Sure, elections will always have consequences, but the problem with American elections in particular is that the parties have traded places every 4-8 years basically since FDR. The past 50 years, the Dems have been the kicking-the-can-down-the-road party and lost any sort of interest in actually fighting for anything. And now we’re here. If we had a (D) president now then we would have an ® in 2028 and this would all be moot anyways. American institutions have been rotting since at least Truman–it will take much much more than a few election cycles to get out of this pit. The Democrats are going the way of the Whigs at this point, inshallah.

Conservatives were calling libs “soy” for a decade and they’re out here trying to stir outrage for shit like this. Everyone is 12 now, everyone is “soy” now.

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The fact that Noah Smith is what centrists will consider a Serious, Respectable Intellectual shows how shallow their analytical perspective is. Attempting to explain fascism without any sort of class analysis leads you to dumbass shit like this.

Articles like this really expose the complete desert of imagination of liberalism. There is no political project here, no sense of morality, no end goal. Just a vague, “the data says to win elections you need to do x y z” and that’s where it ends. No values, no backbone.

That’s why it’s a failed project, and why it will continue to fail, no matter how many Democrats are in office.

I see, thank you for your insight. I should really just sit down and read Super Imperialism

If I have time soon, I will perhaps write up how Stalin’s economy differed from these liberal economics and how the USSR under Stalin was pretty much unconstrained in its own domestic spending to drive investment and rapid expansion of the economy

I’d be really interested in this!

And even after Stalin’s death, the liberal policies immediately came back. The lesson here is clear: you really have to figure out how to deal with the liberals if you want to have a successful reform.

And what I find baffling is that the United States, the consumer capital of the world, is able to run up this massive deficit, have this massive military, have the rest of the planet pay for it, and it’s like no one in power in the “BRICS” sphere is acting on that. Like, even these anti-western liberals don’t understand that? Idk, like you said, how would a left wing government even deal with this kind of ideological misstep, permanently?

I just don’t get it. Has no one in power since Stalin ever been able to determine that this “fiscal responsibility” stuff is an artificial self-limiter? Like it’s within Russia’s interests to not “balance the budget,” and as a massive, resource rich nation that is somewhat disconnected from a lot of the world’s supply chain they have the capacity to do so. Surely someone in Russia’s government knows this?

The U.S. could and did build a powerful alliance system, because America was more than a nation: It was an idea and a set of values, values we shared with the rest of the democratic world

No, the US was able to build a powerful alliance system because after WWII there was no one else standing (even the USSR was extremely bruised) and we were the world’s manufacturer. I mean, I guess there were some shared values with Europe too, namely white supremacy and continued domination of the global south.

I swear to god, liberals just say shit about “values” and “democracy” without even a moment of further reflection.

It’s okay, I have a solution! One. Billion. Americans.

Can’t wait for the drug cartel rabbit hole of the inevitable Blowback season about Ukraine. We’re achieving levels of Blowback previously thought impossible!

With a HVDC line there will still be a large static electric field present, but like the study posted by the other user seems to say, it’s not significant enough to pose a threat to human health in and of itself, unless you do some dumb shit. I guess fishing in a pond directly under the line would be a problem if the voltage is high enough and maybe the air is under the right conditions, but in the aggregate cases like that are going to be rare since you don’t need very many of these HV transmission lines.

I wish I didn’t know who any of these people were

Hey… wait a minute

See this comment chain from @sodium_nitride@hexbear.net and @xiaohongshu@hexbear.net. I think I have also mischaracterized the AI boom as a bubble. Maybe a better way to frame it is as “AI Keynesianism,” you have a bunch of investors (and the government) flush with cash who are putting it into something that they view as potentially profitable at some time in the future, and perhaps more importantly, are forming the backbone of a massive surveillance network. This isn’t like the subprime loan crisis or the NFT bubble where the assets in question were literally fake and backed by nothing.

The problem of course if that this is so far proving to be a tremendous waste of capital as far as your average person is concerned and is ensuring that in all areas outside of surveillance/data-tech or (“cloud capital” as Yanis Varoufakis calls it), the US is having less and less of a “real” economy. So when some other crisis emerges, all these data centers and AI CapEx are going to be useless in addressing the needs of the population.

I saw the brain-geniuses over on r/neoliberal talking about this and they claimed “oh actually this doesn’t mean anything because if the money wasn’t invested in datacenters it would have been (counterfactually) invested in something else so the economy is still growing just fine”

And it’s like, yeah, no shit. That’s the problem. All this capital is being invested into something that has had practically 0 return in the last three years except make Silicon Valley technocrats richer, and is not increasing productivity at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars. Hmmm, sounds like a bunch of money is being misdirected to a bunch of nonviable companies that don’t actually offer anything meaningful. It’s almost like… a bubble? Idk, the market has spoken though so I’m sure it’s fine.

Thanks for these names! I found this seminar on MMT/“real economics” based research that was hosted at The Levy Institute this past August and it looks like there was a lot of interesting work from folks like Jia Genliang and other heterodox Chinese economists: https://www.levyinstitute.org/blog/seminar-on-modern-monetary-theory-and-launch-of-new-macroeconomics-successfully-held/

I agree, Popper is one of the primary liberals I’ve read whose critiques of the socialist project don’t feel made in bad faith (probably because he was also a socialist when he was younger). I think the critique of falsifiability is an important one for any analytical framework that claims to be scientific. But even then, falsifiability is itself very difficult in a lot of modern scientific fields (social science, biology, economics) where causality is so complex even having truly testable hypotheses gets very difficult.

Like you said though, the test of the liberal analytical framework vs. the Marxist one ultimately comes down to the ability to predict and more importantly act on those predictions. For instance, American liberals don’t seem to understand that the success of their project a la the New Deal was never just “good people” doing “good things,” it was because there were organized, populist masses who could leverage their ability to extract concessions from a willing ruling structure. This blindness is what makes them so ineffective in moments like the one we’re in now.

Also, I think Popper’s theory of the “Paradox of Tolerance” is very useful when it comes to engaging with fascists. It’s a shame modern liberals don’t seem to have the dawg in them to take that seriously anymore.

It’s really telling how much of a non-falsifiable orthodoxy liberalism / capitalism / liberal democracy is to these people

And that’s the really ironic thing! Liberal academics will call Marxism/historical-materialism “unfalsifiable” because we try to apply a class-based lens to understanding events while both modern economics and liberal political theory basically start and stop with the observation that humans are agents optimizing based on a set of preferences. Like okay, sure, humans are optimizing some utility objective, but that doesn’t tell you anything! You could say that about any action ever! Marxism is a structural analysis of why we hold the preferences we do, why we take the actions we do, and how those evolve with economic relations, technology, culture, etc. This is why we go much further than just hand-waving everything as being the result of good/bad people doing good/bad things.

From what I can tell, basically every self-conscious liberal, from Karl Popper to Ezra Klein, to the people in my personal life, always say historical-material analysis is overly deterministic. That its focus on class structures is too simplistic, and that “you can’t blame everything on capitalism.”

In my own experience, when I counter those arguments with “okay then, what is your theory of history or human society,” I will hear something that basically boils down to: “ah well it’s just a bunch of people with different ideas acting according to their preferences! It’s much too complex to try to engage with using determinist techniques!” This characterization of human behavior is an abstraction so vague it’s basically useless as a basis for determining action, unless of course it’s through an act of individual choice like voooting.

How convenient. The same old “it’s too complex, don’t bother trying to narrativize it” free-market logic but applied to history and human civilization as a whole. It’s pretty easy to justify the system as it exists if that’s the axiom you start from.