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.
Soriek
1yr ago
Book Summary: “The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s” by William Hitchcock
Eisenhower got short shrift in his time - beloved by American Joe Normals but largely underappreciated by community leaders, historians, and other politicians, who bought into an image of him as basically asleep at the wheel, golfing while the Soviet Union launched sputnik. More careful history, coupled with recently released archival information, has revealed a portrait of an astute leader constantly manipulating massive operations behind the scenes. I’ll break things down roughly by domain:
Foreign Policy:
Despite being a Cold Warrior who castigated Truman for losing China and bungling the Korean War, Eisenhower mostly managed to steer clear of direct conflict himself. He immediately negotiated a detente in the Korean War, deftly resisted the surge of warhawk voices trying to get him to commit to war in Vietnam, and backed off China and the USSR from Taiwan and West Berlin.
In all of these conflicts Eisenhower often got buffeted from both sides by warhawks who thought he was playing nice with communists and by peace seekers who thought he was recklessly risking American engagement, but in each instance he protected American interests and diffused the situation without escalating to an actual war.
To highlight a case study of this approach, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 Eisenhower found both France and England had lied to his diplomats' faces and brazenly violated international law by invading Egypt. Much hung in the balance: the international order of “rule of law” that Eisenhower had worked so hard to create post-World War 2, the opinion of the Global Third World whose alliances would be so crucial in the Cold World, and the relationship between America and its allies, whether they would be allowed to betray America and still be supported or whether the US would assert itself as leader of the western world.
And nuclear war. This was a more real possibility than I think most realize - the Soviet Union was threatening to do anything necessary, and moreover was desperate to reestablish their credentials as an anticolonialst power a week after rolling tanks into Hungary. While the fact that Nasser later became opposed to America has caused many to criticize his move, in the context of the moment Eisenhower’s handling of the situation seems deft and reasonable. His decision to choke off Britain’s financing both legitimized the rules-based international order, established America as the post-war hegemon, and prevented a direct conflict between the four great powers with worldwide implications.
The Modern Warfare State:
The President who warned us about the Military Industrial Complex was well qualified to do so, seeing as he built it. Between World Wars 1 and 2 Eisenhower had been perpetually frustrated that America let its defenses atrophy during peacetime then rapidly scrambled to put it all together when a conflict emerged. His novel policy was for the first time to emphasize massive defense spending during peacetime to prepare for eventual conflict, and indeed he spent half the budget on defense, or roughly 10% of GDP:
Nuclear weapons were only one part of a grand strategy . . . NSC 162/2 demanded not merely more and bigger nuclear weapons, along with the aircraft to deliver those bombs; it also called for a robust intelligence network to analyze Soviet behavior, coupled with elaborate security measures to combat domestic spying. It outlined a nationwide manpower program, emphasizing scientific and technical training to serve military needs. It insisted upon military readiness through stockpiling and securing of vital raw materials and key industrial plants. The concept paper envisioned huge continental defense systems, with early warning radar and a large air force that could meet Soviet intruders. It called for the overhaul of military service requirements for American citizens, with longer tours of duty for draftees, inclusion of women into the armed services, and the establishment of civilians for maintenance work
The darker side of this is that Eisenhower also presided over the creation of the modern Intelligence Community, which under him led coups in Iran and Guatemala and prepared regime change for the DRC and Cuba. This set off a trend of replacing democratically elected leaders with brutal dictators that terribly damaged American prestige in the eyes of the Third World.
For a poignant example of the immediate backlash of this kind of spycraft, the CIA pressured Eisenhower relentlessly to approve the U-2 plane flights over the Soviet Union despite Eisenhower’s fears that it would jeopardize his attempt at detente. Indeed, on the eve of a joint conference between the two powers, a U-2 plane was downed. Kruschev initially assumed that Eisenhower wasn’t responsible, but instead of blaming CIA Chief Dulles for misleading him about the operation, Eisenhower took full blame for the decision. It was probably the responsible thing to do as a leader but it ruined any chance at a thaw in the Cold War.
A further irony is that a large reason for the perception of Eisenhower as an absentee President, golfing instead of governing, was that Americans had no idea these massive operations were happening behind the scenes. When talk started to emerge of a “missile gap,” no one knew that Eisenhower’s spies had been taking photos of Soviet missile sites for years and knew that those fears were overplayed; when events happened in far away corners of the world and Eisenhower seemed not to be acting at all, no one knew that his spies had already infiltrated the government and were busy at work.
Governing to the Center
Before Eisenhower, the political pendulum had swung from the archconservative nostrums of Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover to the bold, all-encompassing activism of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. Eisenhower, perhaps the least partisan president of modern times, sought to stop the pendulum in dead center. To be sure, when he ran for President in 1952, he thundered against the “statism” of the New Deal and its expansive federal programs. But once in office he adopted centrist and pragmatic policies that fairly reflected the preferences of most of his fellow citizens. Early on he made his peace with the New Deal, expanding social security, raising the minimum wage, and founding the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. He even suggested ideas for a national health insurance system. Eisenhower found a way to make the government work without making it too big; his interstate highway system is a good example. Though building its thousands of miles of road cost billions of dollars, most of the money came from user fees in the form of a gas tax, used to replenish the Highway Trust Fund. The burden on the US Treasury was relatively light.
In this commitment to “not burdening the Treasury,” in almost each year Eisenhower fully balanced the budget. He did this by keeping Truman’s wartime high taxes in place, including a top marginal tax rate of 90% (on a tiny sliver of the population). In this he was castigated by the right flank of his party, but he kept the nation’s fiscal health in check while also building the most powerful military on the planet, millions of homes, and the modern highway system. Arguably he kept the pursestrings a little too tight, as his reductions in federal spending are partially credited with the recession of 1957, but he managed to hold the US off its present path of endless debt.
In other ways his centrism can look bold or cowardly, depending on your perspective. His coddling of McCarthy is hard to justify and his lukewarm handling of civil rights is a challenge as well. He desegregated military schools, and passed a toothless civil rights bill, but he refused to lead on the issue. Even his boldest action of all, sending in the troops to desegregate Arkansas, he framed squarely as enforcing rule of law - he didn’t even mention civil rights.
Leadership:
In many of Eisenhower’s addresses, on his high taxes, or his military readiness programs, he again and again urges Americans that they will need to sacrifice for the security and health of the nation. Actually, he doesn’t really urge per se, he basically just says sacrifice is what a good American knows is his responsibility and when he said it, everyone agreed. I can’t fully imagine a president now framing things like this without being castigated for it but Eisenhower enjoyed a whopping average popularity rating of 65%. Americans liked Ike. His star power, however, did not translate into broader success for his party, who lost successively more seats with each Congressional election. This is partially because Eisenhower himself wasn’t really convincingly a Republican and partially because he thought the President was supposed to be a national leader above the fray of partisan politics. When it came to likely his most important role of grooming a successor, he dropped the ball in amazing fashion; when asked by a reporter to name a major decision made by Nixon during their two terms Eisenhower responded “if you give me a week I might think of one.”
However, the strength of Eisenhower’s legacy was such that even without grooming a successor, his successors still largely found their time in office governed by the mold he had cast, in terms of national defense priorities, relatively centrist government activity, and confronting the rising currents of the third world. JFK considered himself in major contrast to Eisenhower’s doddling, asleep-at-the-wheel presidency, only for him to remark how much he ended up “behaving exactly as the Eisenhower administration would have behaved” (nowhere is this more stark than the inherited Bay of Pigs operation).
As for whether Eisenhower’s legacy was positive or negative, I’ll let you be the judge.
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).
Soriek
11mo ago
I think you slightly underplay the signs of modest recovery before the Crisis of 2018 - GDP per capita and growth improved in 2017, the default ended, access to international capital markets was restored, and poverty rates started to fall again to their lowest levels since the 90s. This was enough of a clear improvement that it helped Cambiemos sweep the 2017 elections.
But I don't disagree, that's really the exact point I'm making - Marci actually did implement pretty wide ranging reforms and was barely able to dent their overall endemic instability. His administration's weak point was obviously siding with the Treasury over the Central Bank on inflation, but Frente de Todos is hitting it with 97% interest rates currently and it's still not making a difference.
No, communism did not leave China any poorer than Singapore; their GDP per capita was neck and neck in the early 70s. Yet it has been a very long time since communism and China now massively underperforms relative to modern Singapore, despite a fifteen head start on liberalization and more supposedly favorable demographics
FWIW we did find a ton of chemical weapons, if not nukes:
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Not that this was a surprise. Part of why our intelligence said Iraq had chemical weapons was because we knew they did, since we had exported them a bunch of chem precursors, missile fab equipment, and instructions on how to use them during the Iraq-Iran War. Why didn't we make more noise about it after the invasion, I'm not sure. Maybe it just looked bad on us, no nukes and a bunch of American soldiers injured from weapons that practically had Made in America stickers on them.
Soriek
6mo ago
Oh really? I was honestly unaware, my impression was very little had survived from that era at least in terms of writing.
Soriek
7mo ago
Peace proposals for Texas and Californian independence and full recognition are floated, but they keep getting derailed because of one core Mexican demand: they demand right of return for all Mexicans to anywhere in the US, because this was their ancestral homeland if you go far back enough.
In fairness Mexico only had those territories formally for around 15 years and only had a few thousand settlers across them (many of them likely descended at least partially from European settlers themselves). The Palestinians have much longer ties to their homeland and were more recently displaced, within living memory of many people. Like you say though, Israel will assuredly not agree to their maximalist demands and is unlikely to care much about their history one way or the other in the face of terrorism.
Soriek
7mo ago
This proposal doesn't hit people making over $160k, it hits people making over $250k, about 100 stacks more and solidly in the top 5% of the nation. I empathize with their higher cost of living, but if we have a funding shortfall, who other than the most well off should we be raising taxes on first?
Soriek
7mo ago
One of the reasons supply is restricted within medical care is because MMS helps fund residency slots and have historically capped their funding at '96 levels, keeping supply of doctors lower than it could be. Only in 2022 have we started to fix this and raise the residency slot funding. Cutting MMS funding would be moving backwards on doctor supply.
Most of the rest of the supply restrictions are state level like Con and COPA laws. Cutting MMS funding won't do anything to fix those problems.
International Updates 2
You can probably tell which region has been holding my interest lately from the length of these, but I tried to give a good spread. As before, feel free to add your own coverage of anywhere.
Haiti
Things in Haiti are still brutal, with more than half the country extremely food insecure and 60% of Port-Au-Prince controlled by gangs. However, Reuters reports that “Violence by armed gangs has fallen 'drastically' since the emergence of a vigilante justice movement that has seen at least 160 suspected criminals killed in the last month, a report by local human rights research group CARDH said on Sunday . . . CARDH said 'almost no' kidnappings had been recorded in the last month and counted 43 gang-linked murders, down from 146 in the first three weeks of April.”
Brazil
Brazil hosted the Summit of Americas on Tuesday, the first summit of its kind in 9 years and featuring every South American country except Peru. Brazilian President Lula, attempting to harness what remains of the Pink Tide, called for a revival of the region’s 2008 Hugo Chavez-led integration, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). This would include a common currency, and projects like a “ ‘Bi-Oceanic Corridor,’ a transportation artery to enable countries to ship goods across the continent overland instead of by sea.” A cool idea but it’s unclear how seriously anyone takes it, and potential partners across the left and right (ie both Chile and Uruguay) are skeptical of Lula’s warming with Venezuelan leader Maduro.
The Chamber of Deputies, the conservative-controlled lower house of Brazilian Congress, also passed a controversial bill which will limit formally recognized indigenous lands. The bill is backed by Brazil’s powerful farm lobby and looks posed to pass the Senate as well. The bill potentially opens up the areas of the Amazon inhabited by “over a million people” for development, which critics denounce as a betrayal of Lula’s promises of sustainable development and environmental conservation. Indigenous groups responded by blocking a highway outside Sao Paolo and cops gave them the tear gas treatment.
Argentina
Argentina’s Peronist/Kirchnerist ruling party, Frente de Todos, has presided over a deteriorating economy, as is custom, and faces a rough election ahead. Astoundingly, Forbes now reports that polls show a three way tie between them, the standard center right opposition party Juntos por el Cambio (who previously also botched the economy), and the previously fringe ultra libertarian Javier Millei who “promises to burn the Central Bank, eliminate the ‘political caste’ and use a ‘chainsaw’ to reduce a bloated state,” and was “initially discarded as a something of a lunatic.” His party, La Libertad Avanza, was only created in 2021 and surprised everyone by receiving 17% of the vote in the last legislative election. There isn’t a clear leader for the ruling party yet, though the Cabinet Chief has announced his candidacy and the Ministers of the Economy and the Interior are expected to announce as well.
Guatemala
Guatemala’s conservative ruling party Vamos has been listing towards autocracy this past year. A lot of attention has focused upon the high profile arrest on of the Director of one of the major newspaper lines for investigating corruption. His lawyers have now been arrested as well, nine other journalists have been placed under investigation for covering the trial, and El Periodico has shut down completely. There are elections on the 25th and Vamos’ current President Giammattei must step down, but the government has barred the three most popular opposition candidates on both the left and the right, and finally decided to just go ahead and release a list of 200 candidates from the Citizen Prosperity party who they won’t allow to run.
The U.S. has expressed its concerns about rule of law in Guatemala but still relies on the government to restrict migration outflows, so there’s likely a limit to how much pressure America will apply.
Senegal
Speaking of which, Senegal also has an election next year and has also imprisoned the political opposition leader Ousmane Sonko on sexual assault charges. Large protests have been held and repressed in turn. The current President Macky Sall is technically done with his two terms but altered the constitution recently and may run again.
Central African Republic
Faustin Archange Touadera, leader of the CAR since 2008, is also holding a referendum that would allow him to stay on past his term limits.
Uganda
Uganda has passed their draconian anti-gay law, despite international criticism. The US and some European countries have suspended aid and there has been some talk of sanctions, but Mosevembi’s hilariously named National Resistance Movement (actually a forty year dictatorship) has said they will hold strong.
Iran
On May 27 the Taliban and the Iranian security forces held a firefight near the Nimroz District in Balochistan province. The dispute is over water access. The “Iran Meteorological Organization says that an estimated 97 percent of the country now faces some level of drought,” and Iranian President Raisi recently forbid the Taliban from accessing the Helmand River, despite a 73 sharing arrangement treaty. [edit: covered more by @hanikrummihundursvin below]
Sri Lanka
You probably remember Sri Lanka’s recent near total economic collapse, culminating in its President Rajapaksa literally fleeing the country. Some rare positive news: the economy has been steadily recovering and inflation going down, leading the government to finally cut interest rates and reduce fuel prices for the first time since the crisis. India has also recently extended another billion dollar credit line.
Pakistan
The crackdown on Imran Khan’s party has continued in the months following his arrest, with thousands of supporters arrested, over 80 senior members “forced to leave the party at gunpoint,” and now the arrest of one of Khan’s top allies.
Kosovo / Peru Boots on the Ground Bonus
NATO is deploying more 700 troops to Kosovo after protests from the Serbian minority have grown agressive, and Peru is receiving 1000 American troops to train and advise their security forces as they deal with ongoing protests.
Soriek
3mo ago
It absolutely does
I mean no, not really, for the reason I described. If someone said "I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here," which is a more natural interpretation?
-
"I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I want them to be moral people"
-
"I want oppressed and persecuted people to immigrate here, and I hope they're really bad"
No, it placed no restrictions on immigration
Yes, that is what this conversation is about.
just restrictions on citizenship, restrictions which I would like to see revived and reimplemented.
Sure I didn't ask.
Soriek
6mo ago
Venezuela
I’ve covered in recent weeks that America has undergone a thaw in relations with Venezuela, lifting sanctions in exchange for the Maduro Administration allowing free and fair elections. This began with an opposition party primary, which was marked by intimidation and whose winner, Machado, is still not legally allowed to run for president. Still, it happened, and that’s gotta count for something...
“Top court in Venezuela suspends outcome of opposition primary”
Well, I guess that didn’t last long. The US has, reasonably, said that Venezuela needs to get it together or the sanctions come back. Technically Maduro has till the end of November to lift their prior ban on Machado and specify a date for the election, but as things are going now it doesn’t necessarily look like this thaw will even get that far.
Related: New Scott post on Hugo Chavez
Drawing Connections between Distant Events
One of the things I find most exciting about history is when I can find some underemphasized connection between seemingly unrelated things happening in far flung places. Here’s a few examples, widely ranging in how specific/general they are:
1: The Battle of the Shimonoseki Straits:
During the late Tokugawa Shogunate the rogue Chōshū clan started opening fire on western ships. This was after we had declared Japan officially open, so the US promptly sent a warship to battle the Chōshū and ultimately beat them into submission. What makes this interesting? It happened on July 16th, 1863, almost immediately after the Battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, meaning that Lincoln didn’t learn of two pivotal victories that July but rather three. The scope of the Civil War was simply so huge that we entirely forget America was even both fighting and winning against foreign powers at the exact same time.
2: Spanish Silver in Beijing:
A lot of people know the story of how Spain mined so much gold and silver in Mexico and Peru that it caused them to deal with inflation, and played a role in their repeated bankruptcies in the sixteenth century.
Less talked about is the impact of the Potosí mines on China. After setting up their colony in the Philippines, the Spanish started buying up Chinese goods in exchange for their limitless supply of Bolivian silver, which soon flooded into China and came to replace their own paper currency. This created a critical dependency on problems happening on the other side of the world; during the 30 years war Spain halted the distribution of silver so they could ensure they had enough to wage the war. China, which continued to buy imports with silver, rapidly found its money base dwindle, as well as their ability to pay the military to keep order. Unfortunately, at the same time they got hit with droughts, famines, and various other calamities. How serious was the fallout?
taxes and foreign trade were paid in silver. In ten years the peasants who constituted the largest tax base for the country became four times poorer than before.
There were peasant uprisings. Li Zicheng raided Beijing, the last Ming Emperor hanged himself in the Beihai Park and the Manchu were called in to support the Ming and crack down on the rebels. They did put down the rebels, but didn’t relinquish the power and established themselves as the new Qing empire.
3: Stalin’s Two Fronts:
Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 in a secret agreement with the Soviet Union, but the USSR itself didn’t invade until September 17th. Why the wait? The USSR was fighting a totally different war over with Japan. The Soviet military leadership was in disarray and Stalin made the remarkable choice of replacing the commander with a little known peasant officer named Georgy Zhukov whose career had shot up mostly as a result of the purges taking out other officers. Zhukov ended up being a military genuis and turned the conflict around at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol. A ceasefire was settled on the 16th and the USSR invaded Poland the very next day. Stalin was obsessed with avoiding a two front war and the question remains, if they hadn’t won such a commanding upset in Khalkin Gol, can we be certain the USSR would have proceeded with the invasion in Poland?
On the other side, the ceasefire meant that the North Strike faction in the Japanese military finally lost out to the Spread South faction, who pushed for Japan to rapidly proceed into Southeast Asia, where conflict inevitably waited with British Malaya and American Philippines.
4: Ghana, Sumatra, and Salem:
Back in the day the Dutch controlled part of Ghana and was allied with the Ashanti Empire, while the British controlled another part of the country and was allied with the Fante Confederacy. Eventually, in a well meaning effort to standardize custom duties and create space between the two countries forts so as to avoid conflict, the Dutch and English swapped some land around. Suddenly the Dutch found themselves controlling land with Fante, who did not like being their subjects, or having to deal with the Ashanti, who had been their enemy forever. With conflict flaring up, what previously had been one of the most productive colonies in the Dutch Empire suddenly became a huge pain, leading to the Dutch ceding it to the English only a few years later.
This skirmish between two tribes of under a million people each led to a treaty with ripples from West Africa to Indonesia all the way to North America. In Ghana it led to three more Anglo-Ashanti Wars, finally resulting in the full English conquest of the Gold Coast, which would remain under British control until 1957, with Ghanian troops fighting for the British Empire in places as far flung as Ethiopia and Myanmar.
On the other side of the world, in exchange for taking the rest of the Gold Coast, England recognized the Netherlands’ full conquest of Sumatra in Indonesia, which led to a brutal three decade war of conquest, and finalized Dutch control over the entire Indonesian archipelago, which did not become independent until 1949. This particular conquest also had further repercussions for the global spice trade because Aceh was the world’s largest supplier of pepper.
In fact, there had been a multi-million dollar pepper trade between Aceh and, of all places, Salem, Massachusetts. This was such a relevant market that Andrew Jackson sent gunships not once but twice to Aceh to take vengeance on pirates raiding the pepper traders. With the Dutch asserting full control over the industry and continuously raising trade barriers, the experience of being at the whims of European trade restrictions in overseas markets helped build towards American policy makers’ promotion of the Open Door Policy and even overseas colonization.
If there are any other interesting connections across distance or time, share them here! I’m an avid collector.
Soriek
7mo ago
Where did you get that number from? In 2017 the average person paid about $3,045 in SS tax. Even if you multiplied that by two for a household, a 3.44% increase in the tax wouldn't come close to $2565.
Remember that even though workers really shoulder the full burden of the tax, half of it comes from your employer's account so that's not literally a 3.44% increase on whatever your takehome salary was before.
I should be clear I don't really have a dog in the fight, just didn't want people to have the impression that the fight was particularly about abortion.
Out of curiosity I looked at Planned Parenthood's 2021-22 report; sex ed seems to be small compared to the medical services category ($49,200,00 vs $1,052,000 on page 33). I think a lot of the medical services are offered under affiliates but if it's funded through the same source or receives patients from the same centralized pipeline I guess same difference.
The breakdown of medical services is on page 29, for some reason the total is a little smaller here (9,117,154):
Edit: @FarNearEverywhere caught that this is probably number of services provided rather than dollar value per service category. Leaving the breakdowns up in case that's still interesting info.
STI Testing & Treatment: 4,411,825
Contraceptive Services: 2,348,275
Cancer Screenings & Prevention: 470,419
Other Reproductive Health Services (Pregnancy Tests, Prenatal Services, Miscarriage Care): 1,110,247
Abortion Services: 374,155
Other Services (Family Practice Services, Adoption Services, Urinary Tract Infections Treatments): 402,233
Probably a lot of this stuff conservatives consider elective, and cultural conservatives maybe object to contraceptives, but I'm not even sure how substantial that opposition is. Pew suggests only 4% of Americans think contraception is morally wrong and even for Catholics the number is only 13%. I imagine opposition is less to specific services and more just a holistic dislike of Planned Parenthood as an organization for that very public backing of abortion. Personally though I'm kinda surprised what a small portion goes to abortion.
Soriek
1yr ago
I mean, he probably convened a meeting of ethics professors, focus grouped the results a bit, got a supreme court ruling and a blessing from the pope before confronting the maniac.
Pretty unnecessary response imo.
I don’t especially care about this incident anymore than I care about any of the other daily killings in NYC, but even maintaining the same hold without putting the one hand behind the head (which is what causes the downward pressure on the bloodflow) would have been both easier and less lethal. Not even saying he should have done that in the situation if the guy was violent, but if all he wanted to do was restrain him (as opposed to knock him out and dip) then almost any way of holding someone other than the really specific RNC position is less lethal.
Soriek
5mo ago
Finland & China
Not two countries I thought I would be listing side by side, but Finland has been conducting its investigation into the early October incident that ruptured the gas pipeline between them and Estonia and the telecom wires between them and Sweden. Unfortunately for international stability, they seem to be pointing the finger at China.
An investigation by Finnish authorities identified as the main suspect Chinese container ship Newnew Polar Bear, which is believed to have dragged its anchor across the Baltic Sea seabed, cutting through the cables and gas lines. The anchor — which weighs 6,000 kilograms — was retrieved a few meters from the site of the damage.
Finland and Estonia have since been in touch with Chinese authorities seeking their cooperation with the investigation. The Baltic Times reported earlier this week that the two European countries have asked to send representatives to Beijing to investigate the vessel, which is currently en route to a Chinese port.
Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur expressed similar sentiment in an interview with Swedish public broadcaster SVT last month, saying the captain of the ship surely "understood that there was something wrong" after dragging an anchor for over 180 kilometers.
Coming more than a year after the Nord Stream gas pipelines connecting Russia to Germany were damaged by several explosions, the Balticconnector incident raises more concerns over the safety of undersea critical infrastructure and possible measures to protect them from external sabotage. No culprit has been identified for the Nord Stream attack despite an international investigation.
I’ll leave that last sentence hanging just to remind everyone how much weirdness there has been about figuring out who is to blame in all this (the west seems the most likely to have benefited from Nord Strom; pretty unclear who benefits here).
Yes wealthy people would be paying a larger share under this sytem and the benefits would be distributed downwards, like most other taxes.
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