This was a problem after Brexit because Ireland is quick to remind people that its *native* tongue is Irish (a Celtic language), not English, and had deemed Irish its EU language. I remember reading that they had to do some bureaucratic fix to keep English, the "official" language of no EU member states, as the lingua franca.
Do we even know what the proto-Celtic languages in pre-Saxon England were? Cornish, to my knowledge, is the only Celtic language from present-day England that people can speak (although it's like 300 people at this point).
Some variety of Brythonic, I think, so related to modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish. But the Celts were probably not the first people to live in These Islands, and we have no frigging idea what language the Bell Beaker People spoke.
The daily language of Malta isn't English, it's Maltese, although business language and commerce is English and in the capital w the big expat community it's different, but not main language except in business sense
Secondary and Tertiary ed is largely in French all across N & W. Africa and yet... French is not the native mother tongue in reality except in upper middle class strata.
I've been there, Malta, if one isn't in the international districts, it's quite apparent Maltese is a living tongue. Now 50 years from now maybe not
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.
Mandarin speakers gush over your three words of broken Chinese to the point where it gets annoying when you're midway through the slog to fluency and know you still suck wind.
The offense some people take at tourists not learning their language always strikes me as the height of narcissism. In the past few years I've traveled to Egypt, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Austria, Costa Rica, Japan, and Vietnam. You're telling me that to be a good citizen of the world I'm supposed to learn all of those languages before spending 3-17 days in those countries? GMAFB.
The fact that English is so commonly spoken is grounded in legitimate, rational factors that dictate it's utility. The rest of the world doesn't speak English because of their magnanimity to Americans.
It doesn't take too long to learn hello/goodbye/please/thank you in most languages (looking at you, Russian), and people usually appreciate it when you make at least that token effort. If you have no common language, then pleasantries, pointing, and holding up fingers (or writing down numbers) can get you surprisingly far.
It's also worth noting that English is not the lingua franca everywhere. I went on a climbing trip to Kyrgyzstan about ten years ago; we met some people who spoke English in the cities, but out in the countryside we had to rely on my extremely limited Russian (talking to locals whose native language was probably Kyrgyz). I'm sure English has become more widespread since, but I bet it's still rare outside towns.
The first time I went to Japan I worked mainly in Kanji since I could read 90% of them including all place names, so communicated by writing down pidgin Japanese. Learned a couple dozen words around food and necessities while there. Getting a data SIM was hard back then and nothing was in English.
When we were in Russia, more than a decade ago now, I had to learn to sound out Cyrillic so I could parse out place names on bus and subway routes that had no Latin writing (outside the newer lines in Moscow basically nothing did.)
I also figured out key food names, bathroom, cardinal directions, street, and a dozen other words beyond pleasantries.
These were back when my brain was young/supple/functional, of course.
This past time in Spain basically everyone spoke English except recent Latin American immigrants (lol), and in Japan the whole of society is increasingly functioning in both, not least because their guest worker class all speak English on day one (though a surprising number spoke what sounded like solid Japanese).
Yeah, Cyrillic is pretty easy and Russian is a delightful language, though really hard to master. And it’s a country with a cool culture and history. Shame that the government is evil and that the Russian people themselves, though often very funny, are full of lies.
I once got a long-distance bus in Thailand to what turned out to be completely the wrong town, and didn't work out my mistake until the next morning (though when we got off late at night the total lack of tourist infrastructure tipped us off that something was not quite right). All the signs were in Thai script, of course, so we'd got on what we thought was the right bus and got off after the correct number of stops. I guess nowadays GPS would have told us we were going the wrong way and translation apps would have been able to read the script for us, and probably Google Maps would have up-to-date bus info complete with which stand to wait at.
My son is going to outlying areas of Krgyzstan later this year. (He speaks Russian.) I will try to remember to follow up re English! When he was in Kazakhstan outside the two big cities few people spoke English, but lots of people want to learn
Nobody is demanding that everyone speak English. And nothing I said above implied that being polite and making an effort is wrong or inappropriate. You're coming at this from the flip side of the people I was referencing. I agree with what you're saying completely, but don't think it's relevant in response to anything I said.
My experience in Europe is that as long as people understand you're also not a native English speaker, they take much less offence and some all of a sudden know how to speak English. Especially in France, where wearing a little flag pin can change your experience dramatically. I make sure to talk like the Swedish Chef whenever in France.
I got a much more positive reception to my German last time I went ~2.5 years ago than I had previously, where as soon as I was made as an American it was much more of a 'While I appreciate your efforts let's please just make this easier on both of us.' It's all their dialects that I feel like aren't even always fully mutually intelligible among German speakers that makes it tough to totally blend in, at least outside of the bigger northern and western cities.
My mom's native language is French (as in the kind they speak in France where she was born) and the Quebecois have also been kind of rude to her about it. I think there's just something wrong with them.
A Swiss German friend once told me about the time a German came to stay with his family. After a few days she said "Swiss German isn't nearly as hard to understand as everyone says!" Whereupon the family all started *actually* speaking Swiss German, as opposed to High German with a Swiss accent, and she became completely lost.
Somehow I have been exposed to my wife's extremely obscure county dialect of Mandarin enough to understand 95-98% of what is said.
The neighboring city, though, sounds like someone planted Arabic and Scots speakers there and interbred the languages with Mandarin. It's *wild,* I can understand more of basically every other regional Mandarin dialect from Chengdu to Harbin than I can that... stuff.
I took German in high school and college. I’ve been to Germany, and being able to get by in the language was only mildly useful for reading signs and menus bc everyone could and did speak English. But I’ve shared a train car in the former Yugoslavia with a lady whom our only common language was German, and I was surprised how easily we carried a conversation. In general knowing a bit of language can go a long way
My German is very rudimentary, I just haven't had an opportunity to use it nearly enough after high school. It was passably decent when I graduated, but Mandarin kinda forced it out of my brain.
On the occasions I've been in Germany and Austria since, basically no one has the patience to allow me to conduct the interactions I can make it through, unfortunately. At least, unlike the French, or god forbid the Quebecois, they don't then proceed to bitch that I cannot speak good German.
I'm in Germany/Austria 4-6 times a year for work and in Switzerland or Luxembourg on occasion. There is really no point in learning German except to read Goethe in the original.
I've honestly found Germany weird with where they speak English. I had a terrible time with rudimentary German in Frankfurt (even international hotel stuff struggled with English) but in a recent trip to Franconia (hardly a business or tourism hub) people would immediately switch into English when I spoke in German.
On a related note I always found the thing about the French being annoyed at any language you speak to be untrue. I always either get perfectly happy switching to English or responses in French, this is across the country from Paris to rural Occitania.
There also seems to be less and less point as technological aids improve over time, at least in terms of basic context-limited interactions. It's been kinda cool over 8 years in retail seeing phones go from "amusingly shitty Babelfish" to "oh wow this videocall conversation is being translated in real time". As long as someone knows just enough English to understand some variant of "do you have a picture/how do you say that in English", we can probably come to an understanding that'll let me point them to the mayonnaise, or whatever.
(Cantonese customers still preferentially come my way, even though I know like 50 words tops, and they're quite understanding about "3rd generation sorry lol". Sometimes you just wanna deal with someone who looks like you, even if they can't communicate well.)
I've been deep in the interior of mainland China having conservations with people where we're both speaking/typing into our phones. Going from having to point at Polish words in a phrasebook to being able to communicate with someone who only speaks a notoriously difficult language despite no shared language is incredible. Really opens up the world.
The universal translator future feels very close to a reality. When I've traveled abroad in recent years I've been able to get by with a steady combination of smiles, deference, English, and (when all else fails) google translate. I just take my phone out and type out what I need to know and hold my phone out while making apologetic gestures to convey that the necessity of the phone is entirely due to my own inadequacies. It's really great to be able to so easily connect with people who you otherwise would have no way real way of communicating with.
The Québécois are especially Anglophobic, from what I've heard. The one time I visited Montreal I came down with strep. Trying to navigate the healthcare system there was a fun adventure.
Russians (and Ukrainians) are the exact opposite of the French: if you tell one that you're learning Russian, they're both over the moon about it and very eager to help you practice.
Actually, Swedish isn't useless outside our borders because it gives us the chance to talk trash about people when visiting other countries (only to realise they are also Swedish and understood everything you said).
Not only can my wife and I talk shit anywhere with ~0% chance of being overheard by locals, but a nearby Chinese person will have overheard us, pop out of the woodwork, and proceed to commiserate with us over precisely what sort of miserable assholes the locals are!
Czech is (AIUI, despite the username I only speak a tiny amount) mostly mutually intelligible with Slovak, and to a lesser but still useful extent with Polish (and so on through the Slavic languages, with intelligibility decreasing with distance). But sure, not much use outside Central and Eastern Europe. Unless you're speaking to a fellow Slavic immigrant, which I understand is quite a common situation here in the UK :-)
Also worth noting that Spanish is by far the most commonly-spoken second language in the US, and it's not helpful in much of Europe. An English-Spanish bilingual American is still probably speaking English in Germany.
I thought Quebecois were only particular about service in French when they're in Anglophone Canada? Every Quebec Francophone I've met in the US has spoken excellent English.
"I speak English because the incredible economic, media, scientific, and warfare successes of the Anglosphere have made English the de facto world language, and far more useful than my native language."
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?
Once when I was in Budapest a Spanish couple was trying to buy tickets to a museum. They were speaking English with the Hungarian clerk, but neither of them spoke English quite well enough to communicate effectively with each other. I had to step in and help because I could understand both of them and they could both understand me, but they couldn't fully understand each other. I found myself in a similar situation at the airport in Israel when an American Hassid who seemed to speak Yiddish has his first language was trying unsuccessfully to communicate in English with the Israeli VAT refund clerk. Again, I was able to help, exclusively by speaking native English to both of them.
Once in Israel I called a Thai restaurant to make a reservation and started off in Hebrew only for the guy at the other end to go, "You . . . speak English please?"
Yes but in this case it was a Thai person running a restaurant in Israel. He probably spoke English better than he spoke Hebrew. I tried to use some Dutch from a Rick Steves phrasebook once at a coffee shop in Flanders and the Albanian guy at the counter told me to speak English. Similar situation I assume.
There's a bit in the French mountaineer Lionel Terray's memoir "Conquistadors of the Useless" where he and a friend go to Quebec for the winter to work as ski instructors. His friend attempts to chat up the local girls, but gets nowhere because as soon as they start speaking he bursts out laughing.
I had this experience in Portugal. Japanese couple was trying to ask a random guard (who seemed to be Lusaphone African) questions at one of the palaces in Sintra. The hangup seemed to be the word "queue."
Right, a specific thing I've noticed is people who speak English as a second language usually learn either American or British English and get confused when they're talking to someone who speaks the other version of English as a second language. Native English speakers understand both versions (for the most part -- I only recently learned that rocket is arugala, but matters less than lift and queue...), which helps us translate.
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 will continue to have an imprint.
What's ironic is that Bernie still seems enamored with the Nordic socialism of the 1970's, but they all became much less socialist since then, having learned from real experience.
I think the degree to which we've got people in their 60s-80s operating as if the world still is what it was 30 or 40 years ago is a very serious problem.
Which isn't to say there isn't a case for seriously reworking a number of load bearing social and economic pillars for the 21st century. Its just not around a European model that even Europe got away from decades ago.
I've noticed that a lot of older people still think that the bad stuff that happened with health insurance pre-Obamacare (think people going bankrupt because the insurer rejected a claim from a out of network provider in an emergency) is happening. Or they massively underestimate how progressive our tax system is. I'm sure there are conservative versions of this, but I don't know a lot of older conservatives so I'm not sure what the conservative version of that is.
The one that really gets me is the older people who do not realize how much we've reduced extreme poverty in low income countries. It's a huge win but they often do not recognize it or think it's gotten worse.
I guess I'm "older" (?), but I'm not under the impression the our tax system, taken as a whole (i.e., not just federal income tax, but SS, state and local, etc.), is all that progressive.
It’s definitely not progressive especially when you count capital gains and wealth which is basically untaxed. Last year my household made about 4x what I made in 2015 if you include my now-wife’s income and capital gains but my household only paid 2x the tax.
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).
Left wing housing policy is explicitly to reserve homes for the deeply rooted and deter/deflect what they view as illegitimate demand from people whose only claim to the city is being upwardly mobile with high paying jobs. The difficulty is their desired social contract being realized.
Ugh, I recently got an intriguing job offer in the Bay Area and was looking at housing, completely nuts, $3m minimum for crappy single-family homes. Townhomes seem to be slightly better (only 5x what they’d cost anywhere else instead of 10x) probably because they have no land. Even an upwardly mobile person making $400k TC can’t afford that. The people who were born there and inherit housing there from their ancestors who probably got it for free after murdering the indigenous there are truly a class of aristocrats among aristocrats that no one can work up into their ranks without getting an insanely lucky win in the startup lottery.
I’m not sure it’s the left-wing people driving this though; seems like the stereotypical NIMBY in my mind is a Marc Andressen type.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're asking here. Is your assumption that the only two types of Californians who own homes are Spanish/Mexican-descended people plus a few mid 19th century White settlers who murdered members of the indigenous populations or the super-wealthy?
The average homeowner who is not from the moneyed tech class but lives in Sunnyvale has family that moved to California between 1900 and 1970, had a middle-class job, and got lucky with where they bought a house. No murdering needed!
I think the fact that Trump proved all the left-wing conspiracy theories about MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATS (that they prefer to fundraise off of Republican abuses than solve them, that they are much more focused on defeating the left in primaries than in winning general elections, that they fundamentally do not understand the exercise of power, etc.) correct is a much bigger deal in the left's rise.
The number of actual persuaded, doctrinaire (non-pejorative sense) leftists is still not very high. What you have now are a large number of people who have become convinced that the Democratic establishment is morally and intellectually bankrupt for whom the left is the only available option.
Yep. You can disagree with left-wing positions on what various policies *should* be but they’ve clearly had the most factually accurate read on how things in politics *are*. That’s given them credibility.
This seems backwards. Factional leftists are more interested in defeating "the establishment" than winning general elections. They were insufficiently concerned about keeping MAGA out of power during the Biden administration. Etc.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't push my politics leftward in certain ways that persist. However I'm not sure the responses synthesized well in the vehicle of the Democratic party. You've got these out of touch dinosaurs perpetually holding off a 'youth' movement (a lot of which is now middle aged or close to it) to its last breath, but where that youth movement seems to have never grown into readiness to act as mature stakeholders. It's why you have people in their late 30s and 40s talking like they're still in the quad, oblivious to living in a very different moment.
There's something very funny about the dynamic for most of human history being 'the old holding off the young', except today it's 'the very very extremely old who should be in a nursing home holding off the middle-aged'
Which isn't a wish or anything. Extended life has its trade offs but I'm glad I still have so many of my older family members around, and by the grace of God (and modern medicine), still having a decent quality of life. But most of them really are passed a point where they can run our big institutions.
Same boat. Honestly though I don’t think the timing lines up very well with blaming the GFC. The GFC pushed politics to the right with the Tea Party since it was largely blamed on government the bailouts of banks and incumbent homeowners seemed pretty f-ing unfair (honestly if I could press a button again to have another housing crisis and reset prices to what they were in 2008 with no bailouts to existing homeowners including myself I’d do it lol). Things like Occupy were small by comparison, fizzled out quickly, and never got any electoral wins like leftists would get starting in the late 2010s. 2010 was probably the most right-wing I’d ever been and I voted for Republicans in Congress that year. Most of my peers were always socially liberal supporting things like gay marriage but only really shifted hard to the left after Trump came on the scene.
I see Occupy as the seed that brought Sanders/Warren into the mainstream of the American left, with their at that time more class oriented politics ultimately losing out in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that shot hard left on identity politics. I agree with you that Trump was partially responsible for whats happened by personifying the hard left's vision of everything wrong with America. However this has been a total disaster in that it both failed to create a more muscular, class based rebalancing of what the American economy should look like and is running working class men of all races out of the party.
I think it's interesting that if Leftists win they win, and when they lose its still winning and validates them. It definitely is interesting.
I also think as a millennial that came of age and joined the workforce during the great recession is something you make some interesting points about it.
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.)
I arrived in NYC in 2001 with $700. I slept in a hostel for the first month. And stayed for a decade (not in the hostel!....my last apartment, Paul Rudd lived down the hall and Michael Strahan lived above me). I'd like to think this is still possible.
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).
My take was that it could have been avoided if Turkish nationalism hadn’t happened and the Ottoman monarchs had continued to be heads of a multi-national dynastic state.
I think we overlook how weak the Ottoman's were - the Bulgarians almost took Constantinople in 1913, Muhammad Ali basically took over in the 1830s. These guys were propped up by the Great Powers to maintain the balance of power, particularly keeping the Straits from the Russians. Expecting them to create Austro-Hungary under Franz Joseph is silly, they would've collapsed a century earlier without outside intervention.
Yes, typical leftist nonsense. It's a good thing people like me from the Balkans rarely come across this shit.
The really dumb tell though is that supposedly the Ottoman empire failed to colonize, and that's why it was behind, e.g. Germany. Even though by any kind of realistic definition the ottomans controlled both far more territory and people from different ethnicities.
What they failed at, was industrialization, which neither requires not is helped by colonization. It sometimes enable subsequent colonization - and sometimes not, e.g. as in Germany among others.
British author Jon Courtenay Grimwood wrote an alternative history series that takes place in modern-day Ottoman Egypt in a world where WWI was resolved quickly in the Balkans without spreading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabesk_trilogy
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.
Good correction. People get confused because both start with 'centri.' We should rename them using terms developed from the science of human anatomy and call them "innie" and "outie" forces.
As the reader, I feel strongly that figures need captions. It is not clear what’s being plotted in the graph. I get from context that it’s something to do with the 107th Congress, but are each point different representatives? And if so which are Ralph Hall and Charles Stenholm? With are the New England Republicans? And what’s the black dot?
This isn’t the first time there’s been a confusing figure in SB without proper labeling and descriptions.
I shouldn’t have to guess because there should be a caption underneath explaining exactly what’s being plotted. The relevant data that you want to highlight to make the point should be labeled, either directly or with a legend.
Figures should be standalone, and I shouldn’t have to dig through text to make sense of it. And in this case, even digging through the text doesn’t clarify it.
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 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.
I find it amusing that people realize you couldn't just transplant the relatively cheap rent of China and Tokyo into a US city directly. But we do think they could just send over enough cars to keep those prices going low. Or that they would not choose to price their wares to what our market clearly demonstrates it will support.
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.
Xi Jinping did not crush the video game and tutoring industries and spin up a massive EV manufacturing industry out of nowhere to “keep employment structures stable”… the man is taking a hard look at the distribution of human and capital resources in the economy and pushing buttons, sometimes clumsily and sometimes not, to stack the deck in favor of deploying such resources to purposes which will be useful when wartime mobilization comes.
They crushed the tutoring industry for very good reasons but didn't make the corresponding investments in education outside the first and better parts of second-tier cities to make it stand up.
The "crushing" of all the soft tech is wildly overstated. All those things still exist at scale and soak up a ton of employment, and the youth are still lying flat. The only durable crushing was of tech sector stock prices.
Stop reading Noah Smith, he is *not* genuinely knowledgeable about China and trade issues.
I’m not gonna bother rebutting this silly statement; if you don’t know why it would be bad for China to gain global hegemony, I’m not going to persuade you here. But you are proving the accuracy of the conclusion of my original statement:
“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.”
The problem is that the trade with China in that scenario would not be free. China has pursued mercantilist policies under a thin umbrella of free trade and they would do the same with cars - backing Chinese makers in ways we can’t to ensure market dominance. Note that China is very protective of its domestic market from foreign competitors.
What we need with China, IMO, is a policy of reciprocity, not fake free trade.
The standard answer is that Americans now have 30k extra to spend elsewhere in the economy and that would create a separate set of higher paying jobs. But predicting what those would be is fairly tricky and, frankly, if you knew you should start a business to capture that before the change.
As I said, “sometimes clumsily and sometimes not”…
I don’t really know what your point is - you think he’s not doing what he can to gear his country up for a major struggle for geopolitical hegemony against the United States?
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.
I think it's generally true that if you have a rent-stabilized apartment and never need/want to move, your experience of NYC is objectively better today than in, say, 2006. It's just when you have to find housing that you really have to face the trade off. I've always said the secret to living in NYC is to find a rent-stabilized apartment and stay there til you die.
Right, Andy. By the way on my recent trip to London, the locals told me that they have a similar problem to New York. All the middle class and upper middle class people are buying homes in the suburbs now because you just get more for your money. Perfectly rational reaction. But their absence, they argued, means that the cultural and nightlife of London has suffered because they don't come into town during the week now. So the real estate situation affects both the suppliers and consumers of cultural life.
I'm not from NYC but am from a big city where my neighborhood became much more expensive and found myself nodding along to much of that section. I think the experience is a lot broader than new yorkers might assume.
I came from NYC to Chicago in 1988 for college, and it has absolutely been the same here (I got miffed the first time I heard about Williamsburg in 2001 because Wicker Park/Bucktown was earlier)
However, the food is *way* better than 1988 Chicago, and now most El trains run 24/7
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.
Of course it’s not possible to have affordable housing in a central and convenient neighborhood in any context other than the aftermath of white flight or a plague or something. It’s an inherently temporary and nice byproduct of something intrinsically bad.
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
Yeah, but I don’t think you can look at the music scene in NY now and think it holds a candle to multiple periods of the past. There may be nowhere in the world that has that because of the way the music business changed.
It’s like saying we’re living in the greatest era of moviemaking ever.
Of course we're living in the greatest era of movie making ever. There's more great content made by amateurs on YouTube just in the past year than in the entire history of humanity prior to that.
As a former New Yorker who, like Matt, went elsewhere to college and didn’t (couldn’t afford to) come back, it’s easily New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down:
E.B. White has always been the only writer whose writing about New York I could ever stand just because he was never especially sentimental about the place. Similarly, he's the only person whose kvetching about Florida I can tolerate, as he was always more than willing to concede that people actually like living there.
The other changes that seem material to NYC street life is the smart phone. Individuals in their own bubble vs. feeling like a part of the same roiling sea. And in general it seems like the current population has a lot more tolerance for dirty streets and disorderly conduct.
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...
Many are in Philadelphia because it is close enough to come to the city on weekends to sell their wares to rich people who are willing to pay a lot more for it then elsewhere. I know two artists who charge double what they do elsewhere when they go to shows in NYC, yet often sell more.
I'm mostly joking but there are some pretty cool things happening in eastern queens, in part because it's affordable and immigrant heavy. Oddly fun malls, which is weird in 2026, if not exactly boho.
All Chinese malls are oddly fun. Not so fun that we need as many as their big cities have, but much more fun than the thoughts that "mall" invokes here. It'd be nice to have 2 or so in Philly proper, unfortunately the one that kind of follows that model opened into the teeth of COVID and is on life support.
IP is a massive source of rent-seeking. Trolls are able to inflict massively asymmetrical costs on companies because of how expensive these cases are to litigate and the risk of ruinous statutory damages, like the recent billion-dollar judgment that was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in the Cox Communications case. Only giant corporations have the means to fight back; small businesses just get screwed: https://www.shopify.com/news/patent-trolls. IP is one of those areas of law where the defendants are almost always the sympathetic party.
Of course this has nothing to do with free trade and we should support free trade too. But a big part of the abundance agenda should be seeking to break IP monopolies. They ought to make common cause with the antitrust people who also ought to be against what are literally government-enforced monopolies. IP is not necessary for innovation; the most innovative space we have right now is AI and AI-created stuff cannot be copyrighted or patented while many of the big AI companies have forsworn offensive uses of IP.
There should be legal reforms. Durations should be shortened, infringement limited to literal copying and not just similarity (like how it already works for sound recordings), should be unassignable except in the case of a genuine corporate change in control and also “use it or lose it” (like how it already works for trademarks) to prevent trolling, statutory damages should be eliminated, there should be a mens rea requirement to prove infringement, and plaintiffs who bring a lawsuit and lose or even win but recover less damages than they demand should automatically lose their IP and pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees. AI generated works should also not be allowed to have copyrights or patents. Without legal reform, culturally, companies that make money through weaponizing IP should be called trolls and seen as bad rent-seeking parasites shunned by polite society, while those like the AI companies that forswear offensive uses of IP (other than trademarks to prevent actual consumer confusion about it the source of goods) but only make money in free-market ways should be lauded as innovators.
This is factually incorrect in many instances. If I make music or write a book I want the potential to be compensated for that work. Without that why spend the time.
This is even more the case with pharma. Drug development and clinical trials are VERY expensive. And the vast majority of times the drugs will fail. That means the ones that do work out have to be VERY profitable to compensate for all the ones that don't.
I've done a bit of biotech investing and I've had a number of companies go to zero. The ones that work have to REALLY work.
I think it's both true that IP makes pharma work (it's expensive, they need to make money) and that the system around pharma is also frequently gamed to extend patents beyond their natural life in a way that screws over patients, which then pushes this from an economic question to a moral one. But where that line is? I don't know. There is an entire shell game of co-pay assistance between pharma companies, distributors, insurers, and copay management entities that would be entirely unnecessary if we had a way to get drugs to the people who need them in a way that is affordable for normal people with average wages. It's a lot to navigate.
Patents can also be abused. My first job in publishing was with a magazine that covered the bar code scanning industry, and a guy named Jerome Lemelson had patents on the process of scanning a bar code and linking to information in a database -- basically the entire workflow of the bar code, more or less. Not the scanning technology, but the application of it (and the patents were pretty vaguely worded, as I recall). Lemelson (and after he died, his foundation) went after big retailers for payments (Walmart, JC Penneys, Sears, etc.). Which pissed off the retailers and the bar code scanner manufacturers, but despite years of litigation over what they saw as patent trolling, it just kept going. The patents were finally invalidated around 2005, but man that guy was a thorn in the side of the retail industry for years.
Yes I'm very open to the idea that some reform is needed of the system. But the flat statement that "IP is not necessary for innovation" is just REALLY wrong.
I would say that copyrights and patents are there to encourage people to make art / invent something with the knowledge that if they are successful they can't have their effort immediately made valueless by copying.
The trade-off is that they get a monopoly on it for a while.
If a pharmaceutical company uses an AI to help generate a drug but then spends millions of dollars testing the drug - the patent should still apply.
But also "Obvious" things aren't supposed to be patentable - if I, theoretically, said "AI, please invent me a toaster that is cheaper to produce and everyone will like more" and it did - that doesn't feel like you should get a patent for it. You didn't even do the fig leaf "one click" patent of "Hey - people should be able to shop for things and just do one click instead of like 10"
That's obviously an extreme example - but I'm not sure where the line is (and I'm already irritated that the 'concept' of 1-click is patentable - maybe it was like drug discovery and you had to put a lot of effort in to implementing it before you were sure it was actually worth something) - so I think there should at least be a presumption AGAINST patenting things that are generated by AI even if (e.g. pharmaceuticals after actual patient testing) still can be.
Because copyrights and patents are bad in general lol. But right now that is the state of law because IP requires human creativity and AI isn’t considered human. The anti-AI people think this rule will hurt AI but so far it seems to be helping.
Because they are protectionism, and protectionism doesn't work. There is essentially no hard evidence that copyright has any economic benefits. Most creative works produced by humans today do not have and do not seek copyright protection, and that has been true throughout most of history, with the 20th century being an exception.
Patents can be shown to have some economic benefit, but it's also important to realize they were originally conceived as a way to spread ideas, with the alternative being just keeping your good ideas secret. Patents were not supposed to be a litigation cudgel that keeps people from developing and building on public ideas. Economics is more culturally determined than many think, and IP in general is in need of serious reform, if not outright abolition.
One suggestion I read once was a system where the cost to renew IP protections gets higher and higher each year, exponentially, until, eventually, the fees to get the copyright or patent renewed exceed the economic benefits to the holder, at which point, the work or invention goes into the public domain. The idea being that IP which is more valuable can be protected longer, but only up to a point, while IP with relatively low value makes it way into the public domain very quickly.
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.
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 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.
Cuomo was bad. I'm still angry that he managed to keep everyone else out of the non-Mamdani lane last year. Platner is also bad -- worse, I'd argue, because in addition to the personal conduct issues Platner also has a record of extremist views and no record of substantive achievement (except killing people, farming oysters, and starring in Morris Katz videos). He's just not the kind of person who, in my view, has any business serving in a significant public office.
Still beating this horse without once citing to who you're actually talking about. Just vague hand waving about how unfair the treatment of Platner has been due to unnamed actions of shadow figures many years ago. You've been asked repeatedly to cite a source and refuse to do so.
Okay I’m the one who posted the question but this feels pretty bad faith whataboutism. And I am not even here to defend establishment at all.
And tbf I voted for Mamdani and against Cuomo in nyc elections for that very reason. And while I am more to the right of him politically, I am happy with the choice I made so far and think he’s done good job overall so far.
And while i totally agree that some Wall Street figures supporting Cuomo was very pathetic, i really don’t think it justifies backing Platner at all. Like tbf if I lived in Maine, I would still vote for Platner given the situation but i don’t think “what about Cuomo” is the most persuasive or constructive argument at all.
Like tbf I have complaints about some moderate faction who also is obsessed with “establish vs insurgent” but I just don’t think that anything constructive comes out of obsession with that framework
I’m not sure “what about this candidate who lost an election despite being ideologically closer to the electorate because he had a string of scandals” is the defense of Platner you think it is.
And what about Mainers' ability to choose their own representatives? People outside Maine don't even think twice about their entitlement to void Mainers' preferences. It's an anti-democratic instinct.
Plus, the establishment scares off any reasonable outside candidates because it shows what it will do to them. Ratfucking ensures you'll only ever get weirdos running without the blessing of the centralized establishment. That's not good for any of us.
I don't want to condone any of this by jumping on the anti-Platner bandwagon.
“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 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...
As a Zillenial S Philly resident, this is definitely how the older Italians etc speak about the neighborhood and city at large. The black residents (confined to smaller parts of S Philly now) make the points that Queen Village and its CC-adjacent environs used to be much less white than they are now.
From a naive perspective, the freedoms of the 80s and 90s depicted in media seem to have less to do with gentrification (like NY) and more to do with the city's late aughts decline and hard times economically, especially like the closure of UArts and inability to develop Market East. Large block parties that are the toast of nostalgic memory are now better known for having sky-high policing costs, and are still big targets for intra-neighborhood violence.
Similarly, South Street used to be a big hub of nightlife until the big shooting there. Now it's more depressed, but by no means constantly dangerous, and the neighborhoods around it are getting more expensive.
There's still a lot of things that Philly hasn't given up that I have a hard time finding in NY.
Solidly middle class housing is the obvious first component, but not the only. Anyone who you meet in NY with a nice apartment is immediately suspected as a trust fund kid.
Philadelphia is still awash in historic architecture in a way that cities with more development aren't. People speak highly of Baltimore for similar reasons.
Plus, accessible housing stock seems to drive a more neighborly mentality and stronger local connections. My dental hygienist, a tried and true South Philly native, "has a guy" for everything, including her plumber, 'Tommy No-Nose' who did too much cocaine in the '80s apparently, but now offers excellent prices. The Abbott Elementary character Ms. Schemmenti is a dead ringer.
But also, our elderly neighbors bring us holiday cookies, the local crossing guard greets me every morning on the way to work with a "Heyyy! Alright!" in a thick Italian American growl, and we live within a 20 minute walk of at least 20 close-ish friends and 3 grocery stores.
"The city's late aughts decline and hard times economically"
I grew up in the region and have lived in the city for almost a decade now... cannot really see this. To my read of the history, the decline slowed and halted in the 1990's and we've been clawing our way back since then, even after the GFC. Philly weathered the long hangover of 2008 better than basically any city that wasn't NYC or the Bay Area, in terms of attracting and retaining middle class households and growing the tax base, thanks largely to Nutter being sensible.
U. Arts is a mess that had little to do with the economic life of the city, more just the "customer service" model mid-tier university being unsustainable without Millennial-sized entry cohorts. Market East is intractable because we keep pretending that big showpiece projects will solve the issue instead of just allowing construction of high-rise residential projects that will support commercial endeavors once people move in.
As regards the 1980's... Most of my experience speaking to old Italian S. Philly folks (including family friends and extended family, as my dad's side has roots there) is that they claim to have loved having the city to themselves (there was always parking!) and have forgotten the ongoing meltdown of its finances, the rampant crime, disintegrating housing stock, and all the other massive problems.
I do agree that we're much more of a city of communities and neighborhoods than the "common economic zone" that characterizes much or most of NYC at this point. My neighborhood in West is not dissimilar... I get text messages when away from neighbors keeping an eye on my house, can't make it to the playground without my kids running into their friends, end up chilling on someone's front plot with a beer in hand chatting with neighbors when out for a walk, there's a running exchange of food between our household and about 5 others...
Regarding "loneliness epidemic" discourse, I think some of this also comes down to costs.
Of my cohort, some of my friends have access to hosting spaces, but lots don't. I've hosted things (birthday parties, etc) at my place for friends because they live in a studio apartment, don't have enough money to rent a venue, and were worried about weather.
And those kinds of gatherings are a big part of how you transition people from "acquaintances" to "friends" if you don't have other third spaces. It's lower social stakes to invite someone to a gathering that was already happening rather than to take the perceived-to-be-vulnerable step of inviting someone to hang out one-on-on (or two-on-two in the case of "couple friends").
Lots of adults these days never figured out how to expand their social circles intentionally, which is a skill that takes actual effort to cultivate.
In re hosting spaces, I think there's been a dramatic change in expectations about what is an acceptable "hosting space" over the past 40 years. (Picture photos of middle-class household parties in the mid-1980s or earlier and how claustrophobic they look compared to what virtually anyone would be willing to tolerate for a party today.) Whether that is upstream or downstream of lack of socializing, I don't know.
Modern apartment floor plans are a related issue that I've personally struggled with. I live in a unit in a newer building that has no dining room, just a two-seat breakfast bar between the living room and the kitchen, even though I consider it a fairly large place at around 1000 square feet. I would have rather had something different, but I made a cost/benefit decision based on what else was available in the area. I've had four people or so over for dinner, awkwardly standing over that stupid breakfast bar, so where there's a will, there's a way, but it's not great.
Sometimes I look at listings for older housing, like two-flat units in Chicago, and see them gracefully fitting two or three bedrooms plus a dining room and a foyer into a space smaller than my house. Open concept is poison.
That's definitely accurate. I also suspect that a lot of people bought a bunch of stuff during covid that they didn't really have a place for, but haven't updated their mental model of what "clean enough for others to see" looks like to account for things like a treadmill in the living room.
I think it's also easier to host if you're already used to doing so. Some of that's because you're more likely to have cleaned (to whatever standards you feel you need to in order to host) recently. But it's also just the case that things are easier when you practice them.
I've talked to a lot of people who express that they wish they were the sort of person who hosted dinner parties, but they "just aren't". They tried once, and it was a huge hassle, and how does anyone ever manage?
And the first time I threw a dinner party, it was a huge hassle! But I pushed through it and did it again, and that was a bit easier.
I wish the US had the ecosystem of bars/restaurants with all you can eat private rooms for 2-3 hours at a fixed price per head that makes it easy for people in Japan to host impromptu social gatherings without worrying about how big their house is, or what state of readiness it's in. I'm not saying it would solve the loneliness/lack of socialization problem, but it would be nice.
This always feels like an excuse to me. My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for 12+ in our 1-bedroom NYC apartment, you don’t need a huge amount of space. Maybe people are legitimately embarrassed to do that or something, but that seems like the problem rather than the access to space.
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 know many people who were completely certain there was no way Trump would ever get reelected.
That said, odds are he'll probably win as long as no more stuff comes out, and as long as he doesn't make any big own-goals, which isn't a totally safe bet. The GoP probably has oppo they are saving for an opportune time.
Platner also has zero experience campaigning or dealing with a politician as effective as Collins.
It's funny that pundits (like Ron Brownstein and Matt here) suggest that the way out is to grab one of the candidates from the gubernatorial primary. Like this guy Troy Jackson who rolled up an impressive 21% and 45K votes (compared to 72% and the 153K votes Platner got).
If these guys are so good, why did they lose the gubernatorial primary?
I get it that if something truly horrific comes out about Platner then the calculation can (and probably should) change and the fear is that the Republicans are waiting to drop the bombshell after the closure date in mid-July. Well, Democrats can do oppo research too and if there is a huge hidden skeleton, Democrats should be just as good at finding it as the Republicans. So go ahead and do it! Every day there is silence suggests maybe it's not going to happen and there's lots of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Whichever faction of the Democratic Party lost the primary and intra-factional disputes last does this same thing.
I think it's fairly obvious that candidates without severe personal failings are, all else equal, better than ones with them, but it's hard to find a lot of candidates who don't seem like they've wanted office since the age of six and have no personal failings. Half the people who've wanted office since the age of six have serious personal failings, FFS.
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.
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
This was a problem after Brexit because Ireland is quick to remind people that its *native* tongue is Irish (a Celtic language), not English, and had deemed Irish its EU language. I remember reading that they had to do some bureaucratic fix to keep English, the "official" language of no EU member states, as the lingua franca.
I mean, English isn't the *native* tongue of England, either.
Do we even know what the proto-Celtic languages in pre-Saxon England were? Cornish, to my knowledge, is the only Celtic language from present-day England that people can speak (although it's like 300 people at this point).
Some variety of Brythonic, I think, so related to modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish. But the Celts were probably not the first people to live in These Islands, and we have no frigging idea what language the Bell Beaker People spoke.
Also Malta, what a weird coincidence they both have the same main language.
Island cultures are predisposed to speaking English. (See also New Zealand, Jamaica, etc.)
Maltese is a language! Mayor Pete speaks it!
The daily language of Malta isn't English, it's Maltese, although business language and commerce is English and in the capital w the big expat community it's different, but not main language except in business sense
Secondary and Tertiary education are largely in English
and?
Secondary and Tertiary ed is largely in French all across N & W. Africa and yet... French is not the native mother tongue in reality except in upper middle class strata.
I've been there, Malta, if one isn't in the international districts, it's quite apparent Maltese is a living tongue. Now 50 years from now maybe not
Clearly it should be Latin
Does the Vatican want to become an EU member state?
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.
Mandarin speakers gush over your three words of broken Chinese to the point where it gets annoying when you're midway through the slog to fluency and know you still suck wind.
Japanese speakers are incredibly impressed i can say "large beer, please" and also very sympathetic when I follow with "where is the toilet"
Seriously they always tell me how good my Japanese is - in English, of course
Des Bishop is an American comedian with a very funny bit about being fluent in Mandarin and living in China.
The offense some people take at tourists not learning their language always strikes me as the height of narcissism. In the past few years I've traveled to Egypt, Thailand, Germany, Italy, Austria, Costa Rica, Japan, and Vietnam. You're telling me that to be a good citizen of the world I'm supposed to learn all of those languages before spending 3-17 days in those countries? GMAFB.
The fact that English is so commonly spoken is grounded in legitimate, rational factors that dictate it's utility. The rest of the world doesn't speak English because of their magnanimity to Americans.
It doesn't take too long to learn hello/goodbye/please/thank you in most languages (looking at you, Russian), and people usually appreciate it when you make at least that token effort. If you have no common language, then pleasantries, pointing, and holding up fingers (or writing down numbers) can get you surprisingly far.
It's also worth noting that English is not the lingua franca everywhere. I went on a climbing trip to Kyrgyzstan about ten years ago; we met some people who spoke English in the cities, but out in the countryside we had to rely on my extremely limited Russian (talking to locals whose native language was probably Kyrgyz). I'm sure English has become more widespread since, but I bet it's still rare outside towns.
The first time I went to Japan I worked mainly in Kanji since I could read 90% of them including all place names, so communicated by writing down pidgin Japanese. Learned a couple dozen words around food and necessities while there. Getting a data SIM was hard back then and nothing was in English.
When we were in Russia, more than a decade ago now, I had to learn to sound out Cyrillic so I could parse out place names on bus and subway routes that had no Latin writing (outside the newer lines in Moscow basically nothing did.)
I also figured out key food names, bathroom, cardinal directions, street, and a dozen other words beyond pleasantries.
These were back when my brain was young/supple/functional, of course.
This past time in Spain basically everyone spoke English except recent Latin American immigrants (lol), and in Japan the whole of society is increasingly functioning in both, not least because their guest worker class all speak English on day one (though a surprising number spoke what sounded like solid Japanese).
Yeah, Cyrillic is pretty easy and Russian is a delightful language, though really hard to master. And it’s a country with a cool culture and history. Shame that the government is evil and that the Russian people themselves, though often very funny, are full of lies.
I once got a long-distance bus in Thailand to what turned out to be completely the wrong town, and didn't work out my mistake until the next morning (though when we got off late at night the total lack of tourist infrastructure tipped us off that something was not quite right). All the signs were in Thai script, of course, so we'd got on what we thought was the right bus and got off after the correct number of stops. I guess nowadays GPS would have told us we were going the wrong way and translation apps would have been able to read the script for us, and probably Google Maps would have up-to-date bus info complete with which stand to wait at.
My son is going to outlying areas of Krgyzstan later this year. (He speaks Russian.) I will try to remember to follow up re English! When he was in Kazakhstan outside the two big cities few people spoke English, but lots of people want to learn
Yes please! What's he doing there?
Nobody is demanding that everyone speak English. And nothing I said above implied that being polite and making an effort is wrong or inappropriate. You're coming at this from the flip side of the people I was referencing. I agree with what you're saying completely, but don't think it's relevant in response to anything I said.
My experience in Europe is that as long as people understand you're also not a native English speaker, they take much less offence and some all of a sudden know how to speak English. Especially in France, where wearing a little flag pin can change your experience dramatically. I make sure to talk like the Swedish Chef whenever in France.
That might work for white people, but many Europeans are pretty shitty towards Asians trying to speak English with them, in my experience.
Ah that's a good point, I can imagine.
I got a much more positive reception to my German last time I went ~2.5 years ago than I had previously, where as soon as I was made as an American it was much more of a 'While I appreciate your efforts let's please just make this easier on both of us.' It's all their dialects that I feel like aren't even always fully mutually intelligible among German speakers that makes it tough to totally blend in, at least outside of the bigger northern and western cities.
My mom's native language is French (as in the kind they speak in France where she was born) and the Quebecois have also been kind of rude to her about it. I think there's just something wrong with them.
A Swiss German friend once told me about the time a German came to stay with his family. After a few days she said "Swiss German isn't nearly as hard to understand as everyone says!" Whereupon the family all started *actually* speaking Swiss German, as opposed to High German with a Swiss accent, and she became completely lost.
Somehow I have been exposed to my wife's extremely obscure county dialect of Mandarin enough to understand 95-98% of what is said.
The neighboring city, though, sounds like someone planted Arabic and Scots speakers there and interbred the languages with Mandarin. It's *wild,* I can understand more of basically every other regional Mandarin dialect from Chengdu to Harbin than I can that... stuff.
I took German in high school and college. I’ve been to Germany, and being able to get by in the language was only mildly useful for reading signs and menus bc everyone could and did speak English. But I’ve shared a train car in the former Yugoslavia with a lady whom our only common language was German, and I was surprised how easily we carried a conversation. In general knowing a bit of language can go a long way
I used much more German in Russia than in Germany or Austria, and more Mandarin in Germany and Austria than German.
i'm taking a german language class in germany now, and most of the people in the class do not speak any english.
My German is very rudimentary, I just haven't had an opportunity to use it nearly enough after high school. It was passably decent when I graduated, but Mandarin kinda forced it out of my brain.
On the occasions I've been in Germany and Austria since, basically no one has the patience to allow me to conduct the interactions I can make it through, unfortunately. At least, unlike the French, or god forbid the Quebecois, they don't then proceed to bitch that I cannot speak good German.
I'm in Germany/Austria 4-6 times a year for work and in Switzerland or Luxembourg on occasion. There is really no point in learning German except to read Goethe in the original.
Doch.
I've honestly found Germany weird with where they speak English. I had a terrible time with rudimentary German in Frankfurt (even international hotel stuff struggled with English) but in a recent trip to Franconia (hardly a business or tourism hub) people would immediately switch into English when I spoke in German.
On a related note I always found the thing about the French being annoyed at any language you speak to be untrue. I always either get perfectly happy switching to English or responses in French, this is across the country from Paris to rural Occitania.
In Germany the key factor is proximity to US military installations. I think the Franconia region has 6 or 8 American bases.
That is a very good point. I did end up drinking with two American soldiers on evening leave when I was in Nuremburg!
There also seems to be less and less point as technological aids improve over time, at least in terms of basic context-limited interactions. It's been kinda cool over 8 years in retail seeing phones go from "amusingly shitty Babelfish" to "oh wow this videocall conversation is being translated in real time". As long as someone knows just enough English to understand some variant of "do you have a picture/how do you say that in English", we can probably come to an understanding that'll let me point them to the mayonnaise, or whatever.
(Cantonese customers still preferentially come my way, even though I know like 50 words tops, and they're quite understanding about "3rd generation sorry lol". Sometimes you just wanna deal with someone who looks like you, even if they can't communicate well.)
I've been deep in the interior of mainland China having conservations with people where we're both speaking/typing into our phones. Going from having to point at Polish words in a phrasebook to being able to communicate with someone who only speaks a notoriously difficult language despite no shared language is incredible. Really opens up the world.
The universal translator future feels very close to a reality. When I've traveled abroad in recent years I've been able to get by with a steady combination of smiles, deference, English, and (when all else fails) google translate. I just take my phone out and type out what I need to know and hold my phone out while making apologetic gestures to convey that the necessity of the phone is entirely due to my own inadequacies. It's really great to be able to so easily connect with people who you otherwise would have no way real way of communicating with.
The Québécois are especially Anglophobic, from what I've heard. The one time I visited Montreal I came down with strep. Trying to navigate the healthcare system there was a fun adventure.
Russians (and Ukrainians) are the exact opposite of the French: if you tell one that you're learning Russian, they're both over the moon about it and very eager to help you practice.
Actually, Swedish isn't useless outside our borders because it gives us the chance to talk trash about people when visiting other countries (only to realise they are also Swedish and understood everything you said).
Mandarin is great for this, haha.
Not only can my wife and I talk shit anywhere with ~0% chance of being overheard by locals, but a nearby Chinese person will have overheard us, pop out of the woodwork, and proceed to commiserate with us over precisely what sort of miserable assholes the locals are!
Czech is (AIUI, despite the username I only speak a tiny amount) mostly mutually intelligible with Slovak, and to a lesser but still useful extent with Polish (and so on through the Slavic languages, with intelligibility decreasing with distance). But sure, not much use outside Central and Eastern Europe. Unless you're speaking to a fellow Slavic immigrant, which I understand is quite a common situation here in the UK :-)
Also worth noting that Spanish is by far the most commonly-spoken second language in the US, and it's not helpful in much of Europe. An English-Spanish bilingual American is still probably speaking English in Germany.
I thought Quebecois were only particular about service in French when they're in Anglophone Canada? Every Quebec Francophone I've met in the US has spoken excellent English.
"I speak English because the incredible economic, media, scientific, and warfare successes of the Anglosphere have made English the de facto world language, and far more useful than my native language."
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?
Once when I was in Budapest a Spanish couple was trying to buy tickets to a museum. They were speaking English with the Hungarian clerk, but neither of them spoke English quite well enough to communicate effectively with each other. I had to step in and help because I could understand both of them and they could both understand me, but they couldn't fully understand each other. I found myself in a similar situation at the airport in Israel when an American Hassid who seemed to speak Yiddish has his first language was trying unsuccessfully to communicate in English with the Israeli VAT refund clerk. Again, I was able to help, exclusively by speaking native English to both of them.
Once in Israel I called a Thai restaurant to make a reservation and started off in Hebrew only for the guy at the other end to go, "You . . . speak English please?"
Few things annoy me like making an effort at speaking the language of a different country only to be told to stop trying and just speak English
Yes but in this case it was a Thai person running a restaurant in Israel. He probably spoke English better than he spoke Hebrew. I tried to use some Dutch from a Rick Steves phrasebook once at a coffee shop in Flanders and the Albanian guy at the counter told me to speak English. Similar situation I assume.
Btw, I’ve heard stories that this sometimes happens to Québécois when they travel to France.
There's a bit in the French mountaineer Lionel Terray's memoir "Conquistadors of the Useless" where he and a friend go to Quebec for the winter to work as ski instructors. His friend attempts to chat up the local girls, but gets nowhere because as soon as they start speaking he bursts out laughing.
I had this experience in Portugal. Japanese couple was trying to ask a random guard (who seemed to be Lusaphone African) questions at one of the palaces in Sintra. The hangup seemed to be the word "queue."
Right, a specific thing I've noticed is people who speak English as a second language usually learn either American or British English and get confused when they're talking to someone who speaks the other version of English as a second language. Native English speakers understand both versions (for the most part -- I only recently learned that rocket is arugala, but matters less than lift and queue...), which helps us translate.
I'm American so I'm biased, but I generally find American English a bit more sensible than British. Color/colour, analyze/analyse, airplane/aeroplane.
Ironically, one of the places I prefer US spelling is the metric system: meter/metre, liter/litre, "metric ton"/tonne.
As far as vocabulary I think they're roughly equal, truck/lorry, elevator/lift, all of that.
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 will continue to have an imprint.
What's ironic is that Bernie still seems enamored with the Nordic socialism of the 1970's, but they all became much less socialist since then, having learned from real experience.
I think the degree to which we've got people in their 60s-80s operating as if the world still is what it was 30 or 40 years ago is a very serious problem.
Which isn't to say there isn't a case for seriously reworking a number of load bearing social and economic pillars for the 21st century. Its just not around a European model that even Europe got away from decades ago.
I've noticed that a lot of older people still think that the bad stuff that happened with health insurance pre-Obamacare (think people going bankrupt because the insurer rejected a claim from a out of network provider in an emergency) is happening. Or they massively underestimate how progressive our tax system is. I'm sure there are conservative versions of this, but I don't know a lot of older conservatives so I'm not sure what the conservative version of that is.
The one that really gets me is the older people who do not realize how much we've reduced extreme poverty in low income countries. It's a huge win but they often do not recognize it or think it's gotten worse.
I guess I'm "older" (?), but I'm not under the impression the our tax system, taken as a whole (i.e., not just federal income tax, but SS, state and local, etc.), is all that progressive.
It’s definitely not progressive especially when you count capital gains and wealth which is basically untaxed. Last year my household made about 4x what I made in 2015 if you include my now-wife’s income and capital gains but my household only paid 2x the tax.
Totally agree. I have facepalmed many times hearing old legislators try to understand modern technology.
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).
Left wing housing policy is explicitly to reserve homes for the deeply rooted and deter/deflect what they view as illegitimate demand from people whose only claim to the city is being upwardly mobile with high paying jobs. The difficulty is their desired social contract being realized.
Hukou's for everyone!
Good luck with that platform...
Ugh, I recently got an intriguing job offer in the Bay Area and was looking at housing, completely nuts, $3m minimum for crappy single-family homes. Townhomes seem to be slightly better (only 5x what they’d cost anywhere else instead of 10x) probably because they have no land. Even an upwardly mobile person making $400k TC can’t afford that. The people who were born there and inherit housing there from their ancestors who probably got it for free after murdering the indigenous there are truly a class of aristocrats among aristocrats that no one can work up into their ranks without getting an insanely lucky win in the startup lottery.
I’m not sure it’s the left-wing people driving this though; seems like the stereotypical NIMBY in my mind is a Marc Andressen type.
umm, what percent of Californians do you think are descended from people who "murdered the indigenous"?
I barely even grew up knowing anybody whose family was here before 1900.
How else are people affording $3m homes? There aren’t that many people making the $800k+ you’d need to buy that fair and square.
If they sell a $2 million home to buy the $3 million home, that's only one more million they have to come up with.
I'm really struggling to understand what you're asking here. Is your assumption that the only two types of Californians who own homes are Spanish/Mexican-descended people plus a few mid 19th century White settlers who murdered members of the indigenous populations or the super-wealthy?
The average homeowner who is not from the moneyed tech class but lives in Sunnyvale has family that moved to California between 1900 and 1970, had a middle-class job, and got lucky with where they bought a house. No murdering needed!
I think the fact that Trump proved all the left-wing conspiracy theories about MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATS (that they prefer to fundraise off of Republican abuses than solve them, that they are much more focused on defeating the left in primaries than in winning general elections, that they fundamentally do not understand the exercise of power, etc.) correct is a much bigger deal in the left's rise.
The number of actual persuaded, doctrinaire (non-pejorative sense) leftists is still not very high. What you have now are a large number of people who have become convinced that the Democratic establishment is morally and intellectually bankrupt for whom the left is the only available option.
Yep. You can disagree with left-wing positions on what various policies *should* be but they’ve clearly had the most factually accurate read on how things in politics *are*. That’s given them credibility.
This seems backwards. Factional leftists are more interested in defeating "the establishment" than winning general elections. They were insufficiently concerned about keeping MAGA out of power during the Biden administration. Etc.
Older Millennial here, you are correct, and i'm sad to say my generation is largely to blame for the party's drift to the left over the past 15 years.
Yea I'm an old Millenial, Xennial, whatever.
I'd be lying if I said it didn't push my politics leftward in certain ways that persist. However I'm not sure the responses synthesized well in the vehicle of the Democratic party. You've got these out of touch dinosaurs perpetually holding off a 'youth' movement (a lot of which is now middle aged or close to it) to its last breath, but where that youth movement seems to have never grown into readiness to act as mature stakeholders. It's why you have people in their late 30s and 40s talking like they're still in the quad, oblivious to living in a very different moment.
There's something very funny about the dynamic for most of human history being 'the old holding off the young', except today it's 'the very very extremely old who should be in a nursing home holding off the middle-aged'
In past eras most of them would be dead.
Which isn't a wish or anything. Extended life has its trade offs but I'm glad I still have so many of my older family members around, and by the grace of God (and modern medicine), still having a decent quality of life. But most of them really are passed a point where they can run our big institutions.
Same boat. Honestly though I don’t think the timing lines up very well with blaming the GFC. The GFC pushed politics to the right with the Tea Party since it was largely blamed on government the bailouts of banks and incumbent homeowners seemed pretty f-ing unfair (honestly if I could press a button again to have another housing crisis and reset prices to what they were in 2008 with no bailouts to existing homeowners including myself I’d do it lol). Things like Occupy were small by comparison, fizzled out quickly, and never got any electoral wins like leftists would get starting in the late 2010s. 2010 was probably the most right-wing I’d ever been and I voted for Republicans in Congress that year. Most of my peers were always socially liberal supporting things like gay marriage but only really shifted hard to the left after Trump came on the scene.
I see Occupy as the seed that brought Sanders/Warren into the mainstream of the American left, with their at that time more class oriented politics ultimately losing out in 2016 to a Clinton campaign that shot hard left on identity politics. I agree with you that Trump was partially responsible for whats happened by personifying the hard left's vision of everything wrong with America. However this has been a total disaster in that it both failed to create a more muscular, class based rebalancing of what the American economy should look like and is running working class men of all races out of the party.
I think it's interesting that if Leftists win they win, and when they lose its still winning and validates them. It definitely is interesting.
I also think as a millennial that came of age and joined the workforce during the great recession is something you make some interesting points about it.
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.)
I arrived in NYC in 2001 with $700. I slept in a hostel for the first month. And stayed for a decade (not in the hostel!....my last apartment, Paul Rudd lived down the hall and Michael Strahan lived above me). I'd like to think this is still possible.
I always think of Madonna's claim that she arrived in NYC with $35 in her pocket
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.
That the Armenian Genocide could have been avoided by being nicer to Turkish nationalists is certainly a take!
…. and it wasn’t my take.
My take was that it could have been avoided if Turkish nationalism hadn’t happened and the Ottoman monarchs had continued to be heads of a multi-national dynastic state.
It isn't yours, it's Nikuruga's.
I think we overlook how weak the Ottoman's were - the Bulgarians almost took Constantinople in 1913, Muhammad Ali basically took over in the 1830s. These guys were propped up by the Great Powers to maintain the balance of power, particularly keeping the Straits from the Russians. Expecting them to create Austro-Hungary under Franz Joseph is silly, they would've collapsed a century earlier without outside intervention.
Yes, typical leftist nonsense. It's a good thing people like me from the Balkans rarely come across this shit.
The really dumb tell though is that supposedly the Ottoman empire failed to colonize, and that's why it was behind, e.g. Germany. Even though by any kind of realistic definition the ottomans controlled both far more territory and people from different ethnicities.
What they failed at, was industrialization, which neither requires not is helped by colonization. It sometimes enable subsequent colonization - and sometimes not, e.g. as in Germany among others.
British author Jon Courtenay Grimwood wrote an alternative history series that takes place in modern-day Ottoman Egypt in a world where WWI was resolved quickly in the Balkans without spreading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabesk_trilogy
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”
And entomoligically it means "caterpillar-seeking"
Good correction. People get confused because both start with 'centri.' We should rename them using terms developed from the science of human anatomy and call them "innie" and "outie" forces.
As the reader, I feel strongly that figures need captions. It is not clear what’s being plotted in the graph. I get from context that it’s something to do with the 107th Congress, but are each point different representatives? And if so which are Ralph Hall and Charles Stenholm? With are the New England Republicans? And what’s the black dot?
This isn’t the first time there’s been a confusing figure in SB without proper labeling and descriptions.
I shouldn’t have to guess because there should be a caption underneath explaining exactly what’s being plotted. The relevant data that you want to highlight to make the point should be labeled, either directly or with a legend.
Figures should be standalone, and I shouldn’t have to dig through text to make sense of it. And in this case, even digging through the text doesn’t clarify it.
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 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.
I find it amusing that people realize you couldn't just transplant the relatively cheap rent of China and Tokyo into a US city directly. But we do think they could just send over enough cars to keep those prices going low. Or that they would not choose to price their wares to what our market clearly demonstrates it will support.
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.
Xi Jinping did not crush the video game and tutoring industries and spin up a massive EV manufacturing industry out of nowhere to “keep employment structures stable”… the man is taking a hard look at the distribution of human and capital resources in the economy and pushing buttons, sometimes clumsily and sometimes not, to stack the deck in favor of deploying such resources to purposes which will be useful when wartime mobilization comes.
They crushed the tutoring industry for very good reasons but didn't make the corresponding investments in education outside the first and better parts of second-tier cities to make it stand up.
The "crushing" of all the soft tech is wildly overstated. All those things still exist at scale and soak up a ton of employment, and the youth are still lying flat. The only durable crushing was of tech sector stock prices.
Stop reading Noah Smith, he is *not* genuinely knowledgeable about China and trade issues.
How about we just not start WWIII? China hasn’t started a war in generations whereas we just started one a few months ago.
And most of the rest of the “West” currently views China more positively than the US for this reason so it won’t be the “West” fighting WWIII.
I’m not gonna bother rebutting this silly statement; if you don’t know why it would be bad for China to gain global hegemony, I’m not going to persuade you here. But you are proving the accuracy of the conclusion of my original statement:
“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.”
The problem is that the trade with China in that scenario would not be free. China has pursued mercantilist policies under a thin umbrella of free trade and they would do the same with cars - backing Chinese makers in ways we can’t to ensure market dominance. Note that China is very protective of its domestic market from foreign competitors.
What we need with China, IMO, is a policy of reciprocity, not fake free trade.
The standard answer is that Americans now have 30k extra to spend elsewhere in the economy and that would create a separate set of higher paying jobs. But predicting what those would be is fairly tricky and, frankly, if you knew you should start a business to capture that before the change.
As I said, “sometimes clumsily and sometimes not”…
I don’t really know what your point is - you think he’s not doing what he can to gear his country up for a major struggle for geopolitical hegemony against the United States?
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.
I think it's generally true that if you have a rent-stabilized apartment and never need/want to move, your experience of NYC is objectively better today than in, say, 2006. It's just when you have to find housing that you really have to face the trade off. I've always said the secret to living in NYC is to find a rent-stabilized apartment and stay there til you die.
Right, Andy. By the way on my recent trip to London, the locals told me that they have a similar problem to New York. All the middle class and upper middle class people are buying homes in the suburbs now because you just get more for your money. Perfectly rational reaction. But their absence, they argued, means that the cultural and nightlife of London has suffered because they don't come into town during the week now. So the real estate situation affects both the suppliers and consumers of cultural life.
I'm not from NYC but am from a big city where my neighborhood became much more expensive and found myself nodding along to much of that section. I think the experience is a lot broader than new yorkers might assume.
I came from NYC to Chicago in 1988 for college, and it has absolutely been the same here (I got miffed the first time I heard about Williamsburg in 2001 because Wicker Park/Bucktown was earlier)
However, the food is *way* better than 1988 Chicago, and now most El trains run 24/7
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.
Dr. Pangloss and not Candide. (Gotta hit the day's pedantry quota.)
You are, of course correct. Nice catch! Thanks
Of course it’s not possible to have affordable housing in a central and convenient neighborhood in any context other than the aftermath of white flight or a plague or something. It’s an inherently temporary and nice byproduct of something intrinsically bad.
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").
Duality is crap. I demand euphoria!
Lol!
Hear, hear!
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
Yeah, but I don’t think you can look at the music scene in NY now and think it holds a candle to multiple periods of the past. There may be nowhere in the world that has that because of the way the music business changed.
It’s like saying we’re living in the greatest era of moviemaking ever.
Of course we're living in the greatest era of movie making ever. There's more great content made by amateurs on YouTube just in the past year than in the entire history of humanity prior to that.
Lol. Content ain’t movies.
Agree. But what would an "old," "boring" guy know anyway.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment but I read the text differently.
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"
As a former New Yorker who, like Matt, went elsewhere to college and didn’t (couldn’t afford to) come back, it’s easily New York I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down:
https://youtu.be/c5kM3iwYVi0
I hope that's true...
E.B. White has always been the only writer whose writing about New York I could ever stand just because he was never especially sentimental about the place. Similarly, he's the only person whose kvetching about Florida I can tolerate, as he was always more than willing to concede that people actually like living there.
I miss The Limelight. Or I would if I still lived in NYC and I wasn’t old.
Yes. Do you remember Jean Shepherd used to broadcast live from there?
Was he one of the guys selling weed in the choir balcony?
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.
The other changes that seem material to NYC street life is the smart phone. Individuals in their own bubble vs. feeling like a part of the same roiling sea. And in general it seems like the current population has a lot more tolerance for dirty streets and disorderly conduct.
My first roommate in NYC ran the Thursday night puppet show at CBGB. She was also an anarchist and strange. But yeah, that NYC is gone.
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?
Because that would make Declan feel better in his old age of course.
Many are in Philadelphia because it is close enough to come to the city on weekends to sell their wares to rich people who are willing to pay a lot more for it then elsewhere. I know two artists who charge double what they do elsewhere when they go to shows in NYC, yet often sell more.
Right. I lived there for a long time and the place was artist friendly. Go, Philly!
Flushing
Flushing... as a center for bohemian artists?
I've been there enough to not really buy that.
I'm mostly joking but there are some pretty cool things happening in eastern queens, in part because it's affordable and immigrant heavy. Oddly fun malls, which is weird in 2026, if not exactly boho.
All Chinese malls are oddly fun. Not so fun that we need as many as their big cities have, but much more fun than the thoughts that "mall" invokes here. It'd be nice to have 2 or so in Philly proper, unfortunately the one that kind of follows that model opened into the teeth of COVID and is on life support.
IP is a massive source of rent-seeking. Trolls are able to inflict massively asymmetrical costs on companies because of how expensive these cases are to litigate and the risk of ruinous statutory damages, like the recent billion-dollar judgment that was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in the Cox Communications case. Only giant corporations have the means to fight back; small businesses just get screwed: https://www.shopify.com/news/patent-trolls. IP is one of those areas of law where the defendants are almost always the sympathetic party.
Of course this has nothing to do with free trade and we should support free trade too. But a big part of the abundance agenda should be seeking to break IP monopolies. They ought to make common cause with the antitrust people who also ought to be against what are literally government-enforced monopolies. IP is not necessary for innovation; the most innovative space we have right now is AI and AI-created stuff cannot be copyrighted or patented while many of the big AI companies have forsworn offensive uses of IP.
There should be legal reforms. Durations should be shortened, infringement limited to literal copying and not just similarity (like how it already works for sound recordings), should be unassignable except in the case of a genuine corporate change in control and also “use it or lose it” (like how it already works for trademarks) to prevent trolling, statutory damages should be eliminated, there should be a mens rea requirement to prove infringement, and plaintiffs who bring a lawsuit and lose or even win but recover less damages than they demand should automatically lose their IP and pay the defendant’s attorney’s fees. AI generated works should also not be allowed to have copyrights or patents. Without legal reform, culturally, companies that make money through weaponizing IP should be called trolls and seen as bad rent-seeking parasites shunned by polite society, while those like the AI companies that forswear offensive uses of IP (other than trademarks to prevent actual consumer confusion about it the source of goods) but only make money in free-market ways should be lauded as innovators.
"IP is not necessary for innovation"
This is factually incorrect in many instances. If I make music or write a book I want the potential to be compensated for that work. Without that why spend the time.
This is even more the case with pharma. Drug development and clinical trials are VERY expensive. And the vast majority of times the drugs will fail. That means the ones that do work out have to be VERY profitable to compensate for all the ones that don't.
I've done a bit of biotech investing and I've had a number of companies go to zero. The ones that work have to REALLY work.
I think it's both true that IP makes pharma work (it's expensive, they need to make money) and that the system around pharma is also frequently gamed to extend patents beyond their natural life in a way that screws over patients, which then pushes this from an economic question to a moral one. But where that line is? I don't know. There is an entire shell game of co-pay assistance between pharma companies, distributors, insurers, and copay management entities that would be entirely unnecessary if we had a way to get drugs to the people who need them in a way that is affordable for normal people with average wages. It's a lot to navigate.
Patents can also be abused. My first job in publishing was with a magazine that covered the bar code scanning industry, and a guy named Jerome Lemelson had patents on the process of scanning a bar code and linking to information in a database -- basically the entire workflow of the bar code, more or less. Not the scanning technology, but the application of it (and the patents were pretty vaguely worded, as I recall). Lemelson (and after he died, his foundation) went after big retailers for payments (Walmart, JC Penneys, Sears, etc.). Which pissed off the retailers and the bar code scanner manufacturers, but despite years of litigation over what they saw as patent trolling, it just kept going. The patents were finally invalidated around 2005, but man that guy was a thorn in the side of the retail industry for years.
Yes I'm very open to the idea that some reform is needed of the system. But the flat statement that "IP is not necessary for innovation" is just REALLY wrong.
"AI generated works should also not be allowed to have copyrights or patents."
Why not?
I would say that copyrights and patents are there to encourage people to make art / invent something with the knowledge that if they are successful they can't have their effort immediately made valueless by copying.
The trade-off is that they get a monopoly on it for a while.
If a pharmaceutical company uses an AI to help generate a drug but then spends millions of dollars testing the drug - the patent should still apply.
But also "Obvious" things aren't supposed to be patentable - if I, theoretically, said "AI, please invent me a toaster that is cheaper to produce and everyone will like more" and it did - that doesn't feel like you should get a patent for it. You didn't even do the fig leaf "one click" patent of "Hey - people should be able to shop for things and just do one click instead of like 10"
That's obviously an extreme example - but I'm not sure where the line is (and I'm already irritated that the 'concept' of 1-click is patentable - maybe it was like drug discovery and you had to put a lot of effort in to implementing it before you were sure it was actually worth something) - so I think there should at least be a presumption AGAINST patenting things that are generated by AI even if (e.g. pharmaceuticals after actual patient testing) still can be.
Because copyrights and patents are bad in general lol. But right now that is the state of law because IP requires human creativity and AI isn’t considered human. The anti-AI people think this rule will hurt AI but so far it seems to be helping.
"Because copyrights and patents are bad in general lol."
How so?
Because they are protectionism, and protectionism doesn't work. There is essentially no hard evidence that copyright has any economic benefits. Most creative works produced by humans today do not have and do not seek copyright protection, and that has been true throughout most of history, with the 20th century being an exception.
Patents can be shown to have some economic benefit, but it's also important to realize they were originally conceived as a way to spread ideas, with the alternative being just keeping your good ideas secret. Patents were not supposed to be a litigation cudgel that keeps people from developing and building on public ideas. Economics is more culturally determined than many think, and IP in general is in need of serious reform, if not outright abolition.
One suggestion I read once was a system where the cost to renew IP protections gets higher and higher each year, exponentially, until, eventually, the fees to get the copyright or patent renewed exceed the economic benefits to the holder, at which point, the work or invention goes into the public domain. The idea being that IP which is more valuable can be protected longer, but only up to a point, while IP with relatively low value makes it way into the public domain very quickly.
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!
It doesn't really matter what you say because Freddie never responds. He just like throwing out hand grenades. Many such cases.
“throwing out hand grenades”
He keeps forgetting to pull the pin first.
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.
What is this whataboutism kick with you?
At least he’s stopped demanding that people justify Bill Clinton’s rise thirty years ago when they were 8 years old.
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.
I think he has a pretty good point in this case.
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.
Cuomo was bad. I'm still angry that he managed to keep everyone else out of the non-Mamdani lane last year. Platner is also bad -- worse, I'd argue, because in addition to the personal conduct issues Platner also has a record of extremist views and no record of substantive achievement (except killing people, farming oysters, and starring in Morris Katz videos). He's just not the kind of person who, in my view, has any business serving in a significant public office.
Hey, this is a Kathryn Garcia Substack
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.
Still beating this horse without once citing to who you're actually talking about. Just vague hand waving about how unfair the treatment of Platner has been due to unnamed actions of shadow figures many years ago. You've been asked repeatedly to cite a source and refuse to do so.
Okay I’m the one who posted the question but this feels pretty bad faith whataboutism. And I am not even here to defend establishment at all.
And tbf I voted for Mamdani and against Cuomo in nyc elections for that very reason. And while I am more to the right of him politically, I am happy with the choice I made so far and think he’s done good job overall so far.
And while i totally agree that some Wall Street figures supporting Cuomo was very pathetic, i really don’t think it justifies backing Platner at all. Like tbf if I lived in Maine, I would still vote for Platner given the situation but i don’t think “what about Cuomo” is the most persuasive or constructive argument at all.
Like tbf I have complaints about some moderate faction who also is obsessed with “establish vs insurgent” but I just don’t think that anything constructive comes out of obsession with that framework
I’m not sure “what about this candidate who lost an election despite being ideologically closer to the electorate because he had a string of scandals” is the defense of Platner you think it is.
And what about Mainers' ability to choose their own representatives? People outside Maine don't even think twice about their entitlement to void Mainers' preferences. It's an anti-democratic instinct.
Plus, the establishment scares off any reasonable outside candidates because it shows what it will do to them. Ratfucking ensures you'll only ever get weirdos running without the blessing of the centralized establishment. That's not good for any of us.
I don't want to condone any of this by jumping on the anti-Platner bandwagon.
You mean you only engage in whataboutism?
New York moves around but still retains its elements.
Bohemian New York moved to Brooklyn in the 1990s and 2000s. And now keeps being pushed out to further and further reaches of Brooklyn.
Soho went from being a giant art gallery to a giant outdoor mall.
Wall Street has become a residential neighborhood, tourism welcome center, and living memorial.
Midtown is midtown, the same as always. It still looks and feels the way it does in depictions from movies made in the 80s.
Harlem has gone bougie.
Queens is like the Lower East Side was 100 years ago, a polyglot smorgasbord of vibrant immigrant communities.
And Times Square went digital?
I can’t believe I forgot about all the changes in Times Square. The Giuliani years were really transformational in that neighborhood.
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 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...
As a Zillenial S Philly resident, this is definitely how the older Italians etc speak about the neighborhood and city at large. The black residents (confined to smaller parts of S Philly now) make the points that Queen Village and its CC-adjacent environs used to be much less white than they are now.
From a naive perspective, the freedoms of the 80s and 90s depicted in media seem to have less to do with gentrification (like NY) and more to do with the city's late aughts decline and hard times economically, especially like the closure of UArts and inability to develop Market East. Large block parties that are the toast of nostalgic memory are now better known for having sky-high policing costs, and are still big targets for intra-neighborhood violence.
Similarly, South Street used to be a big hub of nightlife until the big shooting there. Now it's more depressed, but by no means constantly dangerous, and the neighborhoods around it are getting more expensive.
There's still a lot of things that Philly hasn't given up that I have a hard time finding in NY.
Solidly middle class housing is the obvious first component, but not the only. Anyone who you meet in NY with a nice apartment is immediately suspected as a trust fund kid.
Philadelphia is still awash in historic architecture in a way that cities with more development aren't. People speak highly of Baltimore for similar reasons.
Plus, accessible housing stock seems to drive a more neighborly mentality and stronger local connections. My dental hygienist, a tried and true South Philly native, "has a guy" for everything, including her plumber, 'Tommy No-Nose' who did too much cocaine in the '80s apparently, but now offers excellent prices. The Abbott Elementary character Ms. Schemmenti is a dead ringer.
But also, our elderly neighbors bring us holiday cookies, the local crossing guard greets me every morning on the way to work with a "Heyyy! Alright!" in a thick Italian American growl, and we live within a 20 minute walk of at least 20 close-ish friends and 3 grocery stores.
"The city's late aughts decline and hard times economically"
I grew up in the region and have lived in the city for almost a decade now... cannot really see this. To my read of the history, the decline slowed and halted in the 1990's and we've been clawing our way back since then, even after the GFC. Philly weathered the long hangover of 2008 better than basically any city that wasn't NYC or the Bay Area, in terms of attracting and retaining middle class households and growing the tax base, thanks largely to Nutter being sensible.
U. Arts is a mess that had little to do with the economic life of the city, more just the "customer service" model mid-tier university being unsustainable without Millennial-sized entry cohorts. Market East is intractable because we keep pretending that big showpiece projects will solve the issue instead of just allowing construction of high-rise residential projects that will support commercial endeavors once people move in.
As regards the 1980's... Most of my experience speaking to old Italian S. Philly folks (including family friends and extended family, as my dad's side has roots there) is that they claim to have loved having the city to themselves (there was always parking!) and have forgotten the ongoing meltdown of its finances, the rampant crime, disintegrating housing stock, and all the other massive problems.
I do agree that we're much more of a city of communities and neighborhoods than the "common economic zone" that characterizes much or most of NYC at this point. My neighborhood in West is not dissimilar... I get text messages when away from neighbors keeping an eye on my house, can't make it to the playground without my kids running into their friends, end up chilling on someone's front plot with a beer in hand chatting with neighbors when out for a walk, there's a running exchange of food between our household and about 5 others...
Appreciate your read on things! My vision of those early days smacks of some suburban bias for sure.
Regarding "loneliness epidemic" discourse, I think some of this also comes down to costs.
Of my cohort, some of my friends have access to hosting spaces, but lots don't. I've hosted things (birthday parties, etc) at my place for friends because they live in a studio apartment, don't have enough money to rent a venue, and were worried about weather.
And those kinds of gatherings are a big part of how you transition people from "acquaintances" to "friends" if you don't have other third spaces. It's lower social stakes to invite someone to a gathering that was already happening rather than to take the perceived-to-be-vulnerable step of inviting someone to hang out one-on-on (or two-on-two in the case of "couple friends").
Lots of adults these days never figured out how to expand their social circles intentionally, which is a skill that takes actual effort to cultivate.
In re hosting spaces, I think there's been a dramatic change in expectations about what is an acceptable "hosting space" over the past 40 years. (Picture photos of middle-class household parties in the mid-1980s or earlier and how claustrophobic they look compared to what virtually anyone would be willing to tolerate for a party today.) Whether that is upstream or downstream of lack of socializing, I don't know.
People hosted parties in 1100 square foot Levittown houses that had six people living in them.
Modern apartment floor plans are a related issue that I've personally struggled with. I live in a unit in a newer building that has no dining room, just a two-seat breakfast bar between the living room and the kitchen, even though I consider it a fairly large place at around 1000 square feet. I would have rather had something different, but I made a cost/benefit decision based on what else was available in the area. I've had four people or so over for dinner, awkwardly standing over that stupid breakfast bar, so where there's a will, there's a way, but it's not great.
Sometimes I look at listings for older housing, like two-flat units in Chicago, and see them gracefully fitting two or three bedrooms plus a dining room and a foyer into a space smaller than my house. Open concept is poison.
That's definitely accurate. I also suspect that a lot of people bought a bunch of stuff during covid that they didn't really have a place for, but haven't updated their mental model of what "clean enough for others to see" looks like to account for things like a treadmill in the living room.
I think it's also easier to host if you're already used to doing so. Some of that's because you're more likely to have cleaned (to whatever standards you feel you need to in order to host) recently. But it's also just the case that things are easier when you practice them.
I've talked to a lot of people who express that they wish they were the sort of person who hosted dinner parties, but they "just aren't". They tried once, and it was a huge hassle, and how does anyone ever manage?
And the first time I threw a dinner party, it was a huge hassle! But I pushed through it and did it again, and that was a bit easier.
I wish the US had the ecosystem of bars/restaurants with all you can eat private rooms for 2-3 hours at a fixed price per head that makes it easy for people in Japan to host impromptu social gatherings without worrying about how big their house is, or what state of readiness it's in. I'm not saying it would solve the loneliness/lack of socialization problem, but it would be nice.
I think most people have more square foot per person in their homes than people in previous generation. But standards have risen even faster.
This always feels like an excuse to me. My wife and I hosted Thanksgiving for 12+ in our 1-bedroom NYC apartment, you don’t need a huge amount of space. Maybe people are legitimately embarrassed to do that or something, but that seems like the problem rather than the access to space.
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 know many people who were completely certain there was no way Trump would ever get reelected.
That said, odds are he'll probably win as long as no more stuff comes out, and as long as he doesn't make any big own-goals, which isn't a totally safe bet. The GoP probably has oppo they are saving for an opportune time.
Platner also has zero experience campaigning or dealing with a politician as effective as Collins.
IOW, lots of things can happen.
It's funny that pundits (like Ron Brownstein and Matt here) suggest that the way out is to grab one of the candidates from the gubernatorial primary. Like this guy Troy Jackson who rolled up an impressive 21% and 45K votes (compared to 72% and the 153K votes Platner got).
If these guys are so good, why did they lose the gubernatorial primary?
I get it that if something truly horrific comes out about Platner then the calculation can (and probably should) change and the fear is that the Republicans are waiting to drop the bombshell after the closure date in mid-July. Well, Democrats can do oppo research too and if there is a huge hidden skeleton, Democrats should be just as good at finding it as the Republicans. So go ahead and do it! Every day there is silence suggests maybe it's not going to happen and there's lots of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Whichever faction of the Democratic Party lost the primary and intra-factional disputes last does this same thing.
I think it's fairly obvious that candidates without severe personal failings are, all else equal, better than ones with them, but it's hard to find a lot of candidates who don't seem like they've wanted office since the age of six and have no personal failings. Half the people who've wanted office since the age of six have serious personal failings, FFS.
We'll see how it goes...
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.
By went to war, you mean negotiated, right? Not assassinated/kidnapped their leadership?