I saw a great meme the other day: “You speak English because it’s the only language you speak. I speak English because it’s the only language YOU speak. We are not the same.” lol…
The Europeans writing these memes have also made their languages, aside from Spanish, very unattractive to learn.
They’re often hostile to learners (French) or eager to demonstrate that you need not bother learning (Germans).
Their own business affairs are conducted in English because their neighbors learn it instead of the neighboring language.
A dozen of them are small enough that the language is useless outside their borders (Dutch, Swedish, Czech…)
Is it any wonder I went for Mandarin, several friends became fluent in Arabic, and the vast majority of serious American language-learners go for Spanish or Portuguese?
Also worth noting that the Europeans who look down on Americans for not learning languages continue to look down on bilingual Americans who just happen to have learned a language that isn’t theirs.
I’ve dealt with Québécois tourists in S. Jersey who don’t speak anything but their drunken antique French and are mad at me for only being able to offer help in English, Mandarin, and German, FFS.
Spanish speakers are typically very kind about my stumbling attempts to communicate. They nod encouragingly and occasionally offer corrections the same way I offer corrections to my 3yo granddaughter.
Visiting Vancouver BC and listening to what I think was a Quebecois dude (though possibly something Eastern European, never actually heard Quebecois before) in a deep conversation with someone from Seoul, Korea about her experiences there in English was just amazing to me... like, how lucky are we that we speak the Terran language?
The New York discussion reminds me of a Fran Lebowitz interview, where she said there was a time where she could have no money in her pockets upon waking, and by that same night she could earn money somehow. New York today is in many ways better than the past, but that sense of endless possibility is gone.
I was talking to a guy who was originally from Mexico, and he said that if you're truly broke, go knock on ten doors and ask to work, and at least one of your neighbors will give you work. (This was in Denver.)
Extremely petty quibble, but isn't "centripetal force" wrong as a political metaphor for separatism? Centripetal force is whatever keeps an object connected to the centre and therefore in orbit, like gravity or the tension of a chain. The centrifugal force, while "fictitious" in physics, is what I'd use for the impulse of peripheral parts of an empire to fling themselves out and away from its influence.
A laughable claim, Mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton's Laws in a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day.
The Ottoman Empire was a lot larger in Europe in 1912 than in 1914: even if Princip got arrested, the repercussions of the Balkan Wars are still going to be running through the Ottoman Empire.
[In 1912, Albania was Ottoman, as was modern North Macedonia, roughly the southern third of modern Bulgaria and the northern part of modern Greece from Thessaloniki to the modern Turkish border]
Without WWI, they'd clearly be easier for the CUP to handle, but that's still a lot of problems.
Remember that the Trucial States (the UAE after independence in 1971) were already a British protectorate (since 1820), as were Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman (all of these were formally princely states of British India, and were governed from Delhi, not London), while Aden and Egypt were direct protectorates.
The Rashidis and Saudis in the central part of the Arabian peninsula were effectively independent of the Ottomans (the Rashidis were allied to the Ottomans).
That means that a very large fraction of Arabs are already outside the Ottoman Empire, which is going to make holding on to Damascus and Baghdad very difficult as Arab nationalism starts to take hold. The CUP was able to Turkify Anatolia by committing the Armenian Genocide, and there were also massacres and expulsions of Jews and Greeks - and Kurds haven't exactly had an easy time under the rule of either the CUP Empire or post-imperial Turkey. But that isn't an option for Arabs (because they have somewhere outside the Empire to go, and because they are local majorities, where the Armenians, Jews and Greeks were, even locally, minorities), and Turkifying Arabs hadn't worked in the preceding four centuries of Ottoman rule; Abdulmecid doesn't have the prestige of Suleiman the Magnificent: Turkishness is far less attractive than it has been in centuries, so why would it succeed now?
One big advantage that the Hapsburgs had is that only a small fraction of their ethnic minority population had nation-states outside the Empire - just Romania and Serbia. Indeed, for many of the minorities within the Empire, all of that ethnicity lived under Hapsburg rule (e.g. Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes). Poles and Ukrainians did cross borders, but both found the Hapsburgs less oppressive than the Hohenzollerns or the Romanovs, so tended not to be very rebellious except insofar as they were supporting rebellions in Germany or Russia.
For the Ottomans, by 1914, the reverse is true: only the Armenians lack a state, and they found Romanov Russia less bad than Ottoman Turkey.
The Ottomans held onto those areas for hundreds of years without Turkifying them. So there’s a bigger interesting question of why European-style nationalism took hold in the late 1800s leading to all the late Ottoman horrors. I don’t think it was inevitable but really a function of the Ottoman Empire falling behind Europe since it failed to colonize and industrialize, and things would’ve turned out differently with a much better Middle East today to keep up with Europe developmentally without adopting European-style nationalism.
Much of Europe didn’t really have nationalism until the same point in time, though. The nationalist revivals in the Balkans were in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nationalism was mostly confined before that to places that had nation-states that largely coincided with the dynastic states of the early modern period - English, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. German and Italian nationalism really got going under Napoleonic occupation, but you don’t see much in the way of Czech national identity until the 1830s and further east and south takes even longer: the first Slovak party is founded in 1871, for instance. Bulgarian and Serbian nationalism are a little earlier than Slovak, but not that much, Albanian even later.
Arab nationalism - or at least, the Arab cultural revival and the standardisation of what we now call Modern Standard Arabic - was one of the earlier nationalisms outside of Western Europe, the Nahda is an 1820s/1830s origin.
The Balkan nationalism (which itself happened in the later 1800s after earlier nationalist waves like the 1848 revolutions) seems to have predated and been a direct cause of Turkish nationalism though. It led to Turks being expelled from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire declined for several decades before the Ottomans did the same thing to minorities in Anatolia (which didn’t happen until the 1900s).
I think the rise of Bernie, DSA, and a bigger appeal of the prominent left/socialist leaning faction (I'm still not sure most of them are full on socialist in the European sense) is downstream of the Great Recession. None of this regains prominence I dont think without a lot of facts on the ground circa 2008-2014 or so. Doesn't mean they're right about everything or anything policy wise but I think it was a defining historical moment on Millenial politics that we will continue to have an imprint.
I think the left has more support now than in 2008-14 and bigger factors are Trump proving all the left-wing conspiracy theories about the Tea Party (not really libertarians just racists) correct, and the explosive asset price growth in recent years which means that if you already had money in 2008 you’re probably super-rich now but if you didn’t you’ll struggle to get normal middle-class markers like homeownership even if you do get a good job, which also proves left-wing narratives about success (it’s not about how hard you work or even how talented you are but about how much money you or your parents started with).
As a native Manhattanite (and hence New Yorker), I agree with Matt about the City. It's not the same anymore and a lot of good things have disappeared, for example, the literary, musical and artistic bohemian communities that made the place so interesting. As Matt says, it may not have been better but it was different and I miss the old New York too. I console myself sometimes by re-reading E.B. White's old essay, "This is NewYork."
I'm not a native, but I'm the decades I've lived here NY has generally gotten better. What I appreciate most about NYC is that it actually changes. It feels like certain projects take forever, but because the city is so large aggregate much gets completed.
Seneca, I believe a lot of that talent went to Hoboken initially but who knows where now? What New York lost was the cultural synergy of all those folks under one roof. And Mayor Bloomberg, despite repeated pleas for more affordable housing for the creative community, did precisely nothing.
So what we have now is a city of rich people and rich people are always homogenised and boring, IMHO. Sad...
Not at all perfect but as Matt says different. I remember going to after hours jam sessions in the neighbourhood jazz community where the music was just stunning because the musicians were playing for and competing against each other. You just won’t find that kind of creativity anymore in my old neighbourhood. The musicians all moved away because of the price of housing. I hope you’re not one of those people like Voltaire’s Candide who thinks we all at present live in the best of all possible worlds. Hate to tell you but there were some things in the past that were better.
I think Candide was referring to the constraints of Duality in general not particular situations. That is, on the whole of the collective human experience were in the best of all possible worlds (you can't have everything "good" without its counterpart "bad").
There were things in the past that were better but not too many. And humans really really tend to think that whatever happened when they were between 10 and 30 was perfect. There's no shortage of live music in NYC today that's just not a very good example
“Once there was another city here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it: the Lost City of New York.”
I'm sorry, I will not engage in any conversation about Graham Platner that is not also a conversation about Andrew Cuomo and the fact that the institutional Democratic party and much of the democratic aligned media enthusiastically supported Cuomo despite being accused of worse things than by more people. Funny that his name does not appear in that question.
To that point, though, obviously the NYC establishment would have had better odds of stopping Mamdani if they hadn’t rallied behind a scandal-plagued guy. There’s a lot of people in New York City, didn’t need to pick Cuomo.
I'll never forget a commenter here that accused you of endorsing Cuomo solely because you didn't endorse Mamdani, when it was easy to cite that in an RCV model, your top choice was Zellnor Myrie, and then 3 or 4 more others after him. Things aren't always so binary!
This is a strawman. Who exactly was enthusiastic about Cuomo? Schumer and Gillibrand didn’t endorse him; neither did Biden or Harris or any other relevant figures in Democratic politics save a couple congressmen.
Also, Cuomo never worked as a mercenary or wore an SS tattoo for 20 years.
I specifically voted for Mamdani because Cuomo is a bad person despite Cuomo probably having more alignment with my personal policy preferences. And I'm here to tell you, it's possible to not support a candidate because they are a bad person.
I was not a Cuomo supporter but: 1) Cuomo was very much a known entity as a politician whereas Platner is a neophyte, 2) Cuomo didn’t have a very strong Republican to face in the general election, and 3) Cuomo lost a winnable race anyway to a candidate with fewer scandals! Like Matt, I would have been thrilled if the establishment dumped Cuomo for a different “normie” dem but the dynamics of that race were quite different.
Meh, people like Freddie fail to win political arguments and elections on the merits so they resort to mimicking Republicans. His whole whataboutism with Bill Clinton is just so recycled.
Just because past (now irrelevant) political figures had baggage doesn’t somehow erase all this now new political baggage from one preferred candidate.
Meh, I think if you looked at which Democratic Congresspeople vote the most with Trump it’d be centrists like Fetterman and not leftists. Leftists are more opposed to the right than centrists are.
I think the pharmaceuticals patent people didn't cover themselves with glory during the TPP negotiations.
When Malaysia had a mass grave of Burmese refugees found?
The state department fudged the numbers to get Malaysia's human rights record high enough.
When Australia suggested that maybe Pharmaceutical patents should not adhere to the US 12 year standard?
WE WENT TO WAR!!!! HOW DARE THEY!!! IF WE CAN'T KEEP OUR PRICE POINT FOR AN EXTRA 4 YEARS, WE'LL PULL OUT OF IT!
It really showed where the energy in the TPP was, and it is telling that more of the left hasn't wanted to pick any of it up. You can't say that this will promote human rights and environmental standards while going to bat for big pharma.
The backdrop of this is that the US “free market” drug sales model funds the large majority of all pharmaceutical research and profits for the world while most other countries basically free ride by paying state negotiated prices way cheaper than what the US consumers pay. I do not want the US to be paypigs for the rest of the world tbh.
In re the Ottoman Empire surviving and other alternative paths for the Middle East, I highly recommend this alternate history short story from Reason Magazine of all places - "The Tale of Many Jerusalems": https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/printer/ (This link goes to the printable version to avoid pop-ups ads. Just close the printing pop-up window and you can read the story directly.)
I hear a lot of very similar nostalgia from some folks for how Philly used to be in the 80's. Curiously this is mostly confined to S. Philly's residual white working class populations, whereas what I get from my black middle class neighbors is more a litany of horror stories.
Unlike NYC, I'm not sure we've lost quite as much of value...
I think Chinese EVs are a good example of what free trade entails. Would the average American be better off if they could buy a $60k SUV for $30k? Sure. Would the collapse of legacy automakers leave a far smaller group devastated? Most certainly. So what to do?
The problem with cheap Chinese EVs isn’t that they’re cheap or that they’re EVs, it’s that they’re Chinese.
If the EU had spent hundreds of billions in European taxpayers’ euros to subsidize a massive and unprofitable EV export industry as a means to combat climate change, then yes absolutely Americans should be allowed to buy those cars, even if it’s not great for Michigan.
But because China’s primary goal here isn’t the climate, it’s deindustrializing the West in preparation for WWIII, that’s a different scenario. Every American’s opinion on this question, except those in the auto industry who are directly affected, should just be a function of how much they’d like to not lose WWIII or Cold War II to the Chinese Communist Party.
Bit of an exaggeration. Deindustrializing the west is a perhaps-happy side effect of the Party's complete inability to find a path forward for growing the pie other than trying to continue to grow the secondary sector and keep employment structures stable despite a complete lack of domestic end-consumer demand for more than a small fraction of its outputs.
That whole endeavor is reaching a breaking point, so the next two decades are going to be very interesting.
The price differential on that $60k SUV would not be $30k, for one, but more importantly...
What exactly is everyone's proposed endgame when the Chinese state can't keep all its plates up in the air to hold down export prices? The "China price" today is contingent on the exchange rate being something like half what it should be, government suppression of wages in the secondary sector, free inputs of land, electricity, and construction capacity/facilities to industry, extensive investment in transportation that serves mainly to push down logistics costs, negative-real-rate credit to manufacturers and a massive "extend and pretend" push by the SOE banking sector, and crippling fiscal repression borne by savers (ordinary citizens). All of this necessitates growth in total credit of something like 8% of GDP a year on net (after accounting for GDP growth, that is).
What do we do when that cannot continue, and the Chinese EV price becomes, well, $60k, and the US and EU are denuded of any of the capacity or workforce needed to reconstitute an EV industry at home on a timeline of less than decades?
If you believe that the Chinese EV leaders have a compelling manufacturing and technology advantage, then facilitating FDI from them to stand up capacity in the US in the manner of Toyota or Hyundai is the correct response.
If we did that, however, we'd find the resultant EVs cost only a bit less than Tesla can turn out, moderately less than Hyundai, because they'd have been stripped of all the various subsidies and labor arbitrage that actually make up the China price, which are actually just endless transfers from the Chinese citizenry to the Chinese state and secondary sector, which chooses to then transfer them abroad to stabilize employment at home and denude foreign nations of capacity in the sector in question.
Egypt was still officially part of the Ottoman Empire till 1914, though it was defacto independent in 1805 and defacto a British Protectorate from 1882. I have no idea how that impacted trade, cultural ties or migration.
I'm glad that Matt gave more context to the Dean Baker IP question, because in what was linked from Baker, I felt that he just hand waved substituting in "public funding" for IP. My question there was going to be things like what kind of taxes are going to be raised to get that public funding, which entities will it go to, and would it be at risk with political changes (something that is sadly very relevant given what this Trump administration has done).
At heart, the challenge with innovation is that it's a public good, and in order to significantly monetize it, it needs to be artificially turned into a club good by adding exclusivity by law. That can be reasonable in small doses, but you really have to watch the length of patents and *especially* copyrights.
Thank you very much for answering my question! And it makes good sense how party loyalty voting can get corrupted by hyper polarization, even as someone who doesn't like the idea of chaining ones views to a party.
And the lower stakes of some state and local races is another good angle. And inadvertently, I was able to get Matt to answer a question that I know has been asked by many Slow Borers many times that I'm not sure he ever answered before, and that is in what situation he would consider voting for a Republican.
Platner is going to win. There's no reason to get rid of him because establishment Democrats are simply wrong about their theories of personal scandals and character, and their faction used to know this when they defended Bill Clinton.
I used to have a Hungarian colleague, with a Bulgarian wife, working in the Czech office of an American company.
"What language do you speak at home?" I asked them.
"English, of course!" they replied.
Very funny that the whole EU adopted the native tongue of obscure Ireland as its common language
Also Malta, what a weird coincidence they both have the same main language.
I saw a great meme the other day: “You speak English because it’s the only language you speak. I speak English because it’s the only language YOU speak. We are not the same.” lol…
The Europeans writing these memes have also made their languages, aside from Spanish, very unattractive to learn.
They’re often hostile to learners (French) or eager to demonstrate that you need not bother learning (Germans).
Their own business affairs are conducted in English because their neighbors learn it instead of the neighboring language.
A dozen of them are small enough that the language is useless outside their borders (Dutch, Swedish, Czech…)
Is it any wonder I went for Mandarin, several friends became fluent in Arabic, and the vast majority of serious American language-learners go for Spanish or Portuguese?
Also worth noting that the Europeans who look down on Americans for not learning languages continue to look down on bilingual Americans who just happen to have learned a language that isn’t theirs.
I’ve dealt with Québécois tourists in S. Jersey who don’t speak anything but their drunken antique French and are mad at me for only being able to offer help in English, Mandarin, and German, FFS.
Spanish speakers are typically very kind about my stumbling attempts to communicate. They nod encouragingly and occasionally offer corrections the same way I offer corrections to my 3yo granddaughter.
Visiting Vancouver BC and listening to what I think was a Quebecois dude (though possibly something Eastern European, never actually heard Quebecois before) in a deep conversation with someone from Seoul, Korea about her experiences there in English was just amazing to me... like, how lucky are we that we speak the Terran language?
The New York discussion reminds me of a Fran Lebowitz interview, where she said there was a time where she could have no money in her pockets upon waking, and by that same night she could earn money somehow. New York today is in many ways better than the past, but that sense of endless possibility is gone.
I was talking to a guy who was originally from Mexico, and he said that if you're truly broke, go knock on ten doors and ask to work, and at least one of your neighbors will give you work. (This was in Denver.)
Extremely petty quibble, but isn't "centripetal force" wrong as a political metaphor for separatism? Centripetal force is whatever keeps an object connected to the centre and therefore in orbit, like gravity or the tension of a chain. The centrifugal force, while "fictitious" in physics, is what I'd use for the impulse of peripheral parts of an empire to fling themselves out and away from its influence.
I think you’re right, yeah. I was getting mixed up!
That's amended. Thanks for letting us know!
A laughable claim, Mister Bond, perpetuated by overzealous teachers of science. Simply construct Newton's Laws in a rotating system and you will see a centrifugal force term appear as plain as day.
You’re right — etymologically, centripetal means “center-seeking” and centrifugal means “center-escaping”
The Ottoman Empire was a lot larger in Europe in 1912 than in 1914: even if Princip got arrested, the repercussions of the Balkan Wars are still going to be running through the Ottoman Empire.
[In 1912, Albania was Ottoman, as was modern North Macedonia, roughly the southern third of modern Bulgaria and the northern part of modern Greece from Thessaloniki to the modern Turkish border]
Without WWI, they'd clearly be easier for the CUP to handle, but that's still a lot of problems.
Remember that the Trucial States (the UAE after independence in 1971) were already a British protectorate (since 1820), as were Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman (all of these were formally princely states of British India, and were governed from Delhi, not London), while Aden and Egypt were direct protectorates.
The Rashidis and Saudis in the central part of the Arabian peninsula were effectively independent of the Ottomans (the Rashidis were allied to the Ottomans).
That means that a very large fraction of Arabs are already outside the Ottoman Empire, which is going to make holding on to Damascus and Baghdad very difficult as Arab nationalism starts to take hold. The CUP was able to Turkify Anatolia by committing the Armenian Genocide, and there were also massacres and expulsions of Jews and Greeks - and Kurds haven't exactly had an easy time under the rule of either the CUP Empire or post-imperial Turkey. But that isn't an option for Arabs (because they have somewhere outside the Empire to go, and because they are local majorities, where the Armenians, Jews and Greeks were, even locally, minorities), and Turkifying Arabs hadn't worked in the preceding four centuries of Ottoman rule; Abdulmecid doesn't have the prestige of Suleiman the Magnificent: Turkishness is far less attractive than it has been in centuries, so why would it succeed now?
One big advantage that the Hapsburgs had is that only a small fraction of their ethnic minority population had nation-states outside the Empire - just Romania and Serbia. Indeed, for many of the minorities within the Empire, all of that ethnicity lived under Hapsburg rule (e.g. Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes). Poles and Ukrainians did cross borders, but both found the Hapsburgs less oppressive than the Hohenzollerns or the Romanovs, so tended not to be very rebellious except insofar as they were supporting rebellions in Germany or Russia.
For the Ottomans, by 1914, the reverse is true: only the Armenians lack a state, and they found Romanov Russia less bad than Ottoman Turkey.
The Ottomans held onto those areas for hundreds of years without Turkifying them. So there’s a bigger interesting question of why European-style nationalism took hold in the late 1800s leading to all the late Ottoman horrors. I don’t think it was inevitable but really a function of the Ottoman Empire falling behind Europe since it failed to colonize and industrialize, and things would’ve turned out differently with a much better Middle East today to keep up with Europe developmentally without adopting European-style nationalism.
Much of Europe didn’t really have nationalism until the same point in time, though. The nationalist revivals in the Balkans were in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nationalism was mostly confined before that to places that had nation-states that largely coincided with the dynastic states of the early modern period - English, French, Spanish, Dutch, etc. German and Italian nationalism really got going under Napoleonic occupation, but you don’t see much in the way of Czech national identity until the 1830s and further east and south takes even longer: the first Slovak party is founded in 1871, for instance. Bulgarian and Serbian nationalism are a little earlier than Slovak, but not that much, Albanian even later.
Arab nationalism - or at least, the Arab cultural revival and the standardisation of what we now call Modern Standard Arabic - was one of the earlier nationalisms outside of Western Europe, the Nahda is an 1820s/1830s origin.
The Balkan nationalism (which itself happened in the later 1800s after earlier nationalist waves like the 1848 revolutions) seems to have predated and been a direct cause of Turkish nationalism though. It led to Turks being expelled from the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire declined for several decades before the Ottomans did the same thing to minorities in Anatolia (which didn’t happen until the 1900s).
Fascinating thread here! I did a degree in European Studies in college, and it warms my heart to be part of a community having discussions like this.
I think the rise of Bernie, DSA, and a bigger appeal of the prominent left/socialist leaning faction (I'm still not sure most of them are full on socialist in the European sense) is downstream of the Great Recession. None of this regains prominence I dont think without a lot of facts on the ground circa 2008-2014 or so. Doesn't mean they're right about everything or anything policy wise but I think it was a defining historical moment on Millenial politics that we will continue to have an imprint.
I think the left has more support now than in 2008-14 and bigger factors are Trump proving all the left-wing conspiracy theories about the Tea Party (not really libertarians just racists) correct, and the explosive asset price growth in recent years which means that if you already had money in 2008 you’re probably super-rich now but if you didn’t you’ll struggle to get normal middle-class markers like homeownership even if you do get a good job, which also proves left-wing narratives about success (it’s not about how hard you work or even how talented you are but about how much money you or your parents started with).
As a native Manhattanite (and hence New Yorker), I agree with Matt about the City. It's not the same anymore and a lot of good things have disappeared, for example, the literary, musical and artistic bohemian communities that made the place so interesting. As Matt says, it may not have been better but it was different and I miss the old New York too. I console myself sometimes by re-reading E.B. White's old essay, "This is NewYork."
I'm not a native, but I'm the decades I've lived here NY has generally gotten better. What I appreciate most about NYC is that it actually changes. It feels like certain projects take forever, but because the city is so large aggregate much gets completed.
Isn’t it out in Bushwick or Greenpoint somewhere now?
Seneca, I believe a lot of that talent went to Hoboken initially but who knows where now? What New York lost was the cultural synergy of all those folks under one roof. And Mayor Bloomberg, despite repeated pleas for more affordable housing for the creative community, did precisely nothing.
So what we have now is a city of rich people and rich people are always homogenised and boring, IMHO. Sad...
Why, precisely, was Bloomberg supposed to provide affordable housing for creatives at the expense of literally everyone else?
Flushing
As a non-New Yorker, the song that captures how New York makes me feel is LCD Soundsystem, Losing My Edge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk
"I'm losing my edge to better-looking people... with better ideas and more talent"
I hope that's true...
The point was he had no interest in affordable housing for ANYONE. Artists were just one part of the victims of the Potemkin village he was creating.
Let me guess New York was perfect in the time you're most nostalgic for and now that you're old and boring New York sucks? Many such cases!
Not at all perfect but as Matt says different. I remember going to after hours jam sessions in the neighbourhood jazz community where the music was just stunning because the musicians were playing for and competing against each other. You just won’t find that kind of creativity anymore in my old neighbourhood. The musicians all moved away because of the price of housing. I hope you’re not one of those people like Voltaire’s Candide who thinks we all at present live in the best of all possible worlds. Hate to tell you but there were some things in the past that were better.
I think Candide was referring to the constraints of Duality in general not particular situations. That is, on the whole of the collective human experience were in the best of all possible worlds (you can't have everything "good" without its counterpart "bad").
There were things in the past that were better but not too many. And humans really really tend to think that whatever happened when they were between 10 and 30 was perfect. There's no shortage of live music in NYC today that's just not a very good example
Thanks for your thoughtful comment but I read the text differently.
Lamenting a changing New York is almost a genre in of itself. Pete Hamill’s “The New York We Lost” might be the best example.
https://nymag.com/news/features/48277/
“Once there was another city here, and now it is gone. There are almost no traces of it anymore, but millions of us know it existed, because we lived in it: the Lost City of New York.”
I'm sorry, I will not engage in any conversation about Graham Platner that is not also a conversation about Andrew Cuomo and the fact that the institutional Democratic party and much of the democratic aligned media enthusiastically supported Cuomo despite being accused of worse things than by more people. Funny that his name does not appear in that question.
To that point, though, obviously the NYC establishment would have had better odds of stopping Mamdani if they hadn’t rallied behind a scandal-plagued guy. There’s a lot of people in New York City, didn’t need to pick Cuomo.
I'll never forget a commenter here that accused you of endorsing Cuomo solely because you didn't endorse Mamdani, when it was easy to cite that in an RCV model, your top choice was Zellnor Myrie, and then 3 or 4 more others after him. Things aren't always so binary!
This is a strawman. Who exactly was enthusiastic about Cuomo? Schumer and Gillibrand didn’t endorse him; neither did Biden or Harris or any other relevant figures in Democratic politics save a couple congressmen.
Also, Cuomo never worked as a mercenary or wore an SS tattoo for 20 years.
I specifically voted for Mamdani because Cuomo is a bad person despite Cuomo probably having more alignment with my personal policy preferences. And I'm here to tell you, it's possible to not support a candidate because they are a bad person.
I was not a Cuomo supporter but: 1) Cuomo was very much a known entity as a politician whereas Platner is a neophyte, 2) Cuomo didn’t have a very strong Republican to face in the general election, and 3) Cuomo lost a winnable race anyway to a candidate with fewer scandals! Like Matt, I would have been thrilled if the establishment dumped Cuomo for a different “normie” dem but the dynamics of that race were quite different.
What is this whataboutism kick with you?
The right sees the left as its enemy. The left sees the center as its enemy. Such is politics.
Meh, people like Freddie fail to win political arguments and elections on the merits so they resort to mimicking Republicans. His whole whataboutism with Bill Clinton is just so recycled.
Just because past (now irrelevant) political figures had baggage doesn’t somehow erase all this now new political baggage from one preferred candidate.
Meh, I think if you looked at which Democratic Congresspeople vote the most with Trump it’d be centrists like Fetterman and not leftists. Leftists are more opposed to the right than centrists are.
They vote against Trump, but that’s not the primary target of their rhetorical ire, their fundraising movements, and the policies they propose.
The intensity of one’s beliefs or interests matter just as much as what those beliefs and interests are.
At least he’s stopped demanding that people justify Bill Clinton’s rise thirty years ago when they were 8 years old.
I think he has a pretty good point in this case.
One can debate individual matters in a concrete fashion. One can also turn every dispute into a meta-level factional fight.
I tend to find narrow focuses on discrete matters to be more productive.
Hey, this is a Kathryn Garcia Substack
I think the pharmaceuticals patent people didn't cover themselves with glory during the TPP negotiations.
When Malaysia had a mass grave of Burmese refugees found?
The state department fudged the numbers to get Malaysia's human rights record high enough.
When Australia suggested that maybe Pharmaceutical patents should not adhere to the US 12 year standard?
WE WENT TO WAR!!!! HOW DARE THEY!!! IF WE CAN'T KEEP OUR PRICE POINT FOR AN EXTRA 4 YEARS, WE'LL PULL OUT OF IT!
It really showed where the energy in the TPP was, and it is telling that more of the left hasn't wanted to pick any of it up. You can't say that this will promote human rights and environmental standards while going to bat for big pharma.
By went to war, you mean negotiated, right? Not assassinated/kidnapped their leadership?
The backdrop of this is that the US “free market” drug sales model funds the large majority of all pharmaceutical research and profits for the world while most other countries basically free ride by paying state negotiated prices way cheaper than what the US consumers pay. I do not want the US to be paypigs for the rest of the world tbh.
In re the Ottoman Empire surviving and other alternative paths for the Middle East, I highly recommend this alternate history short story from Reason Magazine of all places - "The Tale of Many Jerusalems": https://reason.com/2002/11/01/the-tale-of-many-jerusalems-2/printer/ (This link goes to the printable version to avoid pop-ups ads. Just close the printing pop-up window and you can read the story directly.)
I hear a lot of very similar nostalgia from some folks for how Philly used to be in the 80's. Curiously this is mostly confined to S. Philly's residual white working class populations, whereas what I get from my black middle class neighbors is more a litany of horror stories.
Unlike NYC, I'm not sure we've lost quite as much of value...
I think Chinese EVs are a good example of what free trade entails. Would the average American be better off if they could buy a $60k SUV for $30k? Sure. Would the collapse of legacy automakers leave a far smaller group devastated? Most certainly. So what to do?
The problem with cheap Chinese EVs isn’t that they’re cheap or that they’re EVs, it’s that they’re Chinese.
If the EU had spent hundreds of billions in European taxpayers’ euros to subsidize a massive and unprofitable EV export industry as a means to combat climate change, then yes absolutely Americans should be allowed to buy those cars, even if it’s not great for Michigan.
But because China’s primary goal here isn’t the climate, it’s deindustrializing the West in preparation for WWIII, that’s a different scenario. Every American’s opinion on this question, except those in the auto industry who are directly affected, should just be a function of how much they’d like to not lose WWIII or Cold War II to the Chinese Communist Party.
Bit of an exaggeration. Deindustrializing the west is a perhaps-happy side effect of the Party's complete inability to find a path forward for growing the pie other than trying to continue to grow the secondary sector and keep employment structures stable despite a complete lack of domestic end-consumer demand for more than a small fraction of its outputs.
That whole endeavor is reaching a breaking point, so the next two decades are going to be very interesting.
The price differential on that $60k SUV would not be $30k, for one, but more importantly...
What exactly is everyone's proposed endgame when the Chinese state can't keep all its plates up in the air to hold down export prices? The "China price" today is contingent on the exchange rate being something like half what it should be, government suppression of wages in the secondary sector, free inputs of land, electricity, and construction capacity/facilities to industry, extensive investment in transportation that serves mainly to push down logistics costs, negative-real-rate credit to manufacturers and a massive "extend and pretend" push by the SOE banking sector, and crippling fiscal repression borne by savers (ordinary citizens). All of this necessitates growth in total credit of something like 8% of GDP a year on net (after accounting for GDP growth, that is).
What do we do when that cannot continue, and the Chinese EV price becomes, well, $60k, and the US and EU are denuded of any of the capacity or workforce needed to reconstitute an EV industry at home on a timeline of less than decades?
If you believe that the Chinese EV leaders have a compelling manufacturing and technology advantage, then facilitating FDI from them to stand up capacity in the US in the manner of Toyota or Hyundai is the correct response.
If we did that, however, we'd find the resultant EVs cost only a bit less than Tesla can turn out, moderately less than Hyundai, because they'd have been stripped of all the various subsidies and labor arbitrage that actually make up the China price, which are actually just endless transfers from the Chinese citizenry to the Chinese state and secondary sector, which chooses to then transfer them abroad to stabilize employment at home and denude foreign nations of capacity in the sector in question.
Egypt was still officially part of the Ottoman Empire till 1914, though it was defacto independent in 1805 and defacto a British Protectorate from 1882. I have no idea how that impacted trade, cultural ties or migration.
I'm glad that Matt gave more context to the Dean Baker IP question, because in what was linked from Baker, I felt that he just hand waved substituting in "public funding" for IP. My question there was going to be things like what kind of taxes are going to be raised to get that public funding, which entities will it go to, and would it be at risk with political changes (something that is sadly very relevant given what this Trump administration has done).
At heart, the challenge with innovation is that it's a public good, and in order to significantly monetize it, it needs to be artificially turned into a club good by adding exclusivity by law. That can be reasonable in small doses, but you really have to watch the length of patents and *especially* copyrights.
Thank you very much for answering my question! And it makes good sense how party loyalty voting can get corrupted by hyper polarization, even as someone who doesn't like the idea of chaining ones views to a party.
And the lower stakes of some state and local races is another good angle. And inadvertently, I was able to get Matt to answer a question that I know has been asked by many Slow Borers many times that I'm not sure he ever answered before, and that is in what situation he would consider voting for a Republican.
Platner is going to win. There's no reason to get rid of him because establishment Democrats are simply wrong about their theories of personal scandals and character, and their faction used to know this when they defended Bill Clinton.