine is to bless certain opinions and to stigmatize others, to indicate what is a socially acceptable opinion and what is not. It���s just not the way I have ever rolled on anything. So I responded to the race and IQ controversy exactly as I would any other: put it all on the table and let the facts and arguments take us where they may. In fact, I couldn���t understand why those who loathed the book didn���t leap at the chance to debunk it. If it were so transparently dreck, why not go in for the kill?...

Sarah Jeong (2014-12-23): "G O T T A H E A R B O T H S I D E S" ���Andrew Sullivan"

Sarah Jeong (2014-12-23): "Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins?"

Sarah Jeong (2014-12-23): "Let's hear both sides!"

Andrew Sullivan (2018-08-03): When Racism Is Fit to Print: "You could describe an entire race as subhuman: 'Are white people genetically disposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins'...

...Another indicator that these statements might be racist comes from replacing the word ���white��� with any other racial group.... Imagine someone tweeting that Jews were only ���fit to live underground like groveling goblins���.... But the alternative view���that of today���s political left���is that Jeong definitionally cannot be racist, because she���s both a woman and a racial minority. Racism against whites, in this neo-Marxist view, just ���isn���t a thing������just as misandry literally cannot exist at all.... Jeong, by virtue of being an Asian woman, is one of the elect, incapable of the sin of racism or group prejudice. All she is doing is resisting whiteness and maleness, which indeed require resistance every second of the day. That���s why Jeong hasn���t apologized to the white people she denigrated or conceded that her tweets were racist. Nor has she taken responsibility for them...

#shouldread
#mondaysmackdown
#moralresponsibility

Some of My Less Polite Thoughts from Aspen

Secretary Rice, in her opening statement, focused on historical roots of our current mishegas...: Why we decided to launch such a war of choice in 2003 has always been opaque to me. Can you make your thinking less opaque to me, as to why this was thought to be a good idea?...
Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel : Joe Nye���and the others���should not have pretended that that the Trump Administration has a strategy, and is some sort of unitary actor. It doesn't. It isn't...

My More Polite Thoughts from Aspen...

#shouldread
#development
#acrossthewidemissouri
#highlighted
#security

Aspen: Security: Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel

Aspen: Security: Nine Reactions to the Four Ex-National Security Advisors Panel: Most important:

Joe Nye���and the others���should not have pretended that that the Trump Administration has a strategy, and is some sort of unitary actor. It doesn't. It isn't. For the right analogies, we need to reach back to the Tudor or Stuart dynasties���a King Charles II Stuart without the work ethic, mostly concerned with his mistresses, his parties, and deference to himself; easily bribed by the King of France, &c.; plutocrats maneuvering and using access to advance their interests; other kleptocrats manuevering and using access to advance their interests; and a few technocrats���a Pepys, a Godolphin���trying to hold things together. Graham Allison's three analytical perspectives���rational actor-organizational process-bureaucratic politics���are not sufficient to understand this thing. We need a fourth perspective: weak chaos monkey king, perhaps?...

And here are eight more:

Once again, it was genuinely scary how rapidly all four of them segued into zero-sum thinking. We true globalists need���badly, very badly���to gain mindshare, so that they believe truly that world trade and globalization is usually win-win and can almost always be win-win���that it is win-lose only if somebody is being very stupid. They mouth the words, but you can see that their hearts are not in it, and they will very quickly slip the leash and run off into the bracken...

Stephen Hadley made the point that Trump's strategy of insult-degrade-squeeze-deal is always risky, and does not work unless interactions are one-shot only. This is belied by Trump's success in insulting-degrading-squeezing-dealing with Republican legislators and would-be policymakers. It really depends on who his counterparty is. Those counterparties who offer up their dignity find that he takes it, and then asks for more.

Condi Rice's pivot within five minutes from "we need special focus on minorities and women" to "we must 100% reject 'identity politics'" and "'identity politics' will trigger white 'identity politics'" was, from one perspective, a thing of rhetorical beauty. Nice work if you can get it���and she has gotten it...

We old white guys need, badly, to:

Stand up and immediately separate ourselves from any claim that white men in America regard themselves as an identity politics group first and not as Americans first...
Reinforce at every opportunity the contingent and recent nature of "whiteness"���say that in the South Boston I knew in the 1990s, when an Irish-Catholic married an Italian-Catholic, it was described as a "mixed marriage"...
Start taking a knee during the national anthem...

Condi Rice really needs to cool it with the: "I'm a free trader, but...", "I'm a believer in immigration, but...", "I believe in the North Atlantic partnership, but...", &c. It's really not helpful���or illuminating. See #2 above...

Tom Donilon and Susan Rice should not have engaged in unilateral disarmament with respect to the repeated digs from Rice and Hadley at Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and anyone who dares note that January 20, 1993 was the last time there was a Republican president who gave evidence of having read and understood his briefings. I would rather not have partisan point-scoring. But asymmetric niceness is not effective...

All of them talked much too much about "U.S. Leadership" with a capital "L". None of them was willing to observe that, after this mishegas, nobody is going to be willing to give us the keys. None of them was willing to say that after 2003-2008 and 2017-?, the U.S. now has a well-deserved reputation as a chaos monkey, that the task is that of managing hyperpower descent to create a world in which it is comfortable for us to live after we are no longer the hyperpower. (Of course, if they did say it, they would be unlikely to ever be asked back as Secretary of State or whatever.)...

They really need to cool it with the "National Security Advisor the toughest job in government" flattery. It ain't, and it's undignified to claim it is. Not just President, but Chief-of-Staff, Speaker, Senate Majority Leader, State, Defense, the service Secretaries, White House congressional affairs posts all have a greater mismatch between expectations and capabilities...

Some of My Less Polite Thoughts from Aspen

#shouldread
#security
#acrossthewidemissouri
#development