Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

Kevin Drum: We Need to Figure Out How to Fight Weaponized Disinformation: "I’ve been blogging for 15 years, and there’s never been a day when I wanted to stop...

Doug Rushkoff: Survival of the Richest: "The hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after 'the event'...

Cory Doctorow: I was naive: "I've been thinking of all those 'progressive' Senators who said that... Jeff Sessions was a gentleman, honorable, decent—just someone whose ideas they disagreed with. They approved Sessions for AG on that basis, and he architected this kids-in-cages moment...

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos-monkey essence. The smart David Leonhart tries to advise people how to deal with this: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...

The sharp and well-intentioned Will Wilkinson still thinks that the name "libertarianism" is worth fighting for, or perhaps that "liberaltarianism" is worth fighting for. I, however, for one, think that "libertarianism" is poisoned in the same way that "fascism", "communism", "socialism", and "neoliberalism" are poisoned. Too many bad people have waved their banners in bad faith. In libertarians' case, the bad people waving in bad faith have been those who think that the only rights that matter are the rights to discriminate, to exchange, and to hold what you have no matter how you acquired it. Maybe "positive libertarians" has a chance, maybe not: Will Wilkinson: Liberaltarianism: Back the Future: "Misean economics,... filtered through Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard's peculiar views of rights and coercion...

Paul Krugman: Brexit Meets Gravity: "These days I’m writing a lot about trade policy. I know there are more crucial topics, like Alan Dershowitz. Maybe a few other things? But getting and spending go on; and to be honest, in a way I’m doing trade issues as a form of therapy and/or escapism, focusing on stuff I know as a break from the grim political news...

David Brooks explicitly practicing identity politics. What's odd is that Jews are almost always first on the block to be excluded from "Western Europe" whenever someone embarks on the journey that leads to ultimately saying that the only true civilization bearers are the Anglo-Saxons (or the Saxon-Saxons, depending), with the wogs starting at either Calais or Liege, depending. Does he even know that the only sovereigns who made significant outreach to rescue the Sephardim expelled from Spain was named Bayezid II Osmanli?: Yastreblyansky: Identity politics with David Brooks: The wolves are in the henhouse: "David Brooks's hot take on the Trump-Putin summit ('The Murder-Suicide of the West') was that it was like when C.S. Lewis's mother died, not that he was there, it was in 1908, but he's read about it, and it's pretty sad...

Spencer Ackerman: U.S. Officials ‘at a Fucking Loss’ Over Latest Russia Sellout: "PERSONA NON GRATA: The White House’s refusal to rule out turning over former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul to the Russians has current and former State Department officials seeing red...."

There are two ways this could go—extending "whiteness" or permanent Republican minority status. In the past, "whiteness" has always been expanded so that it includes a vast majority of the American population—and so now we have people named Mark Krikorian denouncing the threat of a Hispanic wave that will pollute America: Kevin Drum: White Party, Brown Party: "I don’t think that our political system will literally become the White Party vs. the Brown Party, but it’s already closer to this than any of us would like to admit. What’s worse, it’s all but impossible to imagine how Republicans can turn things around in their party. They’re keenly aware of the need to address their demographic challenges, but the short-term pain of reaching out to non-whites is simply too great for them to ever take the plunge. Democrats aren’t in quite such a tough spot, but their issues with the white working class are pretty well known, and don’t look likely to turn around anytime soon either

A Britain led by Theresa May or Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbin will not "rediscover its own way... the Britih re most resilient, most inventive, and happiest when they feel in control of their own future". That is simply wrong. And if it were right, May and Johnson and Corbin are not Churchill or Lloyd-George or even Salisbury: Robert Skidelsky: The British History of Brexit: "I am unpersuaded by the Remain argument that leaving the EU would be economically catastrophic for Britain...

I think Paul Krugman puts his finger on the decline of Niall Ferguson here: Paul Krugman: _"What we have here is an example of a phenomenon I've seen a number of times: the doom loop of hackery...

How much of the forthcoming announcement of an upward bump in GDP growth in the second quarter is due to people battening down the hatches for Trump's trade war, and will be reversed over the course of the next year? That is what we are all trying to estimate right now: Paul Krugman: Trump, Tariffs, Tofu and Tax Cuts: "More than half of America’s soybean exports typically go to China, but Chinese tariffs will shift much of that demand to Brazil, and countries that normally get their soybeans from Brazil have raced to replace them with U.S. beans. The perverse result is that the prospect of tariffs has temporarily led to a remarkably large surge in U.S. exports...

Blaming the Pollyannaish fecklessness of the Bank of England on the feckless indolence of Britain's reporters: Simon Wren-Lewis: How UK deficit hysteria began: "Monetary policy ran out of reliable levers to manage the economy. However, journalists wouldn’t know that from the Bank of England, who tended to talk as if Quantitative Easing was a close substitute to interest rates as a monetary policy instrument...

Extremely wise and interesting on how the more empirical reality tells the Trumpists to mark their beliefs to market, the more desperate they are to avoid doing so: John Holbo: Epistemic Sunk Costs and the Extraordinary, Populist Delusions of Crowds?: "Here’s a thought.... The first rule of persuasion is: make your audience want to believe...

Paul Krugman: "Maybe it's worth laying out the incoherence of Trump's trade war a bit more, um, coherently...

IMHO, betting that "even the Tory Party can spot a wrong 'un" seems a lot like drawing to an inside straight: Dan Davies: "The hard brexit types have been bounced into deal which has taught them that they're not as clever as they thought they were. Now they'll react to that with a leadership challenge which will teach them that they're not as popular as they thought they were. It's like education in the Montessori system-each little independence of discovery builds on the next..."

Anne Applebaum: Brexit is reaching its grim moment of truth—and the Brexiteers know it: "David Davis... and Boris Johnson.... At no point... have they or any of their Brexiteer colleagues offered what might be described as a viable alternative plan. That is because there isn’t one...

Marcy Wheeler: The Mueller Questions Map Out Cultivation, a Quid Pro Quo, and a Cover-Up: "I wasn’t going to do this originally, but upon learning that the Mueller questions, as NYT has presented them, don’t maintain the sixteen subjects or even the 49 questions that Jay Sekulow drew up from those 16 areas of interest, and especially after WaPo continues to claim that Mueller is only investigating 'whether Trump obstructed justice and sought to thwart a criminal probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election', I am going to do my own version of the questions, as released by the NYT. I’m not pretending that this better represents what Mueller has communicated to Sekulow, nor am I suggesting NYT’s version isn’t valid. But the questions provide an opportunity to lay out a cultivation, quid pro quo, and cover-up structure I’ve been using to frame the investigation in my own mind..." https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-mueller-questions-map-out-cultivation-a-quid-pro-quo-and-a-cover-up-part-one-cultivation/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/02/the-quid-pro-quo-a-putin-meeting-and-election-assistance-in-exchange-for-sanctions-relief/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/03/the-quo-policy-and-real-estate-payoffs-part-three/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/04/the-quest-trump-learns-of-the-investigation-part-four/ https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/05/07/the-sekulow-questions-part-five-attempting-a-cover-up-by-firing-comey/

John Quiggin: Shibboleths: "I was reminded of... 2011, about when the baton was being passed from Palin to Trump...

IIRC, back when I first read Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, I thought it was a joke: He spent all this space ranting about how nobody is allowed to make consequentialist arguments, and then makes the consequentialist argument that Lockeian appropriation of pieces of the global commons as private property is fine because it has the consequence of making the world richer? And then there was this: using the Cambridge Rent Control Board to break his contract—his self-actualization as a promise-making autonomous moral being—to extort 30,000 dollars from Eric Segal: Anarchy, State, and Rent Control: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...

I missed this when it first came through: Lessons from special elections, especially PA-18: Josh Barro: Why Pennsylvania special-election result should terrify Republicans: "Should Democrats seek to build a coalition of college-educated suburbanites plus white urbanites and minorities, or should they try to win back blue-collar white voters...

Isaiah Berlin (1972): [The Bent Twig: A Note on Nationalism](http://delong.typepad.com/isaiah-berlin-1972--the-bent-twig.pdf" title="Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf" alt="Isaiah Berlin 1972 The Bent Twig">Isaiah Berlin (1972)- The Bent Twig.pdf): "THE rich development of historical studies in the nineteenth century transformed men's views about their origins and the importance of growth, development and time...

No, the Trump administration is not very competent at achieving its stated goals. But that does not mean that the Trump administration is not doing enormous harm under the radar by simply being its chaos monkey essence: David Leonhardt: Trump Tries to Destroy the West: "[Trump's] behavior requires a response that’s as serious as the threat...

Alex Barker and Peter Campbell: Honda faces the real cost of Brexit in a former Spitfire plant: "Honda operates two cavernous warehouses.... They still only store enough kit to keep production of the Honda Civic rolling for 36 hours...

Josh Rogin: On Twitter: "In a private meeting, Swedish PM Stefan Lofven explained to Trump Sweden is not a member of NATO, but sometimes partners with the alliance. Trump responded that the U.S. should consider the same approach..."

Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni: Nielsen becomes face of Trump’s border separations: "Kelly’s status in the White House has changed in recent months, and he and the president are now seen as barely tolerating one another. According to four people close to Kelly, the former Marine general has largely yielded his role as the enforcer in the West Wing as his relationship with Trump has soured. While Kelly himself once believed he stood between Trump and chaos, he has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment—at least this chapter of American history would come to a close..."

John Holbo (2008): Douthat on Conservatism: "This has to be a complete failure.... Take out the parenthetical bit and you have something that is much closer to a definition of ‘liberalism’ than ‘conservatism’, at least in the American context...

Michael Tomasky: We Are Truly Living Through the Amateur Hour Presidency: "From the moment when Donald Trump surprised even his own staff by announcing a summit with North Korea, it was obvious, I mean achingly obvious, that the president had no idea what he was doing...

I think Michael Berube overstates his case—as his character "His" notes at the end: Slate and #Slatepitch are still a thing. But they are much less of a thing. And everyone who writes for Slate or who used to write for Even the Liberal New Republic bears the mark on their reputation: Michael Berube: R.I.P., Liberal Contrarianism: "Before #Slatepitch became a punchline, Slate (and others) really did thrive on a certain kind of anti-liberalism. It’s dead now—well, almost.... ILLE: Here’s your reliable index: the death of the liberal contrarian. HIC: Come again?...

Josh Marshall: And you shall know him by his body language:"

Matt O'Brien: "The funniest thing is Niall Ferguson now says he's "going back to what I do best." What's that, writing conspiracy theories about how inflation is "really" 10%? Or attacking the Fed for doing its job? Or falsely saying Keynes didn't care about the long run because he was gay?..."

The interesting question is why are those who call themselves conservatives on the brink of extinction in so much of academia. Some self reflection from Niall Ferguson on this might be useful. But it might not. And I am not holding my breath: Jacob T. Levy: "If it appears that a powerful right-wing professor is the source of the suppression of disagreement on campus, that just further proves that left-wing student political correctness is the real threat. #unfalsifiable:"

Paul says: "hyperinflation is coming any day now" and "minimum wages at their current levels are killing millions of jobs" are joining "there is no such thing as global warming" and "evolution is false" as destroyers of "conservatives" in academia: *Paul Krugman: "Today's column has nothing directly to do with... the puzzling failure of wages to grow faster despite what look like tight labor markets https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html...

Brad Setser: "Larry Summers on Trump and trade:: 'From tweet to tweet, official to official, nobody can tell what his priorities are.' Certainly rings true to me. I have almost stopped trying to guess. Even for China:"

Jonathan Marks: Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?: "Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate...

Patrick Iber: "Before we spend all day calling for Niall Ferguson's tenure to be revoked: I don't think he has tenure...

Paul Krugman: "An ugly story from Stanford. But I think Brad gets only a small piece of the issue when he talks about Stanford's intellectual quality control problem...

Ken Schultz: "I’m not an IPE expert, but it seems like you must be doing tariffs wrong if they aren’t even supported by the labor union in the protected industry..."

Paul Krugman: Oh, What a Stupid Trade War: "Even if tariffs were expansionary, that would just make the Fed raise rates faster, which would in turn crowd out jobs in other industries...

Paul Krugman* @paulkrugman: Trump is going all in on (a) claiming that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a huge crime wave; (b) Democrats supporter immigrant criminal gangs. Both claims are lies, pure and simple https://t.co/0orSpr9o5e. One important thing to realize about the immigrant crime wave thing is that the people who believe it mostly come from places where there are hardly any immigrants. https://t.co/wNse30FZwp...S

Doug J. Balloon: "'The coarsening of discourse' is a standard conservative pundit lament, but nothing illustrates the unfortunate reality better than the writings of conservative pundits themselves. Read a typical George Will column. It's probably wrong but the most aesthetically disturbing thing you're likely to encounter is a Mark Twain quote taken badly out of context. Read a typical Bobo, Bret, or Douthat column and you'll find discussions of how many sex partners a teen should have, defenses of pedophilia, and sex robots..."

Carlos (2007): Internet race and IQ debate: Andrew Sullivan Edition:): "Doug, the guy is also a perfect vector for promoting nitwit ideas through a credulous population...

David Frum: 15 Criminal-Law Questions Surrounding the President: "Open questions...