Soriek
5mo ago
I feel like this sort of commentary underlines just how provincial and illiterate our academic class has become. Tolkien didn't invent a new sort of hero, he was instantiating a very old (and very Catholic) sort of hero that 'most people today outside of the trad-right are simply unfamiliar with because modern culture is overwhelmingly secular and liberal. "Your will Lord, not mine, be done." Is just one of those sentiments that just doesn't compute to someone who's entire worldview/life-experiance has been filtered through multiple layers of irony, post-modernism, and their Jewish Poli-Sci Professor's theories about Freud, Nietzsche, and "the will to power". But it computed to Tolkien, and it evidently computed to a great deal of his audience.
It might be relevant that Tanner Greer himself who made the argumment is a devout Mormon. I think there's something more specific happening that I maybe did a bad job getting at, but tried to articulate downthread. It's not that Tolkien invented the reluctant hero, but that in the modern YA trope (that's taken off since then) you see a different kind of post-divine revelation, post-destiny, post-prophecy kind of relationship between purpose, power, and morality.
I think a hero who accepts their mission specifically because it was handed down from God is of a very different nature, this is someone who believes there is an absolute authority that can and will be answered to. The moderns protagonists don't believe that, which is part of why they're so uncertain about their mission and nervous about accepting. It's the very breakdown in authority and trust that partially defines their reluctance and their character. The fact that their worlds are exagerrated, disfigured pastiches of totalitarian governments and corporations is another sign their stories are reflecting the psychology of people inhabitating a highly modernized world rather than calling back more traditional themes and motifs.
Separately, surprised to see you joining the crowd here blaming modern malaise on the Jews. I thought you were pretty solidly in my camp against that kind of vulgar count-the-jew philosophy.
Soriek
6mo ago
After their internal ballot, 55 people people voted against him in what was supposed to be a secret vote. Freedom Caucus folks then published their numbers and encouraged people to call in and harass them, and most of them fell in line. According to a few sourcs, including Tim Burchett, Jordan allies were even threatening to support primaries against holdouts. So idk what's really at his disposal, but he's certainly not afraid to fight for it.
Soriek
2mo ago
Hey sorry, I’ve been pretty slammed the past few weeks and haven’t had time to really sit down and grind these out, they take a while.
I do have to admit my enthusiasm has been waning a little lately, here and on forum in general. I’ve never been really into the culture war side of things, but I like the userbase here and noticed a lot of people like to talk foreign policy, so this was an attempt to create a central place for that kind of discussion. The hope was for TT to develop into something more community driven / self-sustaining without me, if users were into it. But after nine months it looks likely we won’t reach that; I think last week had zero posts and today has one. Which is fine, if people’s interests just lie elsewhere, not every swing is a hit.
Soriek
3mo ago
North Korea
Kim Jong Un says he no longer wants to reunify with South Korea:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country would no longer pursue reconciliation with South Korea and called for rewriting the North’s constitution to eliminate the idea of shared statehood between the war-divided countries, state media said Tuesday.
The historic step to discard a decades-long pursuit of a peaceful unification, which was based on a sense of national homogeneity shared by both Koreas, comes amid heightened tensions where the pace of both Kim’s weapons development and the South’s military exercises with the United States have intensified in a tit-for-tat.
Not that all that much progress was happening towards reunification before, but still I guess its newsworthy.
North Korea has also sent its Foreign Minister Choe Son Hui to Russia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. In the west this has raised suspicions on North Korea provided more weaponry for Russia in the Ukraine conflict.
Soriek
7mo ago
It should be noted this was long after PP funds were banned from being used for abortions, so moderate Republicans got smeared with trying to cut funding from all the other services PP provided to some several million low-income women. And then as now, Democrats had the Senate so there was a limit to how conservative any viable budget could be.
Soriek
3mo ago
Pretty much just paraphrasing our founder:
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges”
-George Washington
OG approved.
Soriek
10mo ago
How many people feel strong romantic connections with their partners? I feel like I experienced this in my first few relationships but not really in the decade since then. I'm not really clear whether you're supposed to still feel a spark in adult relationships or whether those are just irrational young love feelings that don't really pop up again, and most healthy adult relationships are just based on finding someone who's compatible and nice.
(continued from OP)
The Dutch Empire
The Netherlands is the strongest example of America forcing an empire into actually decolonizing. Why? Because the Netherlands is our greatest foe and must be destroyed at all costs we were fighting a prestige battle in southeast, first against Japan and then later against both the Soviet Union and the PRC, and support for decolonization was the currency that purchased regional alliances. Public opinion on Dutch repression had soured everywhere as well, within the American public and even within the other major colonial empires, and after the Indonesian nationalists crushed a communist rebellion they cemented their reputation as a potential anti-communist bulwark within the region. The Netherlands having outlived its usefulness and dragging down public opinion everywhere, America threatened to cut off Marshall Plan funds unless the Netherlands agreed to decolonization. America allowed the Dutch to keep West New Guinea for another little while and eventually encouraged them to pull out of there as well. Don’t worry though, we coup’d Indonesia’s anti-colonial leader shortly after and helped them genocide all the leftists.
Suriname negotiated directly with the Dutch for their independence; America was not involved.
The Belgium Empire
Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC all achieved independence without American intervention. See below comment for more detail on the DRC.
The Portuguese Empire
In 1944 the US agreed to respect Portugal’s sovereignty over its colonial possessions in Africa and even restore its control over East Timor in exchange for gaining a military base on the Azores. Following the war Harry “I have always been an anti-colonialist” Truman, focused on Soviet containment, greenlit Portugal into the Marshall Plan and NATO and “never regarded the existence of the Portuguese colonial empire as an obstacle to the establishment and maintenance of good relations with Lisbon”. When India tried to kick Portugal out of its remaining enclaves, the Eisenhower Admin formally recognized those territories as Portuguese “provinces”.
As Soviet expansion in Africa spread, and the Portuguese repression of the Angolan rebellion grew to be an international embarrassment, the Kennedy Administration stopped selling them weapons, started voting in favor of unsuccessful UN Resolutions for Portugal to “consider” reforms in Angola, and started offering support to the UPA (later the FLNA) (notably, in their fight not against Portugal, but against the Communist Soviet backed MPLA).
This was short lived, however, during the Cuban Missile Crisis America tracked Soviet submarine movements using the Azores base, which further cemented its importance. Shortly Kennedy reversed course, allowed weapons shipments to be sold to Salazar in 62 and 63, barred American officials from communicating with Angolan rebels, and even sent Portugal aid packages. The US moving forward abstained in UN resolutions or voted in Portugal’s favor. Little changed with LBJ; under Nixon’s “Tar Baby Option” of not opposing the white minority governments in Southern Africa, a treaty was concluded in 1971 reestablishing American support for Portugal and supplying generous grants, loans, free military advisory officials and new weapons sales (against the will of Congress).
The Empire eventually ended in 74 not because of the US but the Carnation Revolution, in no small part driven by a population sick of being taxed and conscripted for colonial wars. The US was not involved in the coup and rather looked upon it warily as the possible beginnings of a Communist state. In the wake of the revolution “the United States, unlike the UN and the majority of Western European governments, did not exert significant pressure for rapid decolonization,” and even encouraged a two year transition period rather than the immediate independence demanded.
The Spanish Empire
The Americas won their independence from Spain with no intervention on the part of the US (who promptly took a bunch of Mexico’s newly independent territory). America fought against Spain in the 1898 war to “liberate” its colonies, and then just colonized them ourselves and ruled over them from afar for decades to come, often brutally suppressing their attempts at independence. We also later separately conquered and occupied for decades the former Spanish colonies of Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, and otherwise coup’d any anti-colonial leader we didn’t like and frequently supported brutal dictators that would be our own puppets. In my opinion all this is near fatal to the idea that America opposed colonialism because we ideologically identified with the victims; we literally just were a colonial power ourselves.
Conclusion
Tl;dr There are two things America can’t stand in this world: anti-colonial leaders trying to deny our hegemony, and the Dutch.
America played the primary role in decolonizing Indonesia (including West New Guinea), may have played an important but uncertain role in Egyptian independence, and advocated half heartedly and unsuccessfully for the decolonization of the Portuguese Empire and British India, but mostly tolerated or supported both Empires. In situations where America supported decolonization, it looked much less driven by ideological dogmatism or anticolonial sentiment than by a desire to maintain a good reputation among other countries that could drift to the USSR and China. More frequently America continued to sustain diplomatic relations and military support for colonial empires and their successor states long after public opinon in Europe and the rest of the world had turned on them. The overwhelming majority of colonies earned their independence without American intervention but due to factors like sustained counterinsurgency, being too costly to maintain, dwindling public support, and dwindling benefit to the metropole. In other areas America literally just colonized countries ourselves.
Soriek
7mo ago
I will strongly oppose any increase/stealth increase (raising the payroll cap/widening the tax base) in taxes. Raising the payroll cap is just kicking the can down the road as the CBO mentions
I'm referencing the second of the two options they describe:
The second alternative would apply the 12.4 percent payroll tax to earnings over $250,000 in addition to earnings below the maximum taxable amount under current law. The taxable maximum would continue to grow with average wages but the $250,000 threshold would not change, so the gap between the two would shrink. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the taxable maximum would exceed $250,000 in calendar year 2039; after that, all earnings from jobs covered by Social Security would be subject to the payroll tax. Earnings under the current-law taxable maximum would still be used for calculating benefits, so scheduled benefits would not change under this alternative.
Soriek
9mo ago
I have no idea what if anything would actually make poor and rich students equal, but here at least they'ree suggesting a more modest metric of hitting "funding required for adequate test scores," as estimated by the the Department of Education's National Education Cost Model.
Medium- and high-poverty districts are spending, respectively, $700 and $3,078 per student less than what would be required. For the highest-poverty districts, that gap is $5,135, meaning districts there are spending about 30% less than what would be required to deliver an adequate level of education to their students. (Conversely, the two low-poverty quintiles are spending more than they need to reach that benchmark, another indication that funds are being poorly allocated.)
I don't understand the cost model well enough to know if it makes sense or not.
Soriek
5mo ago
Poland
A follow up to the TT from two weeks ago on PiS PM Morawiecki being allowed to form a government as the top vote getting party. He has now (to nobody’s surprise) failed a vote of no confidence by 266 to 190, bringing an end to Pis’ long dominance.
With the formalities out of the way, this paves the way for Donald Tusk to be sworn into power, with 248 votes in favor vs 201 opposed in his first vote.
Besides rebuilding bridges with Brussels, Tusk’s campaign pledges included promising to allow abortion – subject to a near-total ban under PiS – until 12 weeks, declaring termination, IVF and contraception fundamental rights, and allowing civil partnerships for same-sex couples…
Brussels has withheld billions of euros in Covid-19 recovery funds in an increasingly bitter row over Poland’s rule of law, and has required reform on issues such as judicial independence and green energy.
Tusk has now officially been sworn into office with his cabinet:
Tusk’s Cabinet includes a former foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, taking up that role again. Adam Bodnar, a respected human rights lawyer and former ombudsman, was tapped as justice minister, tasked with reversing the previous administration’s actions that gave it more control of the judiciary.
Tusk named Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, an experienced politician and agrarian party leader, as his defense minister. For Kosiniak-Kamysz, 42, Poland’s security is safeguarded by its membership in NATO and the EU. In the face of war across Poland’s border, he has vowed to focus on strengthening the defense potential of the armed forces.
The new culture minister is Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz, a former interior minister under Tusk and the great grandson of “Quo Vadis” author Henryk Sienkiewicz, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. His first task will be to free state media from political control that the previous government exerted.
Also
The confidence vote was delayed when a far-right lawmaker, Grzegorz Braun, used a fire extinguisher to put out the candles of a menorah during a Hanukkah celebration dedicated to Poland’s Jewish lawmakers of the 1920s and 1930s.
what?
The guys who authored the paper testified before a maximally hostile Congress last week. I was ready for them to get torn apart and surprisingly it left me less convinced of the criticisms against them.
The pangolin thing, as covered by the Public Substack and other places I've seen it repeated, seems to be misframed. The scientists never claimed that it was the actual origin of Covid; they explicitly says it's a different virus, just similar in structure. The argument is that no one (including any of the lab leak proponents, to my knowledge) seems to think the pangolin coronavirus variant, 600 miles away from the Wuhan lab, was also man-made, which raises the odds that a virus very similar to Covid-19 could arise naturally.
The distance in time between the scientists saying they weren't certain about how something like the Receptor Binding Domain in Covid-19 could manifest in nature, and them changing their minds and publicly supporting a natural origin theory, wasn't an abrupt turn around of a few days, as alleged, but rather forty five days. During that timeframe the pangolin samples with similar RBDs were discovered, raising odds that this kind of thing could be naturally evolved. In contrast, the site being studied in the EcoHealth proposal was genuinely different than that in Covid-19.
Beyond that, the main thrust of their argument is that the first samples were found in the Hanan market and the first cases in the area surrounding the market, not in the areas surrounding the Wuhan Virology Center. As far as I know nobody has contradicted this, though I don't really follow it and could be wrong.
I think the concerns about how the process was politicized, especially by bueaucrats worried about conflict with China, are still valid - welcome to government though. Claims of a vast Orwellian conspiracy on part of our neoliberal overlords I think are a little unconvincing given that our government has also argued that it probably was a lab leak. In fact, right now six agencies have weighed in and none agree - the DOE and FBI think a lab leak was most plausible, four other agencies plus the NSC suspect natural origins. Almost all of them have framed their results with "low confidence," but you can pick whichever result you like and still say the government agrees with you.
I personally consider the lab leak somewhere between possible and likely, but don't really care where Covid came from. Even if it was caused by research conducted by China and America, the two most powerful countries on earth are obviously not going to pay any kind of penalty.
Transnational Thursdays 6
I generally won’t cover Europe here, mostly because I don’t follow it that closely, so input from our European/Europe-follower user base would definitely add value.
Guatemala
Guatemalan elections will be going to a runoff between the establishment center left and the progressive left. Former First Lady Sandra Torres has come in second place in the previous two elections and will be squaring up against the anti-corruption progressive Bernardo Arevalo, son of the famous Juan Jose Arevalo, the first democratically elected leader of Guatemala. Their parties only received respectively 15% and 12.2% among the 20+ other contenders, so it’s hard to predict how the final tallies will shake out, though polls favor Arevalo (Torres is unpopular in the populous Guatemala City) which would be a major upset. Notably, Zury Ríos, daughter of the former dictator Efrían Ríos Montt and previous frontrunner, did not make it to the runoff. Corruption and fraud accusations have abounded, as well as frustration with the government’s decision to bar popular anti-establishment candidates in the lead up to the election:
with nearly one in four ballots either spoiled or left blank, Guatemalans expressed discontent at the electoral process and the decision to bar early front-runner, businessman Carlos Pineda. Pineda urged supporters to spoil their ballots after he was ruled ineligible.
Interestingly, his exclusion (he was previously the frontrunner) will likely mean that Guatemala will have some flavor of left leaning government no matter who wins, which is probably not what the current conservative ruling party was hoping for.
El Salvador
Bukele is officially running for reelection, against the law of El Salvadoran constitution. This is not much of a surprise from a leader who sent the military into the legislature after they voted against him and has frequently ignored his own Supreme Court. A court packed with his allies has ruled that it’s cool though, and his substantial popularity renders the legal technicalities kind of irrelevant. He will be going against a big tent coalition of the former mainstream right and left wing parties.
Honduras
Related, Bukele’s crackdown on the gangs has attracted supporters across Central America (the now failed Zury Ríos in Guatemala ran on copying his security approach) and Honduras is one glimpse at what that looks like. They have declared a state of Emergency which suspends some constitutional rights and deployed the military in their war against the gangs. Escalating violence in the conflict has also led to curfews being declared in two cities. Left wing President Xiomara Castro originally actually ran on a policy of demilitarizing the police, but following a deadly gang-driven prison riot she has officially handed over control of the prison system to the military.
Sierra Leone
The reigning President Maada Bio won another term with 56%, narrowly passing the 55% threshold needed to avoid a runoff election. Watchdogs have called the count out for fraudulence and the “US, UK, Ireland, Germany France and EU Delegation” have acknowledged irregularities but seem to be tacitly supporting the outcome. Violence has been scattered but not severe.
Mali
Mali’s military junta held a referendum for a new constitution, supposedly to restore the democratic process. The referendum passed with 97% in favor; Observers are unimpressed:
The election observer group MODELE said that participation at midday had only been about 21% of eligible voters. The mission also cited dozens of polling stations that were closed due to security problems, disenfranchising people. The referendum also did not include Mali’s entire northern Kidal region.
Also, the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) is one of the longest standing and most dangerous UN Missions. Originally deployed in 2013 to help the government with the Taureg rebels in the northeast, relationships have deteriorated with the government following the 2020 military coup. The junta government famously forced France to leave last year and earlier this month demanded that MINUSMA leave as well. However, the sudden departure has now been delayed. While I can’t find anyone saying it specifically, I feel like the government has to be hedging their bets till they see how the situation falls out with the Wagner Group, who have largely come to supplant France and even now control many of the Uranium mines the French previously guarded so closely. Following the events of Saturday every host country is curious to see if Wagner will remain a stable partner, (you know, stable-ish), especially in the Central African Republic where the ruling regime largely owes their survival to Wagner.
Pakistan
Pakistan draws nearer to securing a $6 billion bailout from the IMF after passing a budget mostly in accordance with IMF recommendations. They have been in economic turmoil since the coup, of course worsened by the floods, and have been kept afloat by assistance from “ China, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates”.
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party, PTI, continues, with many arrested or driven to switch sides. You can hear him speak about it if you want.
Japan
Japan has reestablished Korea as a most favored nation trading partner, hopefully finally ending their last four years of tension. The source is Japanese reparations for Korean workers and particularly for Korean comfort women during the Empire. Japan’s position is that they already paid reparations during the Park Chung-Hee era; Korea’s position is the money went to the ruling class rather than the victims (though supposedly a lot was invested into the economy); Japan’s counter-position is, well, you shouldn’t have done that. The current nationalist party in Korea is ironically more pro-Japan and has worked towards reestablishing their relationships; security collaboration will increase as well.
Japan is famous for dropping Prime Ministers at the drop of a hat, making the Italian government look like a beacon of stability in comparison (in fairness, in Japan it’s mostly the same party), but astoundingly PM Fumio Kishida has survived both the assassination of Abe and the attempt on his own life, and looks poised to become one of the more important post-war leaders for his security policy. Kishida in his role of Foreign Minister and Defense Minister was known as a dove, but has ironically presided over the largest military buildup in post war history, with a projected 67% increase by 2027. His ability to push this through is of course shaped by general rising fear of China, but imo is also partially because his historical aversion to conflict has left normal critics reassured he won’t abuse a larger military. He has also strengthened ties with the QUAD and as mentioned, is heading towards security reconciliation with Korea as well.
Saudi Arabia
The Yemeni War is not yet over, but both Saudi Arabia and the Houthis have largely honored their ceasefire, and for the first time in seven years Saudi Arabia partially relaxed its blockade to allow a few Yemenis to make the Hajj. The Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Iran also met again recently and affirmed their desire to continue diplomatic relations. China brokered the deal and Saudi Arabia also recently completed a“$5.6bn deal with a Chinese company to manufacture electric vehicles” and is trying to boost Chinese tourism, along with its larger push to become a sports hub. Relations with other countries seem mostly positive-ish lately, as these things go for the House of Al-Saud, with Riyadh even reversing its previous stance and allowing the ascension of Syria back to the Arab League.
I've had a sort of secondary theory about the Argentinian economy for a while that he seems to agree with, that Argentinians are so traumatized by past crises that they'll bank run at the slightest sign things are weakening, making their currency way more fragile to any shock than a normal county's would be. Macri did implement reforms after all, he cut quotas, tariffs, currency controls, FDI restrictions, price controls, and subsidies, and things did get better for a while, then everyone freaked out the moment the US raised interest rates and things deteriorated again.
Soriek
6mo ago
Was the idea of raising wages discussed?
Yeah, this was the crux of the side debate, where Democrats pointed out in the past they've tried to pass greater funding to allow for raises, but Republicans have been opposed. The rule that 80% of federal funds must go to direct workforce is also an atetmpt to ensure that wages are prioritized, if not having raises literally mandated.
If there truly are not enough workers who meet the legal requirements, then maybe the law should be changed to stop limiting supply. The federal government could make a "shall issue" style law for getting qualified as a caregiver.
I think this would be ideal, but both Democrats and Republicans are less likely to pass laws that are seen as targeting state level regulations in absence of a very compelling reason. It happens of course, but getting a serious majority on board with removing a masters degree requirements for specific industries for twenty seven states or whatever is a harder legislative sell than just passing funding laws or regulations that aren't directly challenging state govs. Significantly, this wasn't even discussed by either party in the hearing, I've just happened to hear Senator Cassidy say it in another context.
Or leave it up to facilities and customers to negotiate the level of training they require.
Training and cert requirements are also mostly handled by state law so unfortunately there isn't a ton of room to directly negotiate for providers.
Soriek
7mo ago
Yes wealthy people would be paying a larger share under this sytem and the benefits would be distributed downwards, like most other taxes.
Soriek
9mo ago
As others have pointed out, there's some sleight of hand in what people mean when the say "homeless" and what the causal factors in those populations are.
I don't think so. There's more than enough room to talk about how to deal with whatever percent of homeless people are the most destructive (probably mental institutions) and also talk about what drives homelessness overall. Being homeless is bad in of itself and whether or not every homeless person bothers us, they are all suffering.
Cities like Los Angeles, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle have much higher amounts of these total defectors than other cities. The relevant difference between these and other cities is that total defectors are more or less tolerated in those cities.
Correlation wise, the relevant difference (not just among these three cities but for cities across the country) seems to be the cost of living. NYC and Chicago are much less permissive than Seattle and Portland, clear out homeless encampments and arrest public drug users regularly, and it hasn't made their homeless situation much better. To my understanding the really significant legal difference in the west is just that they can't clear homeless encampments unless they have a place to resettle the homeless too. This seems reasonable enough (and clearances still happen anyway); if you don't have anywhere to put the homeless then you're not actually getting rid of an encampment, just moving it down the road. Likewise, states don't have homelessness because of public drug use (or you would expect states with more drug addicts to have more of this), they have public drug use because their drug addicts live outside.
Soriek
9mo ago
It feels like you're focusing on one sort-of part of the enlightenment's legacy - technocratic administration (which is way older than the enlightenment) - and breezing by the part that's really relevant to people: individual rights. In this respect the American revolution and attendant liberal movements throughout the west were genuinely pretty radical.1
You seem to describe the French revolution as more authentically enlightenment-based for giving less respect to individual rights, but those rights were of course very much enlightenment ideas, in many respects the core foundation of a lot of its philosophy. There is little uniquely innovative or "enlightenment" about the fact that the Jacobins were despotic centralizers or that they persecuted religion - pre-revolutionary France was also a famously centralized despotic regime that did things like kicking out 100% of its Jews and having the government sieze their property cuz maybe they caused the black plague.
It's more than fair to say, as @IGI-111 does downthread, that it's debatable whether scientific government can be given credit for the industrial revolution. There is still, however, a strong argument that individual rights and liberalism can be given that credit. At least that's the Diedre McCloskey argument, that an ideology that promoted individuals having enshrined freedom of expressions and rights to participate in self-governance leads to a world where you have way more people innovating, way more publishing, vastly increased dissemination of knowledge, infinitely increased numbers of people pushing at the doors of scientific and industrial progress. I don't know if I fully buy the argument myself, but anyone arguing against the enlightenment needs to be able to fully extricate all of its credit for the industrial and commercial revolutions to challenge the strongest arguments in its favor.
The other approach, of course, is to bite the bullet and say the post-enlightenment world has brought prosperity, but it wasn't worth what we lost. That's gotta be argued on its own terms though.
1 By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity that Wikipedia describes as a:
philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge, and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe. More simply stated, Deism is the belief in the existence of God, specifically in a creator who does not intervene in the universe after creating it, solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority.
I couldn't say for everywhere, but in hospitals, the largest driver of healthcare spending, at least, a lot goes to administrative bloat: "A Harvard Business Review analysis shows the healthcare workforce has grown by 75 percent since 1990 . . . But there’s a catch. All but five percent of that job growth was in administrative staff, not doctors."
For the broader healthcare sector including VPBs and Pharma, as with all rent seeking systems, a fair amount presumably also goes to shareholders (excluding nonprofits) and top line executive compensation.
Why cut off the end of the quote?
That's the form I got the quote in. It doesn't change it though, this is the standard pro-immigration stance - ever hear people argue that we should prioritize indecent people known for their bad conduct?
Yes, the infamous Free White Men of Good Character. That's who he was addressing
Significantly, the 1790 Act placed no restrictions on immigration whatsoever, from white or nonwhite nations, which feels like the opportune chance to have done so if they wanted. Either way this is not a particular contrast with our late 19th century poet. A mostly white crowd is who Lazarus was addressing as well, writing during the era of mass European immigration. It is well known that Washington was himself a racial supremacist and I think it's good we've moved past his bad ideas (he himself felt that the slavery he profited from was immoral and hoped that it would be done away with). My point is that being welcoming to poor immigrants isn't some commie Jewish revisionism, it's been an attitude present in political tradition from the very start - many of our other founders expressed similar sentiments.
Soriek
5mo ago
India & the West
Reportedly the United States apparently stopped India from assassinating another Sikh separatist in June, this time not in Canada but actually on US soil.
An Indian government employee who described himself as a “senior field officer” responsible for intelligence ordered the assassination of a Sikh separatist in New York City in May, U.S. prosecutors alleged Wednesday.
The government employee, who was not named in the indictment filed in a federal court in Manhattan, recruited an Indian national named Nikhil Gupta to hire a hit man to carry out the assassination, which was foiled by U.S. authorities, according to prosecutors.
The court filing did not name the victim, but senior Biden administration officials say the target was Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the New York-based Sikhs for Justice, a group that advocates the creation of an independent Sikh state called Khalistan within India.
I remain wildly uncertain of how to think about all this. It seems so out of character for the Modi government to be placing hits in allied countries, but I can’t think of much reason why the US would lie here. In every other sense the US has bent over backwards to pull India into its orbits, giving them no strings attached weapons, GE engines, and so on, without even a promise to shift position towards Russia at all. Why jettison all that now? (a question for both sides).
How does the IRA affect Pharma rearch and development?
When we covered the Inflation Reduction Act a year ago some people expressed worries that the Medicare price setting provisions would discourage pharma research and development. Scott makes such a case in this old post. Yesterday the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee held a hearing to examine just that question titled “At What Cost: Oversight of How the IRA's Price Setting Scheme Means Fewer Cures for Patients" (The Republicans run the House so they get to narrative-set here). Normally EC in general and this subcommittee can be counted on to be fairly bipartisan but the focus was on a partisan bill, so there was a lot of calling the price setting “a mafia-style shakedown” vs rants about corporate greed and so forth. Anyway, I’ve tried to break it down into what I think were the relevant sections.
How does it work?
There are two broad categories of drugs, small molecules and biologics. The IRA offers patent protection periods of nine years for small molecules and thirteen years for biologics. After that Medicare basically gets to set the price; if companies refuse to negotiate / accept then they can be taxed on gross receipts starting at 65% and going up to 95%. There are is an “orphan drug” exclusions for drugs targeting under 200,000 people to ideally avoid reducing investment in rare diseases.The only drugs that will be targeted are the top ten most expensive drugs covered by Medicare, which generally means costing a minimum of $400 million annually.
This is projected to save Americans about $100 billion over the next ten years.
Right now only the first ten drugs are being targeted for negotiation, so we’re still very much in the beginning stages of understanding how this will work.
Will it Reduce Innovation?
This is really the main question and I didn’t feel like it was satisfactorily answered, but ultimately I wasn’t convinced that it will.
The basic idea is since after your patent period you’ll make way less profit, people will invest less. But, of course, you still get around a decade of being able to raise the price as high as the market can bear and all the profits that come with that. As was pointed out, the ten drugs being targeted right now have made between $15 and $57 billion each, so investors certainly got their nut. America is the only country to not negotiate prices and drug companies have median net earnings twice as high as non-drug companies, so needless to say they make quite a bit more profit than is normally needed to sustain an industry.
The Republican aligned witnesses say there have been 24 announcements of drug companies saying they are discontinuing research in certain categories. They were unclear what their sources were for a lot of claims (one guy said he did an internal poll in his company) but I managed to connect one claim to a consulting company called Vital Transformations that claims “Had the IRA been in place beginning in 2014, we estimate the reductions in revenue on the impacted drugs to be up to 40%. Because of this, between 24 and 49 therapies currently available today would most likely not have come to market and therefore not available for patients and their providers”.
The Democrat aligned witnesses point out that drug companies discontinue certain drugs all the time and it doesn’t mean it’s related to the IRA, even if it’s politically convenient for them to say so. They cite a Congressional Budget Office study (I’m more inclined to trust this than the Vital Transformations pdf tbh) that concluded drug innovation would only fall by 1% over thirty years. Brookings Institute seems to agree that the discrete announcements of drug discontinuations are not reflected in overall industry trends:
For the first form of investment, pandemic-era spending on the development of vaccines and therapeutics to address COVID-19 resulted in record investment in R&D in 2021 that remained essentially flat in 2022. In the first quarter of 2023, major pharmaceutical manufacturers such as Pfizer, GSK, Sanofi, Bayer, Gilead, AstraZeneca, and Novartis noted increases in their R&D spending, and little in the way of specific concerns were noted that the new price negotiation program would inhibit their company’s growth or investment in new therapies.
More recently, second quarter earnings calls by major publicly traded pharmaceutical companies describe continued positive projections for future earnings and product development. Most companies note that they are carefully assessing the implications of the prescription drug provisions of the IRA, yet they consistently express optimistic views about their longer-term future. For example, Novartis announced that expected future growth allow them to initiate an up-to $15 billion share buyback, while maintaining the flexibility for continued strategic bolt-on acquisition deals. Likewise, Johnson and Johnson completed a $8.5 billion share repurchase in the first half of 2023, and its CEO expressed excitement about future innovation and confidence in the near term and longer-term performance of the firm. Similar sentiments were echoed by GSK, Bristol Myers Squibb, and AbbVie.
Will it reduce research in rare diseases?
The IRA has its “orphan exemption” for drugs that apply for rare diseases that affect small (<200,000) numbers of people. However, you can only apply to one rare disease to be eligible, if you have a drug for a common condition that later gets tweaked to target a rare disease, you don’t qualify, nor if you have a drug that treats multiple rare conditions. Some critics suggested this would reduce investment in multiple rare drug therapies. The category of drugs that target multiple rare diseases is small (about 7% of a random sample) and rarely gets anywhere near the threshold of sales that would qualify you to be a top ten drug targeted by the IRA - anything under $200 million is automatically exempt and your average hovers realistically around $400 million.
Which raises the question: why do we even have the orphan exemption at all when we’re by definition only talking about blockbuster drugs? In this study, the drugs that would qualify for the orphan exemption were similarly profitable as qualifying drugs for common diseases, which is kind of the only result you would expect.
Will it delay the release of drugs, specifically rare cancer drugs?
This was a specific claim because the CEO of Roche Genetech said he would delay the release of an ovarian drug because it would lose out more under the IRA. The counter-argument was basically the same as before about drugs being discontinued all the time, and decisions about whether to bring a drug to market or not are usually made years in advance for broader market reasons. The moment you get a patent your years of exclusivity are ticking away, so no one would choose to lose all private and public sales on an-already finished drug specifically because of expected reduced public profits thirteen years later. If anything the introduction of a limited time window for max profits would encourage companies to release drugs faster to take advantage of that window. In general the incentive also remains to do research in rare cancers because you need to pass a lower threshold of efficacy to get a drug approved.
Why would we expect R&D to be first on the chopping block?
One witness also pointed out that because pharma spends only 10-20% on R&D and 20-30% on marketing, plus have pretty gonzo stock buybacks, etc, it’s not clear that a reduction of profits would have to come from income. I’m not sure about marketing - presumably they’re already spending an amount they think brings in more sales and funds the business. However, the witness also cited that the five biggest pharma companies spent $13 billion more on shareholder compensation than they did on R&D, which is much less obviously connected to direct business success. As mentioned above, drug companies have median net earnings double non-drug companies, so there is still likely more than enough to still handsomely award investors. Also, in a time where they will be making less on existing drugs, if anything it makes more sense to invest in new drug lines.
Why the thirteen year vs nine year difference?
One witness was just hellbent on talking about how small molecules were discriminated against by the four year gap in patent protection, to the point where he would just insert it no matter what he was being asked. You can read the argument written out here. They replied by quoting “the industry” (the pharma industry, I guess?) saying that Biologics are more capital intensive, take longer to research, produce, and bring to market, and have overall higher risk, so it makes sense to give them more incentive. I’m not sure how the witness’ predictions square with the fact that small molecules mergers and acquisitions triple in the year following the IRA vs the year preceding it, or that current forecasts than investment in small molecules is expected to double by 2031.
Do Americans or Europeans have better access to drugs?
Democrats pointed out that according to the Kaiser Foundation 1 in 4 Americans say they struggle to afford drugs, and 3 in 10 Americans report not taking prescriptions because they couldn’t afford them. Pretty bleak!
Republicans responded by referencing a Wall Street Journal article arguing that medicine approval is faster in the US and citing a study that said:
According to the Galen Institute, 89% of new medicines introduced between 2011 and 2018 were available in the U.S. compared to 62% in Germany, 48% in France and 40% in Ireland.
It’s worth debating that if you have a greater share of drugs on the market, but a larger portion of your population can’t afford them, it’s not totally clear who has better access.
How much does the government drive innovation?
Democrats pointed out that according to one study, almost all drugs (99.4%) approved in the last decade had NIH funding at some point in the process. Generally this means NIH handles the early, riskiest research, “de-risking” the field for private investment afterwards. Another 24% of drugs had NIH funding during late stage trials. ” Given that taxpayers are playing a large role in the R&D itself, they claim it seems improper to also expect taxpayers to pay sky high rates for the finished product. Since Republicans are proposing cutting the NIH budget by $2 billion, democrats accused them of not actually caring that much about innovation and mostly being schills for pharmaceutical lobbyists.
Soriek
9mo ago
The CCP famously even spared and converted the last Emperor of China, who was widely considered to have gladly sold out his countrymen to the Japanese (and so was not merely hated for being a monarch).
In fairness, this was less about their philosophy on forgiveness (his wife, the empress, died in a CCP prison) and a very large part to do with them learning from the backlash the Bolsheviks experieced after killing the Romanovs.
There are some incredible, SNL-skit worthy scenes of Puyi trying to reintegrate to normal life and going to get an ID from the local government office that go somewhat like:
Bored DMV-esque Employee: Name?
Puyi: Yaozhi
Employee: Former occupation?
Puyi: Uhhh Emperor of the Celestial Kingdom of China
Employee: Haha no seriously though
Soriek
10mo ago
Transnational Thursdays 5
Added coverage from other countries is strongly encouraged! The more the merrier, I’m hoping for this to be a collaborative thing.
Colombia
President Gustavo Petro ran on a populist platform that’s been a staple of many parts of Latin America but uniquely absent in Colombia; industrial licensing, reasserting national control in face of fossil fuel multinationals, land redistribution, pension & healthcare form, etc. However, his coalition remains in the minority and while Petro rode a wave of discontent to the Presidency, it now seems to be his turn to grapple with protests against his reforms, particularly a form of Medicare for All and some labor laws that reduce employer flexibility with short term contracts. In light of his corruption scandals the conservative-dominated lower house froze progress of three of his major reforms bills on pensions, healthcare, and labor The latter of the bills, which would have reduced working hours and increase overtime pay, was ultimately rejected.
In a poll conducted in May by Invamer, 73% of Colombians said they believed things were getting worse, compared to just 48% in August of last year. Petro received an approval rating of 50% in a poll conducted in November by the same company, but dropped to 34% in the latest poll conducted in April. The recent poll had a margin of error of plus-or-minus 5 percentage points.
How you feel about Petro’s reforms is up for debate; Colombia has avoided the worst of the Latin American experiences of populism, never enduring a period of hyperinflation and genuine economic collapse, and has made some good progress reducing poverty. However, it remains a seriously poor and extremely unequal country - there is certainly significant progress and reforms to be made.
Argentina
The three Argentinian parties have released their platforms (1, 2). The peronist Frente de Todos renamed itself Unión por la Patria for some reason and will probably be led by either the Interior Minister or Kirchner’s former VP. The neoliberal Juntos por el Cambio (the likely winner imo) will likely be led by either the mayor of Buenos Aires or the former Security Minister. Libertarian La Avanzada is running its founder Javier Millei.
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone is about to have elections, which are generally tense affairs. The previous election went to a runoff and one candidate publicly (and falsely) accused the incumbent party of staging Rwanda style genocide against his party/ethnic group, and threatened to not accept the results if he lost. A credible threat coming from a man who overthrew the government twice in the 90s and ran with a campaign slogan of “By Force”! Luckily he won, so I guess we’ll never know what he would have done.
Or maybe we will, because he’s running against the same guy and isn’t popular outside of his ethnic support base. He ran on a campaign of women’s rights and free education for all, but the rollout of the school program has been difficult due to the government’s tenuous control over the rural majority of the country. An IMF fuel subsidy established by his predecessor also expired right after he came to power, rocketing up fuel prices and everything downstream. Falling cost of living has led to several protests throughout his rule which have been put down mercilessly. The opposition party has accused him of rigging the electoral commission, which is probably true but it’s also true that the opposition is probably going to commit electoral fraud in some way as well - let’s just hope it stays peaceful.
Nigeria
Following new President Bola Tinubu’s termination of half a century of fuel subsidies, Nigeria has been wracked with internal protests. His hope is to redirect those funds into progressive priorities like education and healthcare but currently risks large strikes, coming at a time when the government has had to devalue their currency yet again. Fortunately, the government and labor unions have now finalized an eight week timeline for them to negotiate a new minimum wage to make up for rising gas prices, which will ideally avoid that scenario.
Tinubu continues to shake things up, following his arrest of the head of the Central Bank by removing the head of the government’s anti-corruption body ( in fairness, all four of the previous leaders were also removed for corruption themselves) and replacing “all Service Chiefs [the heads of the army, navy, and air force] and the Inspector-General of Police, Advisers, Comptroller-General of Customs from Service.”. National security is one of Tinubu’s largest priorities so it will interesting to see how he reshapes his administration’s security approach.
Uzbekistan
Uzbekistan passed a referendum in April with 90% on a new constitution which both (nominally) expanded civil liberties as well as significantly increased the power of the office of the Presidency. The referendum passed with an implausible 90%, expanded term limits from 5 years to 7 and allowed President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to run for an additional two terms in what will likely be similarly controlled elections. Mirziyoyev, himself only the second leader of the country (his predecessor just being the former Soviet secretary who held onto power till his death in 2016), came to power via appointment and a shambolic election, and seems to be quickly moving to reestablish the authoritarianism of his predecessor.
India
More on the ethnic conflict in Manpiur:
The last straw that broke the camel’s back came when the Manipur High Court directed the government to make its stand clear on the Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status within four weeks. Several protest rallies were organized under the auspices of All Tribal Students’ Union, Manipur on May 3 in various hill towns to impress upon governments in Imphal and New Delhi that the tribals see in the Meitei demand an attempt to secure ST status over and above the three affirmative action benefits they already secured under other categorizations as yet another means to snatch tribal lands.
These protest rallies were peaceful. Yet they were met with counter-blockades by various Meitei civil society organizations in various parts of the valley. Meitei miscreants burned down the Anglo-Kuki War (1917-19) Centenary Memorial Gate at Leisang village and beat up Kuki boys returning from a protest rally. Such incidents escalated into mob fighting. As the Meitei mobs burned down some Vaiphei-speaking houses in Kangvai village later, the ethnopolitical conflict spread like wildfire and transformed large parts of the state into killing fields.
Also, Modi will be visiting the United States today. Observers expect Biden to downplay human rights abuses under the BJP and try to coax India as a meaningful partner in their larger conflicts with China and Russia.
Iraq
Iraq approves its largest budget ever, with the goal of rehabilitating public infrastructure and creating some 600,000 new public service jobs (unemployment was a large focus of the protests over the past few years). Critics accuse the government of running up fiscal deficits irresponsibly, and in denial of projected likely falls in oil revenue, as well as trying to use patronage to secure their power (for instance, the Iranian aligned PMF forces were recently given over a million acres of land that will be distributed in contracts for these development projects). On the flip side, the government also just completed a deal with Qatari companies to help build power plants with Iraq, which would reduce its dependence on Iran (currently 30-40% of energy needs).
How do we assess how much of the Gazan population supports Hamas, or at least this conflict?
They won their only election with 44% of the vote and haven’t held any since. I keep hearing people say they hold supermajority support but the most recent polls I see, conducted on 500 people, show a more mixed bag:
Even the 57% positive opinion may be an overestimate, given that other polls show 75% of Gazans are afraid to criticize Hamas.
I have no idea how credible these polls are, or where other people’s numbers about supermajority support come from, this is mostly an open question.
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