I’m from the midwestern U.S., lived in Minneapolis for three years while I was in law school, and have many friends there. So, events in the Twin Cities have been much on my mind lately.
In reading on the subject of politics, I try to read across the center-left and center-right. Here’s what got my attention over the last few days:
[Read More]Francis Fukuyama, “The Morality of a Mafia Boss”:
Although Donald Trump is a habitual liar about issues big and small, he is occasionally capable of surprising honesty. His statement to a group of New York Times reporters, quoted above, is one example. It contains two largely frank and correct assertions: first, that American international behavior is constrained by norms (i.e. “morality”) rather than law; and second, that the applicable norms are his personal ones, and not necessarily those shared by other nations.
We should acknowledge the truth of the first, and be very frightened of the implications of the second.
Indeed, it is fair to say that international “law” is about principles and norms rather than domestic law that operates within a framework of legislation, interpretation, and application within a particular system of government. It is difficult to make positivist or formalist claims about international law. But that does not mean that the norms do not matter. I shudder to imagine the implications when the person principally responsible for U.S. foreign policy does not recognize any such norms.
See also Robert Kagan at The Atlantic, “America vs. The World”:
Americans are entering the most dangerous world they have known since World War II, one that will make the Cold War look like child’s play and the post–Cold War world like paradise. In fact, this new world will look a lot like the world prior to 1945, with multiple great powers and metastasizing competition and conflict. The U.S. will have no reliable friends or allies and will have to depend entirely on its own strength to survive and prosper. This will require more military spending, not less, because the open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases that Americans have enjoyed will no longer come as a benefit of the country’s alliances. Instead, they will have to be contested and defended against other great powers.
Americans are neither materially nor psychologically ready for this future.
Real attention cannot be measured with a stopwatch or an app, and real attention—human attention—is far deeper and more complex than the ability to get stuff done. We know this, of course: The lives we long for involve going for an undisturbed walk in the park with a friend, getting lost in a book or even simply daydreaming. Life is made of these things, and they are made of attention. Armed with relentless, increasingly artificial-intelligence-driven feeds, Big Tech is conducting a successful attack on that richness, that expansiveness, that freedom. To survive it, and to build something better, we need to rethink attention itself.
[Read More]
This is definitely me being a bit Pa Ingalls over here but: when you’re standing in the field of your long-form text-based platform and you see short form video over the horizon, it’s time to pack up the wagon.
Source: Max Gladstone: Why I Left Substack
I don’t know who Max Gladstone is, but I sure could relate to this feeling.
I had the idea that maybe I would get some thoughts organized today and post something.
I didn’t get that far. So, here’s a photo from today.
Since my family and I are quiet homebodies, we don’t have many New Year’s Eve traditions. My parents usually come to town to visit for a few days, and on New Year’s Eve, we all go out for a nice dinner, then relax at home by the fire. That’s what we did tonight, and it was lovely.
No resolutions, no retrospectives, no best-of-2024 lists. Just a moment to pause and visit with family. Maybe tomorrow we’ll watch the parade and bake some cookies, since we didn’t have time to bake any in preparation for Christmas.
Meanwhile, the seventh day of Christmas rolls into the eighth. (Anyone need some swans? Or milk?)
Reviewing Jordan Peterson’s latest screed, James Marriott sought to write a review for The Times of London in which no sentence could be taken out of context and used as a blurb to suggest that he thought the book might be any good:
The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as “bonkers”) appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad, We Who Wrestle with God repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word.
…
And even when I reached the end I couldn’t relax. I recalled that in an earlier chapter Peterson had intimated darkly that this book is only the first in a series. The stories of Job and Christ, he hints, “will be dealt with exhaustively in a forthcoming work”. Oh God. Please not exhaustively. I can’t take it.
Worth a read: Francis Fukuyama’s latest post at Persuasion, “A Letter to Elon Musk”:
In any event, firing government bureaucrats is not necessarily a path to greater efficiency. It is a widely believed myth that the federal bureaucracy is bloated and overstaffed. This is not the case: there are basically the same number of full-time federal employees today as there were back in 1969, about 2.3 million. This is despite the fact that the government now disburses more than five times as many dollars as it did back then. In fact, you can argue that the government is understaffed, due to relentless pressure over the decades to keep headcounts down.
Instead, Fukuyama recommends deregulatory measures, targeting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which stands in the way of many energy efficiency and infrastructure projects, and the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR), which impose mind-boggling burdens on government purchasing, along with providing better recruitment, training, professional development and pay for federal employees—de-bureaucratizing the bureaucracy.
Via Damon Linker:
I suspect there’s a lot more going on than just those two factors, but there’s no denying that they are important. (I wonder, though—what’s the source data set?)
One of the office spaces I use is expanding. The work will be done soon.