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leilamulveny

Where Trump and Biden Stand on the Middle East - WSJ - 1 views

  • If Mr. Trump wins re-election, he may find his closeness with Riyadh insufficient to persuade Saudi King Salman to take the bold and domestically controversial step of establishing full diplomatic relations with Israel, former officials and Middle East analysts said.
  • The former vice president has promised tougher scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s human-rights record and Yemen war, which also could limit his leverage with the kingdom, the analysts added
  • Mr. Trump has voiced hope a new agreement might be negotiated if he is re-elected.
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  • Forging Middle East peace has been a perennial goal for U.S. presidents, leading to historic breakthroughs such as the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, but also repeated failures to break through entrenched positions, particularly between Israel and the Palestinians.
  • Mr. Biden has said he would return to the 2015 agreement if Iran comes back into compliance with its limits, and would then try to negotiate longer-term and more stringent constraints on Tehran’s nuclear program
  • the importance of maintaining Israel’s military edge, limiting U.S. troop deployments to the region and cultivating efforts to foster ties between Israel and its neighbors.
  • backing a two-state solution along widely internationally accepted parameters and opposing any Israeli efforts to annex territory and build settlements.
  • While maintaining strong support for Israel, he would also seek to rebuild ties with the Palestinians.
aleija

Opinion | Justice Kavanaugh Unlocked Ways to Fight Foreign Interference - The New York ... - 0 views

  • Among many other recent developments not likely on anyone’s 2020 bingo card, a Supreme Court decision about foreign aid and legalized prostitution has shattered perceived constraints on the authority of the United States to robustly defend its elections against foreign interference.
  • ruled that the U.S. government can compel overseas public health organizations that receive U.S. foreign aid to publicly oppose prostitution
  • Yet Justice Kavanaugh’s decree — that “foreign citizens outside U.S. territory do not possess rights under the U.S. Constitution” — is so expansive that it spills into election law, giving federal and state governments ample authority to defend us against the full range of foreign political warfare, without fear of violating the First Amendment.
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  • Intelligence experts warn that Russia’s incursions are continuing in this election cycle, with its digital foot soldiers setting up fake news sites and spreading false stories of hacked voter information to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the vote.
  • Now, the Supreme Court has told us that the constitutional rights of foreign citizens outside U.S. territory cannot be violated because they have no constitutional rights to violate. Justice Kavanaugh heralded this lack of rights as a “bedrock legal principle.”
  • The key to this opinion’s paradigm shift is its transformation of a term that doesn’t even appear in the decision: “expenditure.”
  • Federal law defines an expenditure as “any purchase, payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money or anything of value, made by any person for the purpose of influencing any election for federal office.
  • But if he wants to spend money to influence our elections — by inflaming social divisions, sowing discord, hiring troll farms, hacking campaign computers, suppressing the vote, or by any other means — the legal basis for the government to respond more aggressively is now crystal clear.
Javier E

Republicans have already decided Trump is going to lose - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Republicans, like everyone else, are coming to understand. So some of them may be looking ahead to when Trump is no longer president.
  • That means, perhaps above all, resuming the deficit fear-mongering that was such an effective tool to hamstring Barack Obama’s presidency
  • It also means adjusting their policy and spending agenda to the defensive. They aren’t bothering to talk much about new tax cuts or anything else they’d like to pass. Instead, the focus is shifting to cutbacks and constraints.
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  • Meanwhile, Republicans are encouraging and amplifying the still-small movement to defy stay-at-home orders, with all the same deranged rhetoric about “tyranny”
  • If you think Trump’s chances of reelection are dwindling, why would you try to save the economy now? Imagine if you passed measures that made the recovery easier but Trump lost anyway. Then Biden wouldn’t have such a hard time, and Republicans getting a huge backlash win in 2022 would be less likely. Better to keep everyone miserable for a couple more years.
  • Republicans are genuinely fearful that people will be too thankful if government helps them too much and that the crisis will make the passage of stronger safety-net programs more likely in the future.
  • if you thought Trump could still win, your best move would be to give the economy the biggest short-term boost possible with massive government spending, then worry about cutting it back later.
  • as every conservative knows, if you’re worried about deficits, you want a thriving economy. Getting that economy back on its feet as quickly and strongly as possible will not only bring down the deficit over the long term, it’s also the only thing that will avoid a political disaster in November. So spend, spend, spend.
  • he fact that Republicans don’t want to do this raises the possibility that at least some of them are starting to view Trump as a lost cause.
  • What you get from the Republican side is mostly resignation. The government has done what it can, they say, and now we just need to remove the stay-at-home orders and let the economy heal itself.
Javier E

America's Racial Contract Is Showing - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.
  • Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.
  • The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.”
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  • the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way.
  • The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property
  • The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them.
  • “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”
  • as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.
  • Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence.
  • Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens.
  • Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy.
  • Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.
  • The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience.
  • The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions.
  • In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.
  • The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty.
  • the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.
  • by mid-April, conservative broadcasters were decrying the restrictions, small bands of armed protesters were descending on state capitols, and the president was pressing to lift the constraints.
  • In the interim, data about the demographics of COVID-19 victims began to trickle out. On April 7, major outlets began reporting that preliminary data showed that black and Latino Americans were being disproportionately felled by the coronavirus. That afternoon, Rush Limbaugh complained, “If you dare criticize the mobilization to deal with this, you’re going to be immediately tagged as a racist.”
  • That night, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson announced, “It hasn’t been the disaster that we feared.” His colleague Brit Hume mused that “the disease turned out not to be quite as dangerous as we thought.” The nationwide death toll that day was just 13,000 people; it now stands above 70,000, a mere month later.
  • That more and more Americans were dying was less important than who was dying.
  • The disease is now “infecting people who cannot afford to miss work or telecommute—grocery store employees, delivery drivers and construction workers,”
  • Containing the outbreak was no longer a question of social responsibility, but of personal responsibility. From the White House podium, Surgeon General Jerome Adams told “communities of color” that “we need you to step up and help stop the spread.”
  • Public-health restrictions designed to contain the outbreak were deemed absurd. They seemed, in Carlson’s words, “mindless and authoritarian,” a “weird kind of arbitrary fascism.” To restrict the freedom of white Americans, just because nonwhite Americans are dying, is an egregious violation of the racial contract.
  • majority-black counties “account for more than half of coronavirus cases and nearly 60 percent of deaths.” The disproportionate burden that black and Latino Americans are bearing is in part a direct result of their overrepresentation in professions where they risk exposure, and of a racial gap in wealth and income that has left them more vulnerable to being laid off. Black and Latino workers are overrepresented among the essential, the unemployed, and the dead.
  • “Due to the meatpacking, though, that’s where Brown County got the flare,” Roggensack interrupted to clarify. “It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”
  • Roggensack was drawing a line between “regular folks” and the workers who keep them fed, mobile, safe, and connected. And America’s leaders have treated those workers as largely expendable, praising their valor while disregarding their safety.
  • In South Dakota, where a Smithfield plant became the site of an outbreak infecting more than 700 workers, a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News that the issue was their “large immigrant population.”
  • “We can’t keep our country closed down for years,” Trump said Wednesday. But that was no one’s plan. The plan was to buy time to take the necessary steps to open the country safely. But the Trump administration did not do that, because it did not consider the lives of the people dying worth the effort or money required to save them.
  • the only tension between stopping the virus and reviving the economy is one the Trump administration and its propaganda apparatus have invented. Economists are in near-unanimous agreement that the safest path requires building the capacity to contain the virus before reopening the economy—precisely because new waves of deaths will drive Americans back into self-imposed isolation, destroying the consumer spending that powers economic growth
  • The frame of war allows the president to call for the collective sacrifice of laborers without taking the measures necessary to ensure their safety, while the upper classes remain secure at home.
  • But the workers who signed up to harvest food, deliver packages, stack groceries, drive trains and buses, and care for the sick did not sign up for war, and the unwillingness of America’s political leadership to protect them is a policy decision, not an inevitability
  • Trump is acting in accordance with the terms of the racial contract, which values the lives of those most likely to be affected less than the inconveniences necessary to preserve them.
  • Collective solidarity in response to the coronavirus remains largely intact—most Americans support the restrictions and are not eager to sacrifice their lives or those of their loved ones for a few points of gross domestic product. The consistency across incomes and backgrounds is striking in an era of severe partisan polarization
  • But solidarity with the rest of the nation among elite Republicans—those whose lives and self-conceptions are intertwined with the success of the Trump presidency—began eroding as soon as the disproportionate impact of the outbreak started to emerge.
Javier E

Guilt Is Powerful for Those Doing Fine in the Lockdown - WSJ - 0 views

  • Counselors say clients who can work from home are expressing discomfort with the dichotomy between the improvement in their lives during lockdown and the devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. They are asking themselves whether it is fair that they are not experiencing the same pain they are seeing in the news.
  • “Ninety percent of my clients who are doing well feel an edge of guilt,” says Carla Marie Manly, a clinical psychologist in Santa Rosa, Calif. She warns patients of the toxicity of comparing themselves to other people: There is no benefit to feeling bad because others are feeling pain, and such guilt only leads to anger, sadness and depression.
  • She advises that the way for people to cope with guilt is to accept that they are feeling great even though the current crisis is terrible.
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  • She likens the feeling to survivor’s guilt, when there is a sense of injustice. She recommends a positive action to correct that feeling and to express gratitude.
  • guilt doesn’t have to be destructive, some philosophers argue—in fact, properly understood, it can motivate people to address some of the inequities that the virus is revealing.
  • Guilt is pervasive now because the coronavirus crisis has opened up a very real class division in the country between those whose jobs allow them to stay home and those whose lives and livelihoods are in the process of being destroyed,
  • Guilt tends to promote reparative action, such as helping those in need, says Patricia Greenspan, a professor of philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of “Practical Guilt.” She says those benefiting from the crisis have an ethical responsibility to contribute to efforts to alleviate others’ suffering.
  • Catherine Wilson, author of “Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory,” thinks that someone who feels guilty should think instead about what kind of world would be an improvement on the one we are living in now. If people don’t feel bad about enjoying themselves but see that they can make life better for others, they can use their energy and talent to activate moral leadership, sparking innovations to make society more just and fair, she says
Javier E

Opinion | What Really Saved the Republic From Trump? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.
  • What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials.
  • You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.
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  • in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.
  • The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics.
  • It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.
  • The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted.
  • They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.
  • Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution
  • The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch).
  • The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces).
  • The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.
  • an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular.
  • That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.
  • Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. Over the past four years, six of Mr. Trump’s close associates have been convicted and seven were indicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such prosecutions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.
  • On June 1, as protests and counterprotests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens.
  • The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.
  • Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.
  • Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.
  • Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.
  • Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.
  • The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials.
  • as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.
  • Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
  • It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative.
Javier E

Facebook Is a Doomsday Machine - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • megadeath is not the only thing that makes the Doomsday Machine petrifying. The real terror is in its autonomy, this idea that it would be programmed to detect a series of environmental inputs, then to act, without human interference. “There is no chance of human intervention, control, and final decision,” wrote the military strategist Herman Kahn in his 1960 book, On Thermonuclear War, which laid out the hypothetical for a Doomsday Machine. The concept was to render nuclear war unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.
  • No machine should be that powerful by itself—but no one person should be either.
  • so far, somewhat miraculously, we have figured out how to live with the bomb. Now we need to learn how to survive the social web.
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  • There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.
  • Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.
  • I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.
  • Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.
  • Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.
  • The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.
  • Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.
  • Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.
  • No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.
  • Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.
  • Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.
  • The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.
  • there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.
  • At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.
  • These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people
  • Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.
  • it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.
  • In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.
  • reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.
  • Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.
  • Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms
  • How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.
  • Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.
  • In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”
  • Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.
  • Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.
  • “The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”
  • Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”
  • Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?
  • In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.
  • In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.
  • in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”
  • We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible
  • The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.
  • we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.
  • localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.
  • we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.
  • The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.
  • We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.
  • We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.
  • Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.
clairemann

The Mississippi abortion case threatens birth control and sexual rights. - 0 views

  • The constitutional right to abortion is under concerted attack by a deeply conservative Supreme Court. Last month, the Supreme Court permitted Texas’ ban on abortion at six weeks to go into effect in a one-paragraph ruling decided without full briefing and oral argument,
  • On Dec. 1, the court will consider the constitutionality of Mississippi’s ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In Dobbs, Mississippi is urging the Supreme Court to overrule Roe v. Wade and take away from millions of Americans the fundamental right to control their bodies, choose whether and when to start a family, determine their life course, and participate as equals in American life.
  • the text and history of the 14th Amendment provide no support for the idea that the courts should look to state practice in 1868 to define the scope of the amendment’s protections.
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  • the right to abortion cannot be a constitutional right because states restricted abortion in 1868 at the time of the ratification of the 14th Amendment. Mississippi argues that the public in 1868 would have understood the 14th Amendment to permit state restrictions on abortion to continue.
  • This is not a new argument—it formed the basis of then-Justice William Rehnquist’s dissent in Roe and was made repeatedly by Justice Antonin Scalia over the course of his career on the bench, including in his dissent in Casey
  • Chief Justice John Roberts recognized in his confirmation testimony, it is “completely circular,” using state practice to interpret the constraints the 14th Amendment was written to impose on the states.
  • destabilize a central part of the court’s jurisprudence protecting fundamental constitutional rights. As a result, Dobbs also threatens the fundamental rights to use birth control, marry a loved one, and make decisions about sexual intimacy.
  • For good reason, state practice in 1868 has never been a measure of what fundamental, personal rights are guaranteed against state infringement by the 14th Amendment. This is illustrated not only by Roe and Casey—which explicitly rejected the idea that the state practice in 1868 fixes the fundamental rights for all future generations—but also by many other landmark Supreme Court rulings vindicating the 14th Amendment’s promise of liberty for all.
  • In 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down a restriction on the use of birth control dating back to 1879, holding that it infringed on the right of a married couple to choose whether to start a family and bear children.
  • In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment protected a right to sexual intimacy by LGBTQ adults, despite a very long history of laws that prohibited same-sex intimacy and sexual conduct. In Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment guaranteed the right to marry a loved one of the same sex, even though marriage had historically been limited to a union of a man and a woman. Both decisions drew on Loving to safeguard bedrock rights to love, marry, and form a family, ensuring equal dignity to LGBTQ persons.
  • If the fundamental rights protected by the 14th Amendment are determined by looking to state practice in 1868—as Mississippi and its allies urge—Loving’s holding protecting the right to marry as a fundamental right would be in doubt, as would many other landmark precedents, including Lawrence and Obergefell.
  • It explicitly rejects Loving’s reasoning, arguing that the Supreme Court was wrong to recognize a fundamental right to marry in that case. It claims that Lawrence and Obergefell are “lawless” rulings and urges the Supreme Court in Dobbs to leave “those decisions hanging by a thread.”
Javier E

Anthropocene.pdf - 0 views

  • the first significant human use of fossil fuels—coal— arose during the Song dynasty (960–1279) in China [36,37]. Drawn from mines in the north, the Chinese coal industry, developed primarily to support its iron industry, grew in size through the eleventh century to become equal to the production of the entire European (excluding Russia) coal industry in 1700.
  • the European coal industry, primarily in England, was beginning its ascent in the thirteenth century. The use of coal grew as did the size of London, and became the fuel of choice in the city because of its high energy density.
  • energy constraints provided a strong bottleneck for the growth of human numbers and activity. The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels shattered that bottleneck. Fossil fuels represented a vast energy store of solar energy from the past that had accumulated from tens or hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis. They were the perfect fuel source—energy-rich, dense, easily transportable and relatively straightforward to access. Human energy use rose sharply. In general, those industrial societies used four or five times as much energy as their agrarian predecessors, who in turn used three or four times as much as our hunting and gathering forebears [52].
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  • So when did the Anthropocene actually start? It is difficult to put a precise date on a transition that occurred at different times and rates in different places, but it is clear that in 1750, the Industrial Revolution had barely begun but by 1850 it had almost completely transformed England and had spread to many other countries in Europe and across the Atlantic to North America. We thus suggest that the year AD 1800 could reasonably be chosen as the beginning of the Anthropocene
  • The result of these and other energy-dependent processes and activities was a significant increase in the human enterprise and its imprint on the environment. Between 1800 and 2000, the human population grew from about one billion to six billion, while energy use grew by about 40-fold and economic production by 50-fold [55].
  • Only by 1850 did the CO 2 concentration (285 ppm) reach the upper limit of natural Holocene variability and by 1900 it had climbed to 296 ppm [58], just high enough to show a discernible human influence beyond natural variability. Since the mid-twentieth century, the rising concentration and isotopic composition of CO 2 in the atmosphere have been measured directly with great accuracy [60], and has shown an unmistakable human imprint.
  • The fraction of the land surface devoted to intensive human activity rose from about 10 to about 25–30% [56]
  • The human enterprise switched gears after World War II. Although the imprint of human activity on the global environment was, by the mid-twentieth century, clearly discernible beyond the pattern of Holocene variability in several important ways, the rate at which that imprint was growing increased sharply at midcentury. The change was so dramatic that the 1945 to 2000+ period has been called the Great Acceleration
  • What finally triggered the Great Acceleration after the end of World War II? This war undoubtedly drove the final collapse of the remaining pre-industrial European institutions that contributed to the depression and, indeed, to the Great War itself. But many other factors also played an important role [55,61]. New international institutions—the so-called Bretton Woods institutions—were formed to aid economic recovery and fuel renewed economic growth. Led by the USA, the world moved towards a system built around neo-liberal economic principles, characterized by more open trade and capital flows. The post-World War II economy integrated rapidly, with growth rates reaching their highest values ever in the 1950–1973 period.
Javier E

When America's All-Volunteer Force Loses a War - War on the Rocks - 0 views

  • rguments will rage for a long time about whether the United States could have won the war in Afghanistan with another approach — or even won at all. But after the nation invested two decades, more than $2 trillion, and the lives of almost 2,500 military personnel, the outcome remains the same.
  • The U.S. military now faces the challenge of processing this defeat on two different levels: as individuals, among those who deployed and fought, and as an institution, in which the military’s leaders should now help the all-volunteer force process this painful outcome while simultaneously ensuring that it remains strong and capable of winning the nation’s future wars.
  • Institutionally, the U.S. military faces three critical tasks. First, it has both a moral and a practical obligation to dissect what went wrong during the 20 years of war and to demonstrate that it has processed and learned from those hard lessons.
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  • The U.S. military utterly failed to do this after the Vietnam War, as it sought to erase counter-insurgency from its institutional memory instead of insisting on a brutal degree of self-assessment examining how military actions contributed to the defeat. As a result, a new generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines entered their own unconventional wars a quarter century later with no current doctrine or training on fighting insurgents. This should never happen again.
  • Second, U.S. military leaders ought to clearly identify what went wrong with the disastrous evacuation and take full responsibility for their part in the debacle
  • The decision to end the war was rightly made by civilian leaders. Their decision may or may not have been strategically wise.
  • But the execution of the withdrawal was clearly a military responsibility, and it was indisputably done poorly.
  • Third, senior leaders of the Department of Defense and the services should guide the force to somehow absorb the loss of the war in Afghanistan constructively.
  • senior U.S. military leaders, including Gens. Creighton Abrams and Frederick Weyand, sought to stamp out this dangerous interpretation by reinforcing the idea that militaries in the United States and other democratic societies always fight within constraints imposed by elected leaders. The generals ensured that the psychology of blame and defeat never took root within the force, which enabled it to refocus on preparing for the wars of the future.
  • There is a clear risk that some leaders and troops may begin to blame the war’s stinging outcome on poor civilian leadership and support.
  • Senior military and defense leaders should once again stop this narrative from spreading throughout the force. In fact, doing so today is even more important than it was after Vietnam, since a force that consists entirely of self-selected volunteers faces a greater risk than a conscript force of developing a belief that it is morally superior to the society it serves
lucieperloff

Oreos, Sour Patch Kids and other snacks will soon get more expensive : NPR - 0 views

  • Supply chain problems are making it harder to get so many products and making them more expensive
  • to increase by 6-7% beginning in the new year.
  • Transportation costs and "industrywide supply chain constraints" are some of the factors responsible for the spike in pricing,
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  • This is due to the cost of commodities, transportation and packaging," it said, adding that labor shortages are also a factor.
  • the company says the demand for snacks has not diminished — the pandemic may have even increased it.
  • "Ongoing uncertainty is fueling the desire for comfort and indulgence which has been a consistent trend throughout COVID,"
  • Mondelez isn't the only company to boost prices in response to increasing costs and other factors.
Javier E

Opinion | Therapy Culture Has Undermined Our Maturity - The New York Times - 0 views

  • to trace the decline of the American psyche, I suppose I would go to a set of cultural changes that started directly after World War II and built over the next few decades, when writers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch and Tom Wolfe noticed the emergence of what came to be known as the therapeutic culture.
  • In earlier cultural epochs, many people derived their self-worth from their relationship with God, or from their ability to be a winner in the commercial marketplace
  • in a therapeutic culture people’s sense of self-worth depends on their subjective feelings about themselves. Do I feel good about myself? Do I like me?
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  • many writers noticed that this ethos often turned people into fragile narcissists. It cut them off from moral traditions and the normal sources of meaning and identity. It pushed them in on themselves, made them self-absorbed, craving public affirmation so they could feel good about themselves
  • As Lasch wrote in his 1979 book, “The Culture of Narcissism,” such people are plagued by an insecurity that can be “overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’ reflected in the attentions of others.”
  • “Plagued by anxiety, depression, vague discontents, a sense of inner emptiness, the ‘psychological man’ of the 20th century seeks neither individual self-aggrandizement nor spiritual transcendence but peace of mind, under conditions that increasingly militate against it.”
  • Fast forward a few decades, and the sense of lostness and insecurity, which Lasch and many others had seen in nascent form, had transmogrified into a roaring epidemic of psychic pain. By, say, 2010, it began to be clear that we were in the middle of a mental health crisis, with rising depression and suicide rates, an epidemic of hopelessness and despair among the young.
  • Social media became a place where people went begging for attention, validation and affirmation — even if they often found rejection instead.
  • Before long, safetyism was on the march. This is the assumption that people are so fragile they need to be protected from social harm. Slate magazine proclaimed 2013 “the year of the trigger warning.” Concepts like “microaggression” and “safe spaces” couldn’t have lagged far behind.
  • the elephantiasis of trauma
  • Once, the word “trauma” referred to brutal physical wounding one might endure in war or through abuse. But usage of the word spread so that it was applied across a range of upsetting experiences.
  • A mega-best-selling book about trauma, “The Body Keeps the Score,” by Bessel van der Kolk, became the defining cultural artifact of the era. Parul Sehgal wrote a perceptive piece in The New Yorker called “The Case Against the Trauma Plot,” noting how many characters in novels, memoirs and TV shows are trying to recover from psychological trauma — from Ted Lasso on down. In January 2022, Vox declared that “trauma” had become “the word of the decade,” noting that there were over 5,500 podcasts with the word in the title.
  • For many people, trauma became their source of identity. People began defining themselves by the way they had been hurt.
  • a culture war, and that’s what happened to the psychological crisis. In one camp, there were the coddlers.
  • They sought to alter behavior and reform institutions so that no one would feel emotionally unsafe
  • the coddling approach turned out to be counterproductive. It was based on a series of false ideas that ended up hurting the people it was trying to help.
  • the first bad idea in “The Coddling of the American Mind.” It was the notion that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” inducing people to look at the wounds in their past and feel debilitated, not stronger.
  • The second false idea was, “I am a thing to whom things happen.” The traumatized person is cast as a passive victim unable to control his own life. He is defined by suffering and
  • The third bad idea is, “If I keep you safe, you will be strong.”
  • But overprotective parenting and overprotective school administration don’t produce more resilient children; they produce less resilient ones.
  • The counterreaction to the coddlers came from what you might call the anti-fragile coalition. This was led by Jordan Peterson and thousands of his lesser imitators
  • they merely represented the flip side of the fragile victim mind-set.
  • The right-wing victimologists feel beset by hidden forces trying to oppress them, by a culture that conspires to unman them, dark shadowy conspiracies all around
  • recent right-wing narratives, even J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” often follow the trauma formula: “Take the lamentations about atrophying manhood and falling sperm counts. Call it what you want, but the core idea is always shaped like trauma. Once, we were whole, but now we’re not; now we suffer from a sickness we struggle to grasp or name.”
  • The instability of the self has created an immature public culture — impulsive, dramatic, erratic and cruel. In institution after institution, from churches to schools to nonprofits, the least mature voices dominate and hurl accusations, while the most mature lie low, trying to get through the day.
  • They are considerate to and gracious toward others because they can see situations from multiple perspectives
  • The founders of the therapeutic ethos thought they were creating autonomous individualists who would feel good about themselves. But, as Lasch forecast: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”
  • Maturity, now as ever, is understanding that you’re not the center of the universe. The world isn’t a giant story about me.
  • In a nontherapeutic ethos, people don’t build secure identities on their own. They weave their stable selves out of their commitments to and attachments with others. Their identities are forged as they fulfill their responsibilities as friends, family members, employees, neighbors and citizens. The process is social and other-absorbed; not therapeutic.
  • Maturity in this alternative ethos is achieved by getting out of your own selfish point of view and developing the ability to absorb, understand and inhabit the views of others.
  • Mature people are calm amid the storm because their perception lets them see the present challenges from a long-term vantage.
  • People on all sides genuinely come to believe they are powerless, unwilling to assume any responsibility for their plight — another classic symptom of immaturity.
  • They can withstand the setbacks because they have pointed their life toward some concrete moral goal.
  • “one of the greatest indicators of our own spiritual maturity is revealed in how we respond to the weaknesses, the inexperience and the potentially offensive actions of others.”
  • a sign of maturity is the ability to respond with understanding when other people have done something stupid and given you the opportunity to feel superior.
Javier E

Opinion | Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Brandon Terry - The New York Times - 0 views

  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.
  • But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.
  • King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.
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  • I’ve described it as a romantic narrative, one that’s about unities in the process of becoming, a calling together of Americans to transcend racial division and come together in a unifying way, a more perfect union, as a transcendence of essential American goodness over transitory American evils.
  • when we tell the story that way, unfortunately, not only is it mythic, but it trains us to treat King as the kind of person who’s not doing any original political thinking. What he’s doing is calling us to be true to who we always already were
  • And when you treat him like that, the thing that becomes most interesting about him is not his thought. It’s not the way he challenged us to think about violence. It’s not the way he challenges us to think about segregation, both de facto and de jure. It’s not how he challenges us to think about economic justice.
  • The thing that’s interesting about him starts to be his rhetoric or his tactics, the way in which he pushes people or frames arguments to call us to be true to who we always already were. That’s a real problem because it evades the most incisive, challenging and generative contributions that his public philosophy makes for our era.
  • it gets conscripted into a story that’s ultimately affirming about the adequacy of our constitutional order, the trajectory of our institutions, the essential goodness of our national character. You often hear politicians use this rhetoric of, this is not who we are.
  • it’s partly related to how we tell the story of the civil rights movement and particularly, how we tell King’s role in the civil rights movement.
  • There’s a way in which the philosophy of nonviolence gets painted, even in King’s time, as a kind of extreme, purist pacifism. And part of that is the connection with Gandhi, although I think it’s a radical misunderstanding of Gandhi, as well.
  • it’s a way of imagining the commitment to nonviolence as related to passivity, as related to the performance of suffering for pity. These are things that King never endures. For him, the idea of passive resistance was a misnomer. He helped coin the phrase “direct action” — he and other members of the civil-rights generation — that nonviolence is aggressive.
  • It’s an aggressive attack on injustice, an aggressive form of noncooperation with domination. It’s about trying to wedge yourself into the machinery of domination, to prevent its adequate functioning, to try to force or coerce your fellow citizens to stop and take stock of what kind of injustices are being unfurled in their name.
  • And it does so on the presumption that politics involves coercion, especially for King, who had a pretty tragic sense of human nature, that politics is going to involve confrontation with great evil, that it’s not a Pollyannaish view about what we’re all capable of if we just turn our eye toward God in the right way.
  • We’re owe it to them to live with evil. And we always are going to be called to confront it. We just need to do it in ways that won’t unleash a further chain of social evil and bitterness and revenge and retaliation. And King thought nonviolence was the only weapon that could cut and heal at the same time.
  • So when you hear King talk about love, when you hear King talk about nonviolence, these things actually require not just an enormous discipline around the acceptance of suffering, as if it’s some kind of passive practice, but they require really creative, dedicated thinking around how exactly to push and prod your neighbors into addressing the forms of injustice that structure the polity and how to do it in a way that doesn’t leave a perpetual midnight of bitterness when the conflict is done.
  • He says that the really interesting question, however, is how to organize a sustained, successful challenge to structural injustice. And for King, that requires something that blends militant resistance and a higher-order ethical practice that can point the way toward peaceful reconciliation over the long term.
  • Gandhi has this line where he says, if you can’t practice nonviolence, it quote, “retaliation or resistance unto death is the second best, though a long way off from the first. Cowardice is impotence, worse than violence.” So this idea that if you can’t be nonviolent, it’s better to be violent than to be a coward, doing nothing — I think gets at something important. Can you help unpack that?
  • to raise the question of strategy, as if we can evaluate means without some kind of ethical reflection or without some kind of underlying ethical commitments, for King, is already a confusion. He thinks that the ends are prefigured in any means.
  • Gandhi, in “Hind Swaraj,” has this great passage where he talks about how could come to acquire a piece of property. You could buy it. You could steal it. You could kill somebody in pursuit of it. You could ask for it as a gift.At the end of the day, you still have the same property. But the thing, itself, has changed. In one scenario, it’s a piece of stolen property. It’s a theft. In another, it’s a gift, which is different than something you’ve purchased.
  • So in the course of acquiring the thing, even though the thing is the same, the means have transformed it in a really, really important way. And King wants to say something similar — that in all political practice, the ends are prefigured in the means
  • nonviolence has to be — if it’s going to be true nonviolence for King — informed by a philosophy of love that really wants and desires and wills goodwill for the enemy at present and is committed, at the fundamental level, to going on together in peace, going on together, sharing the polity in perpetuity.
  • I think for King, imperative to nonviolent resistance turns, in large part, on the question of your own dignity and self-respect. So it is a justice question. He’s concerned with structural justice as a matter of the kinds of arrangements that prevail in the larger American society. That’s obviously true.
  • So there’s the person or group you’re in conversation or conflict with. I’m a liberal, and I’m arguing with a conservative. And I think that’s the most common target to think about: How do I beat or convince this person or group on the other side?
  • Then there’s the broader community polity — the voters, of the country, people who are bystanders, maybe interested, maybe not, but a broader community that is in some way watching or can be brought in to watch. And then there’s you, the person taking the action, and how it affects you and your group to take a particular action.
  • something that seems present in King’s thought is much, much, much, much more concern and focus than I think most political thinkers have today on how political action affects you, the person taking it, and affects the broader community that might be watching it
  • — that ends up with you being turned away from the good and toward things like hatred, resentment, violence, which he thinks, ultimately, will corrode your soul and take you further away from flourishing.
  • But he’s also concerned with how you relate to your own sense of equality, equal standing, worth, as he would say, somebodiness, we might say dignity — he also says that a lot — and that for King, to acquiesce in the face of oppression and domination, without protest, is to abdicate your own self-respect and dignity.
  • for him, dignity also required a certain kind of excellence of character, a certain kind of comportment and practice toward others.
  • So it is about trying to defend your dignity, defend yourself respect against insult and humiliation, oppression. But it’s also about doing so in a way that doesn’t degrade your character in the long term, that doesn’t cause you to end up being turned away from the good, which, again, for him, is going to be a religiously-inflected category
  • When you think about somebody’s political philosophy or their theory of political action, you can maybe think of there being a couple agents they’re thinking about.
  • It has fallen out of favor to say that there are certain ways of acting, politically, that are better and worse, from a virtue perspective, because it often is seen not as really a question of you and your relationship to some baseline or ideal but is some kind of concession you’re making to people who don’t deserve
  • I am a person who believes those questions are still legitimate, that they can’t all be reduced to strategy or will to power or psychic drives. I think that there’s something like an ethical life that requires us to argue about it and requires us to think really hard about how we discipline ourselves to achieve it.
  • Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, wrote a phenomenal book, many years ago, called “Righteous Discontent.” And that’s what introduces the phrase, “the politics of respectability.” It’s a study of turn of the century Black Baptist women and their organizing efforts through the church.
  • It’s this idea that, in confronting a system of social stigma, the response that you need to have to it is to try to adjust your behavior, comportment, your self fashioning, in line with the dominant norms so that you can, over time, undermine the stigma and become a full participant in society.
  • there are all sorts of questions, legitimate questions, that are raised against that. Are we losing something valuable about alternative forms of life, about alternative cultural practices, when we take the existing, dominant norms as unassailable or something to aspire to?
  • what’s really fascinating is that he talks a lot about how he sympathizes with all those criticisms. He agrees with them
  • here’s the other part of Evelyn Higginbotham’s formulation — there’s a deeper question, one with thousands of years of moral reflection built up into it, which is about virtue ethics — that there are some things that people are appealing to you about that aren’t about their effect in the polity that aren’t about trying to manipulate white, racial attitudes. They’re about your own flourishing and character. They’re deep questions about how to live a good life, how to achieve excellence and the crafting of your soul.
  • as King would say, our reason sometimes can become subordinate to our passions. It can just be a legitimizing power or rationalizing power to the point where we lose track of what we really want to achieve, the kind of character we really want to have.
  • And for King, many of the appeals he made in that vocabulary are really about that. They’re really about virtue. They’re really about what hatred does to your life, what anger does to your life, what violence does to your life
  • there is a question for him, at the core of his life, which is, what makes this worth doing? That’s a virtue question. It’s not just a strategic or tactical one, in the narrow sense.
  • he describes nonviolence, I think really importantly, as also being about a nonviolence of spirit.
  • the example that he often gives is about humiliation — that there’s a way in which the desire to humiliate others, to diminish their status in front of other people for your own pleasure, the desire to subject them to standards of evaluation that they probably themselves don’t hold or don’t understand, in order to enable mockery. There’s a way in which, if we’re reflexive about where that desire comes from, we will find that it comes from a place that’s irrational, indefensible and, likely, cruel, and that if we were to imagine a way of life built around those feelings, those desires, those practices, it would be one that would make it really hard for us to have healthy social ties, stable institutions, flourishing social relationships.
  • So part of what he’s up to is asking us, at all times, to be self-reflexive about the desires and needs and fantasies that drive us in politics
  • the concession.
  • So what nonviolence does is, it builds in a check on those kinds of rationalizations, those kinds of emotional drives, by teaching us to avoid forms of humiliation and forms of physical violence that make it hard to come back from. So that’s the first point.
  • The second point — and it goes more to your sense of revenge and retaliation — is again, forcing us to acknowledge the legitimacy of anger.
  • He uses the phrase, “legitimate anger” in the late ’60s — but to be reflective about it and understand that, even in a case where someone kills a loved one of yours, revenge, violence, retaliation, that doesn’t bring back the loved one that you’ve lost.
  • The only thing that can do that is a kind of forward-looking, constructive practice of politics and social ethics.
  • so what he’s trying to do is raise the question of, can we channel our legitimate rage, our legitimate anger, into a practice that allows us to maintain our self respect?
  • here’s this man who is both making this public argument and trying to get people to follow him in it and put themselves at risk over it, and is also living it himself, and talks about this unbelievably difficult thing, which is not feel righteous anger, but to not feel hatred, to internally reflect the world you want externally.
  • he does falter. He does fail. And I think when we read biographies of King, when you read the last parts of David Garrow’s biography, when you read Cornel West’s essay, from “To Shape a New World,” which talks a lot about the despair at the end of King’s life, if you watch HBO’S great documentary, “King in the Wilderness,” you see a person faltering and failing under the pressure.
  • He’s not able, for example, to bring himself to a kind of reconciliation with Malcolm X
  • How imaginable is King’s philosophy, is this practice, without his deep Christianity, without a belief in redemption, in salvation, in the possibility of a next life?
  • I think King, himself, thinks that the practice of nonviolent politics does the kind of work that you’re describing. And I think he would be worried about the fact that, in our time, so much of these questions about the management of emotion, the building of character, has become a privatized practice.
  • So I think he does think that that’s one way that this really does happen. And we have lots of evidence from the Civil Rights Movement, personal testimony, and personal reflection, where this seems to be the case.
  • the last thing I’ll say is that in order to do that work, in order to do some of the work you’re describing, he also is building an alternative community
  • So one way that I read that famous final speech, “I’ve seen the promised land” — there’s obviously a prophetic reading of it, but there’s also one where he’s describing the prefiguration of the promised land in the kind of politics and social life he’s participated in over his career, that the promised land is seen in the union politics in Memphis, it’s seen in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, gathering to do Mississippi Freedom Summer. It’s seen in the people walking for 350-plus days in Montgomery, Alabama, and banding together to help each other out, that is the promised land.
  • And when you are in a community that’s constantly talking with each other and lifting each other up and engaging in practices like song, prayer, other communal rituals, to try to affirm this alternative set of ethical and political commitments against the whole rest of the culture, that’s the only way it can be done, is that you have to have an alternative form of social life that can sustain you in that work. The private practice isn’t going to do it.
  • When you look at the principles of nonviolence on Stanford’s King Institute, I think a bunch of them would be familiar to people. You can resist evil without resorting to violence. You seek to win the friendship and understanding of the opponent, not to humiliate.
  • He thinks that we learn a lot about how to love other people by confronting them in public, by forcing ourselves into uncomfortable situations where we have to endure the look of the other, back and forth, where we train ourselves to extend these interactions of contentious politics until they can alter or change the people that we’ve put our bodies in close contact with on the field of politics.
  • I go back to the sermon he gave — and it’s collected in “Strength to Love,” and it’s called shattered dreams — where he confronts a problem that is all over the Black tradition, which is that the struggle we’re engaged in has gone on, in some form or another, for hundreds of years. At the moments of its greatest promise, you can look over the course of history and see, just years later, we find ourselves in situations that are unimaginably awful.
  • King is not naive. He’s a student of history. He’s somebody who asks himself hard questions like this. And he gives two different kinds of answers. And one is the answer that you’ve mentioned here, which is a theological answer. It’s conventional theodicy story, that look, at the end of the day, God is at work in the world. And God is on the side of justice.
  • There’s another way that he goes at it, however. And for me, I read it as rooted in a different kind of project, one that combines what used to be called philosophical anthropology, which is just a way of saying philosophical reflections on what kind of beings we are. It’s rooted in that, and it’s rooted in politics. And I think those things can find lots of overlapping consensus from people outside of the Christian tradition.
  • What you have to be committed to, in the last instance, is that evil is not the totality of who we are as persons, that people have the capacity, emotionally and rationally, to reflect on their life plans, their practices, their commitments, and change them, maybe not all of them, maybe not all at once, but that those things can be changed, and that politics is really a field where contingency is the key word, that although there are structural constraints and everything can’t be done at every moment, that the unprecedented, the new, the unexpected, happens in this realm.
  • And the only way that we can confirm that nothing new will happen, that oppression will last forever, that the future bears no hope, is if we don’t act. That’s the only way we can confirm that it’s true for all time, is by failing to act in pursuit of justice.
  • that’s King’s view, I think. And to me, that’s the persuasive one, that in our action, we might be able to see some measure of justice from a complicated, complex swirl of contingencies, and to move the ball forward — we will inevitably fail — but to look back on that failure with maturity and try to do better the next time.
  • How do you think about the question of the weaponization of nonviolence and then the applicability of its principles to the powerful and to what they might, we might, the state might learn from it.
  • there were many people — Harold Cruse famously wrote this, but others even closer to King — who said, you’re not the leader of Vietnam. You’re the leader of the African American civil rights movement. You should not speak out on this war because you’ll lose your relationship with Johnson.
  • King says that the people who are advising him in this way, they just don’t know him, his commitment or his calling. They don’t understand that if he’s going to raise his voice against violence in Watts or Detroit, that he’s got to raise it against what he called, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” his own government.
  • for him, the question was really one about militarism and the way that gets imagined as this hardheaded, realistic, hyper-rational response to international disputes and social problems abroad, when in actuality, if we take stock of what he called the casualties of war, the spiritual ones and the material ones, we would realize that most of the violence we engage in at the foreign-policy level is counterproductive. It’s created more problems and more harms than it ever has seemed to solve.
  • This is one of the powerful interventions that you see in Lionel McPherson’s essay, in “To Shape a New World.” It’s just this idea that this is about hardheaded realism is mythic. King says it’s about an immature image that we are nurturing for ourselves, that we’re trying to shore up this idea of ourselves as some kind of crusading hero or all-powerful world power, while not taking stock of all of the things about our freedoms, about our way of life, about our connectedness as a society, about our social divisions, that war has exacerbated, not to mention the violence that’s prosecuted abroad.
  • And he says similar things about domestic policy, the ways in which our politics toward poor families, single-parent households, is punitive for reasons that aren’t justified, that our response to what he calls “the derivative crimes of the ghetto” are wildly out of proportion and unjust compared to how we treat the systematic crimes of exploitation, segregation, disenfranchisement, that structure much of ghetto life.
  • So I’m in total agreement with Coates on that question
  • it just seems — I don’t want to call it axiomatic, but a repeated d that the more willing you become to use violence as a state, the more it corrupts you, and the more violent you become as a state, and to some degree, the more violent the people you are policing, the people you are occupying, become.
  • I’m not a pacifist. I don’t believe you can fully eradicate violence. But we don’t weigh how violent we make others, in our actions, very well, and then how violent we become in response, how much we enter into that escalatory dynamic.
  • But then the other thing is this question of this broader community, of changing hearts, of changing minds, of acting upon people, not through punishment, but through our belief that they can alter. And I’d be curious to hear you reflect on that question of community a little bit, because I think one of the central debates of our time is who’s actually in the community.
  • What would it mean to have a bit more of King’s view, of trying to create community at the center of what the state is attempting to do, as it fashions and helps govern the country?
  • BRANDON TERRY: So one underappreciated feature from King’s famous Riverside Church speech against Vietnam, is he goes on this whole riff about America lacking maturity. And it’s a weird thing to have in a foreign-policy speech. You’re used to — you’re a policy person. You don’t usually hear the word “maturity” bandied about in these kinds of debates.
  • But what he’s getting at is that something really tightly linked to violence, that violence always exceeds the original justification you have for it. It’s not precise. It’s not able to be easily targeted, as we think. It spirals out. It produces retaliation. And then we retaliate again.
  • And all the while, it’s expanding its justifications to the point of absurdity. And King describes that as adding cynicism to the process of death. And he says that maturity is one of the only ways out here, that the maturity to be able to stand up and say, we were wrong, we want to make amends, we want to repair evils committed in our name, those are questions that are essentially nonstarters in American politics right now, certainly about foreign policy, but even in some places in domestic policy.
  • that feature of King’s thinking is something that I always want to draw attention to because I think it’s something we ignore. So that’s the first point I want to make.
  • The second thing — and this is also really deeply-seeded in that Vietnam speech — one of the reasons that people hated it so much — he was attacked in The New York Times, basically every editorial page in the country — one of the reasons people hated that speech so much is that he spent so much time expressing solidarity and sympathy with Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese forces.
  • How could you express sympathy or some kind of solidarity with the enemy? And it’s very instructive, how King went about it. He wasn’t one of these people — you’ve seen these images of people waving the North Vietnamese flag at counterculture protests. It wasn’t like that.
  • It was him really spending a lot of time meditating on the reasons why we had ended up in this conflict, narrating the whole history of our failure to support Ho Chi Minh and the struggle against French colonialism, against Chinese colonialism, and how that had led to the situation we were in by 1967. King is narrating this history. He’s also trying to get people to think about what it must feel like to be on the ground in Vietnam and witness these bombings, witnessed this imposition of terror.
  • And he’s doing that because at bottom, he’s inspired by a vision really rooted in a parable the Good Samaritan, from the Bible, that everyone is our neighbor, that there are no sectional loyalties that should eviscerate our moral obligations to others, our obligation to show them respect, to go on in community with them, and that most of what goes on in foreign policy and particularly war making, is a bad-faith evasion of the fact that we’re all interconnected.
  • he understood that there’s a fundamental interconnectedness amongst humanity at the ethical level and at the material, structural level, and that war making is an evasion of that fact. We’re going to have to live together. So the chief question that should organize it is, how can we do so in peace?
  • He has a line where he says, quote, “the dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain and when he knows that he has a means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth, on a scale of dollars, is eliminated.” Tell me a bit about the spiritual and psychological dimensions of King’s economic philosophy and organizing.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Well, for King, the question of poverty and the question of economic inequality are both questions of dignity and democracy, and the questions of dignity because when you live without the adequate means to really enjoy the fair value of your basic rights, when you live in a society — and this is a really important point for King — when you live in a society of profound affluence, like the United States, and you live in severe poverty, it expresses a kind of contempt from your fellow citizens about your standing as an equal member of the polity.
  • So separate from the plain, material fact of hunger or health care, there’s this additional spiritual concern with the way in which living with nothing, living on a lonely island amidst an ocean of prosperity, as he would put it, diminishes your dignity.
  • then another piece — this is bridging of the dignity and democracy question — is that when people don’t have a say in the core, vital interest of their life, when they have no decision-making power over the processes which determine how their life is going to go, that too is a diminishment of their dignity. And King, who was operating in a long tradition of social democracy, wants to expand democratic practices to the broader economic realm.
  • Without expanding democracy into that economic realm, for King, we’re both making a mockery of democracy and we’re diminishing the dignity of citizens who live in search of a real standing as free and equal.
  • as somebody who spends a lot of my time in debates about economic policy, I think it is fair to say that the ends of economics are taken as the economy, typically. People hopefully shouldn’t starve. But a lot of debates about what we should do, even for the poor, become these recursive, well, how can they better participate in the economy and how are they going to be able to invest in themselves and how they’ll be economic opportunity for their children.
  • And the idea that the economy is subservient to the community, that the point of the economy is the community, that it should be measured— our policy should be measured by what they do for democratic participation, for the dignity of individuals, is pretty lost. If anything, I see it more now, on the post-liberal right, as people call it, than I even do among mainline Democrats.
  • it has fallen out of favor as a way to frame and think about these conversations.
  • BRANDON TERRY: Yeah, I think it’s rooted in some really complicated things. I think there’s a kind of liberal anxiety about speaking forthrightly about the fact that living in areas of severe, concentrated disadvantage and racial segregation that we call ghettos, diminishes the dignity of the people who live there.
  • That feels uncomfortable for people to say forthrightly, in the way that King would.
  • so we try to get around it by speaking about opportunity and the wealth gap and unemployment statistics. But really what people are feeling is an existential assault on dignity.
  • one way to read that book is to say that she’s telling a tragic story about the loss of a particular ideal that guided great society politics. And that’s the principle of maximum feasible participation.
  • That was a really social-democratic idea, this idea that, well, we need to empower all sorts of people to participate in policy making and democratic deliberation, and that part of where people will find self-respect and dignity is through engagement in politics and their community
  • I think it gets to something that is very present, towards the end of King’s life, which is his sense that there is something important for the civil rights movement in the labor movement. And unions, on some level, they are mechanisms of democracy. One of the most important functions they have is workplace democracy
  • King is, in this tradition, in many ways inspired by a mentor of his. And one of the most important figures in American history but one of the most severely neglected was A. Philip Randolph, the great labor leader, former organizer of the Pullman Porters, the architect of both the March on Washington that gets canceled, which was going to target the Roosevelt administration during World War II, and the 1963 famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
  • they’ve got a certain set of commitments. So one is the idea that because most African Americans are working class or poor, anything that advances the interests of working-class people and their ability to exercise democratic control over the economy is going to advance the interests of African Americans.
  • for King labor unions are also, as you described, important laboratories of democracy. So they’re one of the few places where people from all walks of life can get together, deliberate about strategy, deliberate about social ends, social goods, put money behind things that they value, that aren’t only their own material interest.
  • today, of course, there’s this ongoing — always is this ongoing argument — of should you have race-based politics or is that unusable, doesn’t work, creates too much backlash? Or you should have class-based politics that are looking for commonalities, and because you’ve had so much economic disadvantage for Black Americans, that’ll work through the mechanism of class just fine.
  • BRANDON TERRY: So King often invokes the philosopher Hegel, because he’s constantly describing his mode of thinking as a dialectical one, where he’s trying to reconcile seeming opposites and produce a new synthesis, which helps you transcend certain intractable problems.
  • Now as a reading of Hegel, that has much to be desired. But as a description of Martin Luther King’s thought, I think that’s always a good way to understand what he’s up to. And so I think what he’s always trying to do is transcend that opposition.
  • there’s a way in which we sometimes will say class-based politics works to lift African Americans because they’re disproportionately poor. And what’s tricky about that is that it doesn’t really theorize what to do about the African American middle class and the African American elite.
  • So a thing that King was thinking a lot about when he wrote “Stride Toward Freedom” and the Montgomery bus boycott, is there are areas where racial solidarity is going to be really effective and probably indispensable.
  • where questions of anti-Black racism emerge, where questions of racial humiliation, stigma that really affects the larger group, things that all Black people feel vulnerable to, those are going to be areas — like the segregation laws on the buses — those are going to be areas where you actually can generate a lot of racial solidarity and do a lot of important work with it, especially as a defensive posture.
  • When you start to get into questions of political economy, however, you have to be careful because the appeal of racial solidarity can actually obscure the fact that Black people don’t all share the same material interest in lots of ways.
  • King’s primary principle always is, is that he’s dedicated to the group that William Julius Wilson called the truly disadvantaged, the least of these, that at the end of the day, he’s going to give everything to the people who are in the most desperate situation, the poor. And that’s going to guide his politics.
  • where that is enabled by a race-based solidarity, so in questions of policing, perhaps, or questions of social stigma and media discourse, that’s where he’ll turn. But in other cases, I think he’d really be trying to experiment with a form of politics that empowers the poor to take leadership on their ow
  • How does being more aware of the distinctions he drew and the decisions he made help you look at some of the paths we should be walking down today and are not, in these conversations, or are walking down and shouldn’t be?
  • n order for us to understand why so many African Americans are located in the realm of the most disadvantaged, in the strata of the most disadvantaged, you have to understand the history of racial domination in this country. You have to understand the persistence of racial discrimination, especially in labor markets. And you have to understand the ways that racial ideology allows us to obscure the nature of our economy.
  • So the most classic example is that structural unemployment gets reframed, in part by racism, as questions of laziness or pathology or criminality instead of as a feature of the economy as such. So King always talks about the critique of racism as part of the diagnosis of the disease in order to cure it.
  • So even in the privileging the least well off and being concerned with poor people of all races, he wants to say that the critique of racism helps us see through the kinds of blindnesses that obscure the nature of our economy and the commonalities across race and the things that we need to address the questions of economic justice precisely
  • The second thing is that, in his critique of Black power, one of the things he says is that he worries that Black power gives priority to the question of race in a way that confuses our analysis of social reality. So what does he mean by that?
  • if you think that all Black disadvantage is primarily about anti-Black racism, you can start to miss the fact that there are broader economic dislocations that need to be addressed, that there are structural features of the American constitutional order, the ways in which municipal boundaries are structured, ways that funding decisions are made, that aren’t primarily driven by racial animus, that need to be addressed.
  • You can lose sight of those things and start to think that the real battle is in something like a totality of anti-Black racial ideology that can be battled in Hollywood movies and comic books and school curricula and legislation and political rhetoric
  • it’s not to say that those things don’t exist. It’s just to say that there’s a confusion about what’s going to make the biggest impact in improving the life circumstances of the least well off.
  • King really calls us to constantly be very precise about what the causal mechanisms are for Black disadvantage and to not be confused by the fact that there’s discrimination and injustice and cruelty in these other realms but which might not have as much causal impact as some of these other things.
  • King was very adamant that Black pride, that a concern with representation, that thinking in expansive ways about how do you affirm the somebodiness of Black youth, that those things are really, really important and that they’re not to be dismissed.
  • So it is a question of justice if people in Hollywood just constantly demean or diminish the talent of nonwhite actors. That is a question of justice. It’s just that we have to be honest about what the import of those struggles will be for the broader group. And the only way we can do that is by being attentive to the class differences within the group.
  • there’s a way in which — and King diagnoses this very incisively — there’s a way in which some genres of Black nationalism are so pessimistic about the possibility for multiracial democracy in the United States, for any kind of Black flourishing in the United States that they essentially foreclose real interest in political organizing and social movements
  • But the energy they still managed to generate — the outrage, the sentiment, the sociality — they find their outlet, instead, in a practice of humiliation, counter humiliation. So that there may not be hope that we can actually change the country, but at the very least, we can enjoy a feeling of retaliation, a kind of self-respecting sense of resistance, by engaging in a practice of trying to humiliate our opponents in the public spher
  • there’s a titillation to that. There’s a catharsis in watching someone — at that point, it would have been called stick it to whitey. Now it would be stick it to the libs or own the libs.
  • this is a significant amount of people that could cause real damage in the places where they don’t face many countervailing forms of power. And they can exercise a much more toxic impact on the broader state of American politics in a time where the media environment is way more fragmented
  • I see those elements. And I think that we need more people operating, in the kind of mode that King did, in his critique of Black power, to try to turn people away from their understandable feelings of hostility and resentment, toward more productive forms of political engagement.
  • the word, “emotion,” which is a neglected part of politics, maybe of King’s thought in particular is that he understood — I think he understood part of the goal of politics and political action as creating a particular structure of political emotion.
  • , what structure of emotion, of political emotion, we’re actually living in.
  • BRANDON TERRY: My mentor and friend, Karuna Mantena, at Columbia, political theorist, a brilliant political theorist working on a book on Gandhi — I learned this from her, thinking a lot about how nonviolence is a kind of realism, in part because it doesn’t engage in of fiction that politics is operating on, in the model of rational discussion. It takes very, very, very seriously the problem of emotion.
  • for King, thinking about the history of racial oppression in America, they’re key emotions that you have to think about. One of the most important ones is fear
  • If that fear is a longstanding, deeply-structuring feature of American culture and political life, if it’s something that animates our comedy movies, our stand-up routines, our political discourse, you can’t operate as if it’s not there. You have to do things that will somehow disarm, disrupt, dispel those fears, in order to make progress on the political questions you want to pursue. That was one of King’s deepest, deepest commitments.
  • He’s thinking a lot about anger, which we’ve talked at great length about. And one of the disappointments I’ve had with radical politics in the present, as sympathetic as I am to most of the aims, is that I just don’t think the emotion question has been adequately considered
  • people often defend their politics as like, King was unpopular. And the things we’re saying are unpopular. So we’re operating in that tradition.
  • it’s not enough to just say, I’ve started a conversation, I’ve provoked something toxic in the culture. He’s not trying to do that, necessarily. He’s trying to elicit reactions that bring forward certain emotions but not let those emotions unravel the society itself. He’s trying to channel them into other forms of political affect that are much more congenial to reconciliation and justice.
  • what we’ve unfortunately ended up with is that the sophistication of mobilization strategists, the depth of the polarization, has made anger the principal affect of American politics at this moment.
  • a King-inspired political philosophy, both at the state level and the activist level, has to do, is think about how do we transform the recalcitrant nature of today’s political anger and channel it into forms of constructive politics that might point toward a more just future and that might dissolve the forms of anger that are illegitimate and ill founded, in part, by doing the kind of work sometimes described as a moral jujitsu, turning those affects against themselves, in part, to try to transform them into something different.
  • maybe it’ll be easier to use myself as an example, here.
  • When I started out in blogging and political writing and journalism, particularly blogging, I think I thought a lot about politics in terms of winning and losing, and in my corner of it, winning and losing intellectually, that I was involved in political arguments, and arguments could be won or lost in front of some kind of audience.
  • One is having been in a lot of arguments. And I think I’m a reasonably good arguer. And so I’ve done, by my own likes, well, and then noticed it didn’t have it all the effect I wanted it to have, which is, if anything, it usually — if you really beat somebody in an argument and they feel humiliated, they go further into views they already held
  • And two things have begun to corrode, for me, that sense
  • so you lose by winning.
  • then the second is, particularly in the Trump era, the sense that if you met something awful with an equal and opposite energetic force, that in some weird way, you just added energy to what was now an awful system and conversation.
  • What do you do to not create a sense that this is a right conversation to be having? And I don’t the answers to it. And I’m not saying like I’ve ascended to some higher plane and don’t argue or any of that. I have all the same intuitions and senses I’ve always had.
  • that’s why I find King so interesting and challenging in this way, because it’s just really, really, really different to ask the question, how do I reshape the emotional politics and the emotional structure of myself, of the people I’m in conflict with and then of the people who are bystanders or watchers of that conflict, for the better
  • It’s just a really different goal to be targeting, and just unimaginably harder than, can I come up with an argument that I think is a winning argument.
  • I think you see it — when he’s assassinated, the leading figures of the Black-Power generation, they’re heartbroken. They mourn his loss. They grieve for him, in part because — and you can read any of these memoirs, particularly Stokely Carmichael’s — they felt like he never — that even when he disagreed with them, he loved them, and not just because they were friendly, but because he loved in the sense that he always invoked, of agape love, that he wanted goodwill for them, and that his arguments weren’t from a place of trying to humiliate them or embarrass them or expose them as ridiculous.
  • He wanted to affirm their right to make the arguments they were making, to affirm their intelligence and judgment and to enter into their mind, to try to reconstruct a position with sympathy, but then show why it falls short for the sake of goals that he was forthright about, about justice, about reconciliation, about love
  • we are in a moment of extraordinary cynicism. And cynicism can take advantage of your intellectual honesty, your practice of agape love. But I think that’s in the short term.
  • In my better moments, I’m of the view that the only way to start to turn the tide against the cynicism that has so corroded and corrupted our political culture is to try to have these demonstrations of humility and authenticity that cause us to put ourselves at some risk, the way that King did
  • So always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience? And if I can put one spin on that, you mentioned the many books King wrote. If people want to start with one thing he actually wrote to read, one book, which one should they start with?
  • I think you get the best sense of his mature thought from his 1967 book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is still our question. So I would definitely recommend that. I also really love “A Trumpet of Conscience,” his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation lectures that were published posthumously.
  • I really strongly recommend Peniel Joseph’s, “The Sword and the Shield.” It’s a dual biography of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. I reviewed it for The New York Review of Books and think really highly of it. It’s a great meditation on the ways they influenced each other. And it gives you a good sense of the broader intellectual milieu of the period.
  • I also really like Jeanne Theoharis’s “A More Beautiful and Terrible History.” I think for people coming to the study of the civil rights movement for the first time are kind of curious about why some of the things that I’ve said don’t sound familiar to them. She writes, in a really accessible and intelligent way, about some of the myths, that structure, how that history is taught and popularly conveyed. We have a lot of agreements there.
  • And then a where do we go from here question, I want to recommend my colleague, Tommie Shelby’s book, “Dark Ghettos,” which is a King-inspired philosophical reflection on the deep structure of ghetto poverty and what it requires of us, as a society, to do to redress it. It’s a book that’s very demanding on how far we’ve fallen short and questions of justice that pertain to the kind of neighborhoods that we grew up in and around.
Javier E

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Robinson Meyer - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Implementation matters, but it’s harder to cover because it’s happening in all parts of the country simultaneously. There isn’t a huge Republican-Democratic fight over it, so there isn’t the conflict that draws the attention to it
  • we sort of implicitly treat policy like it’s this binary one-zero condition. One, you pass a bill, and the thing is going to happen. Zero, you didn’t, and it won’t.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: You can almost divide the law up into different kind of sectors, right? You have the renewable build-out. You have EVs. You have carbon capture. You have all these other decarbonizing technologies the law is trying to encourage
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  • that’s particularly true on the I.R.A., which has to build all these things in the real world.
  • we’re trying to do industrial physical transformation at a speed and scale unheralded in American history. This is bigger than anything we have done at this speed ever.
  • The money is beginning to move out the door now, but we’re on a clock. Climate change is not like some other issues where if you don’t solve it this year, it is exactly the same to solve it next year. This is an issue where every year you don’t solve it, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere builds, warming builds, the effects compound
  • Solve, frankly, isn’t the right word there because all we can do is abate, a lot of the problems now baked in. So how is it going, and who can actually walk us through that?
  • Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of heatmap.news
  • why do all these numbers differ so much? How big is this thing?
  • in electric vehicles and in the effort, kind of this dual effort in the law, to both encourage Americans to buy and use electric vehicles and then also to build a domestic manufacturing base for electric vehicles.
  • on both counts, the data’s really good on electric vehicles. And that’s where we’re getting the fastest response from industry and the clearest response from industry to the law.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: Factories are getting planned. Steel’s going in the ground. The financing for those factories is locked down. It seems like they’re definitely going to happen. They’re permitted. Companies are excited about them. Large Fortune 500 automakers are confidently and with certainty planning for an electric vehicle future, and they’re building the factories to do that in the United States. They’re also building the factories to do that not just in blue states. And so to some degree, we can see the political certainty for electric vehicles going forward.
  • in other parts of the law, partially due to just vagaries of how the law is being implemented, tax credits where the fine print hasn’t worked out yet, it’s too early to say whether the law is working and how it’s going and whether it’s going to accomplish its goal
  • EZRA KLEIN: I always find this very funny in a way. The Congressional Budget Office scored it. They thought it would make about $380 billion in climate investments over a decade. So then you have all these other analyses coming out.
  • But there’s actually this huge range of outcomes in between where the thing passes, and maybe what you wanted to have happen happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Implementation is where all this rubber meets the road
  • the Rhodium Group, which is a consulting firm, they think it could be as high as $522 billion, which is a big difference. Then there’s this Goldman Sachs estimate, which the administration loves, where they say they’re projecting $1.2 trillion in incentives —
  • ROBINSON MEYER: All the numbers differ because most of the important incentives, most of the important tax credits and subsidies in the I.R.A., are uncapped. There’s no limit to how much the government might spend on them. All that matters is that some private citizen or firm or organization come to the government and is like, hey, we did this. You said you’d give us money for it. Give us the money.
  • because of that, different banks have their own energy system models, their own models of the economy. Different research groups have their own models.
  • we know it’s going to be wrong because the Congressional Budget Office is actually quite constrained in how it can predict how these tax credits are taken up. And it’s constrained by the technology that’s out there in the country right now.
  • The C.B.O. can only look at the number of electrolyzers, kind of the existing hydrogen infrastructure in the country, and be like, well, they’re probably all going to use these tax credits. And so I think they said that there would be about $5 billion of take up for the hydrogen tax credits.
  • But sometimes money gets allocated, and then costs overrun, and there delays, and you can’t get the permits, and so on, and the thing never gets built
  • the fact that the estimates are going up is to them early evidence that this is going well. There is a lot of applications. People want the tax credits. They want to build these new factories, et cetera.
  • a huge fallacy that we make in policy all the time is assuming that once money is allocated for something, you get the thing you’re allocating the money for. Noah Smith, the economics writer, likes to call this checkism, that money equals stuff.
  • EZRA KLEIN: They do not want that, and not wanting that and putting every application through a level of scrutiny high enough to try and make sure you don’t have another one
  • I don’t think people think a lot about who is cutting these checks, but a lot of it is happening in this very obscure office of the Department of Energy, the Loan Program Office, which has gone from having $40 billion in lending authority, which is already a big boost over it not existing a couple decades ago, to $400 billion in loan authority,
  • the Loan Program Office as one of the best places we have data on how this is going right now and one of the offices that’s responded fastest to the I.R.A.
  • the Loan Program Office is basically the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, and it’s kind of the closest thing we have in the US to what exists in other countries, like Germany, which is a State development bank that funds projects that are eventually going to be profitable.
  • It has existed for some time. I mean, at first, it kind of was first to play after the Recovery Act of 2009. And in fact, early in its life, it gave a very important loan to Tesla. It gave this almost bridge loan to Tesla that helped Tesla build up manufacturing capacity, and it got Tesla to where it is today.
  • EZRA KLEIN: It’s because one of the questions I have about that office and that you see in some of the coverage of them is they’re very afraid of having another Solyndra.
  • Now, depending on other numbers, including the D.O.E., it’s potentially as high as $100 billion, but that’s because the whole thing about the I.R.A. is it’s meant to encourage the build-out of this hydrogen infrastructure.
  • EZRA KLEIN: I’m never that excited when I see a government loans program turning a profit because I think that tends to mean they’re not making risky enough loans. The point of the government should be to bear quite a bit of risk —
  • And to some degree, Ford now has to compete, and US automakers are trying to catch up with Chinese EV automakers. And its firms have EV battery technology especially, but just have kind of comprehensive understanding of the EV supply chain that no other countries’ companies have
  • ROBINSON MEYER: You’re absolutely right that this is the key question. They gave this $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build these EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s the largest loan in the office’s history. It actually means that the investment in these factories is going to be entirely covered by the government, which is great for Ford and great for our build-out of EVs
  • And to some degree, I should say, one of the roles of L.P.O. and one of the roles of any kind of State development bank, right, is to loan to these big factory projects that, yes, may eventually be profitable, may, in fact, assuredly be profitable, but just aren’t there yet or need financing that the private market can’t provide. That being said, they have moved very slowly, I think.
  • And they feel like they’re moving quickly. They just got out new guidelines that are supposed to streamline a lot of this. Their core programs, they just redefined and streamlined in the name of speeding them up
  • However, so far, L.P.O. has been quite slow in getting out new loans
  • I want to say that the pressure they’re under is very real. Solyndra was a disaster for the Department of Energy. Whether that was fair or not fair, there’s a real fear that if you make a couple bad loans that go bad in a big way, you will destroy the political support for this program, and the money will be clawed back, a future Republican administration will wreck the office, whatever it might be. So this is not an easy call.
  • when you tell me they just made the biggest loan in their history to Ford, I’m not saying you shouldn’t lend any money to Ford, but when I think of what is the kind of company that cannot raise money on the capital markets, the one that comes to mind is not Ford
  • They have made loans to a number of more risky companies than Ford, but in addition to speed, do you think they are taking bets on the kinds of companies that need bets? It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that it would have been impossible for Ford to figure out how to finance factorie
  • ROBINSON MEYER: Now, I guess what I would say about that is that Ford is — let’s go back to why Solyndra failed, right? Solyndra failed because Chinese solar deluged the market. Now, why did Chinese solar deluge the market? Because there’s such support of Chinese financing from the state for massive solar factories and massive scale.
  • EZRA KLEIN: — the private market can’t. So that’s the meta question I’m asking here. In your view, because you’re tracking this much closer than I am, are they too much under the shadow of Solyndra? Are they being too cautious? Are they getting money out fast enough?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s right; that basically, if we think the US should stay competitive and stay as close as it can and not even stay competitive, but catch up with Chinese companies, it is going to require large-scale state support of manufacturing.
  • EZRA KLEIN: OK, that’s fair. I will say, in general, there’s a constant thing you find reporting on government that people in government feel like they are moving very quickly
  • EZRA KLEIN: — given the procedural work they have to go through. And they often are moving very quickly compared to what has been done in that respect before, compared to what they have to get over. They are working weekends, they are working nights, and they are still not actually moving that quickly compared to what a VC firm can do or an investment bank or someone else who doesn’t have the weight of congressional oversight committees potentially calling you in and government procurement rules and all the rest of it.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s a theme across the government’s implementation of the I.R.A. right now, is that generally the government feels like it’s moving as fast as it can. And if you look at the Department of Treasury, they feel like we are publishing — basically, the way that most of the I.R.A. subsidies work is that they will eventually be administered by the I.R.S., but first the Department of the Treasury has to write the guidebook for all these subsidies, right?
  • the law says there’s a very general kind of “here’s thousands of dollars for EVs under this circumstance.” Someone still has to go in and write all the fine print. The Department of Treasury is doing that right now for each tax credit, and they have to do that before anyone can claim that tax credit to the I.R.S. Treasury feels like it’s moving extremely quickly. It basically feels like it’s completely at capacity with these, and it’s sequenced these so it feels like it’s getting out the most important tax credits first.
  • Private industry feels like we need certainty. It’s almost a year since the law passed, and you haven’t gotten us the domestic content bonus. You haven’t gotten us the community solar bonus. You haven’t gotten us all these things yet.
  • a theme across the government right now is that the I.R.A. passed. Agencies have to write the regulations for all these tax credits. They feel like they’re moving very quickly, and yet companies feel like they’re not moving fast enough.
  • that’s how we get to this point where we’re 311 days out from the I.R.A. passing, and you’re like, well, has it made a big difference? And I’m like, well, frankly, wind and solar developers broadly don’t feel like they have the full understanding of all the subsidies they need yet to begin making the massive investments
  • I think it’s fair to say maybe the biggest bet on that is green hydrogen, if you’re looking in the bill.
  • We think it’s going to be an important tool in industry. It may be an important tool for storing energy in the power grid. It may be an important tool for anything that needs combustion.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. So green hydrogen — and let’s just actually talk about hydrogen broadly as this potential tool in the decarbonization tool kit.
  • It’s a molecule. It is a very light element, and you can burn it, but it’s not a fossil fuel. And a lot of the importance of hydrogen kind of comes back to that attribute of it.
  • So when we look at sectors of the economy that are going to be quite hard to decarbonize — and that’s because there is something about fossil fuels chemically that is essential to how that sector works either because they provide combustion heat and steelmaking or because fossil fuels are actually a chemical feedstock where the molecules in the fossil fuel are going into the product or because fossil fuels are so energy dense that you can carry a lot of energy while actually not carrying that much mass — any of those places, that’s where we look at hydrogen as going.
  • green hydrogen is something new, and the size of the bet is huge. So can you talk about first just what is green hydrogen? Because my understanding of it is spotty.
  • The I.R.A. is extremely generous — like extremely, extremely generous — in its hydrogen subsidies
  • The first is for what’s called blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from natural gas, where we then capture the carbon dioxide that was released from that process and pump it back into the ground. That’s one thing that’s subsidized. It’s basically subsidized as part of this broader set of packages targeted at carbon capture
  • green hydrogen, which is where we take water, use electrolyzers on it, basically zap it apart, take the hydrogen from the water, and then use that as a fue
  • The I.R.A. subsidies for green hydrogen specifically, which is the one with water and electricity, are so generous that relatively immediately, it’s going to have a negative cost to make green hydrogen. It will cost less than $0 to make green hydrogen. The government’s going to fully cover the cost of producing it.
  • That is intentional because what needs to happen now is that green hydrogen moves into places where we’re using natural gas, other places in the industrial economy, and it needs to be price competitive with those things, with natural gas, for instance. And so as it kind of is transported, it’s going to cost money
  • As you make the investment to replace the technology, it’s going to cost money. And so as the hydrogen moves through the system, it’s going to wind up being price competitive with natural gas, but the subsidies in the bill are so generous that hydrogen will cost less than $0 to make a kilogram of it
  • There seems to be a sense that hydrogen, green hydrogen, is something we sort of know how to make, but we don’t know how to make it cost competitive yet. We don’t know how to infuse it into all the processes that we need to be infused into. And so a place where the I.R.A. is trying to create a reality that does not yet exist is a reality where green hydrogen is widely used, we have to know how to use it, et cetera.
  • And they just seem to think we don’t. And so you need all these factories. You need all this innovation. Like, they have to create a whole innovation and supply chain almost from scratch. Is that right?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: That’s exactly right. There’s a great Department of Energy report that I would actually recommend anyone interested in this read called “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen.” They made it for a few other technologies. It’s a hundred-page book that’s basically how the D.O.E. believes we’re going to build out a clean hydrogen economy.
  • And, of course, that is policy in its own right because the D.O.E. is saying, here is the years we’re going to invest to have certain infrastructure come online. Here’s what we think we need. That’s kind of a signal to industry that everyone should plan around those years as well.
  • It’s a great book. It’s like the best piece of industrial policy I’ve actually seen from the government at all. But one of the points it makes is that you’re going to make green hydrogen. You’re then going to need to move it. You’re going to need to move it in a pipeline or maybe a truck or maybe in storage tanks that you then cart around.
  • Once it gets to a facility that uses green hydrogen, you’re going to need to store some green hydrogen there in storage tanks on site because you basically need kind of a backup supply in case your main supply fails. All of those things are going to add cost to hydrogen. And not only are they going to add cost, we don’t really know how to do them. We have very few pipelines that are hydrogen ready.
  • All of that investment needs to happen as a result to make the green hydrogen economy come alive. And why it’s so lavishly subsidized is to kind of fund all that downstream investment that’s eventually going to make the economy come true.
  • But a lot of what has to happen here, including once the money is given out, is that things we do know how to build get built, and they get built really fast, and they get built at this crazy scale.
  • So I’ve been reading this paper on what they call “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who also wrote this paper called “Old Green Laws, New Green Deal,” or something like that. And I think they get at the scale problem here really well.
  • “The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”
  • And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: No, we do not. We absolutely do not. I think we’re going to build a ton of wind and solar. We do not right now have the system set up to use that much land to build that much new solar and wind by the time that we need to build it. I think it is partially because of permitting laws, and I think it’s also partially because right now there is no master plan
  • There’s no overarching strategic entity in the government that’s saying, how do we get from all these subsidies in the I.R.A. to net zero? What is our actual plan to get from where we are right now to where we’re emitting zero carbon as an economy? And without that function, no project is essential. No activity that we do absolutely needs to happen, and so therefore everything just kind of proceeds along at a convenient pace.
  • given the scale of what’s being attempted here, you might think that something the I.R.A. does is to have some entity in the government, as you’re saying, say, OK, we need this many solar farms. This is where we think we should put them. Let’s find some people to build them, or let’s build them ourselves.
  • what it actually does is there’s an office somewhere waiting for private companies to send in an application for a tax credit for solar that they say they’re going to build, and then we hope they build it
  • it’s an almost entirely passive process on the part of the government. Entirely would be going too far because I do think they talk to people, and they’re having conversations
  • the builder applies, not the government plans. Is that accurate?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: That’s correct. Yes.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: I think here’s what I would say, and this gets back to what do we want the I.R.A. to do and what are our expectations for the I.R.A
  • If the I.R.A. exists to build out a ton of green capacity and shift the political economy of the country toward being less dominated by fossil fuels and more dominated by the clean energy industry, frankly, then it is working
  • If the I.R.A. is meant to get us all the way to net zero, then it is not capable of that.
  • in 2022, right, we had no way to see how we were going to reduce emissions. We did not know if we were going to get a climate bill at all. Now, we have this really aggressive climate bill, and we’re like, oh, is this going to get us to net zero?
  • But getting to net zero was not even a possibility in 2022.
  • The issue is that the I.R.A. requires, ultimately, private actors to come forward and do these things. And as more and more renewables get onto the grid, almost mechanically, there’s going to be less interest in bringing the final pieces of decarbonized electricity infrastructure onto the grid as well.
  • EZRA KLEIN: Because the first things that get applied for are the ones that are more obviously profitable
  • The issue is when you talk to solar developers, they don’t see it like, “Am I going to make a ton of money, yes or no?” They see it like they have a capital stack, and they have certain incentives and certain ways to make money based off certain things they can do. And as more and more solar gets on the grid, building solar at all becomes less profitable
  • also, just generally, there’s less people willing to buy the solar.
  • as we get closer to a zero-carbon grid, there is this risk that basically less and less gets built because it will become less and less profitable
  • EZRA KLEIN: Let’s call that the last 20 percent risk
  • EZRA KLEIN: — or the last 40 percent. I mean, you can probably attach different numbers to that
  • ROBINSON MEYER: Permitting is the primary thing that is going to hold back any construction basically, especially out West,
  • right now permitting fights, the process under the National Environmental Policy Act just at the federal level, can take 4.5 years
  • let’s say every single project we need to do was applied for today, which is not true — those projects have not yet been applied for — they would be approved under the current permitting schedule in 2027.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: That’s before they get built.
  • Basically nobody on the left talked about permitting five years ago. I don’t want to say literally nobody, but you weren’t hearing it, including in the climate discussion.
  • people have moved to saying we do not have the laws, right, the permitting laws, the procurement laws to do this at the speed we’re promising, and we need to fix that. And then what you’re seeing them propose is kind of tweak oriented,
  • Permitting reform could mean a lot of different things, and Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what it could mean. Environmental groups, within themselves, have different ideas about what it could mean.
  • for many environmental groups, the permitting process is their main tool. It is how they do the good that they see themselves doing in the world. They use the permitting process to slow down fossil fuel projects, to slow down projects that they see as harming local communities or the local environment.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: So we talk about the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Let’s just start calling it NEPA. We talk about the NEPA process
  • NEPA requires the government basically study any environmental impact from a project or from a decision or from a big rule that could occur.
  • Any giant project in the United States goes through this NEPA process. The federal government studies what the environmental impact of the project will be. Then it makes a decision about whether to approve the project. That decision has nothing to do with the study. Now, notionally, the study is supposed to inform the project.
  • the decision the federal government makes, the actual “can you build this, yes or no,” legally has no connection to the study. But it must conduct the study in order to make that decision.
  • that permitting reform is so tough for the Democratic coalition specifically is that this process of forcing the government to amend its studies of the environmental impact of various decisions is the main tool that environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice use to slow down fossil fuel projects and use to slow down large-scale chemical or industrial projects that they don’t think should happen.
  • when we talk about making this program faster, and when we talk about making it more immune to litigation, they see it as we’re going to take away their main tools to fight fossil fuel infrastructure
  • why there’s this gap between rhetoric and what’s actually being proposed is that the same tool that is slowing down the green build-out is also what’s slowing down the fossil fuel build-out
  • ROBINSON MEYER: They’re the classic conflict here between the environmental movement classic, let’s call it, which was “think globally, act locally,” which said “we’re going to do everything we can to preserve the local environment,” and what the environmental movement and the climate movement, let’s say, needs to do today, which is think globally, act with an eye to what we need globally as well, which is, in some cases, maybe welcome projects that may slightly reduce local environmental quality or may seem to reduce local environmental quality in the name of a decarbonized world.
  • Because if we fill the atmosphere with carbon, nobody’s going to get a good environment.
  • Michael Gerrard, who is professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.
  • his view and the view of some people is that, look, the climate crisis is so bad that we just have to make those choices. We have to do things we would not have wanted to do to preserve something like the climate in which not just human civilization, but this sort of animal ecosystem, has emerged. But that’s hard, and who gets to decide which trade-offs to make?
  • what you’re not really seeing — not really, I would say, from the administration, even though they have some principles now; not really from California, though Gavin Newsom has a set of early things — is “this is what we think we need to make the I.R.A. happen on time, and this is how we’re going to decide what is a kind of project that gets this speedway through,” w
  • there’s a failure on the part of, let’s say, the environmental coalition writ large to have the courage to have this conversation and to sit down at a table and be like, “OK, we know that certain projects aren’t happening fast enough. We know that we need to build out faster. What could we actually do to the laws to be able to construct things faster and to meet our net-zero targets and to let the I.R.A. kind achieve what it could achieve?”
  • part of the issue is that we’re in this environment where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and it feels very unlikely that you could just get “we are going to accelerate projects, but only those that are good for climate change,” into the law given that Republicans control the House.
  • part of the progressive fear here is that the right solutions must recognize climate change. Progressives are very skeptical that there are reforms that are neutral on the existence of climate change and whether we need to build faster to meet those demands that can pass through a Republican-controlled House.
  • one of the implications of that piece was it was maybe a huge mistake for progressives not to have figured out what they wanted here and could accept here, back when the negotiating partner was Joe Manchin.
  • Manchin’s bill is basically a set of moderate NEPA reforms and transmission reforms. Democrats, progressives refuse to move on it. Now, I do want to be fair here because I think Democrats absolutely should have seized on that opportunity, because it was the only moment when — we could tell already that Democrats — I mean, Democrats actually, by that moment, had lost the House.
  • I do want to be fair here that Manchin’s own account of what happened with this bill is that Senate Republicans killed it and that once McConnell failed to negotiate on the bill in December, Manchin’s bill was dead.
  • EZRA KLEIN: It died in both places.ROBINSON MEYER: It died in both places. I think that’s right.
  • Republicans already knew they were going to get the House, too, so they had less incentive to play along. Probably the time for this was October.
  • EZRA KLEIN: But it wasn’t like Democrats were trying to get this one done.
  • EZRA KLEIN: To your point about this was all coming down to the wire, Manchin could have let the I.R.A. pass many months before this, and they would have had more time to negotiate together, right? The fact that it was associated with Manchin in the way it was was also what made it toxic to progressives, who didn’t want to be held up by him anymore.
  • What becomes clear by the winter of this year, February, March of this year, is that as Democrats and Republicans begin to talk through this debt-ceiling process where, again, permitting was not the main focus. It was the federal budget. It was an entirely separate political process, basically.
  • EZRA KLEIN: I would say the core weirdness of the debt-ceiling fight was there was no main focus to it.
  • EZRA KLEIN: It wasn’t like past ones where it was about the debt. Republicans did some stuff to cut spending. They also wanted to cut spending on the I.R.S., which would increase the debt, right? It was a total mishmash of stuff happening in there.
  • That alchemy goes into the final debt-ceiling negotiations, which are between principals in Congress and the White House, and what we get is a set of basically the NEPA reforms in Joe Manchin’s bill from last year and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the thing that environmentalists were focused on blocking, and effectively no transmission reforms.
  • the set of NEPA reforms that were just enacted, that are now in the law, include — basically, the word reasonable has been inserted many times into NEPA. [LAUGHS] So the law, instead of saying the government has to study all environmental impacts, now it has to study reasonable environmental impacts.
  • this is a kind of climate win — has to study the environmental impacts that could result from not doing a project. The kind of average NEPA environmental impact study today is 500 pages and takes 4.5 years to produce. Under the law now, the government is supposed to hit a page limit of 150 to 300 pages.
  • there’s a study that’s very well cited by progressives from three professors in Utah who basically say, well, when you look at the National Forest Service, and you look at this 40,000 NEPA decisions, what mostly holds up these NEPA decisions is not like, oh, there’s too many requirements or they had to study too many things that don’t matter. It’s just there wasn’t enough staff and that staffing is primarily the big impediment. And so on the one hand, I think that’s probably accurate in that these are, in some cases — the beast has been starved, and these are very poorly staffed departments
  • The main progressive demand was just “we must staff it better.”
  • But if it’s taking you this much staffing and that much time to say something doesn’t apply to you, maybe you have a process problem —ROBINSON MEYER: Yes.EZRA KLEIN: — and you shouldn’t just throw endless resources at a broken process, which brings me — because, again, you can fall into this and never get out — I think, to the bigger critique her
  • these bills are almost symbolic because there’s so much else happening, and it’s really the way all this interlocks and the number of possible choke points, that if you touch one of them or even you streamline one of them, it doesn’t necessarily get you that f
  • “All told, over 60 federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime, and that is just the federal system. State and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”
  • their view is that under this system, it’s simply not possible to build the amount of decarbonization infrastructure we need at the pace we need it; that no amount of streamlining NEPA or streamlining, in California, CEQA will get you there; that we basically have been operating under what they call an environmental grand bargain dating back to the ’70s, where we built all of these processes to slow things down and to clean up the air and clean up the water.
  • we accepted this trade-off of slower building, quite a bit slower building, for a cleaner environment. And that was a good trade. It was addressing the problems of that era
  • now we have the problems of this era, which is we need to unbelievably, rapidly build out decarbonization infrastructure to keep the climate from warming more than we can handle and that we just don’t have a legal regime or anything.
  • You would need to do a whole new grand bargain for this era. And I’ve not seen that many people say that, but it seems true to me
  • the role that America had played in the global economy in the ’50s and ’60s where we had a ton of manufacturing, where we were kind of the factory to a world rebuilding from World War II, was no longer tenable and that, also, we wanted to focus on more of these kind of high-wage, what we would now call knowledge economy jobs.That was a large economic transition happening in the ’70s and ’80s, and it dovetailed really nicely with the environmental grand bargain.
  • At some point, the I.R.A. recognizes that that environmental grand bargain is no longer operative, right, because it says, we’re going to build all this big fiscal fixed infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to become a manufacturing giant again, but there has not been a recognition among either party of what exactly that will mean and what will be required to have it take hold.
  • It must require a form of on-the-ground, inside-the-fenceline, “at the site of the power plant” pollution control technology. The only way to do that, really, is by requiring carbon capture and requiring the large construction of major industrial infrastructure at many, many coal plants and natural gas plants around the country in order to capture carbon so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere, and so we don’t contribute to climate change. That is what the Supreme Court has ruled. Until that body changes, that is going to be the law.
  • So the E.P.A. has now, last month, proposed a new rule under the Clean Air Act that is going to require coal plants and some natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology to do basically what the Supreme Court has all but kind of required the E.P.A. to do
  • the E.P.A. has to demonstrate, in order to kind of make this rule the law and in order to make this rule pass muster with the Supreme Court, that this is tenable, that this is the best available and technologically feasible option
  • that means you actually have to allow carbon capture facilities to get built and you have to create a legal process that will allow carbon capture facilities to get built. And that means you need to be able to tell a power plant operator that if they capture carbon, there’s a way they can inject it back into the ground, the thing that they’re supposed to do with it.
  • Well, E.P.A. simultaneously has only approved the kind of well that you need to inject carbon that you’ve captured from a coal factory or a natural gas line back into the ground. It’s called a Class 6 well. The E.P.A. has only ever approved two Class 6 wells. It takes years for the E.P.A. to approve a Class 6 well.
  • And environmental justice groups really, really oppose these Class 6 wells because they see any carbon capture as an effort to extend the life of the fossil fuel infrastructure
  • The issue here is that it seems like C.C.S., carbon capture, is going to be essential to how the U.S. decarbonizes. Legally, we have no other choice because of the constraints the Supreme Court has placed on the E.P.A.. At the same time, environmental justice groups, and big green groups to some extent, oppose building out any C.C.S.
  • to be fair to them, right, they would say there are other ways to decarbonize. That may not be the way we’ve chosen because the politics weren’t there for it, but there are a lot of these groups that believe you could have 100 percent renewables, do not use all that much carbon capture, right? They would have liked to see a different decarbonization path taken too. I’m not sure that path is realistic.
  • what you do see are environmental groups opposing making it possible to build C.C.S. anywhere in the country at all.
  • EZRA KLEIN: The only point I’m making here is I think this is where you see a compromise a lot of them didn’t want to make —ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly, yeah.EZRA KLEIN: — which is a decarbonization strategy that actually does extend the life cycle of a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure using carbon capture. And because they never bought onto it, they’re still using the pathway they have to try to block it. The problem is that’s part of the path that’s now been chosen. So if you block it, you just don’t decarbonize. It’s not like you get the 100 percent renewable strategy.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly. The bargain that will emerge from that set of actions and that set of coalitional trade-offs is we will simply keep running this, and we will not cap it.
  • What could be possible is that progressives and Democrats and the E.P.A. turns around and says, “Oh, that’s fine. You can do C.C.S. You just have to cap every single stationary source in the country.” Like, “You want to do C.C.S.? We totally agree. Essential. You must put CSS infrastructure on every power plant, on every factory that burns fossil fuels, on everything.”
  • If progressives were to do that and were to get it into the law — and there’s nothing the Supreme Court has said, by the way, that would limit progressives from doing that — the upshot would be we shut down a ton more stationary sources and a ton more petrochemical refineries and these bad facilities that groups don’t want than we would under the current plan.
  • what is effectively going to happen is that way more factories and power plants stay open and uncapped than would be otherwise.
  • EZRA KLEIN: So Republican-controlled states are just on track to get a lot more of it. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that red states will get $623 billion in investments by 2030 compared to $354 billion for blue states.
  • why are red states getting so much more of this money?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: I think there’s two reasons. I think, first of all, red states have been more enthusiastic about getting the money. They’re the ones giving away the tax credits. They have a business-friendly environment. And ultimately, the way many, many of these red-state governors see it is that these are just businesses.
  • I think the other thing is that these states, many of them, are right-to-work states. And so they might pay their workers less. They certainly face much less risk financially from a unionization campaign in their state.
  • regardless of the I.R.A., that’s where manufacturing and industrial investment goes in the first place. And that’s where it’s been going for 20 years because of the set of business-friendly and local subsidies and right-to-work policies.
  • I think the administration would say, we want this to be a big union-led effort. We want it to go to the Great Lakes states that are our political firewall.
  • and it would go to red states, because that’s where private industry has been locating since the ’70s and ’80s, and it would go to the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt, and that that wouldn’t be so bad because then you would get a dynamic where red-state senators, red-state representatives, red-state governors would want to support the transition further and would certainly not support the repeal of the I.R.A. provisions and the repeal of climate provisions, and that you’d get this kind of nice vortex of the investment goes to red states, red states feel less antagonistic toward climate policies, more investment goes to red states. Red-state governors might even begin to support environmental regulation because that basically locks in benefits and advantages to the companies located in their states already.
  • I think what you see is that Republicans are increasingly warming to EV investment, and it’s actually building out renewables and actually building out clean electricity generation, where you see them fighting harder.
  • The other way that permitting matters — and this gets into the broader reason why private investment was generally going to red states and generally going to the Sunbelt — is that the Sunbelt states — Georgia, Texas — it’s easier to be there as a company because housing costs are lower and because the cost of living is lower in those states.
  • it’s also partially because the Sunbelt and the Southeast, it was like the last part of the country to develop, frankly, and there’s just a ton more land around all the cities, and so you can get away with the sprawling suburban growth model in those citie
  • It’s just cheaper to keep building suburbs there.
  • EZRA KLEIN: So how are you seeing the fights over these rare-earth metals and the effort to build a safe and, if not domestic, kind of friend-shored supply chain there?
  • Are we going to be able to source some of these minerals from the U.S.? That process seems to be proceeding but going slowly. There are some minerals we’re not going to be able to get from the United States at all and are going to have to get from our allies and partners across the world.
  • The kind of open question there is what exactly is the bargain we’re going to strike with countries that have these critical minerals, and will it be fair to those countries?
  • it isn’t to say that I think the I.R.A. on net is going to be bad for other countries. I just think we haven’t really figured out what deal and even what mechanisms we can use across the government to strike deals with other countries to mine the minerals in those countries while being fair and just and creating the kind of economic arrangement that those countries want.
  • , let’s say we get the minerals. Let’s say we learn how to refine them. There is many parts of the battery and many parts of EVs and many, many subcomponents in these green systems that there’s not as strong incentive to produce in the U.S.
  • at the same time, there’s a ton of technology. One answer to that might be to say, OK, well, what the federal government should do is just make it illegal for any of these battery makers or any of these EV companies to work with Chinese companies, so then we’ll definitely establish this parallel supply chain. We’ll learn how to make cathodes and anodes. We’ll figure it out
  • The issue is that there’s technology on the frontier that only Chinese companies have, and U.S. automakers need to work with those companies in order to be able to compete with them eventually.
  • EZRA KLEIN: How much easier would it be to achieve the I.R.A.’s goals if America’s relationship with China was more like its relationship with Germany?
  • ROBINSON MEYER: It would be significantly easier, and I think we’d view this entire challenge very differently, because China, as you said, not only is a leader in renewable energy. It actually made a lot of the important technological gains over the past 15 years to reducing the cost of solar and wind. It really did play a huge role on the supply side of reducing the cost of these technologies.
  • If we could approach that, if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, “Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies, and we’re going to import them.
  • So it refines 75 percent of the polysilicon that you need for solar, but the machines that do the refining, 99 percent of them are made in China. I think it would be reckless for the U.S. to kind of rely on a single country and for the world to rely on a single country to produce the technologies that we need for decarbonization and unwise, regardless of our relationship with that country.
  • We want to geographically diversify the supply chain more, but it would be significantly easier if we did not have to also factor into this the possibility that the US is going to need to have an entirely separate supply chain to make use of for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries potentially in the near-term future.
  • , what are three other books they should read?
  • The first book is called “The End of the World” by Peter Brannen. It’s a book that’s a history of mass extinctions, the Earth’s five mass extinctions, and, actually, why he doesn’t think we’re currently in a mass extinction or why, at least, things would need to go just as bad as they are right now for thousands and thousands of years for us to be in basically the sixth extinction.
  • The book’s amazing for two reasons. The first is that it is the first that really got me to understand deep time.
  • he explains how one kind of triggered the next one. It is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to Earth’s geological history going as far back as, basically, we can track.
  • “Climate Shock” by Gernot Wagner and Marty Weitzman. It’s about the economics of climate change
  • Marty Weitzman, who I think, until recently, was kind of the also-ran important economist of climate change. Nordhaus was the famous economist. He was the one who got all attention. He’s the one who won the Nobel.
  • He focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because it will damage the environment, because it will make our lives worse, but it’s really specifically bad because we don’t know how bad it will be
  • it imposes all these huge, high end-tail risks and that blocking those tail risks is actually the main thing we want to do with climate policy.
  • That is I think, in some ways, what has become the U.S. approach to climate change and, to some degree, to the underlying economic thinking that drives even the I.R.A., where we want to just cut off these high-end mega warming scenarios. And this is a fantastic explanation of that particular way of thinking and of how to apply that way of thinking to climate change and also to geoengineerin
  • The third book, a little controversial, is called “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin
  • her argument is basically that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system, and because we have chosen markets as a structured, organized electricity system in many states, we’re giving preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables, two fuels that I think climate activists may feel very different ways about, instead of coal, which she does think we should phase out, and, really, nuclear
  • By making it easier for renewables and natural gas to kind of accept these side payments, we made them much more profitable and therefore encouraged people to build more of them and therefore underinvested in the forms of generation, such as nuclear, that actually make most of their money by selling electrons to the grid, where they go to people’s homes.
Javier E

The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In the effort to try to solve the crime of bike theft themselves, the group’s members have come close to a world of violence and despair that lurks barely below the surface of this beautiful place and, at times, bursts into the open
  • In some years, Burlington has gone without a single gunfire incident, according to the police. But in 2022 there have been 25 such incidents, including four murders — the most in at least 30 years, the police say.
  • The Progressives on the Council tend to be left leaning on many issues and often at odds with the city’s Democratic mayor. And in June 2020, the Progressive members of the Council successfully sponsored a measure that sought to reduce the size of the city’s police force by about 30 percent. The move, which the mayor opposed, came just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and amid concerns about how the Burlington police had used force against Black people.
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  • The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.
  • The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.
  • Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.
  • “And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”
  • “Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.
  • The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.
  • Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”
  • Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.
  • “We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.
  • “I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.
  • Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.
  • Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park
  • Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.
  • “Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.
  • Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.
Javier E

Opinion | The Crypto Collapse and the End of Magical Thinking - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly.
  • magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history.
  • It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty.
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  • It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.
  • Where did this ideology come from? An exceptional period of low interest rates and excess liquidity provided the fertile soil for fantastical dreams to flourish.
  • Cryptocurrency is the most ideal vessel of these impulses. A speculative asset with a tenuous underlying predetermined value provides a blank slate that meaning can be imposed onto
  • Anger after the 2008 global financial crisis created a receptivity to radical economic solutions, and disappointment with traditional politics displaced social ambitions onto the world of commerce.
  • The hothouse of Covid’s peaks turbocharged all these impulses as we sat bored in front of screens, fueled by seemingly free money.
  • The unwinding of magical thinking will dominate this decade in painful but ultimately restorative ways — and that unwinding will be most painful to the generation conditioned to believe these fantasies.
  • Pervasive consumer-facing technology allowed individuals to believe that the latest platform company or arrogant tech entrepreneur could change everything.
  • illusory and ridiculous promises share a common anti-establishment sentiment fueled by a technology that most of us never understood. Who needs governments, banks, the traditional internet or homespun wisdom when we can operate above and beyond?
  • Mainstream financial markets came to manifest these same tendencies, as magical thinking pervaded the wider investor class. During a period of declining and zero interest rates, mistakes and mediocrities were obscured or forgiven, while speculative assets with low probabilities of far-off success inflated in value enormously.
  • For an extended period, many investors bought the equivalent of lottery tickets. And many won.
  • The real economy could not escape infection. Companies flourished by inflating their scope and ambition to feed the desire for magical thinking.
  • Most broadly, many corporations have come to embrace broader social missions in response to the desire of younger investors and employees to use their capital and employment as instruments for social change.
  • Another manifestation of magical thinking is believing that the best hope for progress on our greatest challenges — climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality — are corporations and individual investment and consumption choices, rather than political mobilization and our communities.
  • Every business problem, I am told, can be solved in radically new and effective ways by applying artificial intelligence to ever-increasing amounts of data with a dash of design thinking. Many graduates coming of age in this period of financial giddiness and widening corporate ambition have been taught to chase these glittery objects with their human and financial capital instead of investing in sustainable paths — a habit that will be harder to instill at later ages.
  • The fundamentals of business have not changed merely because of new technologies or low interest rates. The way to prosper is still by solving problems in new ways that sustainably deliver value to employees, capital providers and customers.
  • What comes next? Hopefully, a revitalization of that great American tradition of pragmatism will follow. Speculative assets without any economic function should be worth nothing. Existing institutions, flawed as they are, should be improved upon rather than being displaced
  • Corporations are valuable socially because they solve problems and generate wealth. But they should not be trusted as arbiters of progress and should be balanced by a state that mediates political questions
  • Trade-offs are everywhere and inescapable. Navigating these trade-offs, rather than ignoring them, is the recipe for a good life.
Javier E

Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Polymathic Cultural Historian, Dies at 81 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For four decades, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a polymathic cultural historian, feasted on those and other brainteasers as he explored mass transportation, spices and stimulants, commercial lighting and the legacy of defeat on society in about a dozen groundbreaking books.
  • “He was an extraordinary public intellectual, an independent largely unaffiliated wildly poly-curious and extravagantly gifted seeker after the patterns and idiosyncrasies of history,” the author Lawrence Wechsler wrote after Mr. Schivelbusch’s death
  • Die Zeit, the German national weekly, called Mr. Schivelbusch a “master of cultural-historical research.”
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  • Among his books are “The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century” (1977), “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants” (1980), “Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century” (1983), “The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery” (2001) and “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939” (2005).
  • Mr. Schivelbusch operated for most of his career as a private scholar, free from academic constraints but dependent on grants and book advances.
  • In Europe, beer soup (heat eggs, butter and salt, then add them to beer and pour over pieces of a roll or white bread) was the breakfast drink of choice before it was replaced by coffee in the 18th century.
  • Gas mains changed family life because they eliminated the hearth as the focus of family life by giving individuals personal light. They also helped replace private enterprise through the granting of municipal or regional gas monopolies.
Javier E

Adam Tooze, Crisis Historian, Has Some Bad News for Us - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • merica and the world are living through what Adam Tooze, the internet’s foremost historian of money and disaster, describes as a “polycrisis.”
  • the revelation that Tooze is now putting forth is that we might not be emerging from crisis. Indeed, we might be in a worsening one, in which much of the world faces a series of self-reinforcing financial and geopolitical pressures, building, perhaps, to some ominous end.
  • Each crisis is hard enough to parse by itself; the interconnected mess of them is infinitely more so. And he feels “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”
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  • he’s among the world’s most influential financial commentators, with loyal readerships in Washington, London, Paris, and Brussels, as well as on Wall Street
  • Tooze’s readers turn to him for his uncanny ability to know which numbers on a spreadsheet matter, or when a trend has hit the point at which it has started to shape history.
  • “Economic events have had such a huge influence on politics this century,” Robert Skidelsky, the John Maynard Keynes biographer, told me. Tooze “illustrates the interpenetration of economic policy and political events. It’s as simple as that.”
  • a long list of challenges: War, raising the specter of nuclear conflict. Climate change, threatening famine, flood, and fire. Inflation, forcing central banks to crush consumer demand. The pandemic,
  • The combination of COVID-19, buckling supply chains, and central banks’ scramble to respond constituted “the first crisis where I found my professional existence, my personal existence, and my understanding of my relationship to history were all just completely seamless, continuous,” he says. He found his niche—and thousands of new readers.
  • As he tells it, he’s not just circulating data or building arguments; he’s also bathing in an anarchic, unstoppable flow of information. “What does it mean to be in the present, in this constant experience of obsolescence, this constant experience of having your ideas and preconceptions consumed by the flow toward the future, which, at any given moment, is fundamentally unpredictable and then once you have consumed it, becomes obsolete?” he says effusively. “That’s my now—this literal floating on the surface tension of the current moment.”
  • Hitler was compelled not just by murderous anti-Semitism but by shortages of land, steel, and fuel, Tooze argued in 2006’s Wages of Destruction,
  • “We always wonder what drives this propulsive quality of the Nazi state, why it is so intent on blitzkrieg and fast conquest,” says Susan Pedersen, a renowned historian of Europe. “Adam lays out how they are operating in a world of economic constraint: For them, victory is possible, if it happens fast.”
  • As Tooze sees it, the forces of central-bank tightening, war, inflation, and climate change are reinforcing one another. He is offering no reassurance about where that might head—only the hope that perhaps this polycrisis might be knowable to us.
Javier E

Where we build homes helps explain America's political divide - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Zoning, NIMBYism and regulations — “all those things matter” when you’re trying to build housing, Herbert said. But land scarcity is the most important.
  • So what’s happening now “is a lot more infill of single-family housing in closer-in communities, where you’re not going to have room for large-scale developments and where the land is going to be worth a lot more,” Herbert said. Single-family land scarcity, he said, “has been a big factor keeping the supply down.”
  • In a blockbuster 2010 paper, Albert Saiz, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analyzed satellite data to estimate how much land was actually available for development within a 50-kilometer (31-mile) radius of each major U.S. city. He found that available land, when combined with measures of land-use regulation, could go “very far to explain the evolution of prices” from 1970 to 2000.
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  • Saiz even took it a step further, showing that a lack of land can cause stricter regulation. If a place has less room to build — due to mountains, wetlands or oceans, for example — each square foot of dirt costs more. Homeowners also may push local officials to regulate the land more aggressively in an effort to protect their investment and safeguard a scarce resource.
  • From 2013 to 2018, zoning and related restrictions added about $410,000 to the cost of a quarter-acre lot in the San Francisco metro area, $199,000 in Los Angeles, $175,000 in Seattle and $152,000 in greater New York
  • The comparable figure for Phoenix sat at $22,000. Atlanta was $15,000. Dallas was a mere $2,000. Not coincidentally, perhaps, many such Sun Belt metros have produced floods of new housing.
  • But why do blue cities tend to have less land available for development? Perhaps it works the other way: Perhaps land-restricted places tend to evolve into Democratic strongholds.
  • We don’t have data for this, but logically higher home prices and regulation in land-light cities should make much of their housing accessible only to educated, well-compensated professionals, right? In this simple mental model, coastal cities have less room and thus, by definition, attract the elite. And in American politics right now, Democrats dominate the professional classes.
  • We’ve long heard Democrats derided as the “coastal elite,” but we never stopped to wonder why all those blue counties hugged the coasts in the first place. Exceptions are easy to find, but the subtle effects of coastal land shortages, over time, could help explain that most prominent feature of America’s political geography.
  • That effect could be compounded, Saiz told us, by the simple truth that coastlines, lakes and other natural obstacles to construction make cities more beautiful, and thus more desirable to those who can afford such amenities, as his research with Gerald Carlino of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia shows. And the presence of an educated workforce will cause the city’s economy to grow faster, further expanding economic divides.
  • “High-amenity areas are more desirable and tend to attract the highly skilled,” Saiz said. “These metros tend to have harder land constraints to start with, which begets more expensive housing prices which, in turn, activate more NIMBY activism to protect that wealth.”
Javier E

The Sad Trombone Debate: The RNC Throws in the Towel and Gets Ready to Roll Over for Tr... - 0 views

  • Death to the Internet
  • Yesterday Ben Thompson published a remarkable essay in which he more or less makes the case that the internet is a socially deleterious invention, that it will necessarily get more toxic, and that the best we can hope for is that it gets so bad, so fast, that everyone is shocked into turning away from it.
  • Ben writes the best and most insightful newsletter about technology and he has been, in all the years I’ve read him, a techno-optimist.
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  • this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.
  • Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.
  • In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.
  • The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.
  • Hellscape
  • What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.
  • what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?
  • We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.
  • At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.
  • What does that mean for news? Nothing good.
  • It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.
  • So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.
  • Two big takeaways:
  • (1) Ad-supported publications will not survive
  • Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.
  • Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.
  • (2) Size is determinative.
  • The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.
  • Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.
  • But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.
  • Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.
  • in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.
  • Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?
  • One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.
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