Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
In this regard, Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
I think this is different from some dumb-ass lawyer believing that an LLM is giving him the correct precedents and not hallucinating them. The writer knew that Shambaugh hadn't spoken to him and stuck them in anyway.
I know I sound not only like an old man who yells at the clouds, but also all those people who shouted to burn someone at the stake, but why doesn't the writer get named and shamed? I get that we don't want a mob, but it seems like a journalist has to maintain some level of truthfulness. The sad things is that Ars just withdraws the article and it misses out on all of the issues that this event raises.
Some people are claiming they’ve gotten calls from agents acting on their own.
Unsurprising, given the possibility of programs like this
https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-08-06/ice-offers-then-quickly-withdraws-cash-bonuses-for-swiftly-deporting-immigrants
I wouldn't be surprised that these bonuses are happening in other places, it is just that they haven't gotten anyone to blow the whistle.
Thanks to Michael for posting the open thread and GftNC for requesting it.
Writing this immediately after writing that can lead to some unwanted inferences, but I'm wondering if anyone would like a spare set of keys to the blog in order to post a regular open thread (and no, I'm not going to get an AI agent to do that) I'll still be posting, but every bit of cognitive offloading helps at my age. Send a message to libjpn at gmail if you are interested.
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
By starting a list like this, I don't mean to be dismissive (except for the Tory complaints, perhaps). Multiple things can be true, so it feels like the attempt to define this as one thing means it doesn't become anything.
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age
On “As it all falls down around our ears: An open thread”
Just in case anyone forgot, Frum was the one who coined the phrase 'Axis of Evil', which started out as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea and was expanded to include Cuba, Libya and Syria. Including Iraq cost the US $800 billion to $1.1 trillion, and while Frum isn't responsible for the full price tag, he doesn't seem to think the mistake should impinge on his bona fides.
"I was powerfully swayed by the fact that the proposed invasion of Iraq was supported by those who had been most right about the Cold War, and was most bitterly opposed by those who had been wrongest about the Cold War."
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Grok clearly doesn't search out all the sources
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2438589/
Research suggests that rates of sexual victimization in prison may be as high as 41% or as low as less than 1%.12 A recent meta-analysis estimates a conservative “average” prevalence estimate of prison sexual assault at 1.9%. While the estimated rate of victimization varies significantly across studies, the characteristics of the victims reported in these studies are more similar. First, rates of sexual coercion are higher than rates of sexual assault or rape, independent of gender. More specifically, unwanted and sexually suggestive touching of breasts, genitals, or buttocks is more typical inside prison than the act of rape itself. Second, in the vast majority of studies, male facilities have been found to have higher rates of sexual assault compared to female facilities. Yet the perpetrators of sexual assaults against female inmates, compared to male inmates, are less likely to involve staff. Third, younger inmates are at greater risk of sexual victimization, particularly if they are new arrivals to a facility and are serving their first convictions. This may explain in part why rates of sexual victimizations vary across facilities within the same prison system. Facilities with a younger population would be expected to have higher rates of victimization than those facilities with a more mature and acculturated prison population. Fourth, inmate-on-inmate sexual victimization has an interracial bias, with victims most likely being White and sexual aggressors most likely being Black. This interracial pattern of victimization has been attributed to revenge for historical oppression and the reversal of racial dominance inside prison.
I also looked at your Grok summary and your takeaway seems to be remarkably narrowly focussed. I'll leave it to others to point out how your takeaway points are misleading.
"
when wonkie posted, I was tempted to post, but I realized that what I was writing was just me happy to, as they say in the commons, 'attach myself to the statements'. I was born in 61, so the 70's and 80's were my cultural memories, so discussions, like the famous bear example, seem a bit overblown. I do think that there were mechanisms to protect women, but those mechanisms were also to keep women in line and there was an implicit bargain that if you don't rock the boat, you won't get thrown to the sharks. What underlies that is power relationships, and I think you can't erase those relationships or declare them out of existence, you can only be truthful about their existence and make sure that they aren't being exploited to do something they aren't supposed it.
As an example, in my FB feed, I've recently had a bunch of people talking about the French figure skater Suraly Bonaly, who was the first person to do a backflip in competition and she did it in 1998. The only problem was that it was an illegal move and she was penalized. However, in these Olympics, it was allowed in 2024 and included in the programs this time. So, just going by the fb posts, this was a female skater (who was also black) being mistreated while the two male skaters were allowed to do it.
None of these posts told the story of Bonaly doing the backflip in the warmups, inches from Midori Ito's head, in 1992, during her warmup just before the short program. This apparently got into Ito's head, because she subsequently missed her triple lutz in the short program and was only able to get the silver by making a comeback in the last program.
It seems indicative of something that it ended up with a black skater trying to throw an Asian skater off her game. In the Rodney King riots, it was Korean stores that took the brunt of protester's rage, and the whole 'Natural Conservative' push (Reagan said something like 'Latinos are Republicans, they just don't know it yet') tells me that the pressure is going to be exhibited more in the groups oppressed. Hurt people hurt people.
So I'd argue that the 'there are no women in the Epstein files' is reflection of a collection of power, not of some unavoidable darkness in the souls of all men. Next to the substack GftNC posts, I'd suggest reading Amelia Gentleman's Guardian piece Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club. Setting aside the irony of the writer's last name, she points out that Epstein's whole enterprise was on the backs of women who booked tickets, organized plans, etc etc. Wonkie's mention of Mad Men is interesting, because while the series revolves around the men being assholes, another important thread is how the women, in the background but vital to keep the machinery running, slowly begin to assert their own power.
While the apparent absence of asian and black victims in the case of Epstein can probably be traced to his own bent, which then gets passed thru his whole enterprise, I also wonder if the absence of asian or black men in the Epstein files might also suggest that minorities are more attuned to the transactional nature of ALL things, and therefore avoided being drawn into it.
"
In this regard,
Coed Revolution: The Female Student in the Japanese New Left
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1fcf87c
is an interesting read, pointing out how women were often relegated to support roles in these movements while simultaneously being demonized by the media.
About jailbait in pop, you also have to take into account the whole structure of the industry, where bands do concerts and groupies flock backstage. My backstage adventures have been with classical music, a bit more sedate, but I remember that I had a 1st year student who was a huge fan of some relatively famous heavy metal band and she missed classes to attend multiple concerts on their Japan tour and she had been befriended by one of the guys in the band and was getting backstage. When she came back from the last concert, she had pictures of her, dressed like a demure Japanese uni student and the musician. Given that this was Japan, there were no drugs, but I didn't really ask what she actually did backstage, though she was clearly smitten. Multiply that by multiple groups and multiple concerts, mix in drugs, and it's probably a feature for a lot of groups.
"
Looking up those links revealed a few more and this one was particularly interesting
https://scienceandrevolution.org/blog/2019/3/30/my-response-to-chomskys-extraordinary-accusations-by-chris-knight
The most interesting section to me is the discussion of Chomsky working at MITRE, and the funding was a machine translation system that would allow "the possibility of translation of Russian language materials, particularly in scientific fields, into English by machine."
which is incredibly ironic, given chomsky's opinion on the development of LLMs
"
Nous, thanks for the full article. While the Cassandra envy is one reading, I see it as Chomsky being constitutional incapable of admitting he is/was in error. I'm most familiar with this pattern in linguistics and Geoff Pullum notes that it is not just that Chomsky is wrong, but that he creates a system (both with his rhetoric and his theory) that is immune to being proven wrong, even when core assumptions are proven wrong.
This is a recent article about this
https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/hl.00186.pul
Pullum also had this more accessible article in the National Review about it
https://www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/xml_20220307_Pullum_BookReview-1.html
With the first splash he made, reviewing Skinner's Verbal Behavior, he had these traits, making me wonder if he ever changed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2223153/
On “Open Thread”
Charles, do you really think that Grok is a media rating service?
For the Economist, having Megan McArdle work for them is is not just one strike, it is more like striking out the entire side.
"
various media rating services
Care to share names?
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
Some random thoughts. I don't know all of the gory details about the French cases mentioned here, but we have had all kinds of revelations about various groups who one would imagine would be more introspective to behave badly/act immorally. Those two phrases highlight the problem, either you assign behavior to an immature lapse in judgement or you make a claim about how it is going against all societal values. And given that Foucault was always identifying flaws in societal thinking, one can see how this can seem like society pushing back, which then engenders its own pushback, etc etc.
One thing that I think is operative in the issues in France is that academia and the elite are siloed there to a great extent, maybe much more than in other countries, and it creates structures that make misbehavior more likely. I'm thinking of the issues that have recently arisen in philosophy with McGinn, Searle and others, the issues in classics (we discussed this article about Peralta who has since moved from Princeton to ASU) as well as in other areas. I tend to think that these problems are often defined as sexism or racism, but the underlying issue is the ability to rationalize. The fact that Chomsky appears to be friends with Epstein (and his quote "I’ve met [all] sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.") seems like instantiations of that urge to rationalization.
On “Open Thread”
I've heard that some companies have already sold off the legal claims for tariff refunds. I'm waiting for the scam emails related to that.
On “Perpwalk Imperial”
The title reference was to Crown Imperial, thought I'm happy to make the connection to nous' link.
A lot of interesting points. I had to check Foucault's dates, he died in 1984, and I wonder if one problem/challenge is that we often live in an eternal present, and we can pull people into that even though they have been long gone. There is the famous letter of Machiavelli where he says:
"When evening comes, I return home and go into my study. On the threshold, I strip off my muddy, sweaty, everyday clothes, and put on the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the antique courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them... there I am not ashamed to speak with them and ask them the reason for their actions; and they, in their humanity, reply to me."
When we can time travel like this, it is easier to subject everyone, living and dead, to our own moral codes.
"
A good time to watch Stewart Lee on Prince Andrew
https://youtu.be/MDUeO4lRhu4?si=N3cb873hkKF98w7-
On “Xi and China’s military: an off the wall theory”
A necrobump on this, this substack piece (don't worry, no Nazi newsletters!) is about Zhang Youxia
https://chinadrew.substack.com/p/the-demise-of-zhang-youxia-hits-different
On “Open Thread”
and nous, I was working on something that links to your comment, so I hope the conversation about that will continue over there.
"
The ars technica thing is interesting to me because the writer had to have known that AI was creating fake quotes
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
I think this is different from some dumb-ass lawyer believing that an LLM is giving him the correct precedents and not hallucinating them. The writer knew that Shambaugh hadn't spoken to him and stuck them in anyway.
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/
I know I sound not only like an old man who yells at the clouds, but also all those people who shouted to burn someone at the stake, but why doesn't the writer get named and shamed? I get that we don't want a mob, but it seems like a journalist has to maintain some level of truthfulness. The sad things is that Ars just withdraws the article and it misses out on all of the issues that this event raises.
"
Some people are claiming they’ve gotten calls from agents acting on their own.
Unsurprising, given the possibility of programs like this
https://www.wlrn.org/immigration/2025-08-06/ice-offers-then-quickly-withdraws-cash-bonuses-for-swiftly-deporting-immigrants
I wouldn't be surprised that these bonuses are happening in other places, it is just that they haven't gotten anyone to blow the whistle.
"
Thanks to Michael for posting the open thread and GftNC for requesting it.
Writing this immediately after writing that can lead to some unwanted inferences, but I'm wondering if anyone would like a spare set of keys to the blog in order to post a regular open thread (and no, I'm not going to get an AI agent to do that) I'll still be posting, but every bit of cognitive offloading helps at my age. Send a message to libjpn at gmail if you are interested.
On “Unsure on the definition of ‘torn’”
morning all, fair point about the interviewee acknowledging the illegality of hiring, though instead of taking it out on those employers, he's happy for the government to take it out on the ones lowest on the payscale.
On “Separated by a common language”
I feel like this whole thing is like a Rorschach test, pick the thing out that really pisses you off the most and you'll see it. You've got
By starting a list like this, I don't mean to be dismissive (except for the Tory complaints, perhaps). Multiple things can be true, so it feels like the attempt to define this as one thing means it doesn't become anything.
On “Xi and China’s military: an off the wall theory”
Yeah, there is that. But imagine if Xi is splitting the difference between those three and Marshall.
On “Moral insanity”
That's true, but the line I hear emerging from dem politicians is that it is because ICE is undertrained that these problems are emerging. I may be missing stuff, but anyone who is talking about this on the various programs from the dem side rails on ICE and makes no mention of Border Patrol.
On “Adam Tooze”
Re: coal, in Tooze's lecture, (roughly here in the youtube video) he points out that after Kyoto, China undertook a national industrialization project that, according to estimates, killed 1.4 million chinese citizens a year, because of increased air pollution, which is why wj refers to coal.
However, there has been a 'hard pivot' against that. Here is the youtube transcript, cleaned up a bit
we're talking here of a truly violent process of transformation which the Chinese regime can be fairly said deliberately opted into as a choice and then pivoted hard against and that pivot begins in the 2010s. It is a matter widely understood of regime survival because there's only so many times people can see their babies choking to death before uh you need to pivot. By the early mid2010s the air pollution standards imposed on Chinese coal fired power stations were actually more strenuous than those in either the United States or Europe. As unpalatable and as uncomfortable it is, we need to reckon with the fact that the cleaning up of China's first phase of dramatic hypergrowth was accompanied under the leadership of Xi Jinping by a extremely explicit commitment to environmental protection at first on a limited scale and then secondly on a global scale culminating in that Chinese appropriation of Europe's vision of green modernization in 2020.
"
Tooze's observation fits in with what I think are the bullshit quality of SDGs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_Development_Goals
The SDGs are universal, time-bound, and legally non-binding policy objectives agreed upon by governments. They come close to prescriptive international norms but are generally more specific, and they can be highly ambitious. The overarching UN program "2030 Agenda" presented the SDGs in 2015 as a "supremely ambitious and transformative vision" that should be accompanied by "bold and transformative steps" with "scale and ambition"
One could argue that the Orange douche blew that one out of the water, but I thought it was western-centric from the start.
I also listened to this Bloomberg Odd Lots podcast with an energy analyst
https://youtu.be/i__iaPepixk?si=dKiCa75BrryAhVNP
I only understood half of it, but coupled with Tooze's observations, leaves me deeply uneasy.
On “Moral insanity”
I'd observe that the two executions in Minneapolis were apparently done by CBP agents with some experience on the job rather than the ICE agents who we've been told are minimally trained. There are a number of narratives that this could lead to and I'm not sure which one is true (and which is most likely to be seized on, which is often very different from the true one) but it does point to some interesting dynamics in all this.
On “Adam Tooze”
And another one, a Guardian piece on Tooze
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/15/the-crisis-whisperer-how-adam-tooze-makes-sense-of-our-bewildering-age