Matt Yglesias on where the right is right; Tove K on work vs. idleness; Jonathan Haidt on media violence then and now; John Cochrane summarizes a monetary conference
"Progressives do not worry that civilization could move backwards if their latest ideas do not work out. Conservatives always think that society is moving backwards."
On the other hand, Progressives almost always catastrophize that society won't make progress unless it changes in the often radical ways they propose. The whole 'right side of history' thing, so this is heavily dependent on what is seen as 'moving backwards'. Back in the day, when Republicans were also considered 'conservative', the GOP was instrumental in moving forward much civil rights legislation so much so that Democrats had to concoct the myth that their racists joined the GOP (which probably would have been news to Robert Byrd)
Ruy Teixeira has an alternate take on Yglesias's post
Re: Haidt and his co-author, a couple miscellaneous comments:
1. there is indeed a lot of performative crap people engage in online. I used to think that people were pretty good about maintaining a distinction between their real world self and their online activities/personas, but I think the ubiquity of smartphones with high quality cameras and the reach of social media has eroded this distinction.
2. I am less certain about the violence aspect. There have been violent, graphic death scenes in movies for a long time. The whole reason movies work as entertainment is that you sorta a little bit forget for a second that what you're watching isn't real/didn't happen. And then of course, some of it did, like in various war movies. E.G., did watching Sands of Iwo Jima or Saving Private Ryan desensitize viewers to the human cost of amphibious assault operations? Probably not so much. Young people don't seem to be inclined toward violence more than previous generations despite what content they're exposed to online and in video games; if anything, they seem less disposed to it. Freddie deBoer wrote an essay a few weeks ago noting that despite the ubiquity of nudity and sex online, young progressives who grew up with this appear to be afraid of or uncomfortable with actual, physical sex much moreso than previous generations (see here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/progressive-attitudes-towards-sex). I would say there appears to be something similar at work with respect to graphic violence vs physical violence.
3. That said, we seem to be pushing towards more political violence, although for now at least, it remains largely non-lethal. The Summer of Floyd garbage, the Jan 6th riot, various Antifa thugs harassing people different places and getting away with it, etc. There were few antecedents to these things in the 2-3 decades pre social media. I don't know how to reconcile this with #2.
The left by definition could never be patriotic about America, because America unfortunately includes the South (and the South's flows of people westward). (Only disingenuously "unfortunately" since this state of affairs has been the useful, permanent casus belli for the left.) To the extent that it would be possible for someone like Yglesias to define himself as patriotic, it could only be in connection to the rule-by-Supreme Court that has engineering Yankee-utopian social change as its goal - it could never be connected to the land (Yglesias' desire for further sprawl/pavement of America obviously demonstrates he has no interest or feeling there) and it could never be connected to the particulars of the founding, which he obliquely reveals by referencing only the Enlightenment-derived verbiage of the Declaration.
And obviously it could never be connected to any sense of national cohesion, since he wishes for America to absorb an eighth of the world's population, and presumably for the majority of the American population that do not so long for that, to die off as quickly as possible and to please in the meantime have no voice politically.
I am not sure why this should trouble him, unless he would wish to rewrite the Simpsons to give half the people flags, and half the people abortion plus flags too - because flags are fun and people like them and maybe they'd inspire more of his new Americans to vote.
If patriotism is a preservative of some sort - he should really be violently allergic to it.
He could of course found a new patriotism based on the new constitution and on the status quo. Only even that breaks down in the context of importing people who are presumed to be “better than you that are here” by purely geographic definition. A global patriotism with the Pride flag might work I guess. I don’t know if people will die for it but maybe the idea is you would never need them to.
I wish we could have Florence King’s take. She’s about the only person I ever miss in that way, maybe also Mark Twain.
Back when he was sane, and as long ago as 2006 (a decade prior to Trump) Jonah Goldberg was saying this
"What bothers me about the SLBFC (Socially Liberal But Fiscally Conservative-added) thing is not the actual political position of being socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Indeed, it’s a sign of how meaningless the term is on the merits that it could in fact be a description of libertarianism (as well as the position of various New Democrats and the like). My peeve is that people who say they are socially liberal but fiscally conservative are generally full of it. They are simply liberals who like to sound tough-minded, when in fact the only fiscal conservatism they have is about their property values and income taxes."
Jonah Goldberg is tied neck and neck with both David French and Bill Kristol for being the world's greatest expert in how absurd abuse of the term "conservative" in self-labelling by prominent commentators has polluted the language to the point of reducing the term to meaninglessness.
I'm not really sure the distinction matters so much, but Scandinavia is Lutheran not Calvinist. It was the state church of Sweden until 2000. Also, the phraseology of “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” has an interesting and mixed origin and is somewhat more modern American in origin and usage.... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_workshop
The statement: "I'm a bit surprised that the warrior/worker distinction is not an established concept in sociology." makes me think of the analogy I use from ecology of producer/parasite distinction which is similar to worker/warrior where the warrior and bureaucrats are parasites upon the workers.
In nature there are also symbiotic "commercial" relationships which are effectively "specialization and trade" relationships like the algae in corals where the algae provide energy from light to the coral and the coral provides N, and P nutrients to the algae.
To riff a little on Tove K’s thoughts on cooperation, maybe it might help to back up to basics. Cooperation would appear to have at least two prerequisites: the ability to recognize other individuals and the ability to remember the past. Recognizing someone and remembering that they cooperated with you in the past may induce you to cooperate with that individual again. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/105971230601400301?journalCode=adba ) Thus, in even highly eusocial species like honeybees, the epitome of a cooperative species, it is not too surprising to learn that honeybees can both recognize other individual honeybee’s faces using the same configural processing that that humans use to combine the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth to create a unique visual representation of another individual as well as odor recognition to identify other individual bees. This enables a bee to form social bonds with other bees in a colony.
So what happens when our memories are overloaded with images of other individuals in our media consumption? That is an intriguing questioned asked at The School of the Uncomformed today (also referencing Freya India) https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/building-people-with-three-dimensional . One wonders to what extent the ancient practice of imprinting an image of a ruler’s face on coins might be related to instinctual efforts to build cooperation? Or perhaps, might the ubiquitous display of a ruler’s portrait be more prevalent in low trust and low cooperation societies where such overt measures might help, at least at some margin, maintain some degree of cooperation, or at least submission? And with the removal of efficacious and substantive cooperation from the realm of individual autonomy to the realm of centralized and remote systems of governance are we opening greater evolutionary space for the neurodiverse? One study is said to have found that 66% of children and 36% of adults with autism spectrum disorders exhibit prosopagnosia (face blindness). And reading, for example, these suggestions for helping children with autism develop cooperative behaviors – be literal, be direct, be specific – seem to be consistent with the overall direction in which mass societies are evolving (https://childmind.org/article/increasing-cooperation-in-kids-with-autism/#:~:text=Kids%20with%20autism%20tend%20to,Vibert%20says. ) Is evolution leading us to a highly regimented future?
It is the establishment’s fault, of course, as with everything. In his 10th lecture in The History of Civilization in Europe, Guizot observes:
“You will recollect, that one of the first facts which struck us in the elements of ancient European society, was their diversity, separation, and independence. [… …]
The fusion of all these societies into one has been accomplished; it is precisely, as you have seen, the distinctive fact, the essential character of modern society. The ancient social elements are reduced to two, the government and the people; that is to say, the diversity has ceased, that similitude has led to union. But before this result was consummate, and even with a view to its prevention, many efforts were tried to make all particular societies live and act in common, without destroying their diversity or independence. It was not wished to strike a blow in any way prejudicial to their situation, privileges, or special nature, and yet to unite them in a single state, to form of them one nation, to rally them under and the same government.
“All these attempts failed. The results which I have just mentioned, the unity of modern society, proves their ill success.”
And so it goes. A stultifying top-down regimentation will only grow more and more mechanical and pervasive with all that is human about humanity cast by the wayside. As individuals, we will be lucky to wind up as autonomous and creative as the individual honeybees trapped in their eusocial evolutionary stasis, patiently awaiting some great upheaval to punctuate a stagnant equilibrium.
"Progressives do not worry that civilization could move backwards if their latest ideas do not work out. Conservatives always think that society is moving backwards."
On the other hand, Progressives almost always catastrophize that society won't make progress unless it changes in the often radical ways they propose. The whole 'right side of history' thing, so this is heavily dependent on what is seen as 'moving backwards'. Back in the day, when Republicans were also considered 'conservative', the GOP was instrumental in moving forward much civil rights legislation so much so that Democrats had to concoct the myth that their racists joined the GOP (which probably would have been news to Robert Byrd)
Ruy Teixeira has an alternate take on Yglesias's post
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-right-stuff-for-the-left
Re: Haidt and his co-author, a couple miscellaneous comments:
1. there is indeed a lot of performative crap people engage in online. I used to think that people were pretty good about maintaining a distinction between their real world self and their online activities/personas, but I think the ubiquity of smartphones with high quality cameras and the reach of social media has eroded this distinction.
2. I am less certain about the violence aspect. There have been violent, graphic death scenes in movies for a long time. The whole reason movies work as entertainment is that you sorta a little bit forget for a second that what you're watching isn't real/didn't happen. And then of course, some of it did, like in various war movies. E.G., did watching Sands of Iwo Jima or Saving Private Ryan desensitize viewers to the human cost of amphibious assault operations? Probably not so much. Young people don't seem to be inclined toward violence more than previous generations despite what content they're exposed to online and in video games; if anything, they seem less disposed to it. Freddie deBoer wrote an essay a few weeks ago noting that despite the ubiquity of nudity and sex online, young progressives who grew up with this appear to be afraid of or uncomfortable with actual, physical sex much moreso than previous generations (see here: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/progressive-attitudes-towards-sex). I would say there appears to be something similar at work with respect to graphic violence vs physical violence.
3. That said, we seem to be pushing towards more political violence, although for now at least, it remains largely non-lethal. The Summer of Floyd garbage, the Jan 6th riot, various Antifa thugs harassing people different places and getting away with it, etc. There were few antecedents to these things in the 2-3 decades pre social media. I don't know how to reconcile this with #2.
The left by definition could never be patriotic about America, because America unfortunately includes the South (and the South's flows of people westward). (Only disingenuously "unfortunately" since this state of affairs has been the useful, permanent casus belli for the left.) To the extent that it would be possible for someone like Yglesias to define himself as patriotic, it could only be in connection to the rule-by-Supreme Court that has engineering Yankee-utopian social change as its goal - it could never be connected to the land (Yglesias' desire for further sprawl/pavement of America obviously demonstrates he has no interest or feeling there) and it could never be connected to the particulars of the founding, which he obliquely reveals by referencing only the Enlightenment-derived verbiage of the Declaration.
And obviously it could never be connected to any sense of national cohesion, since he wishes for America to absorb an eighth of the world's population, and presumably for the majority of the American population that do not so long for that, to die off as quickly as possible and to please in the meantime have no voice politically.
I am not sure why this should trouble him, unless he would wish to rewrite the Simpsons to give half the people flags, and half the people abortion plus flags too - because flags are fun and people like them and maybe they'd inspire more of his new Americans to vote.
If patriotism is a preservative of some sort - he should really be violently allergic to it.
He could of course found a new patriotism based on the new constitution and on the status quo. Only even that breaks down in the context of importing people who are presumed to be “better than you that are here” by purely geographic definition. A global patriotism with the Pride flag might work I guess. I don’t know if people will die for it but maybe the idea is you would never need them to.
I wish we could have Florence King’s take. She’s about the only person I ever miss in that way, maybe also Mark Twain.
Did the libertarians get thrown under the bus or did they trip and fall over their own bad ideas like open borders?
I’d like to see the video footage one more time.
Back when he was sane, and as long ago as 2006 (a decade prior to Trump) Jonah Goldberg was saying this
"What bothers me about the SLBFC (Socially Liberal But Fiscally Conservative-added) thing is not the actual political position of being socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Indeed, it’s a sign of how meaningless the term is on the merits that it could in fact be a description of libertarianism (as well as the position of various New Democrats and the like). My peeve is that people who say they are socially liberal but fiscally conservative are generally full of it. They are simply liberals who like to sound tough-minded, when in fact the only fiscal conservatism they have is about their property values and income taxes."
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/feeling-lucky-socially-liberal-fiscal-conservatives-jonah-goldberg/?utm_source=recirc-mobile&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=next-article&utm_term=first
Jonah Goldberg is tied neck and neck with both David French and Bill Kristol for being the world's greatest expert in how absurd abuse of the term "conservative" in self-labelling by prominent commentators has polluted the language to the point of reducing the term to meaninglessness.
Libertarians have many ideas, some better than others, but none of which are particularly popular with those running the state.
"QE shortened maturity structure and cost the US half a trillion dollars". (SNIP)
In 2024 the US is adding $1 Trillion to the Federal Budget Deficit every 3 months
Data deserving of wider recognition:
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
I'm not really sure the distinction matters so much, but Scandinavia is Lutheran not Calvinist. It was the state church of Sweden until 2000. Also, the phraseology of “idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” has an interesting and mixed origin and is somewhat more modern American in origin and usage.... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_workshop
If you listened to what Larry S. had to say, he went off the rails with his commenting that next Pres of US would be Peronist.
The statement: "I'm a bit surprised that the warrior/worker distinction is not an established concept in sociology." makes me think of the analogy I use from ecology of producer/parasite distinction which is similar to worker/warrior where the warrior and bureaucrats are parasites upon the workers.
In nature there are also symbiotic "commercial" relationships which are effectively "specialization and trade" relationships like the algae in corals where the algae provide energy from light to the coral and the coral provides N, and P nutrients to the algae.
To riff a little on Tove K’s thoughts on cooperation, maybe it might help to back up to basics. Cooperation would appear to have at least two prerequisites: the ability to recognize other individuals and the ability to remember the past. Recognizing someone and remembering that they cooperated with you in the past may induce you to cooperate with that individual again. (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/105971230601400301?journalCode=adba ) Thus, in even highly eusocial species like honeybees, the epitome of a cooperative species, it is not too surprising to learn that honeybees can both recognize other individual honeybee’s faces using the same configural processing that that humans use to combine the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth to create a unique visual representation of another individual as well as odor recognition to identify other individual bees. This enables a bee to form social bonds with other bees in a colony.
So what happens when our memories are overloaded with images of other individuals in our media consumption? That is an intriguing questioned asked at The School of the Uncomformed today (also referencing Freya India) https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/building-people-with-three-dimensional . One wonders to what extent the ancient practice of imprinting an image of a ruler’s face on coins might be related to instinctual efforts to build cooperation? Or perhaps, might the ubiquitous display of a ruler’s portrait be more prevalent in low trust and low cooperation societies where such overt measures might help, at least at some margin, maintain some degree of cooperation, or at least submission? And with the removal of efficacious and substantive cooperation from the realm of individual autonomy to the realm of centralized and remote systems of governance are we opening greater evolutionary space for the neurodiverse? One study is said to have found that 66% of children and 36% of adults with autism spectrum disorders exhibit prosopagnosia (face blindness). And reading, for example, these suggestions for helping children with autism develop cooperative behaviors – be literal, be direct, be specific – seem to be consistent with the overall direction in which mass societies are evolving (https://childmind.org/article/increasing-cooperation-in-kids-with-autism/#:~:text=Kids%20with%20autism%20tend%20to,Vibert%20says. ) Is evolution leading us to a highly regimented future?
It is the establishment’s fault, of course, as with everything. In his 10th lecture in The History of Civilization in Europe, Guizot observes:
“You will recollect, that one of the first facts which struck us in the elements of ancient European society, was their diversity, separation, and independence. [… …]
The fusion of all these societies into one has been accomplished; it is precisely, as you have seen, the distinctive fact, the essential character of modern society. The ancient social elements are reduced to two, the government and the people; that is to say, the diversity has ceased, that similitude has led to union. But before this result was consummate, and even with a view to its prevention, many efforts were tried to make all particular societies live and act in common, without destroying their diversity or independence. It was not wished to strike a blow in any way prejudicial to their situation, privileges, or special nature, and yet to unite them in a single state, to form of them one nation, to rally them under and the same government.
“All these attempts failed. The results which I have just mentioned, the unity of modern society, proves their ill success.”
And so it goes. A stultifying top-down regimentation will only grow more and more mechanical and pervasive with all that is human about humanity cast by the wayside. As individuals, we will be lucky to wind up as autonomous and creative as the individual honeybees trapped in their eusocial evolutionary stasis, patiently awaiting some great upheaval to punctuate a stagnant equilibrium.