Panchayat

Been reading less and less of Noah Smith recently (credit to @wildgifthorses for being way ahead of me on this one), and the newfound hero worship of Modi is probably the last straw. Can't we have one political ideology that doesn't suck dictator cock? What if I hate Xi and Modi and Orbán? Am I just politically homeless?

That's what I thought Noah was, though: a progressive who understands enough economics to not endorse anything completely stupid. And his economic takes are basically still fine. But he's been completely brainkilled by Cold War 2.

he what now

I actually don't think I have seen this at all? I don't read every post or anything, but I am pretty sure I have seen "we ally with problematic leaders all the time, we aren't gonna Fix India, Modi is not the biggest problem on earth right now, and deepening ties has way more wins than losses". As he says:

And yeah, the Stalin/Churchill analogies were right on. Stalin was a world-historical monster and Churchill is typical-for-his-country but that country was an oppressive global empire, and the US was right to fully ally with them. That is just politics, China is a bigger threat than India is, making India richer is way better for individual Indians than any American protests could be, etc.

Certainly not saying you can't disagree with it, maybe Modi has more tail risk, maybe he isn't a reliable partner, etc etc. But framing Noah as a Modi apologist is something I am not seeing a case for.

ok I'm biased (chinese) but uh. is india the lesser evil here?

like yes they're a democracy whatever

but they're also. a much less effective government? like arguably they'd want less democracy, not more in india

and of course I'm not sure trying to back china into a wall is the best option for both counties

Yeah, I would say so! Obviously that's a function your vantage point, but India's democratic backsliding is compared to China's absolute authoritarianism and growing totalitarianism, its really not close. India doesn't have anything comparable to China's concentration camps in Xinjiang from the past decade - which is saying something, as India has a bunch of bad things! The fact that its really not close is actually incredible - in 2010 it was closer, China has dramatically worsened in the last decade.

But this is also the wrong perspective; the US is not gonna change China or India's domestic politics. Foreign policy is the land of, well, foreign policy, its about those decisions. And on this one, China is the country currently backing Russia's war in Ukraine while preparing for its own openly-stated massive-scale total invasion and annexation of a sovereign country. China repeatedly butts up against the existing international order, pushing to make it their own in ways that imo will benefit authoritarian states, increase the odds of wars, and reduce the welfare of common people. India meanwhile is, again, no saint, but way more willing to play ball, and the aim of deeper ties is to make them *more* more willing.

Don't take this as some "China is evil" thing, many of China's critiques of the system has validity, they aren't out to be bad guys, and China as a nation has many accomplishments. But the simple reality of the world they are pushing for is one with more war & repression, its the "result" of those aims. You want a broad coalition to mitigate that, people will be better off for that. Virtually any country on earth right now qualifies for that, particularly when by 'coalition' we mean 'free trade and increased security cooperation', no one is proposing pre-emptive strikes or even defense alliances.

I mean India has basically made 2 million of citizens stateless through an act of parliament, has built detention centres and is trying to implement a National Population Register that will single out vulnerable minorities like Muslims- so there is that.

Arguably India’s slide into Fascism is kind of worse and more dangerous because it has democratic support and a broad popular social constituency unlike the CCP 

Baby can do a little a cocaine, as a treat

Kate Beaton classic ❤️

from veronica gerber bicceci, empty set

Which is stupider: the fascists in Argentina (allegedly) banning set theory bc set theory = class theory = LITERAL COMMUNISM or the most annoying kind of leftist who responds to this by saying “Yes, actually babbys first introduction to sets shows how epic and poggers is communism, they were right to fear”

these are the best azumanga daioh panels

-Revolutionary Girl Utena, 1997

Brett putting the question with Venezuela but honestly this is the shit I was thinking with the ongoing Lebanon crises, you see that shit and think in any other time period this country would be invaded 15 times over.

not the shittiest but a shitty future would be one where fukuyama was wrong about the last men but not the end of history, where liberal democracy continues to break down but nothing coherent replaces it, like how Germanic regna replaced the Christian universal empire but could only legitimate themselves by vaguely gesturing at its ideas

This is something I’ve thought about, and it seems to me like Fukuyama was half right about the end of history. He was right to predict a convergence of government types, but wrong about what we were converging to. (That he was right about the last men goes without saying.)

It’s always been the case that the textbook story of how democracies work is somewhere in between a half truth and a noble lie. In a well functioning democracy the “voice of the people” carries some weight, but there’s also the bureaucracy with its own rules, social ties among the elites, the class interests of the well off and their superior coordinating abilities, and so on. The simple fact that millions of people can’t coordinate themselves without leadership means that democracy will always be partly stage managed from the top. None of which necessarily means that democracy is a total sham. Ideally the ideals of democracy will be true enough in practice. Even if the best you can do is asymptotically approach a form of government which is kinda responsive to the popular will.

However, I would say that this kinda sorta democracy is always a bit tenuous. A society has to work hard and continuously to keep its democracy closer to “half truth” than “noble lie”, and it doesn’t take much to push a society far enough away from true democracy that democratic ideals start to feel like a sham to much or most of the population. And even leaving aside trends towards oligarchy, which vary considerably by country, across the globe the bureaucratic state has gained at the expense of everything else. Unavoidably so, since civilization’s greater complexity means democratic control has to be less direct. Hence people’s not entirely illegitimate fears about the deep state.

So far this hasn’t totally destroyed people’s belief in democracy, though it has made them angstier about it. Currently their unhappiness is mostly directed at individual institutions like congress, rather than democracy in general. Perhaps that will continue to be the case, although you could imagine how it might change. For instance, repeated elections where reformist candidates win, but somehow every time none of their reforms come to pass. Think of all the anti-EU votes in Europe which have led to nothing, with the exception of Brexit. Things like that weaken faith in democracy, especially in egregious cases. 

And of course, it seems likely that technological innovations like the internet, digital money, and self-driving (easy to track) cars will benefit bureaucracy and the security state at the expense of democracy, though it’s not impossible that those trends will be reversed.

But if I were to bet, I’d say that democracy will feel increasingly stage managed over time. This isn’t a strict binary. You could imagine a spectrum running from America to Singapore to China, from least to most stage managed. (I’m sure there are democracies less stage managed than the US, but that’s not the point.) In fact I would expect a convergence. Maybe not to Singapore exactly, but to a distinctly half-hearted sort of democracy which isn’t totally useless but doesn’t seem to accomplish much either. In the established democracies, this could be an informal process of elected officials losing power over time, with no outright constitutional changes. In China, it seems unlikely that Xi’s Stalinism will last forever. Even if they don’t go full liberal democracy, you could imagine them adopting more popular participation at some point in the future, even just as a strategy for better governance. (Remember that like a decade ago there was a lot of talk about moving China towards a Singapore model. That went nowhere, but it’s not a crazy sentiment.) Even if these different regimes are nominally very different from one another, I find it easy to imagine them all winding up in a similar place of what one might call hybrid democracy: constitutions (formal or informal) with non-dominant democratic elements. Like what Iran has now for instance. Or how many democracies already kind of work now, but more so.

Which brings us back around to the question of legitimating ideologies. If in fact these hybrid democracies are the wave of the future, why not come up with some justification for that and make that our official philosophy? Well, the problem is that if there were a legitimating ideology for bureaucracy which most people found compelling, someone would’ve invented it by now. I guess Confucianism comes closest, but really its ideas of legitimacy come from monarchy and the family, not the bureaucrats themselves. And China still justifies its government in Communist terms, not for its own sake. So even if democracy becomes ineffective, there would be good reason to keep its ideology around, even if the ideology is as hollow as Chinese Communism.

Although since democracy is explicitly about popular participation, it might be less able to withstand this sort of evisceration. It’s easy to still be a monarchist even if the king is a weakling governed by his advisors. Less easy to be a democrat and support a government with fake or almost-fake elections. That would leave currently democratic nations in a bind. They wouldn’t be able to adopt an ideology to justify their actual government, since like I said no one likes bureaucracy for its own sake, and most of the alternatives are either non-starters in the modern world (monarchy) or horrific (fascism like in China today).

I suppose you could imagine a modified version of liberal democratic ideals taking over. “Checked liberalism” or “balanced liberalism” or something like that. Liberalism which is implicitly subordinate. Or you could yo-yo between that and some sort of fascist-like ideology which still claims to be responsive to the will of the people but in a way which conveniently doesn’t require elections. Etc.

But to me the likeliest future is one where essentially undemocratic governments which nevertheless for efficiency reasons mostly govern liberally clothe themselves in the skin of a hollowed out “liberal democracy”. Ideology will have converged, and governments will have converged, they just won’t converge to to the same thing. It’s possible that these contradictions will be untenable, that the obvious falsehoods will cause a meltdown, but I would bet against that as well, at least most of the time. Most people just go with the flow after all, and the age of revolutions seems to be passing. Though like I said, occasional flips to fascism/authoritarian populism could happen too. If that sort of fascism proved competitive then I guess it could take over, but I’d bet against that as well.

last time the finnish dragged people this hard the russians were pissing their pants

McCarthy's infinite stupidity can only survive in Republican politics.

norman brannon

Historian Brooks D. Simpson goes for Ron Chernow's throat. 3 dead, 5 injured. More at 9.

Obsessed

My absolute hottest take is that, from a culturally relative perspective, no food is bad. None of it. It's an expression of culture, art, history, ecology, material conditions, subjective taste. It's all inedible pap to somebody and the taste of childhood for someone else. Americans be eating cheesed burger. Pea wet is as good as gravy in Wigan. The French eat snails and the Inuit eat seal, the Germans eat sauerkraut and the Russians drink kvass, the Inca ate cavy and the Romans ate flamingo. People around the world have been eagerly awaiting their serving of simple bread or thin porridge or fermented milk product or pickled whatever-the-fuck since we learned to cook food over fire. We all love the slop we grew up eating. Food is a reflection of millennia of culture and loving human artistic expression. Attempting to extrapolate largely harmless online food banter into actual serious comparative rankings or half-baked critical analyses of cultures based on how much you subjectively don't like what they eat is a miserable way to live. Live a little. Peace and love on the only planet with food.

This is a post of critical support for bland English cuisine and unhinged Brazilian pizzas and everything else I don't understand. Turning food, something literally every person on earth enjoys, into a moral or cultural judgement is, well, if it's not full-blown reactionary and parochial... then it's at least kind of nasty, huh?

Bolivia’s Powerful Cholitas Luchadora Wrestlers Photographed by Todd Antony

“when you meet a lesbian person” published in an atlanta lesbian feminist newsletter, 1976

You joke, but there was a famous trans American jazz musician named Billy Tipton who had 5 wives, and he successfully hid the fact that he was trans from 4 of them by claiming that he lost his dick in a car accident. He was only outed when he died in 1989 at age 74.

King shit right here.

About to get forcefully removed from the Cracker Barrel

Ghada Sasa, Oppressive pines: Uprooting Israeli green colonialism and implanting Palestinian A’wna

“Lemonade” “frosted” with “tranny semen”?

Don’t threaten me with a good time

You promise? 🥺

This man literally constantly talks about "tranny semen"

This is the twitter of a man who is totally not projecting any sexual fantasies

BONUS: He also thinks the US should annex Ukraine

Joey Mannarino: tranny semen? So you can’t get me pregnant? 🥹

This porno didn’t fuck around

there’s… a lot to take in here…

I was so flummoxed by this I had to learn more, so I took to Google, where I found this blog post by Dan Cardone, who was a grip on this film. Some highlights:

“FORTUNATELY ONE OF THE MODELS WAS ALSO A FULLY QUALIFIED NURSE” my god I am LOSING my MIND