@John I support the US / Western role in Ukraine. The tragedy is that US / Western support of Israel, which has chosen to turn Gaza into a new Aleppo or Grozny, undermines our ability to draw a clear moral distinction between what we support and what we are opposing in Ukraine. Yes, you can try to draw distinctions, like Russia was the aggressor and violated a sovereign border. I’ll agree. 1/
@John But if you want to be the “forces of light”, you can’t also be doing logistics for the wanton bombing of a civilian population, and the intentional destruction of a territory’s housing. 2/
It’s a terrible criterion to imagine that, if a democracy chooses to do a thing, that somehow makes it right. When a democracy chooses to perpetrate atrocity, it is no less atrocity. 3/
That said, Israel/Palestine deserves none of whatever limited normative deference is due a democracy, because roughly a third of the inhabitants of that territory are disenfranchised and roughly half lack equal protection under its laws. 4/
I once had a friend try to persuade me that China qualifies as a democracy, because tens of millions of members of the CCP can vote within the party. Doesn’t work. Apartheid South Africa didn’t deserve deference to the democratic legitimacy of its choices because it was a democracy for its white population. 5/
Again, even if Israel were a full democracy, that wouldn’t justify its adopting Assad/Putin tactics to pursue its objectives, morally, or politically in the eyes of the Global South, whose support or at least acquiescence we’ll require if we wish to continue to maintain the post Cold War security order. 6/
We need to be able to draw a sharp distinction between forces of light and forces of darkness. Setting aside the darker parts of our past, calling ourselves reformed, we could pretty credibly do that, viz Ukraine and Russia or even China and Taiwan. Biden was making real progress rehabilitating “the West” and “democracies”.
Until we started arming the perpetrator of a new mass atrocity. Then, to much of the world and much of our own publics, it all comes to seem like a lot of cant. /fin
@_dm @ouguoc oh! yes we agree! the questions surrounding the EU wouldn’t be so much its lack of moral purity—as you say, no one has that!—but what role it plays or could play in stabilizing some not completely despicable hegemony. i certainly consider a hegemony a bit more European than the present one potentially optimistic, much better than some of the alternatives. i’m disheartened tho becuase managing the Ukraine crisis seems a basic test of that, which EU and US both now risk ceding.
On culture war and austerity as mutually reinforcing mechanisms by which centet-right parties abet the emergence of fascism. by @sjwrenlewis https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2024/01/why-centre-right-has-helped-cause-drift.html ht @junesim63
@_dm @ouguoc I’m not sure I give very much credit to the international institutions or governance structures (in large part because the US has been undermining them rather than reinforcing them for two decades, maybe they could’ve grown into themselves). I think US hegemony has played a positive role mostly by very basic mechanisms: a hegemon provides order, and has an interest in the stable prosperity of the domain it superintends. 1/
@_dm @ouguoc As ugly and imperfect a hegemon as the US has sometimes been, I see the unraveling of hegemony as a severe threat to these goods. I’d rather an evolution of stable hegemony to a more just order than surviving (maybe) thru the chaos of a contested world in hope of something better on the other side. I hope the US will find means to reinforce stability by acceding to a more shared hegemony, so the structure of global order does not become a military contest (more than it has already).
@_dm @ouguoc it would be nice if some less-corrupted-but-still-liberal center emerging out of the better parts of Europe could become more influential. i remain pretty skeptical that’s occurring (that the tech monopolies are mostly American is a more cynical and very contingent explanation of apparent virtue), but one can certainly hope!
@ouguoc even now, the median USian cares very little about the ME, other than the more tangible implications its crises have here. for her to care much less, some kind of stability would have had to emerge in the ME, or some less US centric form of global governance would have needed to emerge, or our global village, the technological Babylon in which geographical distance no longer translates to social, political, economic distance, would have had to become undone (likely via some catastrophe).
@ouguoc i think US-ians are quite desperate to care less about global affairs, but implicit in the question is the idea the US could just become a normal, keeping-to-itself kind of country without really consequential aspects of the present order coming apart. how would US-ians perceive a world in which European countries and most elsewheres adopted governance models and alliances more sympathetic to any of China / Russia / Iran, and the US is either isolated or (more likely) does as well?
@ouguoc at a meta level, this take is kind of making the same point i am: the partisan wedge on economy questions shows it’s not what pundits (or economists) think of as “the economy” driving the answer. if you think the world is going to hell when the other party is in power, you say the economy is too. 1/
@ouguoc will good “numbers” as the pundits and economists tally them eventually lead to good economy polling? that presupposes an answer to the essential question, which is whether much of the public is right or wrong to be glum about the broader state of things. if there’s more war and inflation or rationing due to supply crunches, “the numbers” will be bad and we’ll never know what would have been. 2/
@ouguoc if some of the sources of broader gloom resolve positively — Israel / Palestine cools off, the Houthis are deterred, Ukraine resolves in a way that seems to restore the certainty of a peaceful Europe, Taiwan/China strains stay subdued, etc — and the numbers stay good, well, then we’d all predict rising sentiment on the economy. 3/
@ouguoc the only test would be a continuation of the status quo. if the global center seems not to be holding, if augurs of chaos continue to swirl and the world in every sense continues to heat, but economically “the numbers” seem good, will sentiment improve? i won’t say definitely not! but i think the public is (correctly) not so interested in disentangling these things. /fin
@ouguoc Drum inspired this thread to a degree. I think he’s badly mistaken overall in his take, both in his characterization of perceptions (the polling he presents in the post you link omits the plurality of people who claim no party ID, for example, which might complicate his story) and of substance (he touts good levels relative to the past to ask why so glum, while omitting consideration of direction and rate of change). He’s right stuff’s not hopeless, but IMHO much too sanguine.
There’s the meme in Democratic politics that’s like “why don’t voters understand the economy is good when the stats say it is and when polled they say they personally are doing well?” 1/
I think it’s geopolitics and environmental. When the apocalypse feels close at hand, you just don’t describe it as a good economy, regardless of this quarter’s GDP. 2/
Pax Americana is under siege. Israel has undermined the moral basis, and Republicans have undermined the political basis, for our role in Ukraine, dramatically increasing the likelihood of global chaos, and frankly diminishing our collective will to resist it. 3/
Global temperatures have been off the charts — average, sea surface temperatures — extreme events of one sort or another are tangible threats to nearly everyone, we are in uncharted waters testing the resilience of ecosystems we depend upon utterly. 4/
In the face of all this, “why aren’t consumers optimistic now that inflation is subsiding without a recession” just misses the point, every point. /fin
“I’m mildly obsessed with the phrase “the exception that proves the rule,” which does not mean that the existence of an exception proves that a rule is true, but that examining the best exception to a proposed rule helps you define the limits of that rule.” #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/why-the-parties-cant-decide
It looks like you’ve been inactive for a while.
a human passes when its body fails.
still lazy after all these years.
perhaps at first i misunderstood this. https://mastodon.social/@HourlyQuotes/111755251818045673
"Just as nobody is an atheist in a foxhole, no large firm is in the private sector during a financial crisis." @matthewstoller https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-time-to-nationalize-and-then
Denial is the fundamental human life force.
@jonshell (thank you. that is a very kind thing to say.)
they are politicizing politics again.
"Rufo cares about the actual values that sustain a liberal vision of freedom and justice in same way that Israeli war-cabinet minister who calls for 'voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian reasons' actually cares about humanitarianism." #RickPerlstein https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-10-first-they-came-for-harvard/