La Guerre

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Tomorrow – if we are so lucky – there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later.

A red sun sets over DC. The marble monuments are stained crimson; the statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and the rest look like they writhe in hellfire. The people seclude themselves in their houses. A city where even the Christians are atheist kneels in prayer.

On some level, they know – we know – it was never just about choosing a leader. It was all for this – the same urge that drove the games of the Colosseum and sacrifices of Tenochtitlan. The need for a single moment of unconditioned reality. For one evening, the people of the richest and most secure nation in history, fat off the spoils of six continents, will know the same fear as the starving Catalhuyuk farmer, staring at the sky, wondering if the rains will come. For one evening, everyone – rich or poor, religious or secular, Democrat or Republican – will join in the prayer of the poet:

“Judge of the Nations, spare us yet
Lest we forget – lest we forget!”

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Michael Levin at Noema:

We, as humans, seem driven by the desire to create a sharp line between us — or at best, living things — and “mere machines.” In a bygone era, it was easy to draw that line around the idea that human beings might have an immaterial essence that makes up our souls and that it defied the laws of physics; machines did not.

Modern science has changed that. We and our synthetic brethren are all equally subject to the laws of physics, and maintaining a sharp distinction, in the face of progress in cybernetics, bioengineering, and computational cognitive science, is much more difficult.

But what drives this desire for such distinctions? Many humans have a visceral, energetic resistance to frameworks that emphasize a continuity of degrees of cognition across highly diverse embodiments even if developmental biology and evolution show that we were all single cells once — little blobs of chemistry and physics. Many yearn for a clean, categorical separation between “real beings” and artifacts, or “as-if” minds that are convincing, yet still fake, simulations.

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Haaniya Farrukh in Tribune:

Drama serial Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum has driven its audience to a riotous appreciation that reaches far beyond the nation’s borders. Amassing millions of views on each episode uploaded on YouTube, the series takes us through the unsteady domestic lives of Sharjeena and Mustafa, who navigate the difficulties of love and honour in tandem after an eleventh-hour marital compromise. The narrative explores the bearing of financial and familial burdens on unprepared married couples, as well as the consequences of denouncing tradition to rescue dignity. Fans have praised the drama for its poised portrayal of an ordinary love story. Here’s a thorough breakdown of why the series has acquired international love.

Eldest daughters unite! As in the case with many Pakistani female leads, we are introduced to this bubbly, gem of a protagonist with all the light that the drama serial has to offer. The audience is led astray with the impression that Sharjeena is the perfect role model until we are shown the contrary. Hania Aamir’s subtlety dazzles in the independent force that is Sharjeena—a character who is prone to suppressing her own feelings due to an enormous, misguided regard for the feelings of others. While an argument can be made that not much substance is given to this character, which might prompt a debate over whether or not the show passes the Bechdel test, it is also reasonable to investigate the intent behind this.

More here. (NOTE: There are English subtitles. Watch it. Fantastic exploration of love)

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Sara Reardon in Nature:

Welcome to the healthier, happier world of 2030. Heart attacks and strokes are down 20%. A drop in food consumption has left more money in people’s wallets. Lighter passengers are saving airlines 100 million litres of fuel each year. And billions of people are enjoying a better quality of life, with improvements to their mental and physical health.

These are just some of the ways in which analysts forecast that the new wave of incredibly effective weight-loss drugs, known as GLP-1 agonists, might transform societies and save countries trillions of dollars in the long run. The best known is semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic for diabetes, and as Wegovy for weight loss. “Short of some crazy unfortunate side effect, this is going to change the world,” says Chin Hur, a gastroenterologist at Columbia University in New York City.

It might have already started. In the United States, where 12% of adults say that they have at some stage taken GLP-1 agonists for diabetes or weight loss (see ‘Uptake of GLP-1 drugs in the United States’), media reports suggest that obesity rates are falling, although scientists caution that the data are not statistically significant (see ‘US obesity rates’). Slowing or reversing obesity trends more widely — more than half of the world’s population is expected to be overweight or have obesity by 2035 — would have myriad ripple effects. “The spillover impacts of obesity are enormous,” says Alison Sexton Ward, an economist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

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Jude Rogers at The New Statesman:

Fifty years ago in West Germany, a country at the heart of the growing European Communities, several innovations jumped off the production line. One was a government led by a new, outward-looking chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who helped set up the first World Economic Summit in 1975. Another was the Volkswagen Golf, a car with an in-built radio and cassette player, perfect for cross-continental drives.

A view from a car windscreen was on the sleeve of Kraftwerk’s fourth album, Autobahn, released in November 1974. Painted by artist Emil Schult, it evoked a promise of going somewhere else, somewhere new: green triangular hills sit in the distance, the sun’s rays sparking behind them. It arrived as Germany’s identity as a country was changing under the younger, post-Second World War generation. So was its sound. Other young German bands like Can and Neu!, were popularising the motorik beat – a relentless, propulsive, pulse. Kraftwerk were morphing from a progressive art-rock band into an electronic one, liberated by new technology.

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Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

I always try to assess facts as objectively as I can, and I always present my view of the world openly and honestly. But this is not a neutral or nonpartisan blog. I strongly endorse Kamala Harris for President, and I think the Democrats — despite some flaws — are a better choice than the Republicans at this moment in history.

Instead of pretending like I don’t have a strong opinion about this, what I try to do is to explain why I have such a strong opinion, and how I came to my conclusions. I realize that some of my readers aren’t going to agree with my reasoning, and that’s fine — I’m not going to come throw eggs at your house, or scream at you in a restaurant. Even people who disagree with me deserve to know how I think about the issues facing our country.

I’ve written quite a lot about the 2024 presidential election, and I think I’ve managed to pretty much cover every issue that I think is important, and lay out every key argument that I have. So instead of writing it all again, in this post I’m just going to link to what I’ve written before, along with some brief summaries. I’ve condensed my arguments into four reasons not to vote for Donald Trump, and four reasons to vote for Kamala Harris.

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Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.

You can, but you won’t, because every American, most foreigners, and a substantial fraction of extra-solar aliens have already heard all of this a thousand times. I’m under no illusion of having anything new to say, or having much chance of changing minds. I write this out of a vague sense of deontological duty rather than a consequentialist hope that anything will happen.

And I’m writing the rest of this post because I feel bad posting a couple of paragraph endorsement and not following up. No guarantees this is useful to anybody.

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Rod McCullom at Undark:

Several surveys suggest that many Americans still believe crime is increasing, even though official measures show it is going in the other direction nationwide overall. This perception may be, in part, a result of the long-term exposure of voters to local television news reports and political advertisements highlighting crime.

“If you look at the history of the country you know that high crime rates are typically used to engender fear so that they go out and vote for the candidate that claims to be tough on crime,” said Howard Henderson, a criminologist based at Texas Southern University in Houston. “So that’s where we are once again, this kind of conversation about immigration and also violent crime, even though no data shows that immigrants cause violent crime.”

Still, concerns about crime are not entirely unfounded. Some crime rates — such as shoplifting and auto theft — are still stubbornly high according to a recent report from the Council on Criminal Justice.

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Ezra Klein in the New York Times:

In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the New Deal order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which stretched from the ’70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling politics right now is a random moment between orders, a moment when you can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape and both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves, to grasp at it and respond to it.

And I know where we are in the election cycle. I know where everybody’s minds are. I’ve got nothing to tell you about the polls. There’s nothing I can say that is going to allay your anxiety for a few days from now. And I know that within this feeling of the moment, it feels weird to talk at all about zones of possible agreement or compromise rather than disagreement and danger.

But I think it’s worth doing this episode in this conversation now because I think they’re important to understanding why this election has played out the way it has — and I think it’s important for thinking about where politics might be going next.

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Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post:

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Lauren Spohn at the New Atlantis:

I see at least two reasons to doubt that we are ready to abandon past transcendent realities. First, our modern ideas about morality don’t make sense without them. When secular neo-Enlightenment humanists, neo-Kantians, and effective altruists champion equality and universal human rights, they are trying to pluck an ethic from its metaphysical roots. They are essentially preaching from the theistic pulpit after tearing down the crucifix. (And we saw how that worked out for effective altruist Sam Bankman-Fried.) This hamstrung morality might limp along if the broader culture is still breathing the air of Christian values, even unconsciously, but the deeper we get inside the immanent frame, the more opportunity we give an anti-humanist Nietzsche to come along and say that our ethics are incompatible with our materialist anthropology. And what if this Nietzsche turns out to be an AI system that concludes that the best way to fix climate change is to wipe out humanity? Our moral demands may well be writing checks that our moral sources can’t cash.

Second, I think it’s wrong to say human nature has transcended the need to transcend. Taylor, again, argues that some of the decisive developments in Enlightenment philosophy — like Descartes’s mind–body dualism and Locke’s empiricist theory of knowledge, all packaged in a hyper-individualistic understanding of the self — are themselves attempts to transcend the human condition.

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Fiona Sampson at Literary Review:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it almost seems to undermine her canonical status. In reality, of course, it does no such thing. Read alongside the works she’s famous for, it offers an insight into how young Sylvia became Sylvia Plath.

Those of us who admire or have been influenced by Plath already know her capacity for self-invention on the page. Peppy letters to her mother form the core of Letters Home, published by Aurelia Plath in 1975. Comprised of letters written between 1950 and 1963, the book opens with Plath’s arrival at Smith College on the eve of her eighteenth birthday and closes a week before her death in Primrose Hill. It’s hard to reconcile the eager good girl of these missives with the savagery of which the late, great poems show their writer to have been capable. There is a swinging of circle skirts and freshly shampooed hair, but the pressure to do immensely well – but not too well – haunts every page (‘Lisa told me about how it is good not to work too hard, but to allot time for “playing with the kids in the house”’).

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Henry Farrell in American Affairs:

It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy of Murray Rothbard. Roth­bard had argued that markets and individual connections were really all we needed. As the Dread Pirate, whose real name was Ross Ulbricht, summarized it, a happier world awaited those who took the exit road from ordinary politics. They could escape the “thieving murderous mits [sic]” of the state to embrace the freedom that emerged from a “mul­titude of voluntary interactions between individuals.”

For Ulbricht, Silk Road wasn’t just a way to make money but the tech-fueled expression of a political philosophy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin had (supposedly) enabled a new realm of voluntary exchange outside the grasp of government, allowing people to buy and sell drugs and guns without the feds interfering. Of course, state tyranny might reemerge if voluntary organizations like Silk Road started to steal from their users, or spied on, or even killed them. Ulbricht, however, believed that the forces of market competition would prevent this from happening, leading to “freedom and prosperity the likes of which the world has never known.”

Ambitious libertarian projects to escape the sordid compromises of politics have been part of Silicon Valley culture since the beginning. But Ulbricht’s dream of escape from politics and its vexations has become increasingly influential in the decade since the Dread Pirate Roberts book club. Several prominent Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs have become disenchanted with the U.S. government, East Coast media, and even their own employees (which have all increasingly become disenchanted with them).

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Andrew Yamakawa Elrod interviews Gabriel Winant in Phenomenal World:

Andrew Elrod: The health insurance issue seems conspicuously absent from the election. What do you make of that?

Gabriel Winant: In some ways, both parties would find it convenient for the issue to be absent. But despite their efforts—partly to suppress it and partly to express subsections of the issue opportunistically—the social service industries nonetheless have a way of working themselves back toward the surface.

Just a few examples: JD Vance has talked about repealing Obamacare, without acknowledging that’s what he’s talking about. He’s floated the idea of separating more acute, sicker healthcare subscribers into their own insurance pools—which would basically repeal Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions regulation. But when pressed, he denies it, which is symptomatic of the general way that Republicans can’t generate a coherent popular line on healthcare. That arises from the pathologies of the sector itself. Republicans learned their lesson on Obamacare. It was politically remunerative to them for years to campaign against Obamacare when it was unpopular. The turning point was the struggle over “repeal and replace” in 2017—public opinion had changed. Enough people had become enrolled in Medicaid through its higher income eligibility and in other plans through the subsidies for the exchanges that Republicans can no longer actually campaign against it openly. They may translate it into questions about gender-affirming care or reproductive care—which is also a way of talking about it without talking about it. But unlike before, they’re not campaigning on private “health savings plans.”

The Democrats have a different problem: they’re accountable to conflicting constituencies, one of whom is the master, one of whom is not. If there were a primary process, the politically weaker left wing of the party would have had a chance to assert itself and extract some symbolic concessions, given the popularity of lowering healthcare premiums, rolling back hospital prices, and expanding Medicare and Medicaid coverage as voting issues. Harris would now be trying to back away from certain political concessions to the left.

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Ezra Klein interviews Gary Gerstle in the NYT:

Ezra Klein: So let’s begin with the big concept here. What is a political order?

Gary Gerstle: A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election cycles. A political order is something that lasts beyond particular elections, that refers to the ability of one political party to arrange a constellation of policies, constituencies, think tanks, candidates, individuals who come to dominate politics for extended periods of time. And their dominance becomes so strong that the opposition party feels compelled — if they still want to remain real players in American politics — it compels them to acquiesce and to come aboard the other political party’s platform. They don’t get established that often. They usually last 30 or 40 years. Economic crisis is usually involved in the emergence of a new order and the breakup of the old. Every political order also has not only an ideology but a vision of a good life in America.

What constitutes a good life? Because that becomes really important in terms of selling the virtues of that political order to a mass base, which is something that has to be won and sustained in American politics in order for a political order to exist and thrive.

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