COPA VACÍA Shakira x Manuel Turizo
Betty Cooper & Veronica Lodge on Riverdale 7.14: Archie the musical
Can’t stress enough how much of the UK’s immigration policy is intended not just to ‘close the borders’ or anything like that, but instead to be as deliberately evil as possible.
Demanding staff at an asylum reception centre paint over wall art, that made kids feel a bit more welcome, is evil.
The cruelty is the point. They want to make every step of the way towards claiming asylum the hardest it can be.
this guy designed all the tattoos in the Yakuza/Like a Dragon games, his IG is full of amazing work as well
"The points at which the conflict between the individual consciousness and the social consciousness occurs are numerous and important. The social consciousness tends naturally to oppress the individual consciousness. The great social institutions that are called religion, legislative bodies, castes, and classes, tend to subordinate the individual to themselves entirely. But the individual can always react and refuse to allow himself to be absorbed and overrun by the group. The very multiplicity of the social circles in which he participates can be a means of liberation for him, as a means of dominating these social influences, each of which would like to wield exclusive rights over him. He concentrates all of these varied, often antagonistic, influences in his consciousness, and combines them if he has the requisite intellectual energy, in a suitable formula.... The further evolution advances, the more social circles and social influences are multiplied around the individual; the more it thereby favors his originality and independence. And we arrive at this apparently paradoxical fact that the independence of the individual is a direct factor of the number of social circles in which he participates."
- Georges Palante, "Individual Consciousness and Social Consciousness," from Precis de sociologie, reprinted in "There is No Free Society"
Global trade and capital flows were structured very differently in the old specie-standard world than they are in today’s dollar-dominated one. In the former, trade imbalances were limited by the ability of each country to manage specie transfers. No matter how large a country’s economy or how powerful its central bank, its currency could be used to settle trade only to the extent that it was seen as fully exchangeable with specie. As foreign holdings of the country’s currency rose relative to the specie holdings of its central bank, the promise of convertibility would become less and less credible, thereby discouraging the currency’s use.
These limits had important consequences. One was that under a specie standard, trade in each country broadly balanced (with the exception of small imbalances driven by capital flows that funded productive investment). Another, more important consequence was that the process through which trade flows equilibrated—described by the Scottish philosopher and economist David Hume’s model of the price-specie flow mechanism—acted symmetrically on both surplus countries and deficit countries, so that demand contraction in the latter was matched by demand expansion in the former.
The current dollar-based system is very different. In this system, imbalances are limited mainly by the willingness and ability of the United States to import or export claims on its domestic assets—that is, to allow holders of foreign capital to be net sellers or net buyers of American real estate and securities. The result is that countries can run large, persistent surpluses or deficits only because these imbalances are accommodated by opposite imbalances in the United States.
Even worse, the contractionary effect of deficits on the global economy is not offset by expansion in the surplus countries, as it was in pre-dollar systems. At the Bretton Woods conference, in 1944, the British economist John Maynard Keynes strenuously opposed a global trading system in which surpluses or deficits were allowed to persist, but he was overruled by the senior American official at the conference, Harry Dexter White. As a result, deficit countries must absorb the deficient domestic demand of surplus countries while surplus countries avoid adjusting—which would entail either paring back production or redistributing wealth to workers—by accumulating foreign assets and putting permanent downward pressure on global demand.
This adjustment process is not well understood, even among mainstream economists. Surplus countries run surpluses not because they are especially efficient at manufacturing but because their manufacturers enjoy implicit and explicit subsidies that are ultimately paid for by workers and households and so come at the expense of domestic demand. This, as Keynes explained, is how mercantilist policies work—improving international competitiveness by suppressing domestic demand—and is why they are referred to as “beggar thy neighbor” tactics. Rather than converting rising exports into rising imports, they result in persistent trade surpluses.
So I've been following this, but not sure a system that prevents these permanent buildups is any good at selecting which industries or even which firms ought to stop trading while the flow goes the other way.
Like, is there just some automatic stop point past which you can no longer send money out of the country? That seems like it would cause a lot of problems near the limit that don't promote useful industry. Do you have to run each big purchase past the Treasury? "Sorry Mr Smith, you can't buy that Steel until they buy enough of our green beans, they might be selling that steel too cheap, relative to the green beans"
It seems like this quickly become another way to do regulatory capture, except in a fashion impossible to ever get rid of. You can always delete bad laws, but if you have to step in and stop trade after too long...
It sucks that country X is juicing metal prices at the net expense of its citizens, but unless your putting it to the limits of anti-dumping treaties, how can you tell the difference between "they can do this for cheaper" vs "they're subsidizing it too much"?
I don't think it requires that level of oversight! (in fact it is the current system with industry specific tariffs and trade deals that requires government intervention on a case by case basis).
if trade surplus nations cannot park their cash in the US because capital flows are blocked or taxed then they simply cannot run the surpluses they do, and will be compelled to import more or export less: the numbers must balance.
could you explain a little how the incentives work in the latter situation? why must the numbers balance?
the big picture is simple: if you export goods to the US and receive a trillion US dollars in return then you have to spend those dollars somehow and if the only way to do that is buying goods back from the US then that's what you will do and the trade will balance.
you could spend the dollars buying goods from another country but then they would have the dollars and need to spend them on something, eventually someone would have to spend them buying goods from the US otherwise what's the point of even having these dollars in the first place, you wouldn't bother giving away a trillion dollars worth of goods to get nothing back.
however in the current global trade system instead of importing goods to balance your exports you could instead choose to export more than you import and then store the balance in foreign assets instead: purchasing US companies and US real estate or lending the money to US financial institutions or the US government itself in the form of buying treasury bonds, which is probably the easiest place to park a trillion US dollars if you happen to have that many.
because the US is willing to absorb arbitrary amounts of foreign capital and has markets deep enough to take it, this can go on for a long time! countries (Germany, China, Japan, etc.) can pursue mercantilist policies where they subsidise their exporters at the expense of their local households, boosting production and undercutting any country that does not do this in order to take their market share.
however this inexorably drives up debt and/or unemployment in the deficit countries, which must now purchase more than they sell and see their own industrial sector gutted, it's bad for these countries -- or at least large sectors of these countries, the financial industry is fine with it -- and it's also bad for the world as it depresses overall productivity and consumption, and consumption is good!
to put it simply we could say that German and Chinese workers are being underpaid so that American workers can be unemployed, this is not a good outcome for anyone!
a system of balanced global trade would make us all (mostly) better off, but only the US can make it happen, as only US hegemony has made it this unbalanced in the first place.
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?
st-just: being a boring socdem is still available?
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:
There are three main Modi actions that have people concerned, and in my estimation all of them are worth worrying about. ...So yes, I’m certainly concerned about the direction India’s governance is taking under Modi, despite his reassurances. But does this mean I think the U.S. should avoid an alliance with India? Absolutely not.
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
Take a modern country like Venezuela. Venezuela is a basket-case, with catastrophic inflation combined with a moribund economy almost entirely reliant on oil exports, all atop substantial internal instability. Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case). But because the leaders of a country like Venezuela know that, they may well try to avoid developing their country into such a weak state in the first place. Sure, bribery and corruption are fun, but only if you live long enough to use it; it’s not worth ruining the economy if the only consequence is being killed when Brazil, Colombia or the United States invades, disassembles your weakened and underfunded military and then annexes the country. The reason that doesn’t happen is not because the United States, Brazil or Colombia has suddenly developed morality (the USA’s record as a neighbor to Central and South America is not one we ought generally to be proud of), but because it no longer makes economic sense to do so. The value of the oil and other resources would be less than the cost of maintaining control of the country. This is why, I’d argue, you see the proliferation of failed states globally: in the past it would be actively profitable for non-failed states to take advantage of them, but as a result of the changes in our economies, failed states instead represent a question of managing costs. States no longer ask if they can profit through a war of conquest, but rather if they’d spend less managing the disaster that a local failed state is by invading versus trying to manage the problem via aid or controlling refugee flows. Even by that calculation, invasion has generally proved a losing option.
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.
Source: acoup.blog
oligopsalter-deactivated2020060
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.
nineteenth-order-simulacra
last time the finnish dragged people this hard the russians were pissing their pants
Source: twitter.com
McCarthy's infinite stupidity can only survive in Republican politics.
I have often argued that “normal people” don’t get into hardcore — and that the ones who do don’t stick around too long — so even as a kid, I sometimes introduced myself by asking, “What fucked you up enough to be here?”
There was always an answer.
Historian Brooks D. Simpson goes for Ron Chernow's throat. 3 dead, 5 injured. More at 9.
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?
