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anonymous

Can Jared Loughner help us get beyond good and evil? - 0 views

www.boingboing.net/...can-jared-loughner-h.html

shared by anonymous on 20 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Feeney's piece is worth reading in its entirety, as is Beyond Good and Evil. It's a lot to sum up in a blog post, but Nietzsche basically says there are two types of moral systems: master-morality and slave-morality. His best summary is section 260. In master-morality, the ruling class makes the rules and thus considers itself noble, while in slave morality, there is a suspicion of those in power and in what they consider "good."
  • In other words, it's all a big misunderstanding based on your point of view, kind of like how you might see Palin as evil when your neighbor sees her as good.
  • What's interesting in relation to mass murders like the Tucson incident is that people can rationalize their way into an internally consistent logic that normalizes their thoughts and actions.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • When Giffords gave an apparently unacceptable response to Loughner's obtuse question about language not being real, she seems to have caused him some cognitive dissonance. He apparently expected her to recognize his intellectual superiority, and when she didn't, he became fixated on what he saw as a slight that threw his self-assessment into question.
  • Everyone, myself included, probably has a delusion or two in their belief system. Once in a while they combine with other factors in a person to create a lethal combination: anger, incompetence, rejection, isolation, lack of empathy, drug-induced hallucinations, participation in economies of violence, unthinking behavior, production of a flawed script. That's not evil. It's simply a tragic nexus of human flaws that can culminate in what is too easily dismissed as evil.
  • anonymous on 20 Jan 11
     
    "Nietzsche is frequently a fave of angry young men who might qualify as what Pesco called confident dumb people. Nietzsche works well for the modern kook with web-induced attention deficits: The fourth chapter of Beyond Good and Evil is a series of 122 Twitter-length aphorisms, and his work is snarky and occasionally humorous. Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil to criticize earlier philosophers who made assumptions about morality based on pre-Christian and Christian beliefs about "evil." Below I discuss why we need to steal Nietzsche back from these people, and I look at a couple of other writers who have examined what gets called "evil" and have attempted to explain it in more nuanced and rational terms."
anonymous

Revolution and the Muslim World - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...21-revolution-and-muslim-world

stratfor geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 23 Feb 11 - Cached
  • There have been moments in history where revolution spread in a region or around the world as if it were a wildfire.
  • Each had a basic theme.
  • But in the end, the reasons behind them could reasonably be condensed into a sentence or two.
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • The key is that in each country where they took place, there were significant differences in the details — but they shared core principles at a time when other countries were open to those principles, at least to some extent.
  • The Muslim countries of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have been the prime focus of these risings, and in particular North Africa where Egypt, Tunisia and now Libya have had profound crises.
  • The key principle that appears to be driving the risings is a feeling that the regimes, or a group of individuals within the regimes, has deprived the public of political and, more important, economic rights — in short, that they enriched themselves beyond what good taste permitted.
  • Why has it come together now?
  • One reason is that there was a tremendous amount of regime change in the region from the 1950s through the early 1970s, as the Muslim countries created regimes to replace foreign imperial powers and were buffeted by the Cold War.
  • More than anything, if we want to define this wave of unrest, particularly in North Africa, it is a rising against regimes — and particularly individuals — who have been in place for extraordinarily long periods of time.
  • In this case, the question of greatest importance is not why these revolutions are taking place, but who will take advantage of them.
  • In this case, whatever the cause of the risings, there is no question that radical Islamists will attempt to take advantage and control of them. Why wouldn’t they? It is a rational and logical course for them.
  • Whether they will be able to do so is a more complex and important question, but that they would want to and are trying to do so is obvious.
  • But while there is no question that Islamists would like to take control of the revolution, that does not mean that they will, nor does it mean that these revolutions will be successful. Recall that 1848 and 1968 were failures and those who tried to take advantage of them had no vehicle to ride. Also recall that taking control of a revolution is no easy thing. But as we saw in Russia in 1917, it is not necessarily the more popular group that wins, but the best organized. And you frequently don’t find out who is best organized until afterwards.
  • Democratic revolutions have two phases.
  • The first is the establishment of democracy. The second is the election of governments.
  • So there are three crosscurrents here.
  • The first is the reaction against corrupt regimes. The second is the election itself. And the third? The United States needs to remember, as it applauds the rise of democracy, that the elected government may not be what one expected.
  • pictures of peaceful demonstrators are not nearly as significant as the media will have you believe, but pictures of demonstrators continuing to hold their ground after being fired on is very significant.
  • This leads to the key event in the revolution. The revolutionaries cannot defeat armed men. But if those armed men, in whole or part, come over to the revolutionary side, victory is possible. And this is the key event.
  • In Libya, the military has split wide open.
  • If the split in the military is roughly equal and deep, this could lead to civil war.
  • Far more common is for the military to split. If the split creates an overwhelming anti-regime force, this leads to the revolution’s success.
  • It is this act, the military and police coming over to the side of the demonstrators, that makes or breaks a revolution.
  • Therefore, looking at the students on TV tells you little. Watching the soldiers tells you much more.
  • The danger is not radical Islam, but chaos, followed either by civil war, the military taking control simply to stabilize the situation or the emergence of a radical Islamic party to take control — simply because they are the only ones in the crowd with a plan and an organization. That’s how minorities take control of revolutions.
  • Only in the case of Eastern Europe do we see broad revolutionary success, but that was against an empire in collapse, so few lessons can be drawn from that for the Muslim world.
  • democracy and pro-Western political culture do not mean the same thing.
  • There are three possibilities.
  • One is that this is like 1848, a broad rising that will fail for lack of organization and coherence, but that will resonate for decades.
  • The second is 1968, a revolution that overthrew no regime even temporarily and left some cultural remnants of minimal historical importance.
  • The third is 1989, a revolution that overthrew the political order in an entire region, and created a new order in its place.
  • anonymous on 23 Feb 11
     
    "The Muslim world, from North Africa to Iran, has experienced a wave of instability in the last few weeks. No regimes have been overthrown yet, although as of this writing, Libya was teetering on the brink."
anonymous

Rand and Empirical Responsibility 13 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...pirical-responsibility-13.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Feb 11 - Cached
  • How, for example, does she know that intellectual appeasement is merely an attempt to apologize for being concerned about intellectual matters? Where would she get such a notion? Where on earth does she come up with the idea that intellectual appeasement involves an "escape from loneliness"? What evidence does she have that such is the case?
  • “Tribalism is … a logical consequence of modern philosophy.” This is a specific application of Rand's theory of history. The trouble with such statements is that, because they are so broad and sweeping, they can neither be corroborated or refuted by empirical evidence.
  • it is far more plausible to suppose that tribalism is a hard-wired feature of human nature, prominent in many human beings, and only weaker or non-existent within the exceptional few.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Philosophy, as Nietzsche noticed more than hundred years ago and which cognitive science and experimental psychology continues to corroborate, often degenerates into a mere rationalization of the the desires, sentiments, and interests that afflict various strains of human nature.
  • anonymous on 15 Feb 11
     
    "Rand, despite her cluelessness about human nature, nevertheless couldn't help tossing off wildly speculative remarks about the more obscure motivations of the human animal."
anonymous

How mainstream games butchered themselves and why it's my fault - 0 views

www.pcgamer.com/...hemselves-and-why-its-my-fault

gaming

shared by anonymous on 08 Mar 11 - Cached
  • Unskippable cut-scenes exist because idiots like me skip the skippable ones. There’s text on screen because idiots like me don’t listen to the characters, and the characters are repeating what the text says because idiots like me won’t read the text. Friendly characters are invincible because idiots like me would shoot them, and we’re not allowed to shoot them because idiots like me will try anyway.
  • For the most part, Half-Life and its sequel did it right: you could always look wherever you wanted, and after the intro you were usually free to move. You generally couldn’t interact with the scripted sequences, but for logical reasons – they happened out of reach or behind glass.
  • I don’t have Attention Deficit Disorder, designers – you do. Only one of us in this relationship is forcing the other to look at what they’re doing. We’re locked in a destructive cycle of dickification: I resent when you take control away from me, so I’m as much of a dick as the controls permit. You see dicks like me being dicks in your playtests, and you think of new ways to be bigger dicks back: to force me to watch your scenes, play out your script, follow your high-school reading level plot.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But in a desperate, frantic attempt to engage disinterested jerks like me, it tried to shove its horrible characters, misjudged script and awkward on-rails sections down my throat before showing me what the game was really about. If it wasn’t for Rich’s review, I’d never have drudged through that miserable dross to the game I like beyond.
  • anonymous on 08 Mar 11
     
    "I'm a horrible gamer. Hopefully it doesn't show in ordinary conversation, but as soon as I start playing something, I become an asshole. The instant the first character speaks, I reflexively want them to shut up. If there's text on screen, I'm not reading it. If there's a cut-scene, I'm skipping it. If there are no enemies to shoot, I shoot my friends, and if I can't shoot my friends, I shoot just next to my friends and then swing my crosshair onto them as quickly as possible in a lame attempt to glance them with a bullet I know won't do anything. I thought that was normal."
anonymous

Visegrad: A New European Military Force | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ad-new-european-military-force

shared by anonymous on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • The Visegrad Group, or V4, consists of four countries — Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary — and is named after two 14th century meetings held in Visegrad Castle in present-day Hungary of leaders of the medieval kingdoms of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia.
  • The group was reconstituted in 1991 in post-Cold War Europe as the Visegrad Three (at that time, Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one).
  • On May 12, the Visegrad Group announced the formation of a “battle group” under the command of Poland. The battle group would be in place by 2016 as an independent force and would not be part of NATO command.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • First, they felt that the Russian threat had declined if not dissipated following the fall of the Soviet Union.
  • Second, they felt that their economic future was with the European Union.
  • Third, they believed that membership in NATO, with strong U.S. involvement, would protect their strategic interests.
  • Of late, their analysis has clearly been shifting.
  • First, Russia has changed dramatically since the Yeltsin years. It has increased its power in the former Soviet sphere of influence substantially
  • Second, the infatuation with Europe, while not gone, has frayed. The ongoing economic crisis, now focused again on Greece, has raised two questions: whether Europe as an entity is viable and whether the reforms proposed to stabilize Europe represent a solution for them or primarily for the Germans.
  • Finally, there are severe questions as to whether NATO provides a genuine umbrella of security to the region and its members. The NATO strategic concept, which was drawn up in November 2010, generated substantial concern on two scores. First, there was the question of the degree of American commitment to the region, considering that the document sought to expand the alliance’s role in non-European theaters of operation.
  • Second, the general weakness of European militaries meant that, willingness aside, the ability of the Europeans to participate in defending the region was questionable.
  • Germany’s commitment to both NATO and the EU has been fraying. The Germans and the French split on the Libya question, with Germany finally conceding politically but unwilling to send forces. Libya might well be remembered less for the fate of Moammar Gadhafi than for the fact that this was the first significant strategic break between Germany and France in decades.
  • There are strong political forces in Germany questioning the value of the EU to Germany, and with every new wave of financial crises requiring German money, that sentiment becomes stronger.
  • For all of the Visegrad countries, any sense of a growing German alienation from Europe and of a growing German-Russian economic relationship generates warning bells.
  • The Nordic countries share the same concerns as the Visegrad countries — the future course of Russian power, the cohesiveness of Europe and the commitment of the United States.
  • In the past, the Visegrad countries would have been loath to undertake anything that felt like a unilateral defense policy. Therefore, the decision to do this is significant in and of itself.
  • Poland is the largest of these countries by far and in the least advantageous geographical position. The Poles are trapped between the Germans and the Russians. Historically, when Germany gets close to Russia, Poland tends to suffer. It is not at that extreme point yet, but the Poles do understand the possibilities.
  • Some will say this is over-reading on my part or an overreaction on the part of the V4, but it is neither. For the V4, the battle group is a modest response to emerging patterns in the region, which STRATFOR had outlined in its 2011 Annual Forecast. As for my reading, I regard the new patterns not as a minor diversion from the main pattern but as a definitive break in the patterns of the post-Cold War world
  • We are in a new era, as yet unnamed, and we are seeing the first breaks in the post-Cold War pattern.
  • For the countries on the periphery, there is a perpetual sense of insecurity, generated not only by Russian power compared to their own but also by uncertainty as to whether the rest of Europe would be prepared to defend them in the event of Russian actions. The V4 and the other countries south of them are not as sanguine about Russian intentions as others farther away are. Perhaps they should be, but geopolitical realities drive consciousness and insecurity and distrust defines this region.
  • Pilsudski proposed an alliance stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea and encompassing the countries to the west of the Carpathians — Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
  • An alliance with Ukraine would provide significant strategic depth. It is unlikely to happen. That means that the alliance must stretch south, to include Romania and Bulgaria. The low-level tension between Hungary and Romania over the status of Hungarians in Romania makes that difficult, but if the Hungarians can live with the Slovaks, they can live with the Romanians. Ultimately, the interesting question is whether Turkey can be persuaded to participate in this, but that is a question far removed from Turkish thinking now. History will have to evolve quite a bit for this to take place. For now, the question is Romania and Bulgaria.
  • the decision of the V4 to even propose a battle group commanded by Poles is one of those small events that I think will be regarded as a significant turning point. However we might try to trivialize it and place it in a familiar context, it doesn’t fit. It represents a new level of concern over an evolving reality — the power of Russia, the weakness of Europe and the fragmentation of NATO. This is the last thing the Visegrad countries wanted to do, but they have now done the last thing they wanted to do. That is what is significant.
  • anonymous on 17 May 11
     
    "With the Palestinians demonstrating and the International Monetary Fund in turmoil, it would seem odd to focus this week on something called the Visegrad Group. But this is not a frivolous choice. What the Visegrad Group decided to do last week will, I think, resonate for years, long after the alleged attempted rape by Dominique Strauss-Kahn is forgotten and long before the Israeli-Palestinian issue is resolved. The obscurity of the decision to most people outside the region should not be allowed to obscure its importance. "
anonymous

New Mexican President, Same Cartel War? - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...ican-president-same-cartel-war

geopolitics mexico U.S. cartel war

shared by anonymous on 16 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In any democratic election, opposition parties always criticize the policies of the incumbent. This tactic is especially true when the country is involved in a long and costly war.
  • This strategy is what we are seeing now in Mexico with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) criticizing the way the administration of Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the National Action Party (PAN), has prosecuted its war against the Mexican cartels.
  • One of the trial balloons that the opposition parties — especially the PRI — seem to be floating at present is the idea that if they are elected they will reverse Calderon’s policy of going after the cartels with a heavy hand and will instead try to reach some sort of accommodation with them.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • In effect, this stratagem would be a return of the status quo ante during the PRI administrations
  • no matter who wins the 2012 election, the new president will have little choice but to maintain the campaign against the Mexican cartels.
  • over the past decade there have been changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States.
  • much of the U.S. supply came into Florida via Caribbean routes.
  • Over the past decade, the tables turned. Now, the Mexican cartels control most of the cocaine flow and the Colombian gangs are the junior partners in the relationship.
  • they are also involved in the smuggling of South American cocaine to Europe and Australia. This expanded cocaine supply chain means that the Mexican cartels have assumed a greater risk of loss along the extended supply routes
  • black-tar heroin and methamphetamine, has also helped bring big money (and power) to the Mexican cartels. These drugs have proved to be quite lucrative for the Mexican cartels because the cartels own the entire production process. This is not the case with cocaine, which the cartels have to purchase from South American suppliers.
  • These changes in the flow of narcotics into the United States mean that the Mexican narcotics-smuggling corridors into the United States are now more lucrative than ever for the Mexican cartels, and the increasing value of these corridors has heightened the competition — and the violence — to control them.
  • Most of the violence in Mexico today is cartel-on-cartel, and the cartels have not chosen to explicitly target civilians or the government. Even the violence we do see directed against Mexican police officers or government figures is usually not due to their positions but to the perception that they are on the payroll of a competing cartel.
  • Consider this: Three and a half years ago, the Beltran Leyva Organization (BLO) was a part of the Sinaloa Federation. Following the arrest of Alfredo Beltran Leyva in January 2008, Alfredo’s brothers blamed Sinaloa chief Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera, declared war on El Chapo and split from the Sinaloa Federation to form their own organization.
  • not only did the BLO leave the Sinaloa Federation, it also split twice to form three new cartels.
  • There are two main cartel groups, one centered on the Sinaloa Federation and the other on Los Zetas, but these groups are loose alliances rather than hierarchical organizations, and there are still many smaller independent players, such as CIDA, La Resistencia and the CJNG. This means that a government attempt to broker some sort of universal understanding with the cartels in order to decrease the violence would be far more challenging than it would have been a decade ago.
  • Another problem is the change that has occurred in the nature of the crimes the cartels commit. The Mexican cartels are no longer just drug cartels, and they no longer just sell narcotics to the U.S. market.
  • Up until a few months ago, it was common to hear U.S. government officials refer to the Mexican cartels using the acronym “DTOs,” or drug trafficking organizations. Today, that acronym is rarely, if ever, heard. It has been replaced by “TCO,” which stands for transnational criminal organization. This acronym recognizes that the Mexican cartels engage in many criminal enterprises, not just narcotics smuggling.
  • Mexican cartels have become involved in kidnapping, extortion, cargo theft, oil theft and diversion, arms smuggling, human smuggling, carjacking, prostitution and music and video piracy.
  • These additional lines of business are lucrative, and there is little likelihood that the cartels would abandon them even if smuggling narcotics became easier.
  • this diversification is also a factor that must be considered in discussing the legalization of narcotics and the impact that would have on the Mexican cartels.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 16 Jun 11
       
      This would seem to be crucial, since discussion of what the U.S. can do always seems to boil (for us) down to one of decriminalization. While that may (or may not) be wise, it does not necessarily follow that it will 'fix' the problem.
  • Another way the cartels have sought to generate revenue through alternative means is to increase drug sales inside Mexico. While drugs sell for less on the street in Mexico than they do in the United States, they require less overhead, since they don’t have to cross the U.S. border.
  • There has been a view among some in Mexico that the flow of narcotics through Mexico is something that might be harmful for the United States but doesn’t really harm Mexico. Indeed, as the argument goes, the money the drug trade generates for the Mexican economy is quite beneficial. The increase in narcotics sales in Mexico belies this, and in many places, such as the greater Mexico City region, much of the violence we’ve seen involves fighting over turf for local drug sales and not necessarily fighting among the larger cartel groups
  • As the Mexican election approaches, the idea of accommodating the cartels may continue to be presented as a logical alternative to the present policies, and it might be used to gain political capital, but anyone who carefully examines the situation on the ground will see that the concept is totally untenable.
  • in the same way President Obama was forced by ground realities to follow many of the Bush administration policies he criticized as a candidate, the next Mexican president will have little choice but to follow the policies of the Calderon administration in continuing the fight against the cartels.
  • anonymous on 16 Jun 11
     
    Here's the latest from StratFor regarding the Mexican Cartel War and how the upcoming 2012 Mexican election might be impacted by the events of the last few years.
anonymous

Rand & Human Nature 3 - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-human-nature-3.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 09 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The first strong hint that this might be the case was unconvered by Hume, who persuasively demonstrated that, logically speaking, it was invalid to derive an ought conclusion from two is premises.
  • in the absence of some desire, sentiment, or other natural and emotive need, no moral end could arise.
  • The second strong hint comes from George Santayana, who, in his demolishment of Moore's ethical philosophy (as limned by Russell) , noted that all arguments for morality committed the ad hominem fallacy
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The third strong hint was noticed, among others, by Pareto when, in his mammoth work investigating the relation between conduct and belief, Trattato di sociologia generale, he noticed that most moral philosophies were devoid of specific ethical content.
  • the purpose of moral philosophy is not to provide guidance
  • but to coddle and flatter human sentiments.
  • Scientific experiments on human behavior only serve to reinforce Pareto's hypothesis. What they demonstrate is that human beings develop a sense for morality well before they are ever exposed, or could even understand, abstract moral philosophy
  • When we apply these insights to the Objectivist ethics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Rand's moral system, like the moral systems of so many other philosophers, consists almost entirely of the rationalization of moral ideals that existed well before any set of abstractions was built around them.
  • the strongest evidence of all consists in the rather surprising fact, unnoticed and evaded by most Objectivists, that Rand's ethical philosophy is devoid of specific content, and that no one could actually use it as a guide for behavior
  • Lacking a "technology" means that no Objectivist, including Rand herself, actually follows the Objectivist morality.
  • Other than a few vague hints, Rand and her disciples never bothered to explain how to distinguish those contexts in which such virtues as honesty, productivity, integrity, and rationality were absolutes from those contexts in which these fine virtues no longer applied.
  • If Rand's ethics were intended (as Rand insisted) to provide a manual for survival, how come the manual doesn't come with any instructions?
  • The most plausible explanation is that the Objectivist ethics is a rationalization of Rand's own moral preferences, many of which were the product of her own, private cognitive unconscious, which she misidentified with "reason" and objective truth.
  • anonymous on 09 Aug 11
     
    "Moral Philosophy = Rationalization. There are convincing and powerful reasons to believe that nearly all that passes for what might be called exhortive, "normative" ethical philosophy is almost certainly rationalization."
anonymous

Unemployment and jobs: Work for post-materialists - 4 views

www.economist.com/...unemployment-and-jobs

economics post-materialist

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - Cached
  • I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today.
  • there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment".
  • Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure
  • This is me. I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work. Reihan Salam has written provocatively on the subject of threshold earners, in addition to introducing me to David Roberts' related idea of "the medium chill".
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      Word up. There are too many things I want to do that cost me money--or at least don't pay me.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      This resonated with me, as well. I am actually pretty good at doing things that are completely tertiary to my job. I've been focused on turning my full-time job into that, but what I'd really like is some way to bounce from project to project, doing what I'm good at, getting some fulfillment, and getting something back from it. I feel like all these little internet-networks hold the potential for that, but - as the article points out - it's not as though you can get by that way.
  • as Ronald Inglehart has documented, the achievement of high levels of widespread material well-being has precipitated a momentous shift toward "post-materialist" values across the entire developed world.
  • Having secured a relatively comfortable standard of living, we have come to worry less about the stuff we need to get by and more about the pursuit of self-realisation, meaning in life, justice in society, and harmony with the natural world.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      I think this is part of the "we're slipping into European economic views" thing.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      Speaking for my wife and I, we feel like our material focus isn't on keeping up with the joneses, but doing stuff that makes enjoy our days just a little bit more.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 21 Jul 11
       
      Unamerican! ;)
  • Whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable.  
  • So, yeah, I'd like to see wage subsidies and a 4% inflation target. But I'd also like to see a shift away from economic policy that pushes us so insistently into the "employee" role. What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody's payroll with social security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from your wages? Self-employed!
  • You must work for somebody, even if it's yourself.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      "Gotta Serve Somebody" is on my morning playlist. Dylan brings the truth.
  • But I don't want to be a tiny business that hires me. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want to be a boss at all, or to have one. I just want to work and get paid for it, on terms agreeable to the parties involved.
  • Clearly, decoupling health benefits from employment would help a lot. Less obviously, but at least as importantly, we need to eliminate the insane patchwork of regulations that keep folks from legally cutting hair for money in a kitchen, or legally making a few bucks every now and then taxiing people around town in a 1988 Ford Escort. De-formalising and de-bureaucratising labour certainly makes it harder for government to track who has paid what to whom, who owes how much in various taxes, and so forth. But it would be truly pathetic if the legal/economic organisation of our society was optimised for government surveillance and tax collection and not for the exercise of autonomy in pursuit of a meaningful life.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 20 Jul 11
       
      ... Maybe. The fact of the matter is that group insurance rates through employers tend to be much more affordable than getting individual coverage. There's a reason so many hipsters and art types work part-time at Starbucks and other shops that offer benefits to part-time workers. Just as there's a reason for regulation beyond just tracking how money moves. We don't just certify drugs or beef because we want to make sure we know what people are spending money on at the supermarket.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 20 Jul 11
       
      Quite true. Will's a bit too anti-regulatory for my taste. To expand your observation: if we let the free market do its thing, it does not logically follow that all our food will be safer, absent a regulatory apparatus. In fact, my hazy recollection is that the mix of regional laws and patchwork of safety requirements is one reason that some industries _crave_ regulation, so they can do business without quadrupling the size of their legal department.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "The Atlantic, with the support of McKinsey & Company, has put together a forum on the question: 'What's the single best thing Washington can do to jump-start job creation?'"
anonymous

Why Rand Never Lost an Argument - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...-rand-never-lost-argument.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The written evidence, such as it is, demonstrates no very great arguing skill on Rand's part. Quite the contrary, Rand, when she deigns to offer any sort of arguments at all, produces rather poor ones, afflicted with yawning gaps and blistering equivocations.
  • There are several factors which contribue to explaining this anamoly. Rand depended on at least five such factors to provide the varnish of irrefragibility over her otherwise hollow and empirically impoverished arguments.
  • Inability of individuals to evaluate the quality of arguments made on behalf of conclusions they agree with.Intimidation tacticsSelection of debating opponentsReliance on explicit articulation of viewsAvoidance of empirical tests in favor of verbalism
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • (1) Cognitive science and experimental psychology have uncovered reams of evidence that people are not very good at evaluating arguments when they agree with the conclusions.
  • Devotees of Ayn Rand sincerely believe that the Objectivist metaphysics, although based on little more than empty tautologies and other such empirically vacuous truisms, represents the very acme of logical soundness.
  • People tend to believe what they want to believe
  • If only bad arguments are available, they will gravitate toward the best of the bad.
  • Most people become attracted to Objectivism when they are young and without experience either of the world or of philosophical arguments
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This was my experience. Though quite intellectual (seeming) from a very young age, the fact of the matter was that binary, reductionist thinking was a very large part of my intellectual adolescence. I moved from fundamentalist Christianity, to strict Libertarianism, to strict Objectivism, before finally understanding it wasn't the *second* part of those labels that was the real problem - it was the first: fundaminalist... strict... strict...
  • Rand's Objectivist philosophy provides an intriguing set of rationalizations defending an extreme form of secular individualism and egoism coupled with common sense view of reality.
  • (2) For Rand, intimidation became central to maintaining her intellectual dominance over disciples.
  • I learned ... that it didn't pay to be confrontational with [Rand]. If I saw or suspected some inconsistency, I would point it out in calm and even tones, as if it were "no big deal." That way, she would often accept the correction and go on. To expose the inconsistency bluntly and nakedly would only infuriate her
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      This has been validated by other writings. Those of poorer stills with verbalization would be absolutely savaged by her.
  • Many of my patients used to tell me that they were terrified to ask questions because of the way Miss Rand might respond to them.
  • I remember many occasions when Rand pounced, assuming that a question was motivated by hostility to her or her ideas, or that the questioner was intellectually dishonest or irrational, or had evil motives, or was her "enemy."
  • A young man asked if her brief characterization of Immanuel Kant's philosophy was accurate, and she exploded that she had not come here to be insulted. I was surprised at the heated tone of her response because he was not antagonistic to her and he had, as I watched him, no glimmer of malice or "gotcha" in his eyes.
  • Rand's anger helped shield her from effective criticism. It encouraged her disciples to be extra cautious when asking questions, which led to many important doctrines in Objectivism remaining unchallenged.
  • Individuals tend to be rather poor at evaluating and criticizing their own beliefs. For this reason, criticism from others is essential for any philosophy that presumes to be rational.
  • Indeed, criticism from others is central to rationality.
  • Rand's refusal to allow herself to be effectively challenged renders her system irrational and dogmatic.
  • (3) Rand not only refused to engage in formal debates with other philosophers and intellectuals, she refused to have anything to do with the two groups which could have challenged her most effectively, namely, conservatives and liberatarians.
  • Her disdain for libertarians is both notorious and perplexing. The reasons for her disdain (which include such trivial reasons as her dislike for the word libertarian) strike one as contrived and superficial, as if they were mere rationalizations.
  • It is not difficult to understand the attraction Ayn Rand has for the uninstructed. She appears, I suppose, to be the spokesman for freedom, for self-esteem, and other equally noble ideals. However, patient examination reveals her pronouncements to be but a shroud beneath which lies the corpse of illogic.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 19 Jul 11
       
      And this is from a member of a movement that's been broadly sympathetic to the spirit, if not the letter, of Objectivism.
  • Rand's hostility (and the subsequent Objectivism policy to avoid libertarians because, as Peikoff once put it, Libertarians are worse than communists) gave her a pretext for avoiding the very group which could offer the most well-informed criticism of her Objectivist philosophy
  • Rand kept her distance from them, as she kept her distance from conservative intellectuals. By doing so, Rand was able to protect herself from just the sort of intellectuals who could have conquered her in debate.
  • Rand never lost an argument, not because she was a great debator, but because she never took on any challenging opponents.
  • (4) Many people do not know how to verbalize their basic beliefs.
  • Regardless of how poor Rand's actual arguments might be, the very fact that she could articulate her beliefs would give her a decisive advantage.
  • (5) In the absence of effective, empirical criticism, debates are determined by factors that have little, if anything to do with the truth.
  • Debates conducted without reference to effective empirical criticism become exercises in verbal facility, where the most aggressive, articulate, personable, and/or witty debator inevitably wins.
  • anonymous on 19 Jul 11
     
    "Sam Anderson, in a review of Anne Heller's biography of Rand, notes: "Eyewitnesses say that [Rand] never lost an argument." Given the poor quality of many of Rand's actual arguments, as one finds them embalmed in her writings, this is a bit of anamoly." You think? :) Another great ARCHN on July 19, 2011
anonymous

Can Objectivism Be Criticised? - 0 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...objectivism-be-criticised.html

objecgtivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Most of Rand’s critics have probably read her key essays several times over, so if they don’t understand them maybe it’s because Rand isn’t as clear as her acolytes claim.
  • a number of stock objections
  • Theory of Concepts
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Epistemology
  • Rand herself became irate when informed by Joan Blumenthal that the tree she thought she saw outside her hospital window was really an IV pole.
  • Ethics
  • Politics
  • Religion
  • Although Objectivists tell us how stunningly original Rand was, most of her ideas and even the way she defends them are quite similar to other thinkers and schools of philosophy.
  • “Objectivism is a version of empiricism.” As such it is subject to the standard criticisms of empiricism, in particular the difficulty of explaining necessity, mathematics and logic without the aid of a priori knowledge. Another example is Rand’s belief that man’s mind is tabula rasa, which makes it subject to various objections from evolutionary psychology.
  • If an Objectivist historian of science and an Objectivist physicist can’t get issues right in their own field whereas Leonard Peikoff (who has expertise in neither) can, what’s the hope for the rest of us?
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "Apparently not. Neil Parille plumbs the latest depths of Objectivist apparatchik stupidity so you don't have to."
anonymous

Rand & Aesthetics 20 - 2 views

aynrandcontrahumannature.blogspot.com/...rand-aesthetics-20.html

objectivism criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther. Art gives him that fuel; the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 11
       
      Quote by Rand
  • I suspect that this statement explains more about Rand's aesthetics than any of Rand's specific theories about art.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 11
       
      Which is at the heart of what passes for her methodology.
  • Now while anyone may have as narrow (or as wide) aesthetic tastes as they please, in a philosopher of aesthetics, such prejudices are deeply problematic. How can a philosopher provide insights on aesthetics applicable to all (or at least most) individuals when their tastes are so confined within the narrow bounds of their own narcissistic agendas?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Don Quixote is a malevolent universe attack on all values as such. It belongs in the same class with two other books, which together make up the three books I hate most: Don Quixote, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 13 Jul 11
       
      A general rule of thumb: Any books Ayn Rand hates are very likely classics worthy of your attention.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 14 Jul 11
       
      Where is the "like" button on that note?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Jul 11
       
      Hah. Thanks. I know my Rand-bashing is probably old to some of my peeps. I try to keep most off the radar, but as a recovered Objectivist, this is all very cathartic.
  • And by implication, anyone who admires and enjoys these three novels is also evil. Rand was not content merely to state her own likes and dislikes, however narrow and prejudiced these might have been; but she also had to attack and disparage those whose tastes differed from her own.
  • In going through Rand's aesthetic judgments, one can't help noticing how often Rand conflates her personal tastes with objective truth
  • Her "Objectivist" philosophy is really the most subjective of philosophies. It's all about her: her tastes, her emotions, her wants, her needs, all writ large in platonic letters across the heavens.
  • The standard of truth and morality in Objectivism is not "reason" or logic or fact; it is Ayn Rand herself. What Rand said is true is true, despite what all the great thinkers and scientists said before her. What Ayn Rand said is good or evil is good or evil, regardless of whatever natural needs may exist elsewhere in the universe. This explains, perhaps more than anything else, why Objectivsm so quickly degenerated into an Ayn Rand personality cult.
  • Rand claim to found her philosophy on the axiom existence exists; but it is really founded on the (implicit) axiom that equates Rand's thoughts and judgments with objective truth.
  • anonymous on 13 Jul 11
     
    Succinct, scathing, and a hell of a read. It's Ayn Rand as the brooding teenager figuring the universe out via scribbling passionate post-its and arranging them on a corkboard. She had it all figured out... It begins: Art as "fuel." For Rand, one of the primary objectives of art was to serve as a kind of spiritual sustenance or "fuel"
anonymous

Eurozone Crisis: Not a Greek Drama - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urozone-crisis-not-greek-drama

geopolitics eu greece

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Lost in the coverage is the fact that Greece constitutes 2.5 percent of Eurozone GDP and Eurozone member states’ direct exposure to Greece is manageable.
  • After a year and a half of watching the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis unfold, we should put one notion to rest: no one event, crisis or decision will cause the Eurozone to collapse. Such a complex system of financial and monetary relationships will not unravel in a day, a month or a year.
  • Eurozone member states have proven highly flexible in their handling of the crisis.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Skeptics contend that because the Eurozone was primarily a political creation, its economic logic is fundamentally flawed. A singular economic or political shock — such as the collapse of the Greek government — could therefore unravel the entire bloc by exposing a slew of economic problems.
  • Precisely because the Eurozone is a political creation, however, fundamental changes in the geopolitics of Europe are required to undermine it. Furthermore, the greater the imminent financial crisis, the greater the likelihood that Eurozone member states will find flexible means to resolve it. This resourcefulness has been evidenced throughout the crisis.
  • Therefore if all else fails, the ECB will print money.
  • The idea that the ECB would participate in its own dissolution because it is committed to its independence, or to maintaining 2 percent inflation, is a theoretical assumption that takes little account of the ECB’s behavior over the last 24 months.
  • This analysis leads us to two conclusions.
  • First, the Eurozone is not going to collapse in the middle of the sovereign debt crisis.
  • Second, fundamental political changes underway in Europe — such as the weakening of the NATO alliance, the regionalization of security alliances, and especially the developing Russian-German relationship — are far more important to the future of the Eurozone than a Greek confidence vote.
  • Because the Eurozone is fundamentally a political project, the weakening of the political bonds that tie Eurozone member states into a currency union are what will ultimately lead to its dissolution or modification.
  • Monumental shifts are underway in Europe. We have no reason to believe that Greece is at the center of them. What is most interesting is that the focus, both in terms of risks and solutions, continues to be on both short-term effects and singular events. This myopia is in part because Eurozone member states, in particular Germany, have not offered a long-term solution or plan.
  • The question that needs to be asked is: what do Europeans, and specifically the Germans, plan to do with Europe’s security and political architecture in the long term? The answer to that question cannot be found in the financial databases of Eurostat or the Bank of International Settlement, nor especially in the coverage of 24-hour investor-news stations.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "It has been 2,000 years since Athenian legislators last received the kind of global attention fixed upon them Tuesday. News coverage of the Greek parliament's June 21 confidence vote captivated the global financial sector. The vote was carried live on most global 24-hour investment-news stations and links to live online feeds of the Greek vote were posted across the world wide web. The vote passed, giving Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou the political authority to try to pass further austerity measures mandated by the Eurozone in another vote on June 28."
anonymous

Obama's Announcement and the Future of the Afghan War - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...uncement-and-future-afghan-war

STRATFOR obama afghanistan

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In 2001, al Qaeda and the Taliban were distinct, yet necessarily intertwined.
  • Meanwhile — and especially after Tora Bora — al Qaeda was increasingly driven into Pakistan and, more importantly, farther abroad.
  • Thus began the deepening divide between the two groups.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • For al Qaeda, a transnational jihadist phenomenon with global ambitions, the logic behind setting up franchises from Yemen and the Maghreb to East Asia was readily apparent.
  • Meanwhile, the Taliban, an Afghan phenomenon, doubled down on their home turf.
  • For their part, the United States and its allies never wanted to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
  • The war has helped prevent a subsequent attack of the magnitude of Sept. 11, 2001
  • Meanwhile, even the most serious observers wonder why the United States is so heavily committed in Afghanistan.
  • The noteworthy aspect of Obama’s speech is that it lays the groundwork for American domestic political rhetoric to circle back into alignment with military reality.
  • If military reality and military objectives are defined in terms of the Taliban insurgency, then Afghanistan is every bit as lost now as it was two years ago – if not more so.
  • But if they are defined in terms of al Qaeda, then the United States has good cause to claim victory and reorient its posture in Afghanistan.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday night made the most important political statement on the war in Afghanistan since the death of Osama bin Laden. In a planned statement, Obama spelled out his post-surge strategy, as the July 2011 deadline approaches that would mark the start of the drawdown of American and allied forces in Afghanistan. While Obama did not declare victory in his address, he laid the groundwork to do so."
anonymous

Why Free Markets? - 2 views

bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...why-free-markets

shared by anonymous on 30 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The short answer, which I will assert here and defend below, is that whatever the intent behind government regulation of markets, it almost always ends up working in the interest of the rich and powerful and does little to protect the interest of those with modest means and little access to power.  If a commitment to social justice demands that we care first and foremost about the least well off among us, supporting government regulation may well violate that commitment.
  • why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?
  • As Hayek made clear 66 years ago, the problem we face when try to “construct” an economic order is how to best make use of all of this knowledge, which is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Mises and Hayek also argued that because this knowledge is structurally dispersed, contextual and tacit, it cannot be aggregated by government planners and regulators (nor, it’s worth noting, by private actors).
  • So one problem facing regulators is that they lack the knowledge necessary to know what people value and how much, so in deciding what to regulate and how, they are acting on incomplete and often erroneous information.  By trying to override the market, they are substituting a less informationally-rich system for a more rich one.
  • In the face of these repeated failures, it’s very easy to imagine, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, that regulators and the politicians who oversee them will start to act in their own political self-interest.  Without the ability to make reliable decisions on the objective merits, self-interest will slowly dominate.  Regulators will try to serve the needs of those who will keep them in power and supply them with healthy budgets.  So-called “Capture Theory” explains that it then becomes easy for regulators to be “captured” by the industries they regulate and then regulate in ways that favor the industry.
  • about 75% of antitrust cases are initiated not by the government but by private firms unhappy with how their competition has behaved.  Private actors constantly engage in lobbying and rent-seeking for regulations that will benefit them and/or harm their competition.
  • For me, as an economist, the argument against a great deal of regulation is precisely that it harms the least well off it is trying to help and provides unwarranted privileges for those who need them least. 
  •  Economic systems are inherent unstable, dynamically evolving things.   In studying them, we are always studying a moving target.  To my mind, that makes equilibrium models less generally applicable than is often held to be the case.
  • I have great sympathy for this line of argument, but write to make two points.
  • First, I think the danger of governmental regulation goes beyond the mere possibility of "capture" of the regulatory apparatus by the powerful. The threat is not just this, but that once the authority to regulate is well-established, the state can use this and other economic tools to "buy off" various constitutencies until the opposition to state authority becomes too weak to prevent a very dangerous concentration of power.
  • Second, there is also a purely moral, but non-consequentialist, argument against regulation.
  • That suggests that human institutions - complexity of parts notwithstanding - often exhibit various aggregate patterns of behavior that correlate with measurable variables, and that can be understood and predicted with reasonable degrees of confidence, and thus that the outcomes of various kinds of higher-level global interventions can similarly be predicted with some accuracy.
  • There is no fundamental theoretical difference between states and other large human organizations that would for some reason result in the inability of states to successfully regulate significant fields of aggregate economic behavior as a result of micro-level calculation problems.
  • This is not an argument for any particular regulatory action.  It is an argument that whether these treatments work is an empirical question that cannot be deduced a priori from the kinds of simplified toy models that are wheeled out in an Economics 101 classes or from the armchairs of either libertarian or socialist philosophers.
  • Philosophers are good at the logical and conceptual analysis of conundrums that occur in the theoretical levels of a science.   But when they venture too far into the way the actual world works, they easily lose their bearings due to their surfeit of rationalistic mental habits and intolerance of detail.
  • Property rights are not actualized in the real human world by philosophical ruminations on the state of nature.  They are actualized by courts, and lawmakers, and executives backed up by police and security services - people with guns and other means of enforcing the laws.  There has never been a durable form of human social life where the power to regulate was not "granted."
  • anonymous on 30 Jun 11
     
    "My first post this week led to some interesting discussion in the comments, which has in turn led me to this post. One issue that came up there was, and I paraphrase: "Okay, fine, markets really do benefit the poor, but the dispute between modern liberals and libertarians is not over 'markets' but over 'free markets.' Libertarians don't want the regulations that liberals do and saying that 'markets' help the poor doesn't help us resolve this issue." Fair enough. So why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?"
  • Erik Hanson on 02 Jul 11
     
    I don't know that free markets help the poor so much as they allow more opportunity to the poor. And where free markets lack is in actually funding the poor, where there's a presumption that they deserve poverty.
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

The Greater Game in Bahrain - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20110628-greater-game-bahrain

bahrain geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 29 Jun 11 - Cached
  • STRATFOR has also picked up indications that Iran was playing a much more deliberate game — taking care to conserve its resources while counting on the perception of a Wahhabist occupation of Shiite-majority land to exacerbate local grievances and stress the GCC states over time. With the Arab states on edge, Iran’s primary aim is to ensure a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq — an area where threats to the Islamic republic have historically originated.
  • Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies are left wondering if the United States will temporarily set aside its broader conflict with Tehran and forge a short-term understanding with the Islamic republic. Such an understanding could expand Iran’s sphere of influence in the region on U.S. terms, leaving Saudi Arabia with a deep sense of betrayal and vulnerability. There are no clear indications that negotiations between the United States and Iran have reached such a juncture, but the Saudis have to reckon with the possibility.
  • This logic is what led STRAFOR today to take a closer look at what was happening behind the scenes
  • anonymous on 29 Jun 11
     
    "According to rumors cited by anonymous Bahraini and Saudi government sources on Tuesday, the 1,000-plus Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) force, deployed to Bahrain in the spring to quell a Shia-led uprising, has begun to withdraw now that the security situation on the island has largely stabilized. STRATFOR sources in the Saudi and Bahraini governments clarified that there will be a reduction of GCC forces, but not a full withdrawal. A Saudi source went on to explain that a permanent base will be built to station a stripped-down Saudi-led force, ready to deploy on short notice, with Saudi reinforcements less than three hours away across the Bahrain-Saudi causeway."
anonymous

Technological Superstition - 0 views

www.kk.org/...technological_s.php

technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • The genius of modern mass production was the machine's ability to make cheap identical copies of any invention -- unlike the uneven creations of mortal craftsmen.
  • Hemingway's personal typewriters (he had more than one) are treated like relics. They are roped off, no touching them, they've become the object of pilgrimages, fetching more than $100,000. Yet, the venerated typewriter itself is indistinguishable from other units made on that assembly line.
  • Relics are common in all the major religions of the world.
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  • The logic of relics is supernatural.
  • This relic magic operates at full throttle in the world of modern celebrity collectors. The $3 hockey puck used in the 2010 gold medal Olympics championship game later sold for $13,000 because of the unique properties it acquired during the game.
  • Provenance is a key notion in relics and collectables.
  • It establishes a chain of claims about previous ownership.
  • But provenance itself does not explain why we assign any special meaning to the artifact, or to the clone.
  • Yet as we approach the tenth anniversary of the disasters of 9/11, there is an official campaign to assign supernatural potency to the remains of the World Trade Center. The twisted bits of steel salvaged from the site of the fallen towers are being treated as holy relics, taken on a long processions for public viewing, while the disaster site itself is being described as a "sacred place."
  • There is certainly value in keeping old things. Museums that collect artifacts, like say the Computer History Museum, contain both original prototypes and arbitrary production-run units, and these contain great historical information and lessons. But it doesn't (or shouldn't) matter who touched or used them previously. Manufactured artifacts can't be relics. They are all clones.
  • Of course, there is no difference, which is why we place so much emphasis on provenance ("it's been in our family forever!"). In the end, a historical technological artifact is one of the reservoirs in the modern world where superstition still flows freely.
  • anonymous on 02 Jul 11
     
    By Kevin Kelly at The Technium: "Superstition is alive and well in the high tech world. It is visible most prominently in our technological artifacts, some of which we treat like medieval relics. Recently, supernatural superstition has crept into American treatment of 9/11."
anonymous

The Paradox of America's Electoral Reform - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...adox-americas-electoral-reform

shared by anonymous on 10 Mar 15 - Cached
  • This election process matters to the world for two reasons.
  • First, the world's only global power will be increasingly self-absorbed
  • The United States sees itself as the City on the Hill, an example to the world. But along with any redemptive sensibility comes its counterpart: the apocalyptic.
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  • Likely an archaic institution, the Electoral College still represents the founders' fear of the passions of the people — both the intensity of some, and the indifference of others.
  • They had two visions: that representatives would make the law, and that these representatives would not have politics as a profession.
  • The founders saw civil society — business, farms, churches and so on — as ultimately more important than the state, and they saw excessive political passion as misplaced.
  • First, it took away from the private pursuits they so valued, and it tended to make political life more important than it should be.
  • Second, they feared that ordinary men (women were excluded) might be elected as representatives at various levels.
  • They tried to shape representative democracy with standards they considered prudent — paralleling the values of their own social class, where private pursuits predominated and public affairs were a burdensome duty.
  • Of course it was the founders who created political parties soon after the founding. The property requirements dissolved fairly quickly, the idea that state houses would elect senators went away, and the ideological passions and love of scandal emerged. 
  • Political parties were organized state by state, and within state by counties and cities. These parties emerged with two roles.
  • The first was to generate and offer potential leaders for election at all levels.
  • The second was to serve as a means of mediation between the public — for multiple classes, from the wealthy to the poor — and the state.
  • The party bosses did not have visions of redemption or apocalypse. They were what the founders didn't want: professional politicians, not necessarily holding office themselves but overseeing the selection of those who would.
  • This was a system made for corruption, of course, and it violated the founders' vision, but it also fulfilled that vision in a way. The party bosses' power resided in building coalitions that they could serve.
  • The system was corrupt, but it produced leaders like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as some less illustrious people.
  • Starting in 1972, following Richard Nixon's presidency, the United States shifted away from a system of political bosses. This was achieved by broadly expanding primaries at all levels. Rather than bosses selecting candidates and controlling them, direct democratic elections were used for candidate selection. Since the bosses didn't select candidates, the candidates were beholden to the voters rather than the bosses. Each election year, the voters would select the candidates and then select the officeholder. Over time, the power of the political machine was broken and replaced by a series of elections. The founders did not want this level of democracy, but neither did they explicitly want the party boss.
  • This change had two unanticipated consequences.
  • The first was that the importance of money in the political process surged.
  • Corruption moved from favors for bosses to special treatment of fundraisers, but it was still there.
  • Reformers tried to limit the amount of money that could be contributed, but they ignored two facts.
  • First, a primary system for the presidency is fiendishly expensive simply because delivering the message to the public in 50 states costs a fortune. Second, given the stakes, the desire to influence government is difficult to curb.
  • The second unintended consequence was that it institutionalized political polarization.
  • The founders designed politics to be less important than private life, and in the competition on Election Tuesday, private life tends to win, particularly in off-year elections and primaries.
  • in the primaries, only two types of candidates win. One is the extremely well funded — and the passion of the wings make funding for them even more important. The other is the ideologically committed.
  • All of this applies equally to elections to the House and Senate. It has been said that there has never been less bipartisanship than there is now. I don't know if that is true, but it is certainly the case that the penalties for collaboration with the other party, or for moving to the center, are extremely high.
  • This is not meant to romanticize the bosses. We are, on the whole, better off without them, and we can't resurrect them. I am trying to explain why our elections have become so long, why they cost so much money, and why the wings of the parties get to define agendas and legislative and executive behavior.
  • Geopolitics, as Stratfor uses the concept, argues that the wishes and idiosyncrasies of individual leaders make little difference in the long run. This is because leaders are constrained by global realities. It is also because internal political processes define what must be done to take and hold power. Those internal political processes have their own origins in impersonal forces.
  • There has been a long struggle between the founders' vision of how politics should work and the reality of the process.
  • The American Republic was invented and it is continually being reinvented on the same basic theme. Each reform creates a new form of corruption and a new challenge for governance. In the end, everyone is trapped by reality, but it is taking longer and longer to enter that trap.
  • The political parties emerged against the founders' intentions, because political organization beyond the elite followed from the logic of the government. The rise of political bosses followed from the system, and simultaneously stabilized and corrupted it. The post-Watergate reforms changed the nature of the corruption but also changed the texture of political life. The latter is the issue with which the United States is now struggling.
  • The problem endemic in American culture is the will to reform. It is both the virtue and vice of the U.S. government. It has geopolitical consequences.
  • anonymous on 10 Mar 15
     
    "We are now in the early phases of selecting the president of the United States. Vast amounts of money are being raised, plans are being laid, opposition research is underway and the first significant scandal has broken with the discovery that Hillary Clinton used a non-government email account for government business. Ahead of us is an extended series of primaries, followed by an election and perhaps a dispute over some aspect of the election. In the United States, the presidential election process takes about two years, particularly when the sitting president cannot run for re-election."
anonymous

Turkey's Geographical Ambition - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...urkeys-geographical-ambition-0

shared by anonymous on 12 Aug 14 - Cached
  • Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.
  • Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France.
  • Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means "Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
  • Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language.
  • Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s Russia.
  • The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.
  • In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War.
  • Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds.
  • there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period.
  • Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G.S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing.
  • In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
  • Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession.
  • The root of the problem is partly geographic.
  • Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
  • The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts to influence Iran.
  • Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region's complexities.
  • Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey.
  • anonymous on 12 Aug 14
     
    "At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable."
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