I'd like to hear more about Chicago's "core economic engine in a process of gradual long-term structural decline." It sure seems prosperous on the surface.
for what it's worth, on the mayoral question, far too light a focus on nithya raman's shortcomings in LA given matt's past writings on urban order/disorder. several years ago while on city council, she literally told folks in east hollywood living near a dangerous open air drug market to "get to know your local encampment" while advising them to stay safe by going in groups. this is not the candidate we need.
Regarding Mayors and Michelle Wu in particular, it seems that Boston is rather easy to run with major academic and medical institutions driving the economy and a rather small disadvantaged population ("college town with a fishing pier" was Tina Fey's line). Menino, Walsh and Wu have sort of cruised along doing little to improve a struggling school system or grow housing and Boston chugs along with a wildly low crime rate (the only major city with no bump during Covid) and crazy high cost of living.
In my memory, but totally absent from today's conversation, there was talk about how McCain Feingold tilted the playing field toward Senators over Governors. The best I can determine why that might be the case are restrictions on soft money and what state level parties can do.
As someone who considers myself to be part of the rationality community -- as many of the people expressing concerns about AI x-risk do -- I find it so incredibly frustrating and sad that not only are so many of the arguments for AI risk incredibly sloppy and imprecise, but they are exactly the kind of arguments that we would expect people like them (us) to be biased to make and are then defended with all the usual motte-bailey and other tactics we are supposed to be about resisting. **We should have setup institutions and incentives dedicated to disproving/discrediting AI x-risk concerns** and only been convinced to the extent we failed. We did the opposite.
I mean the fundamental narrative here is that intelligence is the most important and dangerous thing and casts the key people to heroically deal with the problem to be the very computer scientists making the argument. I mean one could have been worried about all sorts of impacts of AIs from their economic impacts, to their effects on war to their effect on socialization and human psychological joy which cast some other profession in the staring role. This doesn't mean you can dismiss the concern but it is exactly the kind of coincidence that should make you suspicious and want a particular precisce and careful argument. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what I see even in discussions by people who should know better [see details below].
I mean of course the rationality community is human and has the usual human failings but I wish we'd been better able to recognize the problems here and create institutions and methodologies that overcome them. Instead -- thanks to the harmful influence of Yudkowsky -- I see a great deal of advocacy and proselytizing and far too little self-examination and self-criticism.
---
I have to give Bostrom credit in that he tried to be pretty careful about most of these things but instead of trying to carefully fill in the places he was still sketchy I instead see people just ignoring key aspects of his argument. Critically Bostrom recognized that you **needed to assume that AIs would maximize some really simple goal to really get the alignment problem off the ground**. I mean every behavior maximizes some scoring function and if you don't make any other assumptions there is no reason to assume that AIs couldn't be taught to behave in exactly the deferential context dependent way a smart but utterly devoted human assistant might.
Bostrom's argument was (essentially) that the more intelligent a creature gets the more unified goals it has. Thus we should expect that eventually a really smart AI will decide to paperclip maximize or adopt some other unaligned moral goal. If anything I think continued AI development has undermined this argument -- we see that the superpower of AIs is exactly the opposite, the ability to learn and apply really complex context dependent rules. But this part of the argument has almost completely dropped out of the discussion.
And instead of filling in the somewhat handwavey way Bostrom dealt with intelligence and trying to give a useful definition and show that it is both reasonable to predict AIs will score very high on that metric and that makes them threatening or allows for runaway growth we get handwavey narratives that treat it as a superpower.
There are quite a few topics where the British electorate holds far more inconsistent views than the US electorate. Land use is definitively one of them. Everyone thinks the system of local planning control is mad, and hates having anything to do with it. And yet when the government centralizes it, they are exposed to exactly the same forces as the local planners and so cane actually get anything more done. Everyone wants stuff built. No one wants stuff built near them. There’s no substantial movement of property owners who acknowledge that development improves land values as there is in the US
I’m not sure how prevalent that movement is in the US either. I have spent most of my planning career in NYC and even there, even in Manhattan, a lot of people didn’t want new development. I grew up in the low-density midwest; my family is still there and for the most part people don’t like new development there either.
I’ve been very happy to see the rise of YIMBY sentiment here, but I am not at all sure that something like “street votes” would work well here in terms of building support for more development. We also have a *long* way to go.
So in the SF Bay Area at least, building more market rate housing is well on the way to being a mainstream position in the Democratic Party. There are exceptions, but if you look at most of our city councils and the candidates for governor, they are all now talking at least about a general expansion of construction, not just about "affordable housing". In the UK the only places where housing construction is popular are in poorer towns where generally people don't want to live.
On the East Coast, even a lot of the YIMBYs I know are still focused on "affordable" housing even though it's increasingly clear that regulations on that have tended to diminish the feasibility of building.
Thanks for posting these comments, it's interesting to see the variations in different jurisdictions!
To be fair to NYs YIMBYs I thin they face a different kind of problem. The Bay Area is at a point where even tech workers can’t afford to buy where they want to and police officers can’t afford to live where they’re employed. It’s really an almost universally understood problem. In NY as I understand it there is housing people can afford but it tends to be too far out from where people work. “Affordable housing” still probably is the right solution but it is a different problem
I don’t think “affordability” really means the same thing that we mean when we say “inflation.” It’s people mad about high nominal prices. If inflation miraculously went to 2% next month and stayed there for over 2 years, then 2028 would still feature a lot of “affordability” discussion, because people will still see a gallon of milk at $4 and many of them will still be anchored on lower, pre-2022 prices.
Your second sentence makes me wonder yet again if there's any data about how long it took people to adjust to the "new normal" of prices after the late 1970s to early 1980s inflation era.
I came of age in that period. The inflation was followed by, and ended by, a long and deep recession. This reset everyone’s focus on what the biggest economic problem was, and what anyone should be most worried about. You don’t worry about prices when you have no money and no job. There was also the worry about nuclear holocaust with Reagan’s belligerence towards the USSR.
I would say the answer to your question is that by 1983 the prices were the new normal, so about three years. But the intervening problems were sufficient enough that absent them there may not be predictive quality to that data.
I think that's probably right. I graduated from college in 1982, and everyone was screaming more about the double-digit unemployment. I guess I remember prices going up dramatically all the time in the 1970s, but because of my youth I think I just took it for granted. That was just how things were.
Vibecoded a little survey tool at https://votto.app to measure sentiment on takes and questions like this across different dimensions, traits, media community affiliations, etc. to see where things split in interesting ways. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring fam at https://votto.app/slowboring
Not very interesting yet without meaningful data but if y'all enjoy seeing survey results sliced up by cross-tabs, would love to get some responses to test out the flow and see cool curves!
Thanks, that was fun. I was surprised at a couple of my responses being far outside the SB typical range. (Could change as more people vote of course…)
Fun tool! It took me a moment to figure out what was going on - I thought it wasn’t showing me results because I had to create an account first, but then I accidentally clicked on a box and it registered a vote and showed me the result. I couldn’t figure out how to change that vote, but then looked at the question and figured the box I clicked was basically right enough anyway.
Right on! No account needed - the results are the “carrot” for voting, and the filtering lenses are unlocked when you report your own About You’s. Bear with any UI issues - still figuring some things out but I love the feedback!
What has Nithya Raman said about crime that she should be disavowing? Are there statements from the past or are there any soft on crime policies she still supports? I agree she needs to do the full Mamdani pivot on crime if she really wants to be mayor, including identifying a tough police chief she would hire if she were to be elected
"Josh Shapiro (who’s probably toast because of Israel)"
Some people will likely strongly disagree with me on this, but do people realize how incredibly messed up this is?
Are there American Jews who are much more critical of Israel? Of course. Being Jewish does not require you to be "pro-Israel," and certainly does not obligate you to side with Israel in their current conflicts.
But it's an issue for Shapiro, specifically, because he is Jewish, and because he did normal Jewish-kid-in-Israel stuff growing up - his religious identity created an additional litmus test for him. That's not okay, IMO, even if I can understand where people who oppose him are coming from. If I was Jewish it would freak me the Hell out.
(FWIW I also kinda think Matt is wrong, and this is fully triangulate-able for Shapiro if he has any personal flexibility.)
Shapiro's substantive positions on Israel are very mainstream Dem. He's a governor so he's not stuck taking votes in Congress. I think he has an opportunity to take a strong "Israel should exist and be secure/the Netanyahu government is extremely bad" approach. If anything he has more leeway to be extremely critical of the Israeli government without alienating pro-Israel/anti-Bibi Jewish voters because of his credibility on the issue. Also worth noting that Pritzker, a favorite of progressives who is also Jewish, was an AIPAC donor as recently as 10 years ago. Shapiro has never run for federal office and therefore has never taken an AIPAC donation, and (unlike Pritzker) is not rich so it's unlikely he's donated to AIPAC. Maybe antisemitism will be more of a problem than I think/hope, but I would not write him off.
I don’t think it’s about him being Jewish, in fact I think it’s unfair to characterize it that way. I don’t know exactly what Shapiro’s current views are, but as you say, being Jewish does not obligate you to be pro Israel [or] side with Israel in their current conflicts. But especially the democratic primary voters, and I think non Evangelical voters more broadly, are going to be very unhappy with anyone who isn’t directly critical of Israel’s actions over the last several years.
Anyone who isn’t willing to be directly critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza, in the West Bank regarding settlers and settlements, in their role in the Iran war, and probably in what looks like another occupation and inhumanity in Lebanon, and do so without lots of caveats or pretending it’s just Bibi, etc., is going to be viewed pretty unfavorably in the primaries.
I hasten to add, I don’t think someone needs to become pro Palestinian or start talking about settler colonialism or anything like that. Just treat Israel like any other country behaving badly, and be willing to adjust American policy to reflect that.
As I said, I don’t know his current positions, but for sure soft on Israel is not going to play well in 2028. A close but imperfect analogy was the negative weight carried by Hilary in 2008 for Iraq, especially in contrast to Obama. It wasn’t decisive, but it mattered.
I may just be projecting, but as someone who would have described himself as pretty pro Israel until very recently, I don’t want to hear how bad Iran was, I want to hear the war was stupid and wrong, and that displacing millions of civilians is not the best answer to almost any problem.
No, he's out because he did those things, then backed up being extremely tough on protestors, and continues to back the 'problem is Bibi, not Israel' line.
I bet you there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews right now who did birthright and all the other normal Jewish stuff, who also didn't have racist Ben Shaprio-esque essays in college.
I'll also note I bet the vast majority of American Jews did not volunteer service on an IDF base.
Agreed. I don't think that Shapiro is out. For one thing, Israel will have elections in the next few months, and may have a much different government. Israel with a new government will not suddenly stop fighting existential threats and other security threats (as many on the far left seem to want), but if Netanyahu is defeated it may have leadership with better skills at communicating with the West. It may also be able to stop amplifying the most extreme voices in the country and start addressing some of the worst excesses of its West Bank policy. As quickly as support for Israel has declined, this trend may either reverse at or decrease in saliency.
If Bennett replaces Netanyahu you'd have Smotrich and Ben Givr out of government and West Bank settler violence being taken seriously. That would be a good start. I actually think Bennett vs Bibi would look a lot like Magyar vs Orban.
Agreed. Ideologically, Bennett is actually to the right of Netanyahu. But he has some character and would take West Bank settler violence seriously and wouldn't put key security positions to extremist mediocrities. And more importantly Bennett would actually care about how it communicates with the West.
TBH ideology of the PM is much less important than the coalition they lead. Bibi is corrupt and dependent upon Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Bennett is a rule-of-law conservative and would be in a coalition with parties mostly to his left (and dependent on them to stay in power).
Did I say Iran doesn't have the goal of eliminating Israel? Obviously it does. Israel just wants there never to be any threats in the region ever again and Iran achieving failed state status (as opposed to a reformed nationalist Iran) is a good way to do that.
I would expect a different government not to pursue that goal as aggressively; they should still apologize for fucking up the world economic system but they won't.
You said Israel has the goal of turning Iran into a failed state. This is false. Israel wants to turn Iran into a state that doesn't want to eliminate Israel. That's it's only goal in Iran.
But they’re pretty clearly indifferent to that occurring as an alternative. And would see the ensuing problems as not theirs. Solving your own problems by foisting them on the other countries in the region, along with screwing up the economies of a lot of other countries is not going to be taken well by those other countries.
We have a lot to answer for here, but so do they, and they have a lot less room for error.
Israel would be just fine with a reformed nationalist Iran. Destroying Israel has nothing to do with any rational Iranian nationalism; it's strictly an Islamic Republic goal.
Considering that parties endorsing the position "we do not want to genocide the Palestinians" are currently polling at around 10 percent of the Israeli electorate, I think it safe to say that there will be no significant policy or even linguistic changes as a result of Israel's next election.
"But if the whole national electorate was hostile to market-rate housing, I don’t know what would save us."
Can we stop pretending it's not?
- Most voters live in homes they own.
- A falling market rate would negatively affect the value of those homes.
People say "yes, build more housing, lower housing costs, sure!" but it doesn't mean jack if they are going to act, and vote, in a way that aggressively promotes the exact opposite. If we aren't engaging this problem from that angle then we're just not being serious about it.
Housing costs aren't high and going unaddressed because of "the elites" or "out of touch" politicians or ideology or institutional landlords, it's because your neighbors don't want to mess up their retirement accounts. We have to acknowledge that that is a valid concern, and not just villainous "NIMBYism," and figure out how to balance these competing interests, instead of just closing our eyes and tapping our heels and wishing every 30 year old could buy a house while somehow leaving existing homeowners' net worth unaffected.
But that's not the primary reason because if it was multi million dollars condos or luxury homes going in that would increase property values people would be just as opposed.
Increasing supply basically always lowers prices, at all tiers, even if the increase in supply is on the high end. Matt has written about this. Even if building high-end housing increases the average home price in an area, everybody down the line gets price pressure relieved.
In the long term, if places become more urbanized/capitalized, they could become high-value urban areas themselves. But nobody is turning Nashua into Boston on the time scale of a human life.
I find it really weird that it wasn't mentioned that Daniela Amodei is Dario Amodei's sister. (I had to Google that because I was wondering whether she was Dario's wife and the stuff about Holden Karnofsky had just been accidentally inserted in between.)
“If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” https://www.ft.com/content/927ef2c7-cbf3-4bc1-9bdd-f9884a09d878?syn-25a6b1a6=1
Great stuff Matt, now let's break down the NBA playoffs next week!
I'd like to hear more about Chicago's "core economic engine in a process of gradual long-term structural decline." It sure seems prosperous on the surface.
What makes you think Musk is a great engineer?
for what it's worth, on the mayoral question, far too light a focus on nithya raman's shortcomings in LA given matt's past writings on urban order/disorder. several years ago while on city council, she literally told folks in east hollywood living near a dangerous open air drug market to "get to know your local encampment" while advising them to stay safe by going in groups. this is not the candidate we need.
Regarding Mayors and Michelle Wu in particular, it seems that Boston is rather easy to run with major academic and medical institutions driving the economy and a rather small disadvantaged population ("college town with a fishing pier" was Tina Fey's line). Menino, Walsh and Wu have sort of cruised along doing little to improve a struggling school system or grow housing and Boston chugs along with a wildly low crime rate (the only major city with no bump during Covid) and crazy high cost of living.
I don't think Carter governed better than Obama
In my memory, but totally absent from today's conversation, there was talk about how McCain Feingold tilted the playing field toward Senators over Governors. The best I can determine why that might be the case are restrictions on soft money and what state level parties can do.
As someone who considers myself to be part of the rationality community -- as many of the people expressing concerns about AI x-risk do -- I find it so incredibly frustrating and sad that not only are so many of the arguments for AI risk incredibly sloppy and imprecise, but they are exactly the kind of arguments that we would expect people like them (us) to be biased to make and are then defended with all the usual motte-bailey and other tactics we are supposed to be about resisting. **We should have setup institutions and incentives dedicated to disproving/discrediting AI x-risk concerns** and only been convinced to the extent we failed. We did the opposite.
I mean the fundamental narrative here is that intelligence is the most important and dangerous thing and casts the key people to heroically deal with the problem to be the very computer scientists making the argument. I mean one could have been worried about all sorts of impacts of AIs from their economic impacts, to their effects on war to their effect on socialization and human psychological joy which cast some other profession in the staring role. This doesn't mean you can dismiss the concern but it is exactly the kind of coincidence that should make you suspicious and want a particular precisce and careful argument. Unfortunately, that is the opposite of what I see even in discussions by people who should know better [see details below].
I mean of course the rationality community is human and has the usual human failings but I wish we'd been better able to recognize the problems here and create institutions and methodologies that overcome them. Instead -- thanks to the harmful influence of Yudkowsky -- I see a great deal of advocacy and proselytizing and far too little self-examination and self-criticism.
---
I have to give Bostrom credit in that he tried to be pretty careful about most of these things but instead of trying to carefully fill in the places he was still sketchy I instead see people just ignoring key aspects of his argument. Critically Bostrom recognized that you **needed to assume that AIs would maximize some really simple goal to really get the alignment problem off the ground**. I mean every behavior maximizes some scoring function and if you don't make any other assumptions there is no reason to assume that AIs couldn't be taught to behave in exactly the deferential context dependent way a smart but utterly devoted human assistant might.
Bostrom's argument was (essentially) that the more intelligent a creature gets the more unified goals it has. Thus we should expect that eventually a really smart AI will decide to paperclip maximize or adopt some other unaligned moral goal. If anything I think continued AI development has undermined this argument -- we see that the superpower of AIs is exactly the opposite, the ability to learn and apply really complex context dependent rules. But this part of the argument has almost completely dropped out of the discussion.
And instead of filling in the somewhat handwavey way Bostrom dealt with intelligence and trying to give a useful definition and show that it is both reasonable to predict AIs will score very high on that metric and that makes them threatening or allows for runaway growth we get handwavey narratives that treat it as a superpower.
There are quite a few topics where the British electorate holds far more inconsistent views than the US electorate. Land use is definitively one of them. Everyone thinks the system of local planning control is mad, and hates having anything to do with it. And yet when the government centralizes it, they are exposed to exactly the same forces as the local planners and so cane actually get anything more done. Everyone wants stuff built. No one wants stuff built near them. There’s no substantial movement of property owners who acknowledge that development improves land values as there is in the US
I’m not sure how prevalent that movement is in the US either. I have spent most of my planning career in NYC and even there, even in Manhattan, a lot of people didn’t want new development. I grew up in the low-density midwest; my family is still there and for the most part people don’t like new development there either.
I’ve been very happy to see the rise of YIMBY sentiment here, but I am not at all sure that something like “street votes” would work well here in terms of building support for more development. We also have a *long* way to go.
So in the SF Bay Area at least, building more market rate housing is well on the way to being a mainstream position in the Democratic Party. There are exceptions, but if you look at most of our city councils and the candidates for governor, they are all now talking at least about a general expansion of construction, not just about "affordable housing". In the UK the only places where housing construction is popular are in poorer towns where generally people don't want to live.
On the East Coast, even a lot of the YIMBYs I know are still focused on "affordable" housing even though it's increasingly clear that regulations on that have tended to diminish the feasibility of building.
Thanks for posting these comments, it's interesting to see the variations in different jurisdictions!
To be fair to NYs YIMBYs I thin they face a different kind of problem. The Bay Area is at a point where even tech workers can’t afford to buy where they want to and police officers can’t afford to live where they’re employed. It’s really an almost universally understood problem. In NY as I understand it there is housing people can afford but it tends to be too far out from where people work. “Affordable housing” still probably is the right solution but it is a different problem
I don’t think “affordability” really means the same thing that we mean when we say “inflation.” It’s people mad about high nominal prices. If inflation miraculously went to 2% next month and stayed there for over 2 years, then 2028 would still feature a lot of “affordability” discussion, because people will still see a gallon of milk at $4 and many of them will still be anchored on lower, pre-2022 prices.
What we want is deflation (at the same wages)
Your second sentence makes me wonder yet again if there's any data about how long it took people to adjust to the "new normal" of prices after the late 1970s to early 1980s inflation era.
I came of age in that period. The inflation was followed by, and ended by, a long and deep recession. This reset everyone’s focus on what the biggest economic problem was, and what anyone should be most worried about. You don’t worry about prices when you have no money and no job. There was also the worry about nuclear holocaust with Reagan’s belligerence towards the USSR.
I would say the answer to your question is that by 1983 the prices were the new normal, so about three years. But the intervening problems were sufficient enough that absent them there may not be predictive quality to that data.
I think that's probably right. I graduated from college in 1982, and everyone was screaming more about the double-digit unemployment. I guess I remember prices going up dramatically all the time in the 1970s, but because of my youth I think I just took it for granted. That was just how things were.
Vibecoded a little survey tool at https://votto.app to measure sentiment on takes and questions like this across different dimensions, traits, media community affiliations, etc. to see where things split in interesting ways. Dedicated page for the Slow Boring fam at https://votto.app/slowboring
Not very interesting yet without meaningful data but if y'all enjoy seeing survey results sliced up by cross-tabs, would love to get some responses to test out the flow and see cool curves!
Thanks, that was fun. I was surprised at a couple of my responses being far outside the SB typical range. (Could change as more people vote of course…)
Fun tool! It took me a moment to figure out what was going on - I thought it wasn’t showing me results because I had to create an account first, but then I accidentally clicked on a box and it registered a vote and showed me the result. I couldn’t figure out how to change that vote, but then looked at the question and figured the box I clicked was basically right enough anyway.
Right on! No account needed - the results are the “carrot” for voting, and the filtering lenses are unlocked when you report your own About You’s. Bear with any UI issues - still figuring some things out but I love the feedback!
Agree that this was fun!
What has Nithya Raman said about crime that she should be disavowing? Are there statements from the past or are there any soft on crime policies she still supports? I agree she needs to do the full Mamdani pivot on crime if she really wants to be mayor, including identifying a tough police chief she would hire if she were to be elected
"Josh Shapiro (who’s probably toast because of Israel)"
Some people will likely strongly disagree with me on this, but do people realize how incredibly messed up this is?
Are there American Jews who are much more critical of Israel? Of course. Being Jewish does not require you to be "pro-Israel," and certainly does not obligate you to side with Israel in their current conflicts.
But it's an issue for Shapiro, specifically, because he is Jewish, and because he did normal Jewish-kid-in-Israel stuff growing up - his religious identity created an additional litmus test for him. That's not okay, IMO, even if I can understand where people who oppose him are coming from. If I was Jewish it would freak me the Hell out.
(FWIW I also kinda think Matt is wrong, and this is fully triangulate-able for Shapiro if he has any personal flexibility.)
Shapiro's substantive positions on Israel are very mainstream Dem. He's a governor so he's not stuck taking votes in Congress. I think he has an opportunity to take a strong "Israel should exist and be secure/the Netanyahu government is extremely bad" approach. If anything he has more leeway to be extremely critical of the Israeli government without alienating pro-Israel/anti-Bibi Jewish voters because of his credibility on the issue. Also worth noting that Pritzker, a favorite of progressives who is also Jewish, was an AIPAC donor as recently as 10 years ago. Shapiro has never run for federal office and therefore has never taken an AIPAC donation, and (unlike Pritzker) is not rich so it's unlikely he's donated to AIPAC. Maybe antisemitism will be more of a problem than I think/hope, but I would not write him off.
I don’t think it’s about him being Jewish, in fact I think it’s unfair to characterize it that way. I don’t know exactly what Shapiro’s current views are, but as you say, being Jewish does not obligate you to be pro Israel [or] side with Israel in their current conflicts. But especially the democratic primary voters, and I think non Evangelical voters more broadly, are going to be very unhappy with anyone who isn’t directly critical of Israel’s actions over the last several years.
Anyone who isn’t willing to be directly critical of Israel’s behavior in Gaza, in the West Bank regarding settlers and settlements, in their role in the Iran war, and probably in what looks like another occupation and inhumanity in Lebanon, and do so without lots of caveats or pretending it’s just Bibi, etc., is going to be viewed pretty unfavorably in the primaries.
I hasten to add, I don’t think someone needs to become pro Palestinian or start talking about settler colonialism or anything like that. Just treat Israel like any other country behaving badly, and be willing to adjust American policy to reflect that.
The thing is, he IS directly critical of Israel's actions in Gaza. Why did you think he wasn't?
As I said, I don’t know his current positions, but for sure soft on Israel is not going to play well in 2028. A close but imperfect analogy was the negative weight carried by Hilary in 2008 for Iraq, especially in contrast to Obama. It wasn’t decisive, but it mattered.
I may just be projecting, but as someone who would have described himself as pretty pro Israel until very recently, I don’t want to hear how bad Iran was, I want to hear the war was stupid and wrong, and that displacing millions of civilians is not the best answer to almost any problem.
No, he's out because he did those things, then backed up being extremely tough on protestors, and continues to back the 'problem is Bibi, not Israel' line.
I bet you there are plenty of anti-Zionist Jews right now who did birthright and all the other normal Jewish stuff, who also didn't have racist Ben Shaprio-esque essays in college.
I'll also note I bet the vast majority of American Jews did not volunteer service on an IDF base.
Agreed. I don't think that Shapiro is out. For one thing, Israel will have elections in the next few months, and may have a much different government. Israel with a new government will not suddenly stop fighting existential threats and other security threats (as many on the far left seem to want), but if Netanyahu is defeated it may have leadership with better skills at communicating with the West. It may also be able to stop amplifying the most extreme voices in the country and start addressing some of the worst excesses of its West Bank policy. As quickly as support for Israel has declined, this trend may either reverse at or decrease in saliency.
If Bennett replaces Netanyahu you'd have Smotrich and Ben Givr out of government and West Bank settler violence being taken seriously. That would be a good start. I actually think Bennett vs Bibi would look a lot like Magyar vs Orban.
Agreed. Ideologically, Bennett is actually to the right of Netanyahu. But he has some character and would take West Bank settler violence seriously and wouldn't put key security positions to extremist mediocrities. And more importantly Bennett would actually care about how it communicates with the West.
TBH ideology of the PM is much less important than the coalition they lead. Bibi is corrupt and dependent upon Ben Gvir and Smotrich. Bennett is a rule-of-law conservative and would be in a coalition with parties mostly to his left (and dependent on them to stay in power).
Agreed!
Israel will still have significantly damaged the world economy with the goal of turning Iran into a failed state.
If they'd just sat there and enjoyed their success at Fordo and with the pager bombs maybe a new government gets a pass.
Israel has the goal of surviving and not being attacked by Iran or its proxies. Iran is the one with the goal of eliminating Israel.
Did I say Iran doesn't have the goal of eliminating Israel? Obviously it does. Israel just wants there never to be any threats in the region ever again and Iran achieving failed state status (as opposed to a reformed nationalist Iran) is a good way to do that.
I would expect a different government not to pursue that goal as aggressively; they should still apologize for fucking up the world economic system but they won't.
You said Israel has the goal of turning Iran into a failed state. This is false. Israel wants to turn Iran into a state that doesn't want to eliminate Israel. That's it's only goal in Iran.
But they’re pretty clearly indifferent to that occurring as an alternative. And would see the ensuing problems as not theirs. Solving your own problems by foisting them on the other countries in the region, along with screwing up the economies of a lot of other countries is not going to be taken well by those other countries.
We have a lot to answer for here, but so do they, and they have a lot less room for error.
Israel would be just fine with a reformed nationalist Iran. Destroying Israel has nothing to do with any rational Iranian nationalism; it's strictly an Islamic Republic goal.
Considering that parties endorsing the position "we do not want to genocide the Palestinians" are currently polling at around 10 percent of the Israeli electorate, I think it safe to say that there will be no significant policy or even linguistic changes as a result of Israel's next election.
"But if the whole national electorate was hostile to market-rate housing, I don’t know what would save us."
Can we stop pretending it's not?
- Most voters live in homes they own.
- A falling market rate would negatively affect the value of those homes.
People say "yes, build more housing, lower housing costs, sure!" but it doesn't mean jack if they are going to act, and vote, in a way that aggressively promotes the exact opposite. If we aren't engaging this problem from that angle then we're just not being serious about it.
Housing costs aren't high and going unaddressed because of "the elites" or "out of touch" politicians or ideology or institutional landlords, it's because your neighbors don't want to mess up their retirement accounts. We have to acknowledge that that is a valid concern, and not just villainous "NIMBYism," and figure out how to balance these competing interests, instead of just closing our eyes and tapping our heels and wishing every 30 year old could buy a house while somehow leaving existing homeowners' net worth unaffected.
But that's not the primary reason because if it was multi million dollars condos or luxury homes going in that would increase property values people would be just as opposed.
Increasing supply basically always lowers prices, at all tiers, even if the increase in supply is on the high end. Matt has written about this. Even if building high-end housing increases the average home price in an area, everybody down the line gets price pressure relieved.
In the long term, if places become more urbanized/capitalized, they could become high-value urban areas themselves. But nobody is turning Nashua into Boston on the time scale of a human life.
I find it really weird that it wasn't mentioned that Daniela Amodei is Dario Amodei's sister. (I had to Google that because I was wondering whether she was Dario's wife and the stuff about Holden Karnofsky had just been accidentally inserted in between.)
On the topic of far-right politics in Europe:
“If anything, nationalists are fighting to reassure pro-EU voters. Marine Le Pen has softened her line on Brussels over the years to remain electorally competitive in France. Giorgia Meloni has mostly co-operated with the EU during her three-and-a-half surprising years as a hard-right Italian prime minister. Both will have watched events in Hungary over the weekend and felt themselves vindicated. Of all the varied reasons for Viktor Orbán’s landslide defeat, the public’s desire to mend relations with the EU was prominent. The election winner Péter Magyar, no kind of liberal, and in fact a former Orbán man, favours a “return to Europe”.” https://www.ft.com/content/927ef2c7-cbf3-4bc1-9bdd-f9884a09d878?syn-25a6b1a6=1