Santa Barbara, CA on December 10, 2016

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS I WAS TALKING ABOUT: TRANS EDITION

 

‘“I'm one of the only people that watched that MSNBC town hall, which is horrible. But there was one of the sit down interviews [Harris] did in sort of like the final quarter of the campaign, where she gave that infamous answer [about medical care for trans people],  I will follow the law on this, which is like, it just seems like [the Democratic] strategy for like the past year is like, just don't move, don't do anything, just bury your head in the sand until you can ascertain public opinion one way or the other, and just go with that. . . . ."’

 

‘"I've had a lot of conversations with staffers, with pollsters, et cetera, on this particular topic, of . . .  should Democrats respond to anti-trans rhetoric? And there's two issues. The first one is you're playing whack-a-mole with conspiracy theories.

 

‘Nine times out of 10, any argument that comes out about trans people is misconstruing science  “or the way the world just works, basic numbers, right? And so you're arguing with people who are the statistic equivalent of climate denialists, right? So like rebutting that is a bit of a challenge, but that being said, right, Democrats have a message on climate.

 

‘It's follow the science. What does the science tell us? The science is X.

 

‘The issue [with trans rights] is that Democrats don't really have a message to coalesce around. . . .’

 

‘The first bathroom ban was in North Carolina almost a decade ago, and people were boycotting.

 

‘It was a huge deal. Governor lost his re-election, Republican governor, right? Democrats never crafted a message.

 

‘It's been 10 years . . .  [and] they don't know how to talk about it. And where that becomes a problem is, you know, polls, the trans people did not decide this election, but polls do show that the advertising got average Americans to start associating a focus on trans people and other marginalized people as anathema to their economic concerns, as not focusing on their economic concerns. That's where the ad did work.

 

‘It didn't win the election, but it did get people to associate helping trans people with their own negative economic situation, which is bad, I think, generally for acceptance. If you can do that to anyone, you can pick apart Democratic Coalition forever. The issue is that people on the Hill, people in DC, don't see it that way.’

 

SOURCE: Jael Holzman, Chapo Trap House

 

THE FULL-TIME NON-STOP RIGHT-WING INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM AND ITS POWERS

 

 

 

SOURCE: @mattsheffield via The Editorial Board

 

TRUMP FANS ARE SUFFERING FROM TONY SOPRANO SYNDROME

 

'As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”

 

'Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”

'Tony and Walter are also aspirational figures for a certain type of man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or inflict violence. They want to tell themselves they’re protecting something—home and hearth perhaps—but actually want to validate themselves with a justification for hurting someone else, even if they have to invent one.

 

'Walter represents the emotional state of a particular type of viewer—someone who wants to enjoy his ability to make himself feel good through violence and suffering, and doesn’t want his good time spoiled by a mouthy woman reminding him that the things he is doing are actually bad. This type of reactionary masculinity is itself emblematic of the Trump era, as if conservatives listened to feminist critiques of “toxic masculinity” and decided to shear all virtue from their conception of traditional manhood and retain only those parts that involve dominance and exploitation of others.'

 

SOURCE: Adam Serwer, Portside via The Atlantic

 

THE GOVERNING MODEL WILL BE FULL-TIME HARASSMENT 

 

‘On Nov. 19, two weeks after Election Day, Elon Musk demonstrated perhaps the most brutal, if not sadistic, technique for making life in the federal civil service intolerable.’

 

‘A Wall Street Journal headline from Nov. 22 captured the situation well: “Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers.”’

 

‘What happened? Musk had reposted a tweet declaring, “I don’t think the U.S. Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.” Musk added a comment, echoing the language of the president-elect: “So many fake jobs.”’

 

‘Musk’s tweet, which was viewed by 33.2 million people, described Ashley Thomas, a 37-year-old who, The Journal reported, holds “engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford” and works as the “little-known director of climate diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which advises “private companies to fund ways to improve living standards in developing countries.” A Finance Corporation official told The Journal that Thomas’s work “is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”

As evidence mounted that Thomas’s job was under threat, she sought to pull herself out of the spotlight, taking down all of her social media accounts.’

 

‘The social media excoriation of public sector employees is just one way that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists are using to destroy what they see as strongholds of the left in government and academia.’

 

SOURCE: Thomas Edsall, New York Times

 

THE CEO PAY IS TOO DAMN LOW!

‘“We don’t mind paying our footballers, top-rate footballers, extraordinary amounts of money,” Spencer, a former Treasurer of the UK Conservative party, told the Financial Times. “Somehow that’s considered perfectly acceptable. But if the CEO of BP or HSBC earns £20mn a year, materially less than their peer group in America, everyone jumps up and down saying this is an outrage.” Spencer said pay was one of the reasons why the UK was lagging behind other markets such as the US. . . .’

‘The median FTSE 100 chief executive pay amounted to £4.1mn last year, while bosses of S&P 500 companies in the US were paid a median of $16mn. AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot, who stands to earn as much as £18.7mn this financial year, is the best paid CEO on the FTSE 100. However, 36 per cent of shareholders voted against his pay award. Meanwhile, the average annual salary of Premier League football players is about £2.1mn, according to FT research. The best-paid — including Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland — are estimated by football data agency Capology to earn about £20mn a year in on-field salary. This does not take into account their ability to earn more through lucrative sponsorship deals. . . .’

 

‘“The US celebrates the fact that great chief executives earn large amounts of money. They want their chief executives to be paid like football stars,” said Spencer.’

 

SOURCE: Emma Dunkley, Financial Times

 

THE GREEN TRANSITION WILL NOT BE LED BY THE UNITED STATES OR EUROPE

 

‘The inescapable conclusion of the past 35 years is that it is foolish to treat the US as a reliable partner in global climate policy.

 

‘During Biden’s honeymoon, the hope was that the US and Europe would act together. In Europe, outright climate scepticism is rare and the EU has built an impressive suite of subsidies and carbon pricing. The end of coal-fired power generation in the UK this year was historic. But in Europe too the cost of living crisis is swinging the political mood against tough climate action. The looming crisis in the European car industry, brought on by Chinese success in EVs, exposes the hypocrisy of a continent that promised a Green Deal while clinging to diesel. 

 

‘To varying degrees, both Europe and the US have failed to grasp the decarbonisation challenge identified by their own scientists decades ago. Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader it can now only be China, which is responsible for more than 30 per cent of global emissions and has mastered the green energy supply chain. Given mounting tension with the US, Beijing has every incentive to minimise oil imports. The key question is whether the Chinese Communist party can muster the political will to override its fossil fuel interests. If it can, it will not single-handedly solve the climate crisis but it will assert a claim to leadership that the west will find hard to answer.’

 

SOURCE: Adam Tooze, Financial Times

 

AS U.S. THINKS TECH IS ITS FINANCIAL FUTURE, CHINA WEANS ITSELF FROM U.S. TECH

 

‘China has finally said aloud what was once only discussed behind closed doors: the country must rid itself of US chips.

 

‘Four government-backed industry associations, representing the bulk of China’s semiconductor demand, issued co-ordinated statements this week urging member companies to rethink purchases of American silicon that three of them deemed as “no longer safe or reliable”.

 

‘“Be cautious when purchasing US chips,” the four associations said, urging their members to look for Chinese or other foreign suppliers instead.

 

‘The directives came amid the latest tit-for-tat salvo between Beijing and Washington over the foundational technology, an exchange that has laid bare their intensifying competition and added momentum to the development of increasingly separate international supply chains.

 

‘In an unusually swift response on Tuesday, Beijing banned the shipment of key minerals and metals to the US, just hours after American officials unveiled new export controls designed to “degrade” China’s ability to make the most advanced chips.

 

‘The latest US controls include tougher restrictions on shipping semiconductor manufacturing tools to China and a ban on exports of advanced memory chips needed in artificial intelligence hardware.

 

‘In response, China prohibited the export to the US of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials, and imposed stricter controls on graphite.

 

‘Its action signalled a new willingness on Beijing’s part to confront directly US efforts to cut the country off from advanced technology. In talks with President Joe Biden last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping linked Washington’s tech controls to stymying China’s right to development, calling it a red line for the first time.’

 

SOURCE: Ryan McMorrow and Eleanor Olcott,  Financial Times

 

IT’S THE MONOPOLY POWER, STUPID

 

‘For decades, local grocery stores thrived. Then in the 1980s, the government stopped enforcing a key antitrust law. Rapid consolidation followed, giving rise to food deserts & a price spike. Our new graph shows the dramatic impact of this policy shift.’

 

SOURCE: Stacy Mitchell, Twitter

 

WHEN STUDENT HOUSING BECOMES A PROFIT CENTER FOR UNIVERSITIES

 

‘The numbers in this report are shocking. The average purpose-built student room in London now costs more than the maximum maintenance loan, leaving students with a shortfall even before they’ve bought any food, paid for their travel or covered other living costs. The current London Plan is not helping by making the provision of more new beds unviable.’

 

 

SOURCE: Sarah Jones and Martin Rushall, Priced Out? The Accommodation Costs Survey 2024

Notre Dame de Paris on December 3, 2024

WHEN THE CALL TO STRIKE COMES FROM THE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENTS

 

“All sites closed in Lille, the alarm ringing in Evry, a suspension of classes in Nice... Everywhere, in red and black letters, the slogan is displayed on the buildings: ‘Universities in danger’. At the call of France Universités, an association which brings together heads of establishment, the universities are mobilizing each in their own way, Tuesday December 3, to mark their ‘refusal to see themselves condemned to degrade the quality of their training.

 

“While the finance bill for 2025 shows a budget for higher education and research at half mast – an increase of 89 million euros, but a decrease in constant euros – the time must be to ‘take of conscience’ of a reality on the ground that the public authorities pretend to ignore, according to the association. Already on Thursday, November 21, around thirty university presidents converged on foot towards the Ministry of Higher Education, and invited themselves to the office of the minister, Patrick Hetzel.

 

“In a letter addressed to the Prime Minister, Friday November 29, which Le Monde obtained, France Universités now calls for ‘personal arbitration’ on the part of Michel Barnier so that the French university can respond to the ambition of the country’” [N.B. Barnier has now been forced to resign by a no confidence vote in the National Assembly.]

 

“Expressing its “anger”, the association specifies that “the meeting with [Patrick Hetzel] did not dispel the fears resulting from an unprecedented situation of a shift towards a very degraded functioning of the universities”. Eighty percent of them will be in deficit by the end of 2024 and ‘projections show that the situation will be worse in 2025,’ warns France Universités.”

 

SOURCE: Soazig Le Nevé, Le Monde.

 

 

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS WAS INVENTED BY ST. PAUL

 

“His book is certainly timely. As he notes, there are certain epochs, and surely we are slap bang in the middle of one, when “evident truth” is cast aside in favour of all manner of imbecile imaginings. “Mesmerised crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumours trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.” There, encapsulated in a sentence, is the predicament we face in our present-day social and political lives. . . .”

 

“At the heart of the book is an invigorating excursus on St Paul, the founding father of the most consequential and, some would contend, most pernicious religious cult the world has known. Lilla knows his man: ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the history of western populism – spiritual and political – began with Paul.’ He is ‘the cultured despiser of culture’, ‘a learned fanatic of the highest order.’ who ‘held up as spiritual models innocent children, uneducated workmen, and lambs with vacant eyes, forever enshrining reverse snobbery as a Christian virtue.’ If the next resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is in need of a patron saint, surely Paul is the one:

 

“’For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent … If any man among you seems to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise.’”

 

SOURCE, John Banville, review of Mark Lilla, The Observer

 

A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS: HUMAN DEVELOPMENT IN TRUMP-WON V. HARRIS-WON STATES

 

 

SOURCE: The Intellectualist, X

 

CRYPTO ADVOCATE PAUL ATKINS PICKED AS SEC CHAIR BY DONALD TRUMP

 

“Donald Trump has nominated cryptocurrency advocate Paul Atkins to chair the US Securities and Exchange Commission, drawing cheers from across the finance industry as it hopes for a more favourable regulatory climate under the incoming administration.

 

“’Paul is a proven leader for common sense regulations,’ Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. Atkins ‘also recognises that digital assets & other innovations are crucial to Making America Greater than Ever Before.’ . . .”

 

“In another significant move for business, the president-elect also nominated Gail Slater, a top aide to vice-president-elect JD Vance, to head the Department of Justice’s antitrust division.

 

“The finance industry has had a fractious relationship with the current SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who has pursued a broad rulemaking agenda and tough enforcement stance, clamping down on traditional Wall Street players as well as cryptocurrency businesses.

 

“Gensler targeted many of the biggest crypto companies with lawsuits and declined to craft rules for digital assets, arguing many tokens were securities and that existing laws were sufficiently clear. He branded the sector a “wild west” rife with fraud and investor risk.”

 

SOURCE: Stefania Palma, Financial Times

 

UK UNCOVERS VAST CRYPTO LAUNDERING SCHEME FOR GANGSTERS AND RUSSIAN SPIES

 

“A UK-led operation has uncovered a multibillion-dollar money laundering scheme run out of London, Moscow and Dubai that enabled Russian spies and European drug traffickers to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency.

 

“The UK’s National Crime Agency said on Wednesday that its ‘Operation Destabilise’ investigation centred on two companies — Smart and TGR — that acted as a financial hub for cash-rich global criminals and sanctioned individuals relying on cryptocurrency outside the banking system.

 

“The NCA said the network had been used by clients including the Kinahan cartel, Irish cocaine traffickers linked to numerous contract killings, as well as funding ransomware groups, and ‘Russian espionage operations’ from late 2022 to summer 2023.

 

“The illicit network, operating across more than 30 countries, illustrates the growing interaction between hostile states and organised criminals as economic sanctions have forced countries such as Russia to find new ways of operating in the west. The case also shows the increasing use of cryptocurrencies by those cut off from the global banking system.

 

“Rob Jones, director-general of operations at the NCA, said the investigation ‘is the most significant money laundering operation’ that the NCA had ever undertaken.

 

“’It targets . . . a laundromat that brings together at scale street cash and cryptocurrency,’ he said. It ‘takes you from McMafia, through to Narcos, through to le Carré, where you have espionage, where you have transnational organised crime and you have elite Russian-speaking money launderers and cybercriminals.’

 

“The network used couriers to collect physical cash from criminals in one country such as the UK in exchange for cryptocurrency, with Tether the most favoured. The cash would then be laundered through companies and the equivalent value made available in other countries.

 

“This two-way, mutually beneficial trade meant that cash rich cocaine kingpins simultaneously helped Russian cyber criminals and elites to launder stolen crypto and access cash while evading western sanctions.”

 

SOURCE: Miles Johnson and Suzi Ring, Financial Times

 

OVERSHOOTING WITH DONALD TRUMP  

 

 

SOURCE: Simon Evans, X

 

ANY RETURN FROM THE ASSET ECONOMY?

 

“One reason for this disorientation is the absence of any discernible economic or social progress, according not just to conventional statistical measures (such as GDP or life expectancy) but also to the preferred measures of the governing party. What would those measures be? Since George Osborne, who made debt and deficit reduction his central economic goals, departed the Treasury it has been difficult to know what kind of future Tory governments have been aiming at, or how we’d know if we were to arrive in it. Real wages have stagnated, no higher today than when the Cameron-led coalition first came to power in 2010, while the scant growth in GDP since then has been largely an effect of high immigration – GDP per capita has barely risen. The national debt, which Osborne elevated to the indicator par excellence, climbed above 100 per cent of GDP last year, up from around 65 per cent in 2010. Business investment and trade in goods have both collapsed as a consequence of Brexit.

 

“House prices, however, have risen handsomely, up from an average of £170,000 in 2010 to £280,000 today (or, for Londoners, £280,000 to £500,000). More than a decade of the lowest interest rates in the Bank of England’s history – driven even lower than they might have been by multiple rounds of quantitative easing – converted torrents of cheap credit into asset price appreciation, for those fortunate enough to benefit. By withdrawing demand from the economy (through reduced public spending) and forcing the Bank of England to hold interest rates down (to stave off deflation), Osborne ensured that Britain became the textbook example of an ‘asset economy’, in which collective and productive progress is sacrificed for capital gains. This has produced an eerie temporality: society stands still, while certain households seem to pull away magically from others.”

 

“Between 1974 and 2007, Britain’s average rate of productivity growth (the clearest gauge of prosperity) was more than 2 per cent per year; since then, it has been less than 0.5 per cent per year. We shouldn’t underestimate how much of the political economy of the 2010-24 era – with its zero-sum conflicts over the public purse, rising in-work poverty, highest tax burden since 1945 and increasing influence of inherited assets – stems from the inability to build wealth through investment in people, ideas and technology. When Adair Turner, then chairman of the Financial Services Authority, declared in 2009 that much of what banks did was ‘socially useless’, this was viewed as an extraordinary attack on one of Britain’s last globally competitive sectors. In 2024, it would almost be surprising to discover that great wealth (or even a basic level of financial security) could be achieved by doing something socially useful.

 

The expanded remit of the Bank of England, now encompassing responsibility for the overall health of the financial sector, is the outstanding constitutional and political consequence of the financial crisis in the UK. The use of quantitative easing to stimulate a stagnant economy during the post-2008 years, to boost it a couple of months after the Brexit referendum, then to put it on life support under Covid, was the distinguishing economic policy of the era. The distributional effects of QE have been sharply regressive, pumping up asset portfolios, but because the policy was enacted outside the democratic arena by an independent Bank of England, party-political and media attention to these effects has been minimal.”

 

SOURCE: William Davies, London Review of Books

 

 

HONG KONG IMPRISONS DEMOCRACY PROTESTERS, LAUNCHES NEW CULTURE STRATEGY

 

“The road map is part of government efforts to create new economic drivers while also offering more opportunities in professions popular among young people, in a bid to make Hong Kong a more appealing global city.

 

“The blueprint will also outline the city’s efforts to align with the mandate from Beijing’s 14th five-year development plan for Hong Kong to become an “East-meets-West” centre for international cultural exchange. . . . “

 

“The insiders also said the latest version of the blueprint mapped out four key positions: promoting Chinese culture; developing diverse creative industries; building an international platform for East-meets-West cultural exchanges; and refining the ecosystem for creative industries.

 

“The push to promote Chinese culture will cover the intangible heritage of the country’s south and involve collaborations with the Greater Bay Area.

 

“The bay area is an emerging economic zone that combines Hong Kong, Macau and nine mainland Chinese cities and has a population totalling about 87 million.

 

“The road map also covers 71 measures to bolster the development of industries such as the performing and visual arts, music, animation, dance, film and fashion, among other sectors. . .  .”

 

“The same source said the government would also put the existing funding schemes under review so that grants could reflect market demand.

 

“’It does not necessarily mean that funding is market-driven, at least, a performance or a show has to include some market elements,’ the insider said.

 

The source explained that some shows that received government funding sometimes were too niche, and did not have a clear market.

 

SOURCE: Denise Tsang, South China Morning Post

 

 

 

November 20, 2015, Lincoln Cathedral  

 

Is AI Plateauing? 

“If this were just a few hedged anonymous reports about “less improvement,” I honestly wouldn’t give it too much credence. But traditional funders and boosters like Marc Andreessen are also saying the models are reaching a “ceiling,” and now one of the great proponents of the scaling hypothesis (the idea that AI capabilities scale with how big they are and the amount of data they’re fed) is agreeing. Ilya Sutskever was always the quiet scientific brains behind OpenAI, not Sam Altman, so what he recently told Reuters should be given significant weight:

‘Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of AI labs Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and OpenAI, told Reuters recently that results from scaling up pre-training—the phase of training an AI model that uses a vast amount of unlabeled data to understand language patterns and structures—have plateaued.’

“[Though it’s bad that AI cost increases exponentially], I think people focusing on price or the domain-specificity of improvements are missing the even bigger picture about this new supposed scaling law. For what I’m noticing is that the field of AI research appears to be reverting to what the mostly-stuck AI of the 70s, 80s, and 90s relied on: search.

 

“I don’t mean searching the web, rather, I mean examples like when this summer Google DeepMind released their state-of-the-art math AI able to handle mathematical Olympiad problems. It's a hybrid, very different than a leading generalist LLM. How does it work? It just considers a huge number of possibilities.

‘When presented with a problem, AlphaProof generates solution candidates and then proves or disproves them by searching over possible proof steps…. The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found.’

“This sort of move makes sense, because search was the main advantage for AIs against humans for a very long time . . .”

 

“Continued improvements are going to happen, but if the post-GPT-4 gains in AI came mainly from adding first better prompts (chain-of-thought prompting) and now more recently the addition of search to the process (either over many potential outputs or over the model’s parameters itself) this is different than actually constructing baseline-smarter artificial neural networks. It indicates to me a return to the 70s, 80s, and 90s in AI.”

 

SOURCE: Eric Hoel, The Intrinsic Perspective

 

EPISTEMIC COLLAPSE

 

"I do think there is an information story to be told here, but I also think, and I promise I'll address it, but I also think that people who vote for Trump, many of them often understand themselves to be voting for his spirit and not for specifics, right? And they are voting for the spirit of resentment, they are voting for the spirit of sort of anti-establishment thinking, they are voting for the spirit of having somebody punish their enemies, right? And that spirit, that vibe of Trumpist dominance, gratification and like fun resentment, right?

 

“That is an emotional register that can contain a ton of contradictions, right? So you can be pro-abortion rights, at least in your state, and be pro-Trump at the same time, because it is perfectly possible to favor abortion access for you and also fucking hate a lot of other people and want to see them punished, right? And that is, I think, a continuous theme you see in Trump supporters.

 

“If you ask them about Trump policies, often they will say, well, I don't support that, but they do support the animating feature behind those policies, the sort of spirit of sadistic, jeering, fuck you. That's what they really like, they enjoy the anger. But I do also think, to your point, that there's an information ecosystem problem, right?

 

“Like this information ecosystem is dog shit. It is impossible to get reliable information. The media has lost its credibility, but it's also just lost its monopoly on the audiences.

 

“People don't trust the most credible sources to be telling them the truth, but they're also not really listening to those sources anymore. So they're listening to a lot of fucking --d“

 

“Podcasts.”

 

“A lot of goddamn podcasters”

 

“Fuck them. I hate those guys.”

 

“They're listening to podcasters. They're watching influencers who do front-facing videos on TikTok and Instagram reels. They're getting a lot of information sort of ambiently from what they see posted by their connections or what their friends who saw something posted online say to them over burgers.

 

There's this ambient disinformation and a corrosion of the information environment and the reliability of information that has led to, I think, a really profound epistemic collapse that is completely impervious to the style of politics that involves facts and policy mattering.”

 

SOURCE: Moira In Bed With The Right Podcast: Episode 42 Nov 19, 2024

 

 SOURCE: KAL, The Economist, November 14, 2024

UNIVERSITIES DOING TRUMP’S WORK FOR HIM

 

“The contradiction between liberalism’s substantive ends and its formal means is not a new problem. One could argue—I would—that virtually every historical moment of substantive liberal triumph has been made possible by social movements that imposed themselves from below, often over the protest of liberal policymakers and thinkers, registering their objection to the means despite their abstract support for the ends. Universal adult suffrage, the welfare state, equal protection under law—such is the story of each of these.

 

“In our time, there are entrenched institutional liberal forces, not only in formal politics but in the universities, the press, the legal system, the nonprofit sector, and even the corporate world, that intone the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and the rule of law, yet work every day to defeat their own internal left-wing challengers: student protests, labor struggles, “woke excesses.” When they raid encampments (student or unhoused) or bust unions, they do Trump’s work for him, remaking Americans in authoritarian ways. The phenomenon that Trump represents can only be defeated when liberal institutionalists cease trying to quash the insurgent left in the name of protecting democracy, and instead look to it as an ally and a source of strength. This is not because the ideas of the left already represent a suppressed silent majority—a fantastical, self-flattering delusion—but because it is only the left that has a coherent vision to offer against the ideas of the right.”

 

SOURCE: Gabriel Winant, Dissent (November 7, 2024)

 

 

IT’S THE RACE AND CLASS COMBINATION, STUPID

 

"There are countless polls that show Americans want things that are anathema to the Republican Party and especially to Trump’s agenda. At least 65 percent of Americans believe that the federal government has a “responsibility to make sure all Americans have health care.” More than 50 percent insist that “government aid to the poor does more good than harm.” Nearly 80 percent believe that Social Security benefits should not be reduced in any way. Polling by Pew also shows that most Americans believe that the government should do more to help “the needy even if it means going deeper into debt.” Nearly 70 percent of Americans are concerned about the costs of child care, and thus nearly 80 percent support some kind of government-subsidized, affordable-child-care initiative. And overwhelming majorities agree that the U.S. is enveloped in an ongoing housing crisis. More than 60 percent of voters agreed with the statement “Housing is a basic necessity, and the private market is unable to address many Americans’ affordability concerns.” In hurricane-wrecked and Republican-controlled Florida, a recent survey found that a whopping 90 percent of residents believe that climate change is real and 58 percent believe that it’s human-caused. Nearly 70 percent of them want the state and federal governments to do more to address it.

 

"Despite the widespread desires of ordinary Americans for the government to play more of a role in improving their quality of life, Trump and the Republican Party reject these calls for greater public spending and services to help those in need of it. But the Democratic Party has also been reluctant to cast itself as the party for greater government intervention to help with health care, housing, and child care. For more than a generation, the Democratic Party has envisioned itself as jettisoning its reputation as the party of social welfare, most dramatically exemplified by the War on Poverty and the Great Society initiatives, the signature legislation of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Harris has made some modest proposals like expanding the child tax credit and providing grants for potential first-time homeowners, but none is nearly enough to offset the economic malaise that ordinary people are experiencing right now. It is almost as if the Democrats believed that the sharp personal contrast between the candidates — a white supremacist Trump against a Black South Asian daughter of immigrants — was significant enough to outweigh substantive mention of any other details of why their party should prevail.

 

"In her unprecedented run for office, Harris has almost completely retreated from the more progressive positions she took during the heated primary in 2020 and the bolder proposals that the Biden-Harris campaign eventually adopted. These promises, designed to convince the millions of young people protesting in the streets to cast their votes for the Democratic ticket, included increasing the minimum wage, paid family leave, subsidized child care, canceling student debt, and other big government expenditures, some of which were realized in the $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Act signed by Biden in 2021. The Democrats won in 2020 with 81 million votes, the most in American history.

 

"But in this election, even though ambitious government proposals are still popular with wide swaths of the electorate, Harris has returned to a political message that emphasizes the supremacy of capital, marginalizes the role of the state and public expenditure, and has legitimized Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric on the border and wherever Black and brown bodies need to be surveilled and policed. She has deftly avoided any mention of the 2020 protests that are the reason she was selected as Biden’s running mate in the first place. The simultaneous eruption of protest in response to the murder of George Floyd and the unfolding human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic raised the demands not only for police reform but also for the state to play a greater role in helping suffering people. Since her ascension to the top of the ticket, Harris and the Democratic National Committee have excised the influence of the Black Lives Matter social movement that suffused the party’s 2020 political platform and its emphasis on countering racism, police brutality, and inequality. It has been airbrushed from history. Indeed, in the Harris and Walz 80-page platform, the words “racism,” “inequality,” “diversity,” and “police brutality” are nowhere to be found.

 

"[I]n this race, Trump is setting the terms, and this time he has shed the patina of economic populism that once defined him and is leaning even more heavily into conspiracy ramblings and outrageous bigotry. Harris, lacking sufficient pressure from the left, has largely abandoned gestures or appeals to the working class and instead touts endorsements from current and former Republicans, including war criminal Dick Cheney. Focused on appealing to middle-of-the-road and undecided voters, Harris has now been left to scramble to bolster support among core Democratic bases, including Black men. Weeks away from the election, Harris promised up to $20,000 in forgivable loans for Black entrepreneurs, an initiative to tackle sickle cell disease, more regulatory protections for cryptocurrency investors, and the creation of new opportunities for Black men to participate in the emerging cannabis industry. It reeks more of desperation than as part of a coherent plan to mobilize voters."

 

SOURCE, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Hammer and Hope (Fall 2024).

 

THEFT OF ENJOYMENT

 

“Nationalism thus presents a privileged domain of the eruption of enjoyment into the social field. The national Cause is ultimately nothing but the way subjects of a given ethnic community organize their enjoyment through national myths. What is therefore at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing. We always impute to the ‘other’ an excessive enjoyment; s/he wants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life) and/or has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. In short, what really bothers us about the ‘other’ is the peculiar way it organizes its enjoyment: precisely the surplus, the ‘excess’ that pertains to it—the smell of their food, their ‘noisy’ songs and dances, their strange manners, their attitude to work (in the racist perspective, the ‘other’ is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labour; and it is quite amusing to note the ease with which one passes from reproaching the other with a refusal to work, to reproaching him for the theft of work). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it; this is also the case with castration, which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that ‘really cannot happen’, but we are nonetheless horrified by its prospect. The ground of incompatibility between different ethnic subject positions is thus not exclusively the different structure of their symbolic identifications. What categorically resists universalization is rather the particular structure of their relationship towards enjoyment:

 

‘Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of the modern racism we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. . .The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental status of the object is to be always already snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment that we write down in shorthand as minus-Phi, the matheme of castration. The problem is apparently unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of racism is thus hatred of my own enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of extimacy, then the hatred is also my own.’ (Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Extimité)

 

“What we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us: the lack (‘castration’) is original; enjoyment constitutes itself as ‘stolen’, or, to quote Hegel’s precise formulation from his Science of Logic, it ‘only comes to be through being left behind. Yugoslavia today is a case-study of such a paradox, in which we are witness to a detailed network of ‘decantations’ and ‘thefts’ of enjoyment.’”

 

SOURCE: Slavoj Žižek, New Left Review (Sept/Oct 1990)

 

by Cathy Gere and Adam Aron,  professors at UC San Diego

Much has been written about the problem of denial of climate change science. But the University of California exemplifies another, possibly much tougher, problem: How do you go from acceptance of the science to action? 

The UC is a leader in climate change research and policy. And yet, its ten campuses emit more than a million metric tons of CO2 every year from burning natural gas, a fossil fuel, to provide heating, cooling and electricity. Many in the current generation of UC students -- increasingly aware of the extent to which global heating poses an existential threat to their futures -- are asking themselves why a university that has done so much to raise the alarm about greenhouse gases has done so little to curb its own emissions.

In 2013, then-UC-president Janet Napolitano launched the ‘Carbon Neutrality Initiative.’ This unfunded mandate, handed down from the Office of the President to the individual campuses, promised that the university would go ‘carbon neutral’ by 2025. 

In the first few years, the focus was on energy efficiency measures, such as better insulation, and lights that turned on with movement sensors. These efforts were successful in reducing emissions, but those savings have now been erased with a dramatic new building plan at the UCs. While the efficiency gains were an achievement, the low-hanging efficiency fruit are now all picked, and the emissions goals set by President Napolitano are still way out of reach.

Three quarters of the university’s energy is supplied by natural gas, a fossil fuel, obtained by highly toxic hydraulic fracturing methods that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The UC looked into replacing fossil natural gas with biofuels, but that is, at best, a limited solution: there are serious problems with price, scale, and supply. 

A group of experts concluded that the only path to genuine decarbonization lay with electrification of the campus energy systems, but that was rejected as too expensive. Meanwhile, billions of dollars were found for new buildings.

So, with minimal investment in genuinely decarbonizing the university’s energy systems, the Carbon Neutrality Initiative is planning to make up the shortfall with inexpensive "carbon offsets." These are schemes to which institutions and individuals contribute, to try to "make good" on their own greenhouse gas emissions: for example, UC continues to burn natural gas while paying for forest preservation somewhere else. These carbon offsets have been called ‘licenses to pollute’ and likened to the ‘indulgences’ of the Catholic church (a pay-for-prayer scam). Thus, for the UC, ‘carbon neutrality’ does not mean reducing its emissions; it means paying people elsewhere (generally in low-income countries) to reduce their emissions while we go about business-as-usual.

Along with many members of the wider climate action and climate justice movement, we object to offset in principle and in practice.

First, we object to offsets in principle. The idea that we can pay someone in a poor part of the globe to reduce their emissions so that people in the richest country in the world can continue to burn fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases is morally bankrupt. Even if it works exactly as promised (which we very much doubt), all that ‘carbon neutrality’ achieves is the maintenance of the status quo. The IPCC 2018, backed by the world's governments, was very clear: we need to reduce emissions by about 50% by 2030 from 2010 levels to have a chance of keeping global heating to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. So the UC must stop burning natural gas. It can also, at the same time, support reforestation projects. The latter is no substitute for the former.

Second, we object to offsets in practice. To take just one example of an offset program that the University has already mooted, indigenous reforestation in Ecuador, this can hardly be computed in terms of sequestered tonnes of CO2. 

For such a scheme to work, trees have to be planted across an enormous area and reach maturity. Wildcat logging, mining and agricultural encroachment have to be held at bay. Political agreements have to be honored without corruption. How likely is it that all these things will hold true at a time when the climate emergency is accelerating and countries are experiencing increased instability as a result?

The UC is currently soliciting feedback about the carbon offset program from members of the university community. We are urging the administration to abandon the offsets program publicly, and to redirect the resources set aside for it into planning for electrification of the campus energy systems. 

Any path to stopping global heating must pass through genuine decarbonization of our infrastructure. Investing in a false accounting of ‘carbon neutrality’ is a form of climate denial: it denies the reality of our emissions and our responsibility to curb them. The UC prides itself on being a climate leader; we want the university to lead the world in real solutions, not in greenwashing.