[{"id":55668,"date":"2026-09-25T05:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T05:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55668"},"modified":"2026-09-25T17:55:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T17:55:49","slug":"ny-times-should-look-across-the-hudson-not-across-the-atlantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/25\/ny-times-should-look-across-the-hudson-not-across-the-atlantic\/","title":{"rendered":"NY Times should look across the East River, not across the Atlantic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I&#8217;d try a piece that&#8217;s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US. It&#8217;s a mashup of a <a href=\"https:\/\/johnquigginblog.substack.com\/p\/the-european-far-right-has-seen-some\">couple<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/johnquigginblog.substack.com\/p\/us-republicans-are-worse-than-any\">recent<\/a> Substack newsletters.<\/p>\n<p>The <em>New York Times<\/em> has a thumb-sucker about <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/09\/21\/world\/europe\/germany-afd-far-right.html\">the rise of the European far right<\/a>, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with the facts. The picture is one of inexorable advance, citing parties such as \u201cthe Party for Freedom of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and the Reform U.K. party of Nigel Farage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The <em>New York Times<\/em> doesn\u2019t mention that:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The right-wing coalition of which Wilders was part collapsed when he withdrew support and lost the subsequent election. Wilders\u2019 party split and is competing with two other far-right parties, also in opposition.<\/li>\n<li>The right-wing Swedish coalition, which had promised the Sweden Democrats a role, was defeated at the recent election, with the SD vote declining.<\/li>\n<li>Farage\u2019s Reform party has also split, and Farage himself is now massively unpopular.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There have been more consequential losses than this. The most successful far-right government in Europe, that of Viktor Orb\u00e1n\u2019s Fidesz in Hungary, was crushed in elections earlier this year, and the party is now splitting. Poland\u2019s Law and Justice Party (PiS) lost office in 2023 and has now also split.<sup><a href=\"#fn1\" id=\"ref1\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Other successes have turned sour for the far right. Giorgia Meloni\u2019s Brothers of Italy party, a successor to various neo-fascist parties, won elections in 2022 and has held together since then. But the government hasn\u2019t delivered much of the far-right agenda, beyond stunts like a recently announced ban on burqas in schools. The Finns Party\u2019s participation in a right-wing government (in Finland, obviously) has seen a big loss of popularity.<\/p>\n<p>Europe isn\u2019t out of the woods yet. A victory for the National Rally in the French election next year would pose some significant problems. But compared to the defeats listed above, the fact that the German AfD might form the government of a small German state is not a big problem.<\/p>\n<p> <!--more--><\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s important to observe at this point that the rise of far-right parties does not imply an increase in the proportion of voters with far-right views. In almost any country, at least 20 per cent of voters, and maybe more, hold far-right views of one kind or another, which will emerge if given the chance. As I <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2016\/02\/29\/the-three-party-system\/\">observed back in 2016<\/a>, the neoliberal consensus meant that \u201cmainstream\u201d right-wing parties could no longer rely on the votes of (white Christian) tribalists\/Trumpists. They made symbolic gestures in their direction, but largely ignored them, particularly if their interests came into conflict with those of big business. After the 2008 financial crisis, this was no longer possible.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, it\u2019s true that far-right parties have succeeded in pushing European countries to adopt more restrictive immigration policies. But anti-immigrant bigotry has always been a winning issue for the political right. The UK Conservative Party, normally classed as centre-right, has advocated and implemented policies more restrictive than those of many European far-right parties, only to be outflanked by the further-right Reform and Restore.<\/p>\n<p>And that brings us to the elephant in the <em>New York Times<\/em> room: the sanewashing of the Trump administration and the US voting public.<\/p>\n<p>The article contains a passing mention of rhetorical claims made by Vance, Rubio and Trump along lines similar to those of the European far right. But no one reading it would realise that the Trump administration has implemented policies more extreme than those of even the AfD, the furthest-right of the European parties discussed, and has done so with the near-unanimous support of US Republicans.<\/p>\n<p> Admittedly, we haven&#8217;t seen what the AfD might do with untrammeled power, but The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.afd.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/2024-01-31-_-AfD-PM-_-Anhang-Positionspapier-Remigration.pdf\">stated AfD policy on remigration<\/a> is much milder than the one in force in ths US, focusing on deporting criminals and voluntary return. And it includes disclaimers like<\/p>\n<blockquote><p> \u201cWe firmly reject unconstitutional demands \u2014 such as the arbitrary, collective deportation of foreigners regardless of their individual right of residence, or even the deportation of German citizens with a migration background.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Trump administration has gone far beyond this, detaining and deporting people who have committed no crime and have sought to pursue residency through legal processes. And it has repeatedly trashed constitutional protections of all kinds, with heavily armed secret police snatching people off the streets and disappearing them into concentration camps. <\/p>\n<p>This is not just a MAGA policy. Every Republican member of Congress, with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, voted to support this regime of terror.<sup><a href=\"#fn2\" id=\"ref2\">2<\/a><\/sup> And what\u2019s true of politicians is true of voters. Unlike European far-right parties, which rarely get more than 20 per cent support, Trump and the Republicans got nearly 50 per cent of the vote in the 2024 election. And while they are likely to lose ground in the next election, that\u2019s not because of repugnance against these crimes. Immigration is the issue on which Trump\u2019s support is highest, at around 40 per cent. That includes 80 per cent of Republicans.<\/p>\n<p>These aren\u2019t (only) the left-behind denizens of Midwestern diners. <a href=\"https:\/\/assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com\/hub\/hub\/cms\/prod_cms_alt\/file\/2026\/06\/21\/90063c95-6d0a-4a28-b9ab-528e08940916\/cbsnews_20260621_sun.pdf\">Forty per cent of white Americans with four-year degrees share this approval<\/a>. Given the gender gap, the figure for white college-educated men would be close to 50 per cent.<\/p>\n<p>In summary, the <em>New York Times<\/em> would get much more insight into the roots of right-wing extremism if its reporters took the Long Island Rail Road to Suffolk County,<sup><a href=\"#fn3\" id=\"ref3\">3<\/a><\/sup> went to an upscale bar or restaurant and chatted to the patrons there. But it\u2019s far more comforting to read about foreigners nostalgic for Mussolini and Hitler than to consider the likelihood that your next-door neighbour shares their views.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p id=\"fn1\"><sup>1<\/sup> Admittedly, a PiS candidate scraped in to win the most recent presidential election, but he has limited power. <a href=\"#ref1\">\u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"fn2\"><sup>2<\/sup> As usual, Susan Collins got a hall pass to support a failed amendment before falling into line on the final vote. <a href=\"#ref2\">\u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"fn3\"><sup>3<\/sup> The second-richest county in New York, with median household income of $130,000 and a 54 per cent vote for Trump. <a href=\"#ref3\">\u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Responding the gloominess of recent posts, I thought I&#8217;d try a piece that&#8217;s more optimistic about Europe, if not about the US. It&#8217;s a mashup of a couple of recent Substack newsletters. The New York Times has a thumb-sucker about the rise of the European far right, which would greatly mislead anyone not up with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55668"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55677,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55668\/revisions\/55677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55660,"date":"2026-09-21T13:22:52","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T13:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55660"},"modified":"2026-09-22T05:50:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T05:50:46","slug":"into-the-darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/21\/into-the-darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"Into the darkness?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don&#8217;t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means of endless tyranny, with all hopes of human freedom extinguished.<\/p>\n<p>Much of political philosophy over the past three centuries or so has consisted in elaborating a picture of what it means for a society to be one of free and equal human beings, and the implicit self-understanding of most of our societies has been to have that as our imagined collective destination, perhaps delayed by practical concerns and by deep and unresolved questions about what it would mean, about who is included in the scope of freedom and equality (and who not). When John Rawls wrote about an overlapping consensus or when Joseph Carens discussed shared democratic values or even when Habermas outlined the conditions of an ideal speech situation, they were pointing to possibilities unrealized in our actual societies but implicitly acknowledged as the promise of the future. And radical critique of our societies, such as articulated by Marxists or anarchists, did not so much renounce the aspiration to freedom and equality but argued that the desire for it that capitalism and modernity called forth would inevitably be frustrated within an actual society that reproduced domination and exploitation: that liberal society failed to keep its own promises, which would instead be realised by a socialist alternative.<\/p>\n<p>But now we find ourselves on the edge, or perhaps over the edge, of a descent into a world where such visions of freedom and equality are unimaginable and where, to borrow a clich\u00e9, resistance is simply futile. The herald of this predicament was Edward Snowden, who revealed how comprehensive a monitoring of individual thought and action was possible in the world of the internet. Anyway it has turned out that, for most of the population, privacy is something they are perfectly happy to sacrifice, just so long as the algorithms end up being better tuned to the satisfaction of our wants and desires. And progress is no long measured in terms of our liberation from various forms of oppressions but rather in the ever increased abilities we have to acquire and consume, even if that comes at the expense of the natural and physical basis of our very survival.<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Benjamin Constant thought that a private sphere was one of the constituent parts of the &#8220;liberty of the moderns&#8221;, and if he was right then Snowden&#8217;s revelations and, subsequently, the panopticon of the tech oligarchs have put an end to freedom already. But it is one thing, perhaps, to have all that information about us and to put it to effective use beyond the satisfaction and shaping of our consumer choice. Well, a first step in politics is to tailor our information environments so as to manipulate us, or enough of us, to cast our votes in favour of the preferred candidates of crypto billionaires, and we are already beyond that stage thanks to the likes of Palantir. It turns out that enough of us can be scared by the threat of &#8220;illegal immigrants&#8221;, &#8220;fighting-age males&#8221;, &#8220;grooming gangs&#8221; or simply brown people standing up for their rights, to make it likely that far-right populists will take power in parts of Europe as they already have in the United States. And when they are in power they will benefit from the fact that our conventional and sensible politicians have already weakened or removed the guardrails that limit state power, undermining human rights and criminalising those who have been active in protesting the climate emergence, the Gaza genocide or the tens of thousands of migrant deaths. <\/p>\n<p>When Le Pen, or Farage or the AfD are in power, as Meloni is in power in Italy, Trump in the US, Erdogan in Turkey, Modi in India, and, indeed Xi in China, what makes us think that it will ever be possible to remove them? Well perhaps that thought is too soon, for now, because there are still a few institutional obstacles in the paths of some of them, and ageing and death will at least deal with some individuals eventually. <\/p>\n<p>But this only puts off the day when states, armed with vast amounts of information about every single on of us, are able to interrogate that data using artificial intelligence and able to thwart or anticipate any organized political resistance. States are already criminalizing people, such as Just Stop Oil protesters in the UK, for discussing online how to resist. For people to resist they need to co-ordinate with one another, to plan, to argue, to locate their fellow thinkers. Good luck with that if all that planning, co-ordination and chat is analysed in real time by AI, which can dispatch law enforcement to arrest the putative conspirators forthwith. <\/p>\n<p>More than that, we can we even hope that if political resistance is impossible we, or at least a few brave individuals, might maintain a faint light by acts such as harbouring the regime&#8217;s victims, as people did in Nazi Germany? For such acts would likely be quickly detected by AIs questioning the vast pool of data generated by our moving around, shopping, adjusting our central heating and all the mundane actions that interact with &#8220;smart&#8221; devices of various kinds. The &#8220;illegal immigrants&#8221; hiding in your basement will, almost inevitably, generate changes to the digital readings from your building that will distinguish it from the other buildings in the neighbourhood. Again, the police, of ICE, can be sent to investigate on the basis of the data.<\/p>\n<p>It is tempting, in the face of such thoughts, to advocate that people who wish to live as free and equal individuals should simply find somewhere to live off-grid, perhaps practising some form of subsistence agriculture to meet basic needs. But such an option is unattractive for those of us who have been negligent enought to allow our wants to be irremediably shaped by living in a consumer society and we would, of course, also be depriving ourselves of many of the benefits of modern science and in particular of medical technology without which many of us could not survive. Moreover, there is no land in which we could live beyond the boundaries of states, as once there was, so we cannot escape to form Maroon communities or their latter-day equivalents. Insofar as any such experiment were successful, it would likely be suppressed as a threat by the incumbents of state power who would perhaps dress up their intervention as the humanitarian rescue of, for example, children, deprived by their parents of the benefits of modern civilization, including artificial intelligence. Again the &#8220;terrorists&#8221; or the &#8220;separatists&#8221; can be led away.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I&#8217;d like to believe that my fears are unfounded, that approximations to freedom and equality can still be attempted and that resistance to tyranny can still be viable, perhaps using the Master&#8217;s tools. But for now I&#8217;m gripped by a deep pessimism, sometimes relieved by the thought that I will probably not see the worst, a thought that is immediately undermined by reflection on what my children and my children&#8217;s children will have to live under.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story of last week, which will certainly return, is the threat to the survival of humanity (and maybe all life on Earth) from artificial intelligence. I don&#8217;t know how real that threat is and find it hard to think about, but I am worried that even if humanity survives, AI will be a means [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[397,422,459,306,108,363,102,457,455,125,29,52,53,54,70,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-anarchism","category-artificial-intelligence","category-asylum-and-refugees","category-climate-change","category-climate-emergency","category-conspiracy","category-democracy","category-fascist-policies","category-human-rights","category-information-technology","category-political-science","category-political-theorypolitical-philosophy","category-privacy","category-world-politics","category-wtf"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55660"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55663,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55660\/revisions\/55663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55658,"date":"2026-09-20T08:23:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-20T08:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55658"},"modified":"2026-09-20T08:23:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T08:23:14","slug":"sunday-photoblogging-la-pointe-courte","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/20\/sunday-photoblogging-la-pointe-courte\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday photoblogging: La Pointe courte"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/chrisbertram\/55539107658\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"La Pointe courte, S\u00e8te\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/55539107658_2f241b3e91.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" alt=\"La Pointe courte, S\u00e8te\"\/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>At La Pointe courte, in S\u00e8te, France, where Agn\u00e8s Varda shot her film of the same name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At La Pointe courte, in S\u00e8te, France, where Agn\u00e8s Varda shot her film of the same name.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55659,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55658\/revisions\/55659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55653,"date":"2026-09-17T08:40:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T08:40:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55653"},"modified":"2026-09-17T08:40:50","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T08:40:50","slug":"existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/17\/existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Existential Risks in an Age of Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the oddities of our age is that there are two apocalyptic sensibilities that have captured two almost completely distinct groups of the scientifically literate not least among the youth: one can be found among those concerned with the effects of global warming produced by human (technological) activity. Scientifically literate apocalypticism is what concerns me in this post. The other can be found by people concerned about and often working in the development of artificial intelligence above all among those shaped by ideas derived from the philosophers associated with Long-termism. I used \u2018sensibilities\u2019 in the first sentence because when you try to look more closely at the wide diversity of views within each of the two \u2018doomerist\u2019 groups, one finds much heterogeneity in expectations (and the risks\/scenarios attached to them). I find the lack of genuine interaction among these two groups very peculiar, but why this is so I will set aside.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect the relative absence of overlap among the two doomerist orientations has allowed the environmental orientation to have become coded Left-centrist, and the other coded Right-Libertarian in many societies. But I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s fully solidified, and it&#8217;s not my interest today. Of course, many environmentalists tend to treat the growth of datacenters as contributors to the problem they are focusing on.<\/p>\n<p>Scientifically literate apocalypticism is not wholly unprecedented. First, at one point, in living memory of some among us, there was a similar sensibility about the role of nuclear technology, especially atomic weapons, including among many of the people involved in research and development of adjoining technologies. In fact, there existed military\/political strategies, based on then cutting-edge formal modeling (and computing), that required from participants in super-power conflict that one credibly aimed at mutual destruction. It is not unlikely one can find more examples among those who were allowed to be aware of the development of weaponized pathogens during the cold war. That is to say, once post Baconian science (and adjoining technologies) progressed sufficiently to conceive of or build weapons of truly mass destruction at limited cost, such apocalyptic sensibilities are to be expected given only minimal assumptions about human nature as we find it.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Second, scientifically grounded apocalypticism is not exclusively inherent in post-Baconian modernity. It\u2019s pretty clear if you read Seneca\u2019s work on comets, Book 7 of <em>Natural Questions<\/em>, that the planetary science of the ancient Stoics assumed that our solar system was not stable and that catastrophic ends of worlds were a recurring feature of the cosmos. This fit in a wider understanding of the cyclical nature of history. I put all of that slightly anachronistically, but much less than you would imagine. Anyone who looked at the maps of the universe with Descartes\u2019 giant, unstable planetary vortices could contemplate the eternal return of the Stoics.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/bigthink.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/origin-4.jpg?resize=1095,630\" \/><\/p>\n<p>And familiarity with the discussion in ancient Stoicism through Seneca is almost certainly why one of the first foundational open questions after the publication of the <em>Principi<\/em>a was the stability of the solar system.<span data-state=\"closed\"><a id=\"footnote-anchor-1\" class=\"footnote-anchor\" href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science#footnote-1\" target=\"_self\" data-component-name=\"FootnoteAnchorToDOM\">1<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(Attempting to solve the technical problems associated with this drove much of the advances in mathematics, probability theory, and physical astronomy in the eighteenth century.) Long before the<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Big_Crunch\"> Big Crunch<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Heat_death_of_the_universe\">Big Freeze<\/a>, there were genuine concerns about planetary collisions (evidence of the plausibility of which also piled up as our telescopes got better at checking the surface of the Moon).<\/p>\n<p>Ordinarily I would emphasize the many millenarian-Christian ideas (typically with a sectarian Protestant inflection) that resurfaced in a more secularized register within the Environmental Movement and Long-termism. But as should be clear from my discussion of Stoicism, I deny that \u2018scientific apocalypticism\u2019 is necessarily tied to the influence of Christianity, even if it\u2019s pretty clear that many elements in anthropogenic scientific doomerism manifestly are. That we are the cause of our own dread is a by-product of Baconian science, and perhaps something about the ways we conceive of agency since.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the sample size of cases I have sketched is pretty small. Even so, it allows for some fruitful distinctions and observations. For example, eighteenth century doomerism was scientifically productive: scientific focus on it generated lots of new techniques and theories as well as a happy result: the solar system is more stable than we might have hoped. This dissipated the dread at least provisionally. And it probably even lengthened the optimism and providentialism associated with scientific progress. The Big Bang and the Big Freeze re-opened it, but at scales that leave most unmoved; here our cognitive biases prevent acute dread. Lurking in my presentation is the thought that, if we let ourselves be scientifically informed, a process&#8217;s timescale and the agent&#8217;s window of effective monitoring action matter greatly to our affective stance. Structurally this is analogous to the significance of what I call <a href=\"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/06\/29\/on-humphreys-opacity-reverse-engineering-and-social-externalities-of-llms\/\">(recall) &#8216;Humphreys opacit<\/a>y&#8217; (which I define below).<\/p>\n<p>I wouldn\u2019t know for sure if mutually assured destruction helped prevent nuclear war among super-powers, but the dread of it is much less than it once was. (To what degree fears of it are likely to return as the global system enters an age of mercantile competition is, alas, a tricky question.) This is an interesting case because what unites the two contemporary doomerist groups is that they are also anthropogenic. And it would be nice if \u2018governance\u2019 could explain the control and diminution of atomic doomerism.<\/p>\n<p>Now, I hope it is fair to say that what prevents the dissipation of dread about Anthropocene extinction related to climate change is a thoroughgoing disagreement over who may pay to prevent it and far-reaching disagreement over what kind of social world we and our descendants ought to inhabit and how much risk we are willing to let ourselves and others tolerate along the way. Of course, there are other ways of describing such thoroughgoing disagreement. And, if you are a Marxist, and want to blame &#8216;Capitalism,&#8217; that&#8217;s fine by me.<\/p>\n<p>And I hope it is also fair to say that what prevents the dissipation of dread about AGI is that it seems we are entering the age where the machines that may be the source of human extinction will be built by systems of artificial intelligence itself, that is recursive self-improvement. Thinking about recursive self-improvement is not new conceptually. (As my r<a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/on-epistemic-opacity-in-computing\">egular readers know (recall here), Paley\u00a0<\/a>articulated it as a <em>reductio<\/em> of atheism.) What is new is that recursive self-improvement seems very likely. And, crucially, because modern artificial intelligence is characterized by various forms of Humphreys opacity we humans would not be able to catch the threat AI forms in real time.<span data-state=\"closed\"><a id=\"footnote-anchor-2\" class=\"footnote-anchor\" href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science#footnote-2\" target=\"_self\" data-component-name=\"FootnoteAnchorToDOM\">2<\/a><\/span>\u00a0This\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/on-humphreys-opacity-reverse-engineering\">kind of opacity (recall)\u00a0<\/a>involves the inability to surveil the steps of a process from a known input to a known desirable (or truthful, useful, beautiful, etc.) output in a timely manner to the decision-maker or responsible agent.<\/p>\n<p>What the two contemporary doomerist cases I am focusing on have in common is that no likely discoverable set of facts could dissipate the dread. Although it would be very nice if there were grounds to think the timeframes involved could be lengthened greatly. (Some of the people who focus on the existential risk of AGI are techno-optimists about climate change.) Unfortunately, there are powerful currents in both cases that strongly suggest events are accelerating toward doom. It seems that in both cases there is a converging consensus that the root cause of the problem prevents an endogenous solution; political life has to intervene, but how it should do so is very contested. (Again, if you are a Marxist you are allowed to claim the ultimate root of the problem is &#8216;capitalism&#8217; or &#8216;neoliberalism.&#8217;)<\/p>\n<p>Now it is somewhat peculiar \u2014 and this is why the distinctness between the two groups matters \u2014 that the way AI induced existential risk is formulated and debated among those who take it very seriously presupposes the very thing, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/AI_alignment\">\u2018alignment,\u2019<\/a> whose absence is one of the main causes for why the climate activists have failed so far. Here a pun is masquerading as an argument. Of course, \u2018alignment\u2019 itself covers many different kinds of phenomena, and you may claim that these keep the two doomerist orientations distinct.<\/p>\n<p>Part of what\u2019s at stake here is the thought that even if AI is one thing\/system (which I would argue it is not) what it means to make it reliably and minimally cohere with \u2018our\u2019 aspirations ultimately bottoms out in the very political (and other) disagreements the climate case has manifested. That\u2019s to be defended in future posts.<span data-state=\"closed\"><a id=\"footnote-anchor-3\" class=\"footnote-anchor\" href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science#footnote-3\" target=\"_self\" data-component-name=\"FootnoteAnchorToDOM\">3<\/a><\/span> (My regular readers know I am interested in the ways political conflict can be turned into a species of discovery and governance, and the many ways attempts at tackling Humphreys opacity can generate higher forms of it.) But for now: the apparent lack of curiosity about the very real political failure(s) of the climate movement among those that non-cynically focus on the existential risk of recursive self-improvement is one of the main reasons why I wouldn\u2019t be too optimistic that the dangers of recursive self-improvement will be managed well. (Again, Marxists can chant &#8216;Capitalism.&#8217;)<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the main point. But here\u2019s a closing thought. You might have suspected (or feared) that my invocation of Seneca would have ended up in preaching equanimity, <em>amor fati<\/em>, or suicidal despair. But as Adam Smith\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/archive\/smith-adam\/works\/moral\/part07\/part7b.htm\">(here) noted, Stoicism could drive people into political activism. For Stoicism\u2019s \u201cgeneral tendency was to animate them to actions of the most heroic magnanimity and most extensive benevolence.\u201d<\/a> If the doomerists are right, then how to merge successfully apocalyptic sensibilities with effective political philanthropy will be our era\u2019s defining challenge.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"subscribe-widget is-signed-up is-fully-subscribed\" data-component-name=\"SubscribeWidget\">\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-reset button-wrapper\">\n<ul>\n<li class=\"pencraft pc-display-flex pc-justifyContent-center pc-reset\">An earlier version of this post <a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/existential-risks-in-an-age-of-science\">was published at D&amp;I (here)<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div class=\"footnote\" data-component-name=\"FootnoteToDOM\">\n<div class=\"footnote-content\">\n<ol>\n<li>The<a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsnimpressions.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/17\/halley-and-the-senecas-prophecy\/\">\u00a0key early modern text (recall) for this argument is Halley\u2019s (1705)\u00a0<\/a><em><a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsnimpressions.wordpress.com\/2016\/05\/17\/halley-and-the-senecas-prophecy\/\">A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0I am not claiming the Stoics alone caused concern with planetary dynamics. Once it became clear Saturn and Jupiter disturbed each other\u2019s motions it followed naturally.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/digressionsimpressions.substack.com\/p\/on-epistemic-opacity-in-computing\">Humphreys opacity was (recall) part of Paley\u2019s<\/a> analysis, so that\u2019s not new at all.<\/li>\n<li>Part of the issue lurking here is that some of the folks central to AI induced doomerism may well aspire, or think they should, to engineer future alignment for \u2018us\u2019 perhaps knowing there is none now.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the oddities of our age is that there are two apocalyptic sensibilities that have captured two almost completely distinct groups of the scientifically literate not least among the youth: one can be found among those concerned with the effects of global warming produced by human (technological) activity. Scientifically literate apocalypticism is what concerns [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/192"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55653"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55654,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55653\/revisions\/55654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55648,"date":"2026-09-16T20:08:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55648"},"modified":"2026-09-16T20:08:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:08:43","slug":"the-one-where-i-figure-out-in-real-time-whether-i-enjoy-climbing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/16\/the-one-where-i-figure-out-in-real-time-whether-i-enjoy-climbing\/","title":{"rendered":"The one where I figure out in real time whether I enjoy climbing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call \u201cclimbing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine to form \u201croutes,\u201d and you can climb short ones with no ropes (\u201cbouldering\u201d) or longer (thus, higher) ones with a rope running from a harness you wear, up through an anchor installed at the top of the route, and back down to someone on the ground who takes up the slack as you climb and then lowers you back to the ground when you\u2019re finished (\u201ctop-roping\u201d). You can also do something more advanced (\u201clead climbing\u201d) where there is no anchor at the top and the person at the bottom doesn\u2019t take in slack as you climb but rather <em>gives <\/em>you slack as you climb higher with your own rope, which you attach to anchors fixed along the route as you go. (This one I haven\u2019t tried, might never.)<a href=\"#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I started doing this because a friend of mine had just lost her spouse, with whom she had climbed regularly. It\u2019s kind of a buddy sport, and I liked the idea of spending more time with this friend, as well as with two other friends who were already climbing together regularly. So we formed a climbing foursome, me the clear novice, but no matter: I learned how to be the person at the bottom, which you can safely do with no climbing skills at all, so in the confines of a \u201cclimbing gym\u201d where the advanced courses are right next to the ones that have you basically climbing the rungs of a ladder, my being much worse than the others didn\u2019t hold them back too much. (I did fail my first test to be a licensed person-holding-the-rope-at-the-bottom, but that actually was a great thing to have happened to me, for reasons I can explain in a different post. I passed on my second attempt and have been safely hoisting people up and lowering people down walls ever since.)<\/p>\n<p>My climbing was and is mostly motivated by reasons extrinsic to the actual climbing. I really enjoy spending time with these friends, and I like being with them as they do something they all clearly love and excel at. Those reasons are more than enough for me to want to continue doing this. But I often do idly wonder: Do I, additionally, <em>enjoy climbing?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here are some data points:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I rarely feel <em>excited <\/em>leading up to climbing. I am excited to see my friends, sometimes pleasantly hopeful that I\u2019ll manage to complete a new route. But I\u2019m not psyched out of my mind to get into that gym. I have been known to drag feet.<\/li>\n<li>I <em>do <\/em>usually feel glad that I went after the fact. I like the fatigue in my arms and sometimes the feeling of satisfaction when I\u2019ve done something hard. I don\u2019t feel too disappointed when I fail, either. I just generally feel glad to have done it.<\/li>\n<li><em>But<\/em>. I think my feelings of wellbeing post-climbing are less down to the satisfying fatigue or satisfying accomplishment or satisfying anything-related-to-climbing. I think I <em>mostly <\/em>feel good because I\u2019ve just spent time with friends.<\/li>\n<li>I <em>have <\/em>gone climbing by myself on occasion, but note: People keep telling me that women my age need to lift weights, and they have weights at the climbing gym, which I use regularly before I climb. I suspect that some of what brings me to the gym and makes me feel satisfied afterward is renewed hope about my bone density!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019ve already said that friendship (and bone density) are enough to make me want to continue climbing. But in addition to having sufficient reason to continue climbing, do I actually <em>enjoy <\/em>it?<\/p>\n<p>When I sat down to write this, I was hoping just to pose a question about <em>how we figure out<\/em> if we enjoy something. But while writing, a comparison came to mind, which I now find illuminating: The patterns I just bulleted closely match what I see from my kid when he participates in sports. He\u2019s very self-critical, he\u2019s often not the best athlete on the field (that\u2019s just numbers), and his team doesn\u2019t always win. So, participation in sports means he spends a lot of time feeling like he messed up, let his team down, etc. And <em>that <\/em>means:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>He often doesn\u2019t want to go to his practice or game in the run-up to it.<\/li>\n<li>He usually is happy and glad he went after he <em>does.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>But<\/em>, that post-game happiness is plausibly down to things just as extrinsic to the sport as the things that elevate<em> my<\/em> mood after climbing: He\u2019s been with friends; he\u2019s been physically active; sometimes his team won; sometimes he gets ice cream; etc.<\/li>\n<li>What drives him to his sports in the day-to-day is often not confidence that he\u2019ll have fun, but rather his sense that he committed to being there, his hope that his team will win\u2026things I again regard as extrinsic to the actual playing of the sport.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Those data points are a fairly good match with mine. And yet, if asked, I would answer with confidence that my kid <em>does <\/em>enjoy the sports in question. I would answer affirmatively because when he gets out of his way and <em>just plays<\/em>, he is <em>happy<\/em> while doing it. It seems, then, that when I ask myself whether <em>he <\/em>enjoys some activity, I\u2019m asking something like this: When he really does it, does he experience happiness, elation, joy, or exuberance?<\/p>\n<p>Yet when I ask myself if <em>I <\/em>enjoy climbing, I\u2019m evidently asking a different question.<\/p>\n<p>I think my adult version of the enjoyment question incorporates two considerations that my kid version of the question abstracts away: First, by asking whether my kid is happy, elated, etc. <em>when he just plays<\/em>, I am setting aside questions about how much of the time he is in that state of just playing. Second, when I ask simply whether my kid <em>experiences <\/em>those things, I am setting aside questions about opportunity costs, including in the domain of enjoyment itself: I\u2019m not asking whether he could be experiencing <em>more <\/em>enjoyment if he were doing something else. In contrast, when I ask myself if I enjoy climbing, I\u2019m thinking about how little of the time spent \u201cclimbing\u201d is actually <em>time on the wall, climbing<\/em>. There\u2019s the commute, the putting on of the shoes and harness, the turns spent being the person holding the rope at the bottom. I factor all that in as I contemplate the question of <em>my <\/em>enjoyment. I\u2019m also factoring in that the time I spend climbing is time I am <em>not <\/em>being productive. Time not being productive is precious. So, when I ask if I enjoy climbing, I\u2019m treating it as relevant whether something else would bring <em>more <\/em>happiness, elation, joy, or exuberance, or a better volume of those feelings per increment of time spent.<\/p>\n<p>In short, I now think that when I ask about kid enjoyment, I\u2019m doing ideal theory, whereas when I ask about adult enjoyment (or at least <em>my <\/em>adult enjoyment), I\u2019m doing non-ideal theory. While that might seem at first to make some sense, I have a hunch that the asymmetry actually reveals that I\u2019m making a mistake. When we ask <em>what we should do<\/em>, whether <em>we should pursue some hobby<\/em>, we should ask <em>mostly<\/em> without abstracting away the real-world details. We should<em> incorporate<\/em> those details when we ask the practical question of what to do or keep doing, for both kids <em>and<\/em> adults. If my kid felt joy and exuberance but only for ten seconds over the course of an entire season of soccer, and if he hated going to practice every other day, probably we should look for a new activity! But my question wasn\u2019t the practical question of whether to keep climbing: I already knew I had sufficient reason to continue. I just wanted to know <em>whether I enjoy <\/em>the activity.<\/p>\n<p>And surely, the definition of enjoyment shouldn\u2019t be different between kids and adults, even if the things that <em>bring us <\/em>enjoyment clearly should vary across developmental stages. To treat the <em>meaning of enjoyment <\/em>as different seems like an objectionable equivocation.<\/p>\n<p>If I am so confident that my kid enjoys soccer because when he actually plays, he experiences happiness, elation, joy, and exuberance, then I should apply that same standard, with its abstractions, to the question when I ask it of my <em>own<\/em> enjoyment. In <em>neither <\/em>case will my answer settle the <em>practical <\/em>question. (As our most (in)famous ideal theorist was always careful to remind us, ideal theory will not tell us directly what to do in less happy circumstances.) But if, setting aside the practical question, I just want to learn something about my own enjoyment, I should ask: Do <em>I <\/em>experience happiness, elation, joy, and exuberance when I <em>actually engage in climbing<\/em>? And the answer is, I do! I experience those things partly because when I\u2019m climbing, I\u2019m working and concentrating far too hard to worry about optimizing my enjoyment, so I\u2019m definitely <em>not<\/em> thinking about what I might be enjoying more. And, while there might be a lot of time <em>not <\/em>climbing when you go climbing, the time on the wall is, like the time just shooting the shit with my friends, something that brings happiness , elation, joy, and exuberance (if not all at once!).<\/p>\n<p>(I\u2019m experiencing those things right now, too, first because I just sorted something out to my own satisfaction using reflective equilibrium, and I <em>definitely <\/em>enjoy doing that. I also gave myself a visceral reminder of why we should keep writing without AI. The question of whether I enjoy climbing is not a matter of great importance, but I <em>did <\/em>want to know the answer, and I never would have sorted it out without messily writing through the thoughts on my own.)<\/p>\n<p>Now, suppose I\u2019m right. Suppose this journey has revealed that I (someone who clearly thinks way too much about whether I\u2019m properly enjoying what\u2019s meant to be enjoyable) slipped into the mistake of <em>defining the very term enjoyment <\/em>in a way that shifts depending on the subject I\u2019m asking about. Here\u2019s the curiosity I\u2019m left with: Does this reflect a more general tendency? Do we adults do too much nonideal theory when we ask what we enjoy? When we reflect on our enjoyment, are we too often also already anticipating the practical question\u2014the one that we <em>rightly <\/em>locate in nonideal theory\u2014of <em>what we should do<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"#_ftnref1\" name=\"_ftn1\">[1]<\/a> I\u2019m sure I\u2019m explaining this badly and\/or incorrectly. Those in the know, please correct me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago, I started doing this thing that the people who do it just call \u201cclimbing.\u201d Basically, you go to a giant place where there are things strategically stuck to a wall, and you grab them with your hands and feet trying to climb to the top of the wall. The things combine [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55648"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55650,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55648\/revisions\/55650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55640,"date":"2026-09-13T22:11:20","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T22:11:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55640"},"modified":"2026-09-13T22:11:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T22:11:20","slug":"the-us-is-not-a-serious-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/13\/the-us-is-not-a-serious-country\/","title":{"rendered":"The US is not a serious country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>The <em>Wall Street Journal<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/opinion\/donald-trump-5000-dividend-midterm-elections-f2643cf3\">ran an editorial criticising the proposal as bribery<\/a>, and the <em>New York Times<\/em> put it way down the front page of its website.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>A day or two later, the story disappeared from most front pages. Admittedly, it was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the <em>NYT<\/em> found space for stories about the Reflecting Pool fiasco and Trump\u2019s presidential library.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p> I found one story in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/money\/personal-finance\/2026\/09\/10\/trump-5000-dividends-checks-inflation-interest-rates-economy\/91690821007\/\"><em>USA Today<\/em><\/a> suggesting that the policy might be inflationary, but that\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>The reaction from US financial markets has been similarly subdued. Interest rates on government bonds have continued the gradual increase of recent months. There has been nothing like the reaction that put Liz Truss out of office in the UK after a term that lasted less than the shelf life of a lettuce. Meanwhile, stock markets barely reacted.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>Lots of commentary has focused on the fact that Trump has previously proposed handouts that didn\u2019t happen, for example from the savings to be made by DOGE, which never materialised. But this is typical of Trump \u2014 he has a range of obsessions to which he returns from time to time, before his attention span expires.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>Some are relatively trivial, like steam catapults for aircraft carriers, others more consequential, like his suggested conquests of Canada and Greenland, or retribution against his political enemies. But he never abandons them for good.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>And, in the case of cash handouts, he\u2019s had one big success \u2014 the Covid stimulus checks that were sent out with his name on them and almost certainly helped him come within an inch of victory in 2020 \u2014 as well as some smaller ones.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>In any serious country, a massively expensive policy of this kind would have been analysed in detail by now, with estimates of the immediate effect on inflation and interest rates and the flow-on to the economy as a whole. Combined with the budgetary costs and price effects of the Iran War, it seems likely to add at least a couple of percentage points to US inflation, giving the Fed a choice between abandoning its inflation-targeting regime or raising interest rates enough to risk a recession.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>But the US is not a serious country.<sup><a href=\"#fn1\" id=\"ref1\">1<\/a><\/sup> Over the past decade, at least 40 per cent of US voters (including sustained majorities of white men, the dominant identity group) have shown themselves willing to vote for a corrupt and deranged clown, while another third of the population hasn\u2019t even bothered to vote.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>Faced with these facts, mainstream media and establishment Democrats have continued to pretend that everything is normal,<sup><a href=\"#fn2\" id=\"ref2\">2<\/a><\/sup> sanewashing Trump and hoping that another round of elections will solve the problem.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p>As Adam Smith observed to a correspondent, there is a great deal of ruin in a nation. The US is still the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen. But it is running down its capital at a startling rate, and there is no real sign of things turning around in time.<\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p id=\"fn1\"><sup>1<\/sup> Phillips O\u2019Brien has been making <a href=\"https:\/\/phillipspobrien.substack.com\/p\/midweek-update-24-the-usa-is-not\">this point with respect to foreign policy<\/a>. <a href=\"#ref1\">\u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n<p> <!-- paragraph --> <\/p>\n<p id=\"fn2\"><sup>2<\/sup> Each new Trump outrage is met with feeble protests to the effect that \u201cthis is not who we are\u201d, gradually replaced by tacit acceptance that this is who tens of millions of Americans are. <a href=\"#ref2\">\u21a9<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, on 9 September, Donald Trump promised that, if the Republicans retained their Congressional majorities in the November elections, he would send $5000 to every adult American citizen. The cost has been estimated at around $1.2 trillion. The announcement received cursory coverage in the mainstream press the following day. A few retired Republicans protested. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55641,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55640\/revisions\/55641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55635,"date":"2026-09-13T15:35:46","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T15:35:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55635"},"modified":"2026-09-13T15:35:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T15:35:46","slug":"sunday-photoblogging-hotel-dalfonce-pezenas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/13\/sunday-photoblogging-hotel-dalfonce-pezenas\/","title":{"rendered":"Sunday photoblogging: H\u00f4tel d\u2019Alfonce, P\u00e9zenas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\" href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/chrisbertram\/55524782447\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"Courtyard of the H\u00f4tel d\u2019Alfonce, P\u00e9zenas\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/live.staticflickr.com\/65535\/55524782447_715afeb2a7.jpg\" width=\"375\" height=\"500\" alt=\"Courtyard of the H\u00f4tel d\u2019Alfonce, P\u00e9zenas\"\/><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55636,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55635\/revisions\/55636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55618,"date":"2026-09-08T21:32:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T21:32:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55618"},"modified":"2026-09-08T21:32:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-08T21:32:13","slug":"youth-cnd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/08\/youth-cnd\/","title":{"rendered":"Youth CND"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they&#8217;re pretty well disguised unless you were there. (Something I enjoyed about writing this one is that the characters were in both my life and CB&#8217;s life at the time, something we only discovered when we met properly 25 years ago this coming Saturday). Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/home\/post\/p-212122817\">the substack link<\/a> in case you&#8217;d prefer to read it there.<\/p>\n<p>There had to be a Youth CND, both national, and local. I\u2019m not really sure why, to be honest. Every political organization I knew had a youth wing \u2013 the Labour Party Young Socialists (boring, controlled by Militant Tendency), the Young Liberals (which contained anarchists, socialists, and the odd liberal), the Young Conservatives (I once debated some Young Conservatives on behalf of the Young Liberals, despite not being one, at the Oxford city conservative club which was opposite my dad\u2019s office \u2013 they just seemed so incredibly posh, it was as if they wanted to be caricatures), Revolution Youth (the IMG\u2019s outfit \u2013 more about them in a moment). Youth organisations in the Labour Party have mostly ended unhappily, because they were easy to infiltrate and the Party wanted more control than it could reasonably exercise. Youth CND was vulnerable in the same way: much easier for a small coordinated group to dominate than the adult version, not least because there weren\u2019t many young members of the CPGB to resist them, and what young communists there were seemed not, at least then, to be active in CND, but potentially quite damaging to the brand. Some Youth CND activists were well into their twenties. Indeed, this was our problem in Oxford really. I was the organizer of Youth CND in Oxford at the start, which was fair enough because I was the only schoolkid in Campaign ATOM. It attracted several (working class) kids from my school (through me), several (working class) boys from Oxford Boys School (led by a chap called Alex whose parents were both immigrants, and was as good-looking as he was smart, and subsequently became my flatmate for a year in college \u2013 somebody I very much regret losing touch with, actually), a few from Cheney school led by a girl called J whose mum, an East Oxford lefty, once took us to a Leon Rosselson concert. And there was a whole group of people in Revolution Youth, or \u201cRevo\u201d as they liked to call themselves, some of whom seemed old enough to be our parents, and several of whom were definitely old enough to be our teachers. It was uneasy to say the least, and my first experience of factionalism. We\u2019d meet at the bedsit of two of the older Revo people, between the Iffley and Cowley Roads, and they, who I have to say struck me as quite dull-witted, would condescend to us with their catch-phrase \u201cBasically, right\u2026[and then whatever the line was that they were telling us, and which was not open for discussion]\u201d, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that, sure, we weren\u2019t the masses, but we were a group of smart kids from state schools quite aware that more of them had gone to or were at private schools than not. They were irritating and off-putting to anyone new who turned up and wasn\u2019t already absolutely committed.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>We once held a rather good full-day teach-in event at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, which my schoolmates and the Oxford Boys (as I thought of them [1]) had done a lot of work on, and at the end of it, a group of Revo people from around the country got me in a room and threatened me with some unspecified outcome if I didn\u2019t stop doing some also barely specified thing (which was probably exclusionary of them). I was a little rattled, but also aware that a couple of people in the SWP (who were sort of friends), and the most terrifying boy in my school (who was an actual friend; his parents were old communists who disallowed him from reading The Beano and The Dandy because, according to him, they said that DC Thompson was a non-union shop [2]) would have low tolerance for anyone actually trying to harm me. At the next gathering of the national youth CND leadership, one of the Revo crowd (who eventually did a PhD in astronomy at Imperial I think, and was professionally connected to Piers Corbyn, and whom I rather liked) apologized to me on the grounds that they had discussed whether to intimidate me by threatening violence, decided against, so the incident was a breach of discipline.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks later, on my way to weekend national Youth CND conference in Birmingham, I had the misfortune of sharing the carriage with the strangest and most frightening of the Revo crowd, a man whose name I won\u2019t reveal who seemed to be about 30 but was, I now know, around 21. I now know what his age was because he was the housemate of someone I\u2019ve subsequently become close friends with so I\u2019ve latterly learned quite a bit about him. He was weird enough that you always wondered whether he was about to either attack you or cast a spell that might lead to your untimely death. If I\u2019d know then, as I do now, that he collected milk cartons obsessively, it probably wouldn\u2019t have made me feel any safer. When we got off the train he disappeared to a caucus meeting at the IMG\u2019s bookshop in Digbeth, returning to make push whatever line it was that they wanted national Youth CND to take.<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and what about the most terrifying boy in my school?: I won\u2019t use his real name for obvious reasons, so I\u2019ll just call him Dave. Dave was greatly feared for his undeniably erratic behaviour and his regular possession of a knife on his person, rather than for any particular ill-will he exhibited toward anyone. I\u2019m not even sure that he ever actually used the knife. One day, I think shortly after I\u2019d left school, the National Front decided to hold a march in Oxford, triggering a large Anti-Nazi League demonstration against them. At some point the whole event descended into a kind of free for all, with the NF scattering, being chased around the Westgate (much, much less posh then than it is now) by various of the counter-demonstrators; the police diligently, and without enthusiasm, arrested a handful from each group. Once the NF-ers had disappeared we, the anti-Nazis, convened outside the police station in St. Aldates, calling for the release of our comrades by chanting \u201cLet them out\u201d, and other imaginative slogans. It was pretty cordial for a while, but the tension mounted, and eventually Dave threw a brick through a window. If you\u2019ve been in similar situations you\u2019ll know that the ensuing silence was electric, with the quite young cops all suddenly looking angry and afraid. I\u2019m not sure whether anyone else saw who threw the brick (he was my mate and I was right next to him), but none of cops did, because they didn\u2019t make any move to get him, and they would have if they\u2019d known. To break the tension I decided to shout, into the silence, \u201cLet us in!\u201d, at which three of the cops \u2013and almost all of our people \u2013 burst out laughing. After that Peter Moss, a local councilor, was invited into the station to negotiate the release of our comrades.<\/p>\n<p>Another kid from my school, a couple of years below me, let\u2019s also not use his real name but call him Bob, was also enjoying himself that day. I never knew Bob very well, but his dad, Simon, was a hairdresser, another Communist, who was part of the Vidal Sassoon millieu, and had been a member, in his extreme youth, of the 43 Group. Simon was, for many years, my dad\u2019s next door neighbour. Dad and Simon died on the same day, unaware, I now realise, that Bob and I had once ran around trying to attack Nazis together.<\/p>\n<p>[1] Oxford Boys had a head, Dick Proctor, whom my dad admired a great deal, and of whom he once said &#8220;you know how you and I are about county cricket? We keep up with all the scores, follow and know the history of all the counties, we know who the up-and-comers are, and are as interested in the 20&#8217;s and 50&#8217;s as much as the present day? Compared with him we&#8217;re rank amateurs&#8221;. When dad was Chief Education Officer the Express asked him to allow a young journalist to spend a week in a comprehensive school and, knowing she planned to do a hit job, he sent her to Oxford Boys, on the grounds that as a single sex former grammar school with Proctor as head it would be more difficult for her to skewer than other schools (like my own). She did the hit job anyway, and has been very successful since (For a long time she was a regular presenter of The Week in Westminster, the only one of whom I had formed a seriously bad impression, and that was before hearing dad&#8217;s story). <\/p>\n<p>[2] I\u2019ve had other communist friends who were denied the joys of The Beano and The Dandy on the more plausible grounds that reading them would encourage anarchistic heterodoxy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they&#8217;re pretty well disguised unless you were there. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55618"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55619,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55618\/revisions\/55619"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55614,"date":"2026-09-07T01:15:35","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T01:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55614"},"modified":"2026-09-07T01:15:59","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T01:15:59","slug":"when-money-mattered","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/07\/when-money-mattered\/","title":{"rendered":"When Money Mattered"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week all the news services carried a story about the Dutch central bank shipping many, many tons of gold from the Mad King-led United States to the custody of cooler heads (well, cooling, we hope, after that very hot summer) in London.<\/p>\n<p>On the same day, the FT ran a story by Banu Baweja at UBS Investment Bank about how lots of people keep wanting to buy gold. Prices have eased a bit lately, but there is still plenty of demand, which they reckon will keep going. The Mad King and his only-slightly-less-mad Court are part of it, making the American finance products people generally use to try to balance out risk from other activity a bit suss.<\/p>\n<p>But also, when the world cancelled foreign exchange reserves held by that other mad king in Russia, the UBS folk reckon people have started getting a bit suss on all money. \u201cReserve and asset managers globally were left confronting a simple question: if $630bn held in Treasuries, Bunds, gilts and other bonds coule become inaccessible overnight, what constituted money?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Apparently gold is the answer.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Katie Martin from my favourite podcast (Unhedged) this week declared herself \u2018long\u2019 (things she loves) gold. Well, not long on\u00a0<em>gold\u00a0<\/em>gold, really she said, but on the place of gold in the news cycle. I\u2019m with Katie, except in history: I am definitely not wanting a return to the gold standard or something stoopid like that.<\/p>\n<p>Which is to say, while I am just about to talk about the materiality of money in the Age of Gold, I\u00a0<em>don\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0think anything dumb like \u2018gold is money\u2019, \u2018the only real money is gold\u2019 or even that the materiality of money is more material when it is gold than when it is stuff you tap from your phone or credit card at the shops. In fact, money\u2019s historical contingency is key not only to the history I am trying to write, but the politics of money for the foreseeable future. I think (your feedback is sought, please).<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"header-anchor-post\">Offshoring in practice and metaphor<\/h2>\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-flex pc-alignItems-center pc-position-absolute pc-reset header-anchor-parent\">\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-contents pc-reset pubTheme-yiXxQA\">\n<div id=\"\u00a7offshoring-in-practice-and-metaphor\" class=\"pencraft pc-reset header-anchor offset-top\">The Age of Gold (I\u2019m calling it that, from the Gold Rush to the Great Depression<span data-state=\"closed\"><a id=\"footnote-anchor-1\" class=\"footnote-anchor\" href=\"https:\/\/hannahforsyth.substack.com\/p\/when-money-mattered#footnote-1\" target=\"_self\" data-component-name=\"FootnoteAnchorToDOM\">1<\/a><\/span>) helps to see something about how money\u00a0<em>matters<\/em>\u00a0(excuse the matter-related pun). This understanding of money as material is important now because the social relations forged by money over the past fifty years or so are a key contributor to some of our most urgent, even existential, problems.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Let\u2019s start with offshore tax havens, which have been around for a while. Historian Vanessa Ogle shows tax havens and adjacent forms of smuggling caves for money grew markedly between 1945 and 1965. Amidst processes of decolonisation and against the logic of the interventionist welfare state, new legal spaces grew. In the process, a different kind of colonialism meant that on the edges of the new American imperialism, havens grew for what some rich people in the richest bits of the world (not just the US) idealised as free market capitalism. Like magic (except it was in fact the plan), in offshore places they could forge a kind of \u2018freedom\u2019 that not coincidentally accrued to themselves a very unequal share of the benefits of capitalism.<\/p>\n<p>While money was offshore, the welfare state nevertheless grew (such as it was). But it was severely disrupted in the 1970s when the US dismantled the basis of the global financial system by ending the promise to exchange US dollars for gold if asked.<\/p>\n<p>In his Very Serious Treatise on Banking,\u00a0<em>Making Money,<\/em>\u00a0Terry Pratchett inserts this dialogue between our hero, Moist von Lipwig and the head of the bank\/mint, Mr Bent:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cI read somewhere that the coin represents a promise to hand over a dollar\u2019s worth of gold,\u2019 said Moist helpfully.<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Bent steepled his hands in front of his face and turned his eyes upwards, as though praying.<\/p>\n<p>\u2018In theory, yes,\u2019 he said after a few moments. \u2018I would prefer to say that it is a tacit understanding that we will honour our promise to exchange it for a dollar\u2019s worth of gold provided we are not, in point of fact, asked to.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This was pretty much how it worked. So when Europe began to notice that the increased flow of US dollars into their region (mostly a result of paying military folk for the War in Vietnam), America was exploiting the central place the dollar had been given at the end of the Second World War. This breached the trust the world had in America\u2019s intention to use the dollar would to stabilise the global economy. This relied on the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. What with some Europeans threatening to ship their dollars to America and ask for the gold, thus breaching the implicit understanding that the promise to pay depended on not, in point of fact, asking for it, President Nixon solved the problem by ending the promise to pay.<\/p>\n<p>This changed the relationships of all currencies to one another. Currency-by-currency stopped fixing their exchange rates to one another &#8211; the key to mid-century stability &#8211; and started allowing currencies to \u2018float\u2019 &#8211; values determined against other currencies by the market.<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve gotten very used to this, but the scale of the shock was significant. Buying components for the widgets you make (for example) was now complicated by changing exchange rates. Enterprises found that they were not only operating in a much larger and less stable world, but that to compete they also needed to be more agile in shifting their purchasing of things they needed to make widgets &#8211; components, human labour, energy sources &#8211; to wherever it was cheapest.<\/p>\n<p>At first this was about finding the best deal on exchange rates, but it also turned into a global race to the bottom on labour costs (putting downward pressure on wages), warehouse costs (leading to \u2018just-in-time\u2019 production, destabilising employment), and corporate taxes, to try to lure the world\u2019s biggest business to your shores (leading to under-taxing capitalism and undermining the capacity of democracies to redistribute wealth in the interests of producing social stability out of an inherently unfair system).<\/p>\n<p>In his book\u00a0<em>Offshoring<\/em>, John Urry shows that these logics also encouraged the movement of money away from where it was made. The increased mobility of the type of globalisation that began in the 1970s was then accelerated in the 1980s when networked computers rapidly sped up the ability to trade in finance. Money was more mobile than humans, goods or indeed anything else.<\/p>\n<p>In this environment, Urry argues, the super-rich were empowered to pursue a very successful kind of class warfare based on a combination of \u2018movement, relocation and concealment\u2019, pursing institutional changes (especially tax \u2018reform\u2019) that made whole \u2018offshore worlds\u2019 possible. This intensified the pattern that philosopher Georg Simmel had noted, where a \u2018money economy generates new levels of \u201cconsciously will concealment\u201d or secrets.<\/p>\n<p>Such offshoring of wealth was literal and metaphorical. Globalisation now made global the stage (or screen) on which life and major events were performed, \u2018transforming\u2019, said Urry, \u2018the character and temporality of life\u2019. The increased secrecy attached to the hoarding of wealth, he reckoned, was not just applied to finance, but to everything else the rich and powerful did. In\u00a0<em>Virtue Capitalists<\/em>\u00a0I described a logic where \u2018success is the only virtue\u2019, undermining the material reality of what had been moral work: Urry\u2019s analysis suggests that this disconnect between success on the global stage and material truth is a reflection of offshoring.<\/p>\n<p>Offshoring, both as practice and metaphor, blurs the boundary between \u2018what is materially present and what isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"header-anchor-post\">Bringing money down to earth<\/h2>\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-flex pc-alignItems-center pc-position-absolute pc-reset header-anchor-parent\">\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-contents pc-reset pubTheme-yiXxQA\">\n<div id=\"\u00a7bringing-money-down-to-earth\" class=\"pencraft pc-reset header-anchor offset-top\">This helps produce what we have come to describe as a \u2018post-truth\u2019 world. Like John Urry, Bruno Latour sees offshoring as a radical kind of class conflict from above. The effects are not just financial and permissive of secrets and lies, but they are also implicated in climate denial and inaction.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u2018It is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes\u2026had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else\u2019, producing climate denial that is based on a denial of the relationship between \u2018human beings and the material condition of their lives\u2019. So when Trump withdrew the US from climate agreements, this suggested a larger rich-guy pattern of belief that America generally and rich people specifically, don\u2019t belong to the same earth, or are bound by the same material constraints, as everyone else.<\/p>\n<p>Latour says that this \u2018active state of denial\u2019 about climate change is\u00a0<em>also<\/em>\u00a0an active denial of \u2018the material constraints of living on earth\u2019. It is an \u2018offshore reality\u2019 that is epitomised, surely, in Muskism broadly but more specifically, Musk\u2019s Mad Mars scheme.<\/p>\n<p>For Latour this means that we need to come \u2018down to earth\u2019. We need to see that humans are not the centre of a world in which nature is in the background. That we and the material world are one.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"header-anchor-post\">The Age of Gold matters<\/h2>\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-flex pc-alignItems-center pc-position-absolute pc-reset header-anchor-parent\">\n<div class=\"pencraft pc-display-contents pc-reset pubTheme-yiXxQA\">\n<div id=\"\u00a7the-age-of-gold-matters\" class=\"pencraft pc-reset header-anchor offset-top\">This has lots to do with money. The speed, volatility and changeable relative value of money helped produce the material and metaphorical offshoring that is leading to mass extinction, maybe even our own.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>And so, as a historian, I want to turn to the past to see the contingency of money to remind ourselves that money is not\u00a0<em>essential<\/em>, as in it doesn\u2019t have a single ahistorical essence, but is subject to change. That gives us (some) agency (at least if we work together).<\/p>\n<p>The present also demonstrates how subject the very nature of money (as social practice and kinda determinative of social relations) is to class influence. Even though money in the Age of Gold was wildly different to what money is now, we can be pretty sure class interests helped shape it. It matters to know how that worked and what were the consequences. These help produce history\u2019s cautionary tales. Finding the logics of money as an earlier round of global money grew via the gold standard, will help us look beneath what seems natural about money now, all the better to see our way through the current, highly destructive chaos, towards something better.<\/p>\n<p>This is because I reckon thinking about the materiality of money in the Age of Gold will help make money\u2019s materiality newly weird. Since we use money every day, the way ot works seems so natural. In an offshored world governed by very little cash, its materiality &#8211; bringing it down to earth &#8211; seems inordinately hard to do. Making it weirder will help with the process of identifying money with the material constraints of living \u2018terrestrially\u2019, as Latour asks. It is not that money mattered more (or was more material) because it was gold. But by seeing money as matter in the past will help us make it matter, now.<\/p>\n<p>In the 1850s as the Californian and Australian gold rushes were rapidly transforming what global money was and could be, Karl Marx decided to pursue the project was would eventually result in three volumes of\u00a0<em>Capital<\/em>. There were three reasons: firstly, London was a\u00a0<em>great<\/em>\u00a0place to see the kind of society and class formation that made money its centre. And secondly, the British Museum, which then housed the library, had a terrific collection of the primary sources he needed.<\/p>\n<p>But why then? Capitalism has just entered what he called a \u2018new stage of development\u2019. Why? The \u2018discovery of gold in California and Australia\u2019. Gold was why Marx decided to \u2018resume his studies\u2019 in what he called the critique of political economy.<\/p>\n<p>And so it is this Age of Gold to which I am turning, to think about the materiality of money.<\/p>\n<p>Your thoughts and feedback especially at this stage of my project are extremely welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week all the news services carried a story about the Dutch central bank shipping many, many tons of gold from the Mad King-led United States to the custody of cooler heads (well, cooling, we hope, after that very hot summer) in London. On the same day, the FT ran a story by Banu Baweja [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55614"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55616,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55614\/revisions\/55616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":55608,"date":"2026-09-04T01:23:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T01:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/?p=55608"},"modified":"2026-09-04T01:23:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T01:23:12","slug":"the-us-navy-loses-another-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/2026\/09\/04\/the-us-navy-loses-another-war\/","title":{"rendered":"The US Navy loses another war"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; but that won&#8217;t change any minds<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to rely on naval power to coerce the Iranian regime into submission.<\/p>\n<p>Early in February 2026, Trump deployed a carrier strike group (CSG) to the region, with a second arriving shortly afterwards. This show of force was described (with a striking lack of historical awareness) as an \u201carmada\u201d. The lead ship of that group, the <em>USS Abraham Lincoln<\/em>, is now limping home after what is generally admitted to have been a disastrous tour of duty.<\/p>\n<p>As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com\/2012\/10\/you-brought-a-coastal-defense-ship-to-a-battleship-fight\">many people have pointed out to me over the years<\/a>, I\u2019m not a naval expert. But I can count. So, when the armada arrived, I checked the numbers and <a href=\"https:\/\/johnquigginblog.substack.com\/p\/tusnaco\">concluded that the threat was a hollow one<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The escorts are critical. They provide missile defence using AEGIS and Sea Sparrow systems, and once their interceptor stocks fall to low levels they must withdraw to be replaced or rearmed.<\/p>\n<p>This creates an arithmetic problem. A Hobart-class destroyer has 48 blocks, each capable of carrying one AEGIS-controlled SM-2 or SM-6 interceptor. Alternatively, each block can carry four Sea Sparrows, but these are less capable.<\/p>\n<p>Standard USN doctrine calls for the use of two defensive missiles against each incoming missile. On the assumption of 100 usable missiles per escort, that\u2019s 50 defensive actions per escort or 200\u2013250 in total. No one knows how many missiles Iran has available, but typical estimates suggest at least 3000, of which 1000 or more could be used in an anti-ship capacity. Even assuming successful air attacks on launch sites, use of aircraft against missiles, etc., hundreds of missiles will pose a threat, and at least some of them will cause enough damage to force escorts to withdraw.<\/p>\n<p>A carrier-based bombing campaign couldn\u2019t be sustained for even ten days without exhausting the carrier group\u2019s defences and requiring the USN to \u201cdeclare victory and go home\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>As it turns out, I wasn\u2019t the only one who could count. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (a hawkish and generally navalist think tank) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.csis.org\/analysis\/us-military-middle-east-numbers-behind-trumps-threats-against-iran\">looked at the numbers<\/a> and concluded that the available force could do some damage but not enough to produce regime change. And, pretty clearly, the US military drew the same conclusion, except for the bit about going home.<\/p>\n<p>Like CSIS, I didn\u2019t expect a massive air campaign beginning with the killing of the top Iranian leadership. But once the full-scale war began, the vast majority of the attacks were made by land-based aircraft. The carrier-based air arm fired most of its Tomahawks from a safe distance, with only modest effects. Iran responded by attacking land bases with a level of success that could have produced a catastrophe if it had been focused on the navy.<\/p>\n<p>The role of the USN was reduced to its long-stated mission of keeping vital sea lanes open. When that failed, it shifted to the secondary task of imposing a blockade on Iran. Unsurprisingly, this has not produced a surrender \u2014 no naval blockade in recorded history has forced an adversary nation to surrender without the deployment of land forces.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, it is reported that the costs of the futile campaign have wrecked the Navy\u2019s budget. A Navy official, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/us-news\/2026\/aug\/27\/trump-iran-war-navy-budget\">quoted in the Guardian<\/a>, says:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The money for payroll was robbed to pay for overseas contingencies and is being backfilled by money that hasn\u2019t been spent. They are backfilling payroll so we get enough money in our paycheck.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>More succinctly, a former official said:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>They\u2019re fucked. They shot all their weapons; they trashed all their ships; they ran out of their money.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The 2020s haven\u2019t been a great decade for navies. The Russian invasion of Ukraine began with the destruction or capture of almost the entire Ukrainian navy. Then, despite having no navy of their own, the Ukrainians wiped out much of the mighty Black Sea Fleet, with the remnants sheltering in a Russian port as far away from Ukraine as they can get.<\/p>\n<p>The Iranian war began similarly. The destruction of the Iranian Navy was rapid and complete. The most notable feature was the perfidious sinking of a ship returning from a training exercise in India, with the survivors of the initial attack being left to drown, even though their rescue would have posed no risk.<\/p>\n<p>The US Navy suffered nothing more than the failures described above, but that was bad enough. Following the earlier failure to dislodge the Houthis, who now control access to the Red Sea, it is clear that naval forces cannot reliably keep trade lanes open or defeat even a low-level land-based opponent.<\/p>\n<p>But having been through many rounds of this debate, I am confident that nothing will persuade navalists that their beloved flat-tops and frigates are little more than floating targets. Pirates, grey zones, reconnaissance, diplomatic visits, disaster relief and tiger-repelling rocks will all be wheeled out. Still, for any government in serious fiscal trouble (and aren\u2019t they all), reducing the navy* to a coast guard would save a heap of money that would otherwise be wasted.<\/p>\n<p>Anticipating this, I won\u2019t reply to any comments restating points of this kind. If you have something actually new to say, go ahead.<\/p>\n<p>* I haven\u2019t talked about submarines here. The doomsday machines waiting to unleash nuclear Armageddon from the deep ocean floor are too much for me to think about. The ordinary kind, designed to sink ships from concealment, now seem like an expensive way of doing the job of a low-cost missile or drone, and even their invisibility is a depreciating asset.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; but that won&#8217;t change any minds It\u2019s now six months since the US-Israel war on Iran began with air attacks which killed the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei as well as around 200 schoolchildren. The war has dragged on a long time. But before that surprise attack, it had appeared that the US planned to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55608"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55609,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55608\/revisions\/55609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedtimber.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]