Joe Biden, Senator from Citibank (oops, DELAWARE), to Run for President

intelligencer, more like......stupider

Why is it taken as a foregone conclusion that everyone wants the US "to stay on top"? He mentions the possibility of my sort of hand-wringing in the article, then just dismisses it by saying, "America should aspire to be the greatest nation on earth." Which, ignoring the fact that America is not a nation (fucking nitwit), perhaps focusing less on competition and instead on cleaning house and solving the intractable problems of the US might be a better solution? Lunacy.

I'm really hoping this will mark the end of Yglesias being treated as A Smart Person but sadly he's probably much too well-connected for that to ever happen

Yglesias still writes a good article monthly. In the '80s he'd be one of those Sunday paper columnists who's occasionally otm

i like ygelesias on a lot of stuff! and if this was just a one-off, it would be whatever. but i'm kinda...extremely disappointed?...that he's make this the thesis for an entire book?

This review (warning: The New Republic) gives that book — and its author — the savage beating they apparently deserve.

What is a book? A novel, a biography, a popular science story—I think I know what these are, even at the far edges of formal experimentation, where categories are tricky. But what does it mean when a columnist or a pundit writes “a book”? Swift reads, even when they number in the many hundreds of pages, volumes like David Brooks’s The Second Mountain or Paul Krugman’s Arguing With Zombies or Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” diptych tend to collect a set of superficially counterintuitive arguments and insights that upon closer inspection almost always resolve themselves into the preexisting, commonsense notions that their intended readership already assumes to be true. Designed for an educated, business-class airport set who have heard of the Aspen Ideas Festival, they gather groups of loosely connected, lecture-circuit insights like guests at a party where everyone seems to be the friend of someone else’s spouse, awkwardly unable to explain why they’re all there together, sweating and drinking under the same tent.

Matthew Yglesias’s latest, One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, is a near-perfect example of the genre—a book-length collection of thoughts and proposals loosely arrayed around the endearingly crackpot idea that there should be one billion Americans by some undefined point in the future. Why one billion? The author is surprisingly hazy on this point, except to note that the aggregate economic output of China’s and India’s billion-plus people will inevitably exceed our own (and China’s may already have). Yglesias does recognize that by any per capita measure, both of these mega-countries remain much, much poorer than the United States. But “India and China are trying to become less poor and seem to be succeeding.” They may, of course, “stumble and fail, in which case we will stay number one,” although we should not deliberately pursue this “hideously immoral” policy aim. “By contrast,” however, “tripling the nation’s population to match the rising Asian powers is something that is in our power to achieve.”

it seriously sounds like a thomas friedman idea

xp

In my view 'the left' as a coherent ideologically-driven movement does not really exist as a political entity in the USA, in that the numbers of leftists who are invested in and committed to any one flavor of ideology are too few to merit the label of 'movement'.

If you disregard the need for a coherent ideology and identify 'the left' as a much looser amalgamation of people dissatisfied with the present economic and political structure and looking for pragmatic government-centered actions to bring those structures into better alignment with their needs, then 'the left' in the USA is already somewhat larger than 'the right' and can draw upon a potentially enormous reservoir of politically disengaged and dispirited people who see no hope in politics as a source of solutions to their pressing problems. What is most critically missing is a means of organizing and directing the masses, analogous to the right's control of mass media and fundamentalist churches.

here's my wild, ted talk style idea:

what if we spend our time thinking about ways in which the united states can support people in india and china who are becoming less poor, rather than being asked to replicate my dna via fucking to overwhelm them like starcraft zergs? i don't want to compete against people! jfc

Good post, Aimless, and one that resonates more with me.

what if we spend our time thinking about ways in which the united states can support people in india and china who are becoming less poor, rather than being asked to replicate my dna via fucking to overwhelm them like starcraft zergs? i don't want to compete against people! jfc

Our declining standard of living has been propped up by exploitation of the 'developing' world - Yglesias can't countenance cooperation over subjugation because you have to start answering questions about how you maintain that consumer choice economy.

Karl otm, why is the language always about winning in a zero-sum way that entails others losing?

On the other hand, fucking is pretty enjoyable, let's not knock it

Fucking: arguably even more enjoyable when you don't think about all the diapers you might be changing down the road.

or whether your grandchildren will enjoy economic dominance over some other country's grandchildren while the skies are on fire

if the extra 650 million came from immigration/open borders, great.

tbf yglesias is very into this, he doesn't think we can fuck our way to 10^9

damn he really is dumb as a rock.

Bacharach's review is good; also, congrats on having the chutzpah to open a book review with the question "what is a book?" (though he might have taken the gag slightly further with a "Webster's defines a 'book' as..." followup)

i'm sticking with "interesting, if frought" in that it suggests an america with universal childcare, open borders, broad infrastructure and housing expansion... all wrapped in heavily patriotic, pro-fucking, populist, MAGA friendly (and as noted, generally absurd) rhetoric. Why a billion? because a billion is a big number that sticks in people's heads! As jiu-jitsu op-eds go, i think the piece has got some worth.

that said, on review, i thought the entirety of his argument was encompassed in that article and didn't catch that it was a book excerpt... I can't imagine what this would look like or even what more he could add over 250 pages.

Look, he just wants to make messy creampies in as many women as possible, and the book will serve as entree to the sort of fucking he desires.

xp i think you mean fraught!

(i say this only because in years of your posts you rarely misspell anything, so i figure you'd appreciate it)

frawt

Let us not discuss frotteurs (in this, of all threads)

On second thought, I am pretty sure frotting should not be a major topic in any politics thread

Lmao I clicked on the Biden thread and only saw table’s post

well now i know how to spell fraught! thank you for catching me!

Yglesias has been hyping the book on Twitter for at least a month (gotta respect the hustle), so I've had some time to consider the thesis. He's often good at reframing topics in provocative ways, and so this seems like an interesting thought experiment in that vein. Given his trollish tendencies, I think it's meant to be somewhat outlandish, to spur debate and force people to question their assumptions. That said, I can't imagine actually reading a book-length version of the argument.

lol rob

jesus fucking christ table

Corn pop, cream pie, come on Jack!

Joe Biden on U.S. military budget: “I’ve met with a number of my advisors and some have suggested in certain areas the budget is going to have to be increased.” The military budget is already up as much as $2 trillion/10 years under Trump https://t.co/PTBDfGR0el

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) September 10, 2020

He also said he does not foresee major reductions in the U.S. defense budget as the military refocuses its attention to potential threats from “near-peer” powers such as China and Russia.

coolcool

whatever, don't care, as long as spending also increases everywhere else

I don’t think it works that way

Biden’s transition team leader, two weeks ago:
"When we get in, the pantry is going to be bare," he said. "When you see what Trump’s done to the deficit … forget about COVID-19, all the deficits that he built with the incredible tax cuts. So we’re going to be limited."

i'm shocked, shocked that biden turned out not to be an isolationist

Why have a new WPA to perhaps offset 14% unemployment, when you can pump money into a Cold War with China?

I’ll take the bait again.

If the left in the USA wants to have any effect on foreign policy, it has to develop a set of positions that preserve American national security while accomplishing left progressive goals. This means recognizing the incumbency of the military and the intelligence community and building a roster of left (ish) policy professionals who have the national security background to lead the departments of State and Defense and serve in the NSC and the ODNI. This means establishing sophisticated foreign policy planks that withstand scrutiny by cranky old hawks. It means compromise. There is not a light switch in the American foreign policy apparatus - diplomatic, informational, military, and economic - that anyone can just flip from “hegemonic capitalism” to “switzerland.”

We also actually owe things to other countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_pact - those are set, no matter what the current asshole in the oval office thinks. If the US left wants to bring the troops back home and end American “imperialism” (bullshit abuse of the term, but let the kids have their fun), it will have to put in the effort to create the infrastructure of an alternative. This has yet to even begin, as far as I can see.

btw if that came across like an Aimless post, well, fuck y’all Aimless haters

I won't take the bait because I don't think you're reachable on any of that. The issue with Biden's quote, though, isn't about 'left foreign policy' or 'national security,' it's about the further expansion of the bloated defense budget. A warning shot that we're getting austerity except for F-35s and refurbed secret bases in central Asia should terrify everyone, being both bad policy and bad politics - it never works out that 'spending also increases everywhere else.'

Obama took office in 2009 with official unemployment half of what Biden's going to be looking at. The 2022 midterms are going to come fast.

Yes, even if you are for robust national security and defense treaties, that all should still be achievable with a leaner defense budget. It has grown out of control continuously since WW2 and needs to be reined in and redirected towards dozens of other government programs that have been bled dry.

to me, the fact that politicians across the spectrum constantly play at this idea that there's no funding for so many critical items is the bigger scandal here, while the defense budget is this massive untouchable object that we can't dare imagine shrinking even a little

let’s talk about all those winning politicians who’ve campaigned on reducing the size of the annual NDAA. let’s talk about the ones who made it a big part of their platform and so we personally donated to them, and then they won.

it’s like “Hey, this sucks!!!” has been the entire argument for how long?

Just got back from the centrist rally. Amazing turnout. Thousands of people holding hands and chanting “Better things aren’t possible”

— internet h*ppo (@InternetHippo) July 1, 2017

https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/trump2019_discpie_unbranded_large.png

the fuck outta here

There is not a light switch in the American foreign policy apparatus - diplomatic, informational, military, and economic - that anyone can just flip from “hegemonic capitalism” to “switzerland.”

This is a joke argument, right?

https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/joscppgqj0-hpt5qrxb3ua.png

Better to wait a little longer and drive that 17% down, it's only at a 30-year low.

If you don't have the guts to even brook the conversation about even a minor reallocation of defense spending—during a pandemic with congress deadlocked on food and housing assistance—you don't deserve to be in charge of this country.

"deserve" I don't even know what that means

The shareholders agree, milo