Musings–one of many
Class warfare
I’ve recently discovered Joan C. Williams, who is making the best arguments I’ve seen so far about the current political moment. Her new book Outclassed seems interesting but a bit too much for me to get into at the moment. She has a TED Talk, and for once this is a TED talk I consider “worth spreading”: We won’t fix American politics until we talk about class.
In the talk, Williams uses two examples to illustrate the class divide. One of them is abortion rights. She explains that, for her, as for many women in the professional elites, motherhood was something that could be delayed so that professional goals could be pursued.
A contrasting point of view, born of a Twitter polemic (heh), comes from Evgenia Kovda:
I grew up with the idea that you can be a mother and a woman and have a career or an art life and be independent of the earning capability of your husband because of things like socialized childcare, healthcare, and leisure activities for kids. It might sound utopian, but all this existed in the USSR and has remained somewhat in place in Russia today.
Evgenia and her husband Yasha are Americans emigrated from the late USSR. They run their website Nefarious Russians, and often make interesting points. A recent one is comparing Donald Trump to Boris Yeltsin: liberalizing the country into the hands of oligarchs, while enriching himself.
Pandemics, vaccine skeptics, and unforgiven experts
My previous post is on the book The Premonition by Michael Lewis, about a collection of people working in public health who shaped the response to COVID. Several public health workers and scientists have received death threats and have needed police protection for their role in lockdown and masking.
It is a scary time. There seems to be impatience with scientists and technocrats, and at the same time a curious tolerance of witch doctors and snake oil salesmen such as homeopaths, wellness gurus, CEOs of AI companies, or unqualified people who get into scientific/technical policy.
Speaking of which, I liked the following article motivated by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
What the fuck is a vaccine skeptic
What is skepticism? In my lifetime as a word-nerd, I have known “skepticism” to refer to a sort of stubborn insistence upon rigor and evidence in place of things like dogma and “common sense.” A skeptic, by those terms, is someone who questions what they are told. Crucially, a skeptic actually questions, as in seeks answers. A person who merely refuses to learn what can be known is not a skeptic, but rather an ignoramus; a person who raises questions but does not seek their answers is not a skeptic, but a bullshitter.
America these days
A former DOGE engineer explains in a short audio segment his experience there:
“I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was,” Sahil Lavingia told NPR’s Juana Summers.
He was since fired.
Former DOGE engineer shares his experience
Not as much on-the-nose, this delightful article from Jacobin talks about historian Paul Schroeder: The Conservative Historian Every Socialist Should Read.
A few snippets:
International politics is deeply hostile to democratic intervention. At least part of the reason for this is that stability rather than equality or justice is the guiding norm of international relations.
What motivated Schroeder’s support for negative Austrophilia was a belief that order rather than justice was the guiding principle for any international state system. This was a classical conservative position borne out of fear that utopian demands for redress could only further violence and instability. Though the Habsburg Empire was a flawed state by most metrics, for Schroeder the important thing was not to overthrow or remove states that are imperfect, but rather to operate with a realism about the potential political vacuum that a state can hold at bay by its existence.
If stability was a product of historical learning, then the process of historical forgetting for the United States in the post–Cold War era set in well and truly during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Schroeder considered this intervention an instance of straightforward imperialism. Its effects on the international state system were, he argued, disastrous. Schroeder characterized this breakdown as a “fatal leap” from hegemony — by which he meant occupying the position of “first among equals” — to empire.