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The Politics of Short-Term Thinking: Why the Future Is Always Someone Else’s Problem
Imagine a house on fire. The flames are spreading, the walls are crumbling—but instead of putting it out, the people in charge start debating who gets credit for calling 911. That’s what politics looks like in 2025. Everywhere you look, the world is full of problems that didn’t have to be this bad. The climate crisis, wealth inequality, geopolitical instability—none of these issues appeared…
989854452 260 2.6KShares Tell us how and when you decided to become an entrepreneur? I decided to become an entrepreneur after being introduced to Tim Ferriss’s work, specifically his book “The 4-Hour Workweek” (https://fourhourworkweek.com/). It had a strong effect on me and just made sense. It essentially amounts to “work smarter, not harder”. From this inspirational seed …
We seem trapped in the Short Now. The present generation enjoys the greatest power in history, but it appears to have the shortest vision in history. That combination is lethal.
Stewart Brand
About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese
About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese
Cheating is an interesting phenomenon, especially when it concerns motivated students who cheat even though this can only have negative effects on their long-term learning. In the case of language learning, cheating is (almost) always bad for you. It’s not only morally questionable on exams, it’s stupid as well.
Of course, if we’re talking about a language in school people take only to receive a…
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It's been a while.
This summer has seen wars launched, both political and literal. It has seen missiles and rockets launched, most often at defenseless innocents. It has seen the human rights of women, girls, and unarmed men thrown down while the rights of corporations continued to be elevated above those of humans. It has offered distractions from misery and distractions from reason. That's two months of a summer much like any other summer.
In Washington, the Republicans have become so obsessed with the business of reelection that they have convinced themselves that digging their hole a little deeper will somehow lead to an exit on the other side of the Earth. We should try avoid the mistake most of those we like to call "journalists" make, which is trying to apply some sense of earnest belief to congressional Republicans' actions. There's only cynicism to see here, folks. Move on. Move on.
With the modern marvel of gerrymandering (see: Florida), Republicans know their majority in the House is secure. That there are no Senate districts to gerrymander is the reason Republicans' hope of securing the Senate are remote, but they know that, too. The parliamentary foot dragging, the attacks on Obamacare, the lawsuit: these are nothing but distractions. The right wing already got what it wants, an underfunded federal government incapable of enforcing the laws on the books. They aren't campaigning to pass new laws, they just want to maintain the underfunding they have now so they won't have be accountable to anyone.
And it's working, but for how long? Campaigning on fear works, but only as long as the stakes are low. Yes, we're likely to see the status quo for another electoral cycle, or five, but underfunding means things will break and at some point the American people will recognize the real threats getting close to them. You wouldn't want to be a Republican politician when that day comes.
Fear, of course, is the weapon of choice for politicians all over the world. Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine is almost entirely a product of fear-mongering. The idea that ethnically-Ukrainian Ukrainians wanted to seek out and destroy ethnically-Russian Ukrainians is a myth born of centuries of Russian dominance, and abuse, of Ukrainians. There would never be a Rwanda-Hutu-Tutsi-like genocide in Ukraine, but for an ethnic group suffering from a two decade long post-Cold War hangover, Putin's cure has been a tonic. Russians are powerful again, a people and a nation to be feared and respected, wherever that people and nation may be.
Of course, winding people up and giving them lots of weapons can have consequences, as anyone who lost loved ones on Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 could tell you. Russian news agencies have tried, in vain, to blame the unreasonable Ukrainians for the deaths, but the missile was Russian, where've it was fired from. Putin wants to stay in power. Putin wants control over the oil and natural gas pipelines running through eastern Ukraine. Putin wants naval control of the Black Sea. Putin wants glory. In the short term, he'll get it all; in the long term, he'll return Russia to the parts of the Cold War nostalgic Russians have chosen not to remember, such as government oppression, economic isolation, and being international pariahs. The 2018 World Cup may remind more than a few of them of the 1980 Moscow Summer Olympics, with boycotts and economic humiliation.
Israel doesn't have to worry about either of those, at least for now. Their economy is small and what they produce wouldn't make or break an economy the way a collapse of oil and gas would. Their abuse of Palestinians has gone on so long and with such consistency it could passed off as a chronic condition. Too often, it has been. That is, to some small degree, the fault of the Palestinians themselves. Frustrated and angry, they have allowed their political leadership to fall into the hands of violent fear-mongers, no better than the fear-mongering leaders of israel but with less money and fewer, smaller weapons. Their bitter war against Israeli oppression has become a lifestyle unto itself. What would happen if tomorrow Israel gave them everything they need? What would they do if Israelis offered to share everything they have, an equal partnership in the future? Odds are, the Palestinian couldn't know how to handle it, and that just plays into the hands of Israel's leaders, whose only real goal seems to be holding on to power.
Years from now - decades really - the bill will come due for what Israel just did to Gaza. Two or three generations will have to pass for the stench of it to wash away, and that would only happen if the more powerful partner in this mess stepped up and made peace happen. They won't. They think we'll forget. They count on it. When was the last time we thought about the military junta in Egypt? When was the last time we thought about the girls kidnapped in Nigeria? When was the last time we thought about sweatshops in Bangladesh and cyber-espionage from China? We can't remember everything. Our social evolution as a species is based on not having to. We externalize it, and we hope, especially when it's sunny outside and there's some flirting to be done, that someone else is paying attention on our behalf. Between ice-bucket-challenges and wondering if there ever really was song-of-the-summer this summer, we could almost be forgiven for ignoring what's going on in Ferguson, Missouri or the Bronx or somewhere even closer.
The killing Michael Brown is still as unsettled as it is unsettling. Like any crisis, it has exposed things long ignored and kept at arm's length. It's also a case study on the dangers of applying short-term thinking to long-term problems. An unarmed man shouldn't die at the hands of the police. It just shouldn't happen. Ever. Non-violent protesters in what is so often touted as "the freest country on Earth" shouldn't face police in armored vehicles and military riot gear. That shouldn't happen. Ever.
Police culture in the United States is one of fear. Officers are trained to expect the worst. Often enough, they actually face it. Freedom to own weapons means criminals own weapons. Expectation that police will fire their weapons means criminals fire theirs. Expectation that a potential criminal will potentially shoot first leads under-trained, over-armed men and women to shoot first to keep from being killed. We all know what happens next.
It's this fear of killing and being killed that has law enforcement spending its taxpayer money on military hardware. Everywhere in the country state and local law enforcement agencies see things they can't control and look for fast, easy solutions. Somebody's going to make money that way. Selling fear, somebody always does. Again, though, he question is asked: For how long? Soon enough, the people of Missouri will have had enough. "No more!" they'll cry. The American people will have had enough of congressional Republican cynicism. They, too, will cry, "No more!" We'll hear it in Iraq. We'll hear it in Nigeria. We'll hear it in Ukraine, in China, in Israel, in Mexico, in Bangladesh, and everywhere else policy is driven by short-term thinking.
Or not. We've started so many things that we can't ever hope to control, so often without regard to where or when they will end. We mark it down, "unknown track", watch it for a while til the threat passes from us onto someone else, and go on our way.
"No More!" Perhaps if our real journalists cried it out first it might just catch on.
- Daniel Ward
The horizon of the self is very close.
-Nanny Chu
Tom Englehart:
Chalmers Johnson’s book Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire was published in March 2000 -- and just about no one noticed. Until then, blowback had been an obscure term of CIA tradecraft, which Johnson defined as “the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people.” In his prologue, the former consultant to the CIA and eminent scholar of both Mao Zedong’s peasant revolution and modern Japan labeled his Cold War self a “spear-carrier for empire.”
After the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, he was surprised to discover that the essential global structure of that other Cold War colossus, the American superpower, with its vast panoply of military bases, remained obdurately in place as if nothing whatsoever had happened. Almost a decade later, when the Evil Empire was barely a memory, Johnson surveyed the planet and found “an informal American empire” of immense reach and power. He also became convinced that, in its global operations, Washington was laying the groundwork “all around the world... for future forms of blowback.”
Johnson noted “portents of a twenty-first century crisis” in the form of, among other things, “terrorist attacks on American installations and embassies.” In the first chapter of Blowback, he focused in particular on a “former protégé of the United States” by the name of Osama bin Laden and on the Afghan War against the Soviets from which he and an organization called al-Qaeda had emerged. It had been a war in which Washington backed to the hilt, and the CIA funded and armed, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists, paving the way years later for the Taliban to take over Afghanistan.
Read the whole piece, it's really good.
