#nathan robinson

[quyotes]

It says something disturbing about our media that a man can cause well over five hundred thousand deaths and then have his paintings flatteringly profiled, while the deaths go unmentioned.

Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism

[st-just]

The problem with public libraries is that while they are hugely popular, they are also in tension with the prevailing political and economic ideology, which suggests the government should run like a business, cutting costs and measuring the worth of every service by its market price. Libraries offer useless knowledge, the joy of intellectual discovery. A McKinsey consultant, looking at a public library, would wonder why it isn’t charging usage fees to its patrons, or why it has many shelves that few people visit, and what its economic value to the city is. To the extent governments think like McKinsey consultants instead of like human beings, libraries will always be under threat.

Nathan Robinson

[thechadangel]

Puck's parents!

Heinrich Becker and Nathan Robinson. They're married Nathan just didn't want to change his name bc it's expensive and a pain in the ass. Heinrich is ever the supportive husband.

[r5h]

Democrats, You Really Do Not Want To Nominate Joe Biden ❧ Current Affairs

We urgently need to remember who Biden is and think carefully about what would happen if he were chosen.

Highlight reel:

Eight women have accused Biden of inappropriately touching them, and in response Biden has literally said he is “not sorry for anything that I’ve ever done.” I do not understand how there is any world in which this is not immediately disqualifying, and we can expect to see quotes in TV ads like “I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me,” and “I thought he was going to kiss me on the mouth… He was the vice president… I was a nobody,” and “It doesn’t even really cross your mind that such a person would dare perpetuate harm like that.”

Biden voted for the infamous PATRIOT Act, which he called “measured and prudent.” In fact, “he would have liked it to go further, regretting that measures handing police more extreme powers had been removed,” and he has even bragged that the PATRIOT Act was based on a bill he himself wrote long before 9/11, but hadn’t been able to get through thanks to the opposition of civil liberties groups.

Biden also voted for Reagan’s tax cut, which Marcetic calls a “lopsided giveaway to the very richest that led almost instantly to ballooning deficits and widening economic inequality,” and pushed for the reduction of federal spending on social goals, saying the government should be “less involved in direct social questions like day care, education or health.”

Every single thing I’ve mentioned—from Hunter Biden’s consulting gig with the credit card companies pushing Joe Biden to strip consumer bankruptcy protection to African Americans victimized by Biden’s punitive drug sentencing—is going to be put in ads run against Biden, and Trump has hundreds of millions of dollars to blast those ads far and wide. They will be effective, because they will be correct. And if you do not think Trump would run ads criticizing Biden on behalf of incarcerated African Americans, you do not know Trump: He’s already been doing exactly that.

But the electability argument for Biden might be the worst argument of all. Biden is a corrupt, inept, dishonest, undisciplined, rambling con man. This makes him less electable, not more. It makes him exactly the person we don’t want to use to make those very same charges against Trump. Because Biden is a man with almost no message, a bunch of scandals including feeling women up against their will, a seemingly addled and confused brain, a long history of inventing nonsensical stories, and a record and agenda that will inspire no one, the electability case seems thin. Much is made of the difficult challenge Sanders faces in increasing youth turnout, but I’m not sure why anyone under 30 would show up for Joe Biden, a man who has contempt for them and has spent his life embodying everything about the Democratic Party that turns them off politics. If there is a Biden plan for mobilizing and exciting ex-Sanders voters, I struggle to think what it could possibly be.

Democrats do not realize that the only reason Biden appears strong is that they have managed to temporarily suppress discussion of all of the things that make him such a terrible general election candidate against Trump.

But I beg you to read the whole article anyway. It’s incredibly comprehensive, engaging, well-sourced, and convincing.

And then, once you have read it, please do not vote for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary.

[maaarine]

The World’s Most Annoying Man (Nathan Robinson, Current Affairs, May 29 2019)

“There is a giant analytical mistake underlying many of Pinker’s arguments.

He suggests that the proper measure of whether things are “amazing” is comparing the present to the past. 

Both Enlightenment Now and Better Angels show version after version of a similar graph: a trend line of a good thing going up or a bad thing going down.

So, if poor people globally are getting “less poor,” then we can conclude that Capitalism, Democracy, and Science are doing a good job.

But you should not measure your success against what came before, you should measure it against what you ought to have been doing and could be doing.

“Better” does not actually mean “good,” and it might well be that even if things improve,

if they still fall unacceptably short of what we are capable of, there is no reason to diminish one’s amount of outrage.”

[quyotes]

In Laos, the United States attacked both Laotian communist and North Vietnamese forces, flying 580,000 bombing runs between 1964 and 1973, which works out to “one planeload every eight minutes for nearly a decade.” A ton of ordnance was dropped for every person in Laos, and in total the war killed one out of ten people in the country. By the end, “U.S. aircraft had dumped 2,093,100 tons of ordnance on the landlocked country, which is about twice the size of Pennsylvania, with a population then under 3 million.” Laos became the most bombed country in the history of the world, exceeding the World War II bombings of Japan and Germany combined.

Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson, The Myth of American Idealism

[st-just]

The Wall Street Journal also says that we should not worry about businesses endangering their employees because they have “no incentive” to do so. This is false: if 1) businesses have no liability for harm done to employees—as conservatives would like to see happen—and 2) employees are easily replaced—as they are during times of high unemployment—and 3) endangering them is less costly than protecting them, then businesses have a very strong incentive to endanger employees. The Journal editorial board should be forced to take a remedial economics course.

Nathan Robinson

[st-just]

So for Cowen, the evidence that people have “positive attitudes” toward work and “preferences” for it is that they now work more than they used to. By libertarian reasoning, Dickensian London was a place where hard labor was very much “in fashion,” as proven by the number of people who chose to spend 14 hours a day doing it. Cowen says that John Maynard Keynes’ famous prediction of a coming 15-hour work week clearly  “overestimated the value” that people place on leisure, which he attributes to Keynes being a well-to-do Cambridge academic out of touch with the soul of the working man—while Cowen, we must presume, is a blue-collar spot welder in addition to his duties as a George Mason economics professor.

Nathan Robinson and Rob Larson