Elizabeth Warren’s Corporatism

Corporatism” is one of the most misunderstood words in the political vocabulary. American progressives use it to indicate the domination of the state by business interests, when in fact it means something closer to the opposite: the subordination of commerce and industry to political mandates.

National Review

“Corporatism” and all other systems of centralized control are ultimately dependent on the virtue of the person at the top.  It assumes a “good king”.  Therein lies its defect.  A centralized system is not sufficiently “trustless” to survive a “bad king” who statistically must come along.

The doctrine of deep ecology declares that we must keep our hands off nature

I found this out firsthand years ago, when I had a conversation with the late Arne Naess, the Norwegian father of what is known as “deep ecology” and guru of the European Green movement. How seriously did Naess regard the divinity of Mother Nature? He told me that the eradication of smallpox was a technological crime against nature. The smallpox virus, he said—which had maimed, tortured, and killed millions of human beings—somehow “deserved” human protection.

City Journal

The upheaval in the West

There is a crisis of senescence in liberal politics. The reason Biden, Harris and Sanders are competitive is their ideas are all roughly the same age.

The strategy of recruiting fresh new faces like Beto, AOC cannot obscure the basic problem of intellectual decrepitude. The challenge facing the West is that a generational agenda has become the ex-future.

The current tide of political upheaval is basically rejectionist. It is a backlash against the 20th century nihilist project. It’s necessary but insufficient. The harder part, which comes next, is building a successor to the ruins of 20th century ideology.

The question every revolution answers is “what is man”? Once the answer was that he was free under the sky of truth, entitled to a personal relationship with eternity. Then he became a blob of tissue, a ward of history as represented by the state. What will he be now?

Whatever the answer turns out to be it will be stamped by the age of information, the first era in which humanity has had to explicitly account for reality of ethereal things.

Remember when the Internet meant freedom?

The simulation, presented at an industry fair in China, offered a rare look at a system that now peers into nearly every corner of Xinjiang, the troubled region where Kashgar is located.

This is the vision of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible — that China’s leaders are investing billions of dollars in every year, making Xinjiang an incubator for increasingly intrusive policing systems that could spread across the country and beyond. …

The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants; tracks individuals and analyzes their behavior; tries to anticipate potential crime, protest or violence; and then recommends which security forces to deploy, the company said.
On the screen during the demonstration was a slogan: “If someone exists, there will be traces, and if there are connections, there will be information.”

New York Times

Remember when universities were about academic freedom? How is this different in principle, from the hate speech filters being developed with the help of data fusion? Or is it just a matter of degree, a question of how far you twist the dial?

One of the most interesting features of the Chinese system is it allows authorities to create “virtual cages”. In an IOT world you credit card, phone, car etc can automatically stop working or flag you should you stray from the authorized zone.

Perhaps if we don’t have coarse-grained walls enclosing nations we will wind up with fine grained walls built around individuals. We will live in a world “without borders” but the drone will flag you if you try to enter any locality without the right digital token.

Escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing are wiping billions from the net worth of China’s richest surveillance tycoons.

The billionaires behind Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. and Zhejiang Dahua Technology Co. have watched their combined fortunes sink by more than $8 billion since March 2018 as shares of both companies sank on speculation of potential U.S. sanctions. The losses deepened on Wednesday after reports that Donald Trump’s administration is considering blacklisting the surveillance giants, in part because of their alleged role in human rights violations

Bloomberg

Power? No, Thanks, I’m Good

Most people are happy to live their own lives, content in the miraculous experience of being alive. But a significant minority are happy only if they are leading other people’s lives. They feel nothing but what is underfoot.

The wish to have power over others is altogether alien to me; I just don’t get it, any more than I get why anyone wants to have kids or play Settlers of Catan. Even sexual fantasies based on power dynamics don’t particularly appeal to me. Why would I want to boss other people around? What would I make them do? My taxes, maybe? It just sounds awkward, and like a huge hassle. I don’t even like being waited on by people I’d rather have a beer with; I’m uncomfortable holding the meager (and mostly illusory) power of grades over my students.

NYT