it’s not the choices per se made by organs like The New York Times that delegitimates them, as much as the sense they are triangulating — between their audiences prejudices, risks of blowback from disingenuous operatives, desire to retain access and privilege (and bodily freedom) regardless of the next administration.
that’s all understandable, but quite a different basis for decisionmaking that disinterested evaluations of truth, importance, and the public interest.
@Hyolobrika (i’ll take what i can get!)
@Hyolobrika yes! but in modern states, the law changes a lot. sure, i sometimes break laws i think are wrong, but the evolving sensibilities expressed by overt state action have a surprising sway over what i think right or wrong. 1/
@Hyolobrika as a kid, wearing a seatbelt in a car was for punishment. now i always wear a seatbelt. it’s the law, and there was a period when i had to remind myself, and i got ticketed for forgetting. but i now agree, and voluntarily buckle up. would i have done the same, knowing the same social science, if the law hadn’t changed? i don’t know. 2/
@Hyolobrika but i think much of what it means for a state to be legitimate has to do with an unobservable propensity for its publics to internalize state action in forming their own sense of right and wrong. /fin
@Hyolobrika and i wouldn’t characterize conformity of an oppressed group as necessarily being “too scared/weak/oppressed to rebel”. one might also say “too wise to rebel”. the choice to conform to a state so imperfect + unjust “oppressive” is an accurate modifier might well under some circumstances be wiser, not just in a narrow sense of avoiding pain but in a longer-view sense of working towards much more just, less oppressive outcomes, and comparing against actual alternatives.
@Hyolobrika I don’t want to say they “legitimised” the state in a plain-language normative sense. but i do claim that in a functional sense, their conformity did help legitimize the state.
@Hyolobrika is it, in practice? Israel has overwhelming might relative to the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine, yet they can’t engender internal legitimacy. one can compel conformity always at the point of a gun, but no army can constantly point guns at the whole of a population. or persuade those who see the army only as illegitimate (in the fuzzier sense) oppressors to resort to them to resolve disputes. i think it is less kraterocratic than you think. 1/
@Hyolobrika in the United States, much, perhaps most, of the public claims to detest the government. i claim the Supreme Court is currently entirely illegitimate, in a subjective sense. but i still conform to the law in the US, much more than physical coercion can enforce, and would rely upon US courts rather than other means to resolve disputes. 2/
@Hyolobrika normative notions of legitimacy have very little predictive power i think. but that doesn’t mean legitimacy collapses into “might” alone. however the Supreme Court or the American state as a whole might be illegitimate from a variety of normative or subjective perspectives, that illegitimacy is of an entirely different character, evident in human behavior, than Israel’s illegitimacy as government to Palestinians. 3/
@Hyolobrika an interesting case is the Jim Crow South in the US. unlike the Palestinian case, i think the American state in 1950 had internal legitimacy, despite overt oppression of a self-conscious minority. so despite being profoundly immoral, i’d call that government “legitimate” in the senses i describe. 4/
@Hyolobrika why/how was it so? i don’t know. it’s an interesting question. what i do claim is it comes down to more than “might makes right”. blacks in the Jim Crow south faced a regime of pervasive brutality and coercion, but i think it hard to argue they faced that more than Palestinians have in I/P. 5/
@Hyolobrika yet they mostly conformed to law and resorted to the US state to address disputes. in that sense conferred internal legitimacy upon the state that oppressed them (and that arguably still does to a lesser degree). i don’t think a claim that US Blacks were inherently or culturally more pacifistic can be a sufficient explanation. 6/
@Hyolobrika legitimacy resides in and emerges from the relationship between states and publics. the factors that engender it are “soft” — situational, difficult to objectively characterize — rather than “hard” — things we might objectively observe and run regressions on. that’s why i suggest we judge it from the result, rather than from conditions about which we might have normative views or misleading hypotheses. /fin
@Hyolobrika (in any case, thanks a ton for reading and giving these issues some thought!)
@kentwillard we invented corruption and called it progress. that was the whole “shareholder value revolution”.
@kentwillard we need to restructure our industries. we tend to aim our opprobrium at our shitty firms that do shitty things, but it’s an industrial organization problem, not a the-CEO-is-a-bad-guy problem. competing down profits isn’t supposed to be a choice, but a requirement firms face in order to survive.
@kentwillard yes. Trump is a bad champion for tariffs (which i do think might have some place!) because to the degree he is interested in anything beyond his own glory, he is interested in serving and ingratiating plutocrats and tyrants. even when he has some on-point intuition (sometimes he does!), the execution is always crap, shot through with counterproductive grift.
@kentwillard the question is, can they compete with only a 10% edge, given how much they like to kickback rather than reinvest cashflows?
@kentwillard I’m continually astonished by how little understanding there is of how little Trump’s trade restrictionism actually accomplished, and how counterproductively he focused on balance without paying attention to sectoral composition, as if selling soybeans can compensate for losing capabilities in manufacturing. 1/
@kentwillard I agree re autos. “Chicken tax” and CAFE standards were not intended as industrial policy, but their effect has been terrible industrial policy, cautionary tales more than proofs of concept. /fin
@artcollisions we split, spent a few days in Mobile AL. we were fortunate to find our little neck of the woods did not suffer too much. we thought our garage was likely to flood, but it didn’t.
@artcollisions Here in Pinellas County! 🙂
here in Pinellas County, if you wanna get picked up, dress as debris.
@ofnumbers in a sense, only SpaceX has survived. the others exist, but they’ve not seemed to have succeeded. 1/
@ofnumbers they all — including NASA — face soft budget constraints, due to some mix of plutocratic support and state subsidy. SpaceX has those too, but whether it’s “profitable” or not, it’s clear SpaceX has been a justified use of the resources it’s required, while the others arguably have not (for NASA, arguably have not recently, though JWST is perhaps humanity’s most extraordinary accomplishment even if it went way over budget). 2/
@ofnumbers institutional survivorship is not much of a measure of success in the sector, i think. nor is a public/private distinction very informative. /fin
@kentwillard (there’s definitely a bad political economy syndrome around tariffs. look at the US auto market’s pathological specialization into trucks, based partly on laxer CAFE standards, but also a “chicken tax” 25% tariff. that said, i think there may be a case for universalizing a modest universal tariff — 10% or less — as there are positive resilience and capability externalities to home production. just freelancing it is dangerous, though, as each industry will go for chicken taxes.)
i remember in the 1980s angst over the “coarsening” of the American mind. i guess that was about obscenity and cuss words and pop-culture rather than classics and stuff. 1/
wherever you site yourself, whomever you vote for, contemporary political polarization has coarsened minds much more insidiously than all of that shit. 2/
we can’t think properly, can’t consider and weigh ideas, because we know the political valence or implication of every claim, and can’t avoid prejudging or overcompensating for prejudging it all. /fin
@EvolLove I also find Japan very impressive.
@EvolLove China is more prone to deflation than inflation, inflationary pressure has been very rare there. They’ve not killed off any of their population. They’ve expanding the scope of private business, not confiscated it in general, although they have cracked down on some industrialists (“oligarchs?”).
China I think is deservedly characterized as a successful development story more than pure exploitation or some kind of cheat.
@EvolLove I really do hope to visit sometime, and learn more!
