Nils Gilman
@nils_gilman
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Historian of the intelligentsia. Adored by little statesmen & philosophers & divines. SVP of Programs @berggrueninst , Deputy Editor @NoemaMag . Tweets are my own
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Last Seen Profiles
America would be an infinitely better place if all white Southerners had the same attitude towards the Confederacy that most contemporary Germans do towards Nazism: be happy your ancestors lost a terrible war on behalf of an awful cause
Must have been an "awkward" moment for Angela Merkel to sit in ceremony as the Allies commemorated D-Day that broke the back of Nazi Germany.
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If you didn’t like the era of US hegemony, globalization, multilateralism & economic interdependence, you’re going to love the emerging multipolar order that is defined by great power rivalry, revisionist state behavior, economic protectionism, and resurgent populist nationalism.
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During the first third of the twentieth century, Germany had by far the greatest research universities in the world. The Nazis destroyed them in 1933, and 90 years later, they have yet to recover: only one German research university today ranks among the global top 50.
“The real culture war is not about wokeness but about fear and secrecy and control…The culture war is not symbolic. It is not a parlor game. It is real people and their livelihoods, in institutions that are far easier to strip than they are to rebuild.”
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One year ago, not a single American had yet died of Covid. Current US death toll is 460k+.
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This may be the single most mind-blowing statistic of the last decade.
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Beijing is about to discover, just as DC did in the 1970s/80s, that loans to the Global South for infrastructure, made during a time of low real interest rates & a commodity boom, are not going to be paid back. As before, this will be painful for everyone.
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The average age in the Apollo mission control room was 26.
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As of right now, Hurricane Irma is forecast to make landfall directly at Mar a Lago
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Or who wished Ghislaine Maxwell well... or who enthusiastically endorsed Roy Moore... or who...
Btw if you're outraged by the sexualization of underage girls, I'll assume you're not a fan of the guy who bragged about barging in on underaged beauty contestants in a state of undress
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“If the Party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled & tripled turnout down in GA, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t…”
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It’s hard to exaggerate the level of irreality and denial among DC foreign policy types about what the internal political conditions of the country mean for the prospects of US “global leadership.”
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A major mistake in the 1990s understanding of neoliberalism—propagated by scholars as different as S. Strange & D. Yergin—was that it entailed "the retreat of the state" relative to markets.
In fact, what it really was about was the decline in power of LABOR relative to capital.
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Those are called “trees”
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What’s truly amazing about this piece is that Trump’s allies all concede the premise that Cohen has evidence that Trump is guilty of serious crimes. The only debate is whether Cohen will “flip.”
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A central reason why we have forever wars is that there are huge vested interests and careers that depend on endless foreign adventures. A systematic policy of restraint would render most of these people and institutions irrelevant.
People arguing that Biden should’ve renounced the withdrawal deal and stayed in Afghanistan include the Presidents of the CFR and Brookings, AEI’s foreign policy head, two of Trump’s national security advisors and a helluva of a lot of other foreign policy insiders.
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I’m all in favor of a confiscatory top marginal tax rate, but unless we are committed to (a) applying the same rates to corporations, and (b) shutting down tax havens, it’s not really going to curtail the income, wealth and (most crucially) power of the super-rich.
Setting a tax rate of 60-70% on earnings above $10 million isn't a radical idea--it's a PROGRESSIVE TAX SYSTEM. RADICAL is giving millionaires/billionaires 100s of thousands in tax cuts for them 2 buy more yachts & issue stock buybacks for shareholders
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All of us who have studied the conditions that generate coups, genocides and the like are looking at the United States right now with utter horror.
"What we're seeing here in the States right now is almost a pre-revolutionary situation where you have different population groups moving apart from each other, losing confidence in the state, arming up, getting organized," says David Kilcullen.
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There’s really nothing like running the Dalton-to-Harvard-to-Brooklyn gauntlet to set you up as the voice of socialism for your generation
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The appropriate penalty for anyone involved in staging this, according to the plain language of the Hatch Act, is a $1000 fine and a 5 year ban from government.
It’s a sight I never before imagined: the South Lawn of the White House transformed into the stage of a political convention.
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Anyone who studies US foreign relations is familiar with this 1972 dialogue between Nixon & Kissinger.
Still, it remains shocking to read them casually discuss killing tens of thousands of people, as if it were just a betting strategy in No Limit poker — which, in a way, it was.
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You know what else has "billions in losses annually"? Schools. Parks. The military. Courts. The road system. The foster care system. Emergency services. Pandemic preparedness planning. Etc.
That's what the government is for: to supply things under-provided by the market.
The USPS is viewed favourably by 91% of Americans despite billions in losses annually
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Why would one feel either pride or shame regarding events in which one had no agency? The very idea implies a narcissistic form of historiological cathexis.
When I contemplate historical events, I often feel horror or awe or wonder or puzzlement, but never either pride or shame.
It’s actually simple: If you can feel pride in things you didn’t personally take part in, then you can feel shame in things you didn’t personally take part in. Some of you are motivated to make this hard, but it’s only hard bc you want the glory of our history but not the burden.
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Rumsfeld’s notorious epistemological categories (“known knowns”, “known unknowns,” “unknown-unknowns”) missed the most important category: “unknown knowns” – the things we already know but choose to “unknow” because we don’t want to deal with the consequences of that knowledge.
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What is it about Tech that makes people who get rich in in it — particularly GenX techbros — so often think that their financial good fortune somehow qualifies them as general intellectuals (e.g. people with ideas about society and politics that anyone else should care about)?
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More Americans have now died in the COVID-19 pandemic than in all combat we have engaged in over the last half century.
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Having lived through the Clinton presidency, one of its weirdest elements was how the right regarded Bill Clinton as an anathema, when in fact he represented the victorious consolidation of their ideological crusade to dismantle the embedded liberalism of the post-New Deal order.
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Observation from visiting Beijing: Chinese elites have concluded that there's essentially nothing they can do to improve the US-China relationship, and they’re done bothering to pretend they’re interested in trying. And (given the rabid anti-China mood in DC) who can blame them?
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The real coronavirus class divide: a banker sitting comfortably at home while calling for “broad legal indemnification for employers against claims related to the virus” so that employees can’t sue if their workplace exposes them to illness.
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The Chinese economy has grown by an average of 11%+ for the last 40+ years, and yet not one Chinese economist has won a Nobel Prize in Economics. 😂😂
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The function of smart, talented kids at elite private schools is to legitimate the reproduction of “meritocratic” privilege for the children of wealthy donors and alumni who also attend
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Forecast: future historians will look back on the fact that none of the perpetrators of the Iraq War and the Global Financial Crisis were held to account as a political disaster on par with allowing the Confederate leadership to escape essentially unscathed
#WeNeedBetterElites
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I had a prof in college who liked to say, “I read the news section of the Wall Street Journal to find all the information I need to refute the claims made on the op-ed section of the Wall Street Journal.”
What the actual F*%K? So
@WSJ
breaks the "Facebook Files", working with a whistleblower for months to help expose the platforms' threats to the public. But then they print an Op-Ed full of lies and conspiracies from the former President, who isn't even allowed on FB or Twitter?🤬
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Short of a landslide victory for Joe Biden in the upcoming elections, the United States may be headed for a severe constitutional crisis. Here are six strategies for averting the worst outcomes. My latest, on the Transition Integrity Project:
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To anyone who has studied the McCarthy era, the current fusion of anti-intellectualism, red-baiting, white supremacy, and sinophobia is entirely familiar, indeed cliché
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San Francisco this morning — normally hills are visible in the distance
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If another country had armed militia groups occupying state capitols across the country, attempting to intimidate elected lawmakers into pursuing their preferred policy line, and the police just simply tolerated it, we would know what to call that:
A failed state.
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It's amusing when a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, who seems to believe that having tech money somehow makes him a general intellectual, decides to demonstrate that he is embarrassingly ignorant about the topic he is hyper-overconfidently weighing in on:
The same government report that announced 339,000 new jobs in May also announced 440,000 new unemployed persons, causing unemployment to rise from 3.4 to 3.7%. Since the labor participation rate did not change, both cannot be true.
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Neoliberalism was not merely or even mainly an ideology.
Rather, it was a governmental practice — that is, a form of statecraft — defined by the effort to extend market rationality to all relations (human & beyond).
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This is the most important scandal unfolding during the Transition:
The lame duck President has issued an executive order that aims to destroy the legal basis of the federal civil service, and thus the operational capacity of the US government.
This is an extremely important story that isn't getting the attention it deserves.
After GSA initiated the presidential transition, I warned that there would still be new Trump sabotage to come. This is exactly what I was concerned about.
Here's what's happening-- 1/
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George Bush's Global War on Terror (e.g. the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars) will end up costing more in financial terms than the Interstate Highway System, Apollo Mission, the Vietnam War, the F22 Raptor program, and the 2008 Financial bailout COMBINED.
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The University of California enrolls more Pell Grant eligible undergrads than UChicago + Duke + Stanford + Northwestern + *the entire Ivy League* enroll undergrads, period.
There’s no private sector substitute for high quality public higher education.
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28th Amendment:
* Abolish the Senate & transfer all powers to Congress
* Direct popular election of POTUS
* Require all federal elected officials & cabinet officers to place assets in blind trust
* Change SCOTUS appointments to 18 year terms, with one appointed every other year
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6 months ago today, POTUS declares, “We're prepared, and we're doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”
Since then, an average of 1000 Americans a day have died of COVID-19.
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If you want to understand why Northern Italy ended up the first western epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, this is the place to start
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Turns out Dr. Suess already figured out what "America First" is all about, 75 years ago
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A fairly incredible thread from the Treasury Secretary. We are entering a new era.
Likewise, we must address another long-standing challenge: our underinvestment in public infrastructure and institutions that drive productivity and support workers and families.
To address this, I believe we must reorient our framing of US fiscal policy.
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I’d go bigger: Any successful person incapabale of appreciating that their success is MOSTLY the result of luck—defined here as “factors other than their own individual virtues & talent”—is a pathological narcissist who is unaware of the social context in which they operate
I am suspicious of any successful person who refuses to admit that a significant factor in their success was luck.
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One job of history is to re-create the sense of how surprising historical events were to those who took part in them: things that seem overdetermined in retrospect often felt highly contingent to the actors at the time & things that seemed to them immutable turned out not to be.
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What we're seeing with Trump's current political strategy is something very similar to the maneuvers of a corporation pulling out the stops to delay the inevitable coming bankruptcy. As with the corporate bankruptcy, one can't really predict what the final straw will be.
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One thing that amazed me when I was a senior administrator at Berkeley (in the mid-teens) was how many of the faculty — who by any measure enjoy one of the sweetest gigs in the history of human employment — were deeply embittered and/or cynical about their jobs.
I feel like I would really excel as a tenured professor with a very low teaching load at a prestigious university. Anyone else feel this way?
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Back in the late 1990s, I was talking to an Italian friend about what a disaster Berlusconi was, and he observed, ruefully, “The problem is not Berlusconi; the problem is Italians.”
I think about that remark a lot.
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“I was already doing small penis humiliation with a lot of these guys, so jumping to political humiliation wasn’t that much of a stretch.”
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A reminder: "Drain the swamp" never meant getting rid of DC's entrenched corruption, it always meant purging competent professionals and experts.
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The Venn diagram of the fervently “anti-woke” and vehement racists is close to a ⭕️.
While the cultural left has its excesses, anyone who makes it their life work to combat what is basically an egalitarian project (however misguided) is almost certainly someone with an animus.
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Today might be a good day to remind folks that the concept of a “liberal international order” was invented in the 1970s to beat back third worldist demands for a “new international economic order.”
Likewise “rules-based order” was a 1990s neologism to describe American hegemony.
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The verdict on Churchill is and always has been clear: He was terrible about almost everything he ever did politically, except on the single biggest issue he or anyone else ever faced, which he got completely right
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The notion that life was peaceful and pleasant before the advent of civilization and government is a total (and pernicious) myth. It was solitary, poor, violent, and short.
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It’s almost impossible to exaggerate how much the humanities (as well as parts of the social sciences, like anthropology) have theoryfucked themselves
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The difference between the Chinese shipping masks to the rest of the world and America diverting other peoples’ masks to ourselves will be, I suspect, one of the longest lasting geopolitical memories of the pandemic
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Ulysses S Grant? Really, folks?There is literally no situation that the Left is incapable of fucking up with overreach.
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Unless the Dems win both Senate runoffs in Georgia, this will be the first time since 1989 that a newly elected president takes office without his party in control of the Senate, and thus able to seat a cabinet of his choice.
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"MAGA isn’t trying to get people to believe any one story. They’re just trying to sow doubt. If nobody can be trusted, if everyone is corrupt, then Trump [is] no worse than anyone else. Conspiracy theories alienate people from the democratic process."
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Remember sitting in history class wondering, "What would I have done if I were there?" What you're doing now is the answer to that question.
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Someone else pointed this out on here earlier, but it’s worth underscoring:
You might have noticed that you’ve stopped hearing people talk about the “alt-right”; this is because there is no “alt” anymore — the whole right has become alt-right.
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The purpose of this tweet—which is predicated on a lie—is to lay the groundwork for questioning & invalidating legitimate absentee ballots, thus creating a fog of uncertainty about the true electoral results, which will be grounds for him to refuse to relinquish the office.
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The post-Trump era hasn't been great for conservative media
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A hypothetical. Say you're on a dissertation committee where the student dies before publishing (or maybe even finishing). A couple of years later, you see someone else take that student's ideas and publish them as their own.
Do you have an ethical obligation to say something?
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The coming end of the right’s climate change denialism will not herald an embrace of climate liberalism but rather a far darker form of politics. My latest:
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The essential cognitive disposition of our era is to be pervasively hyperstimulated, but chronically bored
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We would not be the first democracy where the fate of the country comes down to whether actual conservatives, when forced to choose, prefer fascism or socialism.
If the choice is between living under liberals in a constitutional republic under the rule of law, or getting conservative policies from authoritarians subverting a constitutional republic and the rule of law, I will live under the liberals and fight within the system. /1
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What about a class that focused on texts published in 1944:
Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Von Mises, Bureaucracy
Drucker, Concept of the Corporation
Polanyi, The Great Transformation
Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
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“Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?’”
So close to getting it…
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People who get rich in, say, the oil and gas business, or in consumer packaged goods, or in hospitality (or whatever) almost never have such pretensions. There’s something about Tech, however, that somehow produces this effect. It would be laughable if it weren't also pernicious.
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These crypto ads remind me of the dot-com ads during the 2000 Super Bowl
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Everyone just experienced the hottest month in 120,000 years. But did you know that we also just set global records for both oil consumption & coal production?
For all the talk of “relative decarbonization,” the planet only cares about total carbon output
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“Republicans have become a party that believes in blanket impunity for the powerful — another sign that Republicans have abandoned their commitment to democracy and to their constituents.”
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Trump's defenders are facing a kind of political analog to the old adage that if I owe you $5, that's a problem for me, whereas if I owe you $5m, that's a problem for you.
It won't end well for them.
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1968 was much worse: the Tet offensive, POTUS effectively gives up, MLK assassinated, leading Dem candidate assassinated, Soviets roll into Prague, rioting at Universities across the world, France coming completely apart.
Then again, 2020 still has seven months left...
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The 4th of July is always a good time to remember Louis Hartz’s hilarious observation that the United States is the only country that believes both that it was born perfect and that it has continuously improved
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This is because the left critique of academia (“an engine of neoliberal elite reproduction”) and the right critique (“a hothouse of woke indoctrination”) both have a strong element of truth. The contradiction between these is coming to a head.
It’s hard to exaggerate the extent of elite academia’s hypocritical performativity
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One of the defining features of the 2020s is that the pandemic caused a shit ton of people to lose their damned minds.
This is obvious to everyone in a million micro interactions, but it’s so pervasive that people rarely remark on it.
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Flights between the U.S. and China
How it started. How it’s going.
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Chad Wolf should be prosecuted for serving illegally as head of DHS and for violating the Posse Comitatus Act. This prosecution should proceed even if he leaves office in January. There must be accountability.
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I don’t think this is hard to understand: these people don’t believe in public goods
A thing I find puzzling (it is alluded to in
@Noahpinion
piece on SF) is how 30y of tech business & thousands of millionaires have not been able to leave much of a visible imprint on SF: no new universities, theaters, libraries, cathedrals, museums, pedestrian areas, fancy parks.
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What we do know is that Sweden has had 5x as many per capita Covid deaths as Denmark, and 10x as many as Norway — two countries with essentially identical demographics, health care, and political systems.
One remarkable feature of our pandemic present is that Sweden kept its elementary schools open all spring -- what the rest of the world would love to be able to do safely now! -- but apparently did not study, model, or examine the experience in any systematic way at all.
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A year from now you will look back at March 2020 as the calm before the storm
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This is why I’ve been saying for years that BRI is less of a dastardly plan that an act of supreme and pernicious foolishness
The BRI feels like a replay of 1960s-style US development assistance: big focus on heavy infrastructure as the sine qua non of development, but predictably resulting in white elephant projects, environmental devastation, financial underperformance, and eventual disillusionment.
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Most hedonistic, decadent, debauched global city by decade:
1900s: Paris
1910s: London
1920s: Berlin
1930s: Shanghai
1940s: Casablanca
1950s: Singapore
1960s: Bangkok
1970s: Los Angeles
1980s: Miami
1990s: Moscow
2000s: New York
2010s: Dubai
2020s: ??
Thoughts?
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This is from 2006. Still, in calling murderous theocrats "part of the Global Left," Butler exhibits the same political blindness that Foucault did in celebrating the "spiritual revolution" in Iran in 1979. Bluntly: the banner of anticolonialism doesn't offer a moral blank cheque.
Intellectual insanity
Judith Butler: "Hamas and Hezbollah are social movements that are progressive and are part of the Global Left"
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As late as the 1990s, half the people world had never placed a single phone call in their entire lives. Today, more than 5 billion people (90%+ of adults) own mobile phones. It's almost impossible to overstate what a vast shift in collective consciousness this has facilitated.
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To anyone who thinks technological change is more rapid now than in the past, I offer you this picture:
Harry Truman, about age 26, working the family farm — who would go on as President to become the first (and so far only) leader to order the dropping of a nuclear bomb.
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More Americans have now died of Covid-19 than have died of HIV/AIDS
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Faculty fought MOOCs with boiling oil & boulders, claiming education could not possibly be delivered virtually. Now, they’re being forced to do it by force majeure & administrators everywhere are taking note.
3rd order impact of Covid-19: the end of the University as we know it.
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A brief thread on the genealogy of the concept of a “Liberal International Order.” 1/10
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The fear of a singularity-driven human extinction event is secularized eschatological nonsense, a malignant psychological byproduct of the unbounded messianic narcissism that prevails in certain precincts of Silicon Valley.
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A largely heriditary elite is anathema to the principles of meritocracy. But this much must be said: an elite that is secure in its prerogatives has a strong incentive to focus on the care and feeding of the system. Long thread: 1/10
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"A deeper worldview articulated by Barr and even by 😡 himself: The idea that the political enemy is so ruthless and existentially threatening that employing extraordinary and extralegal means to crush that enemy is justified."
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"You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston," he said almost sadly. "In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words."
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