A fox hunting in a field, filmed by a Ukrainian drone with a thermal camera. Twitter/X.
With the sixth generation NGAD or F-47 retreating into the future, the US Air Force has dropped their plan to retire the F-22 by 2030; instead, the 185 planes will receive upgrades worth more than $8 billion in total, to keep them flying until 2040. (15-minute video, news article)
The defense buildup comes to the Rust Best: the New York Times on old factories being repurposed to build drones and cruise missiles.
Charred Byzantine bread loaves stamped with Christian images.
Alex Tabarrok: Democracy and Capitalism are Mutually Reinforcing. With lots of graphs.
Mexican chinampas, little island farms in wetlands much used by the Maya and Aztec, still exist. They were traditionally a male-only thing but now some are being taken over by women, some of whom grow non-native crops like kale. (Article, 7-minute video)
What is The Chicago Rat Hole?
This week's music is a live set from the Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra, a Norwegian bluegrass band. They're pretty good, and it is such fun to hear them switch between speaking in Norwegian and singing with Appalachian accents.
Why is Switzerland rich? By an economist and missing the cultural dimension that I, of course, think is crucial.
Fossil bumblebees found with pollen that links them to the flowers they were feeding on.
Engineering houses and communities to survive wildfires.
Karolyn Leavitt plumbs the depths of Trumpism: "The Democrat Party's main constituency is made up of Hamas terrorists, illegal aliens, and violent criminals." The scary part is that Stephen Miller really seems to believe this.
Aerial surveys are revealing "prehistoric megastructures," that is, long stone walls, in many regions, including now in at the northern end of the Adriatic. They main theory is that these were for funneling game to hunters, but this is not at all certain.
If you are curious about the Great Depression, the New Deal, going off the gold standard, etc. I recommend this Tyler Cowen converstion with George Selgin.
Politico on that leaked young Republican chat. They are right that guys who grew up on 4Chan and Discord are the future of the Republican party.
Feminization and cancel culture in the universities: "This cancellation was feminine because all cancellations are feminine. Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field." The argument is that women care too much about making everyone feel emotionally comfortable to ever engage in real debate or allow real freedom of thought. I recognize that this can be a problem in certain female-dominated spaces. But if the masculine alternative is MAGA groyperism I'm not sure censorious female academics come off worse. Ditto for other kinds of masculine discourse, like revolutionary communism or the shock philosophy of anti-bourgeois post-modernists. Men can be very censorious and untruthful. But here's a bit of very ancient wisdom I believe in absolutely: you will never reach the truth if you insist on never offending. You will never become wise if you are not willing to go in dangerous directions and face up to terrible truths, especially terrible truths about yourself.
3 comments:
There's such a a thing as toxic femininity, and it's as prevalent if not more than toxic masculinity, unfortunately this version goes unnoticed and unopposed. I am a woman myself, if that's worth mentioning. I find both all male and all female environments a bit frightening.
Alex Tabarrok: Democracy and Capitalism are Mutually Reinforcing. With lots of graphs.
Tabarrok seems to be missing the point, to the degree that it almost feels like he's being purposefully obtuse. He gets weirdly hung up on things like state ownership of capital, while completely ignoring things like regulations, workers' protections, reduction of wealth inequality, etc.
Tabarrok very much appears to be falling into the trap of failing to understand that when people say "Capitalism" is failing, they mean our current implementation of the concept - not all possible variations in form (the majority of which have never been implemented and tried out). And at the same time, he also seems to be making the same kind of mistake regarding Socialism, and restricting his imaginings solely to the authoritarian Soviet or Chinese models.
His graphs are on the absurdist side. He charts how most capitalist countries are democratic, and how most democratic countries are capitalist But he ignores the fact that virtually no societies on the face of the planet are currently anything OTHER than democratic or capitalist.
When only 6 out of the 195 countries on the planet can be classified as "non-capitalist" (and that's being extremely generous toward China, who are for all intents and purposes fully capitalist these days), your data set is pretty flawed and you aren't really able to draw meaningful conclusions. Similarly, the number of "non-democratic" nations is also very low, particularly depending on how exactly you choose to define the term.
Tabarrok also presents the correlation in his graph without a scrap of consideration for the causation. He seems to forget that a century of violent global struggle and competition occurred between opposing schools of governance and economics, and that this exerted unnatural pressures beyond the simple attractiveness of any one system compared to another. He also ignores that certain parts of the world are developed and industrialized, and that others historically were not and are not still - and all the knock on effects of that. For all his obsession with Soviet and Chinese style socialism and communism, he doesn't bother to consider the mitigating circumstances of the countries that embraced such systems - not only in terms of economic development, but also access to resources, population sizes, cultural legacies, international political pressures, etc.
Tabarrok talks about the Fall of the Berlin wall as if it supports his position, but he again treats it as if it exists in a vacuum. Of course there was a correlation between the "big positive shock to democracy" and a "large and sustained increase in economic freedom". The wall fell BECAUSE one system was failing, and the local populace wanted to replace it with another. It doesn't demonstrate any inherent link between capitalism and democracy - it just demonstrates a preference for an operable system over an inoperable one.
Overall, Tabarrok's reasoning is extremely poor, and I'm not impressed.
It's almost as if gender norms are wholly artificial and arbitrary...
...and that the idea of separating the entire array of human qualities and behaviors out into two entirely made up categories, and then proscribing that certain people have to fall into and exemplify one set (but NOT the other!) and vice versa... is utterly idiotic and deeply unhealthy.
Everyone has both sets of qualities inside them, to varying degrees. Everyone is both "masculine" and "feminine". And there's a word for that combination - "human".
There are few things more dehumanizing than the absurdity of artificially splitting and limiting people based on gender norms. All such sets of norms - in all their varying forms, in all their different cultural permutations, throughout all of history - are equally flawed, and equally destructive to human happiness and wellbeing.
And none of it is necessary. We fashion chains for ourselves in our minds. But all it takes to break free of them... is to choose to think differently.
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