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The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2020-29
Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:
“No matter how long I live, I don’t think I will ever get over how the U.S., with all its wealth and technological capability and academic prowess, sleepwalked into the disaster that is unfolding,” says Kai Kupferschmidt, a German science writer.
I have been preaching to wear masks for reason.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb – 11:22 UTC · 12 Apr 2020
MASKS
One comment about masks and nonlinearities that these imbeciles are not getting.
Reducing exposure to viruses by 30% thanks to an "imperfect" mask does not mean reducing risk of contracting the disease by just 30%. By convexity, it must be more than 30%, can even be 95%.
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Other issues:
Use as open thread …
WHERE WE ARE NOW – PART 1 OF 4
Analysis by Alexander Dugin
Edited by Pepe Escobar
“I have read virtually EVERYTHING, East and West, in terms of detailed analysis of our current, game-changing, global stage of siege – not to mention private conversations with top analysts and the tsunami of think tank reports I have to sift through in my inbox.
“The insights by my friend Dugin are right at the very top. I am publishing an edited version in 4 successive, condensed posts. I personally agree with 90% of his conceptualization – especially the notion of the state in mutation (like the virus) turning ever more dictatorial, and the collapse of the global liberal world.
“This is an effort to invite an informed discussion with you – a global audience. Any entity with zero informed comment to offer, or prone to debased ad hominem attacks stay away – and I’m being very polite about it. For now.
“Part 1:
“The coronavirus has already struck a blow from which neither politics, economics, nor ideology will recover. The pandemic would have to have been dealt with by the existing institutions, in normal mode without changing the basic rules:
– neither in politics (meaning no quarantine, no forced isolation, let alone a state of emergency);
– nor in the economy (no remote work, no stopping of production, exchanges and financial- industrial institutions or trading platforms, no vacation, etc.);
– nor in ideology (no restrictions, albeit temporary on essential civil rights, freedom of movement, the cancellation or postponement of elections, referenda, etc.).
“…but all of this has already happened on a global scale, including in Western countries, i.e., in the territory of the ‘world government’ itself. The very foundations of the global system have been suspended.
“For the ‘world government’ to take such a step, it had to be forced to do so. By whom?
Part-2:
“The state, mutating as fast as the virus:
“Everywhere in the world – whether openly or by default – a state of emergency has been declared. According to the classics of political thought, and in particular Carl Schmitt, this means the establishment of a regime of dictatorship. The sovereign, according to Schmitt, is he who makes the decision in an emergency situation (Ernstfall), and today this is the state. However, it should not be forgotten that today’s state has until the altogether recent last moment been based on the principles of liberal democracy, capitalism, and the ideology of human rights.
“In other words, this state is, in some sense, deciding on the liquidation of its own philosophical and ideological basis (even if such are for now formalized, temporary measures, the Roman Empire still began with the temporary dictatorship of Caesar, which gradually became permanent). Thus, the state is rapidly mutating, just as the virus itself is mutating, and the state is following the coronavirus in this constantly evolving struggle, which is taking the situation ever further from the point of global liberal democracy. All the extant borders which until yesterday seemed to be erased or half-erased are once again gaining fundamental meaning.”
Part-3
“New algorithms engendering a new dictatorial state:
“Over the course of this epidemic, a new state is emerging which is beginning to function with new rules. It is very likely that in the process of the state of emergency there will be a shift of power from formal rulers to technical and technological functionaries, e.g., the military, epidemiologists, and institutions especially created for such extreme circumstances.
“As legal norms are suspended, new algorithms of behavior and new practices are beginning to be deployed. Thus is born the dictatorial state, which, unlike the liberal-democratic state, has completely different goals, foundations, principles and axioms. In this case, the “world government” is dissolved, because any supranational strategy loses all meaning. Power is rapidly moving to an ever lower level – but not to society and not to citizens, but to the military-technological and medical-sanitary level. A radically new rationality is gaining force – not the rationale of democracy, freedom, the market and individualism, but that of pure survival, for which responsibility is assumed by a subject combining direct power and the possession of technical, technological, and medical logistics. Moreover, in the network society, such is based on a system of total surveillance excluding any kind of privacy.
“Thus, if at one end we have the virus as the subject of transformation, then at the other end we have military-medical surveillance and punitive dictatorship fundamentally differing in all parameters from the state that we knew until yesterday. It is not at all guaranteed that such a state, in its fight against the secular ‘plague gods’, will precisely coincide with the borders of existing national entities.”
Part-4
“The state of emergency and the collapse of the global liberal order:
“Agamben has been more radical than others and opposed the measures taken against the coronavirus, preferring even death to the introduction of a state of emergency. He clearly saw that even a small step in this direction will change the entire structure of the world order. Entering the stage of dictatorship is easy, but exiting it is sometimes impossible.
“It is impossible to go back to the world order that existed only recently and which seemed so familiar and natural that no one thought about its ephemerality. Liberalism either did not reach its natural end and the establishment of a ‘world government’, or nihilistic collapse was its original goal, merely covered by an increasingly less convincing and increasingly perverse ‘humanist’ decor.
“The end of globalization will not mean, however, a simple transition to the Westphalian system, to realism and a system of closed trade states (Fichte). Such would require the well- defined ideology that existed in early Modernity, but which was completely eradicated in late Modernity, and especially in Postmodernity. The demonization of anything remotely resembling ‘nationalism’ or ‘fascism’ has led to the total rejection of national identities, and now the severity of the biological threat and its crude physiological nature makes national myths superfluous. The military-medical dictatorship does not need additional methods to motivate the masses.
“The global liberal world has collapsed before our very eyes, just as the USSR and the world socialist system fell in 1991. Our consciousness refuses to believe in such colossal shifts, and especially in their irreversibility. But we must. It is better to conceptualize and comprehend them in advance – now, as long as things have not yet become so acute.”
Dugin does provoke the mind to think. I certainly have my own comments to make, but they’ll need to wait for later after today’s Easter program here at my hermitage on the shoreline where it’s a superb Spring day and the grill will be lit to flame broil our small feast.
Posted by: karlof1 | Apr 12 2020 17:24 utc | 22
Very interesting topic raised by the Global Times on Kudlow’s economic policy post-COVID-19 for the USA:
China won’t be scared by Kudlow’s proposal
When answering a question about how the US can reduce its reliance on Chinese manufacturing, Kudlow told Fox Business Network Thursday that the US could lure American companies to move back from China with full immediate expensing. “Plant, equipment, intellectual property, structures, renovations – in other words, if we had 100 percent immediate expensing, we should literally pay the moving costs of American companies from China back to the US,” he said.
To which the Global Times respond:
First, the proposal to pay for the moving costs is not attractive to US companies at all. If anything, the comprehensive manufacturing costs are much more expensive in the US than in China or in Southeast Asia.
Second, American manufacturers can hardly find enough skilled workers locally if they do move back.
Third, the availability of upstream and downstream supply chains in the US could pose another challenge for US companies moving back home.
Fourth, leaving China, to a certain extent, means companies need to cede China’s massive consumer market to their rivals, which is obviously unacceptable.
Fifth, it is also unwise for companies to make such a relocating decision at a time when China has managed to bring the epidemic under control while the coronavirus continues to rage in the US.
Sixth, it is hard for the proposal to become an actual policy as American taxpayers will unlikely support the proposal.
The Global Times then concludes that:
In this sense, Kudlow’s proposal seems more like a bluff, indicating that the White House would continue to pursue decoupling from China.
The Global Times is correct. Kudlow’s proposal is utopic for one simple reason: it goes against the capitalist system – which is the American (western) way of life.
Kudlow’s proposal really is the right-wing side of the MMT coin, and it’s pretty straightforward: the private sector knows what is good for society, but they can only make the move if profitability is high enough. The State can then accelerate the process by covering for the private sector’s losses, making a low profitable situation (or even a loss situation) into a profitable enough situation so that the move can happen.
The problem with this logic is that is self-destructs: if you reach a point where you know how much money is enough so the entire productive chain be shifted in time-space in order to reach a certain political goal, then you’re already talking about a planned economy.
But it gets worse: Kudlow can even concede that he’s talking about planned economy for a single phase, but after that, he would assume, the State will gently give back the keys of the economy to the private sector. The thing is the cost of reallocation are far from being the only costs of maintaining – let alone expanding – manufacturing infrastructure. You could even, theoretically, reinstate industry to the USA, but then all the other costs involved (mentioned by the Global Times) would apply. The cycle would reset, not be eliminated, and in a much worse profit base.
So, the USG would be put in a situation where it would have to be bailing out its own manufacturing 24/7. It would be a planned economy in denial, with all the bad consequences of capitalism without any of its benefits.
Posted by: vk | Apr 12 2020 20:34 utc | 46
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