Gloom, Doom, or Boom? Finance and Economics

[Heracleum Persicum]

20.94 trillion USD (2020 GDP)

$ 5 Trillion stimulus , 25% of GDP

[Heracleum Persicum]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3XIvxfM0s0


Dont know what, but, just keep the tanks topped

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[Heracleum Persicum]

rece.jpeg (67.23 KiB) Viewed 2937 times

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

I assume posters are familiar with "David Brooks" of NYT, and familiar with his Political views.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bro ... mmentator)

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/tag/david-brooks


Usually I don't agree with him, but, this article of him in today's NYT extremely interesting AND right .. (I am a digital NYT subscriber)


https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/opin ... =url-share

Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun.

.. it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us.

Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today.

There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people.

China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy.

The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone.

.. “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... f=B3uFyqJT



The NYt article is long and very interesting , written by a "conservative" .. It would be an excellent source for an intelligent debate.

.

[Typhoon]

NY Times - D. Brooks | Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun [paywalled]

I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.

We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process.

In the 1990s, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involved “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.

This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.

In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.

This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: those of the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.

There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically.

The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion.

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”

Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.

The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.

First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.

Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.

Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.

China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation.

Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and that their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.

In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.

Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.

After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.

The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.

He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.”

It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.

With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.

Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and in some cases seems to be diverging. The economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind.

Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous.

But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.

07brooks-map-jumbo.png (2.14 MiB) Viewed 2908 times

Credit...World Values Survey Association

In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast.

Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.

We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order.

Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization.

In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support.

What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.

Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.

But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.

To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing.

How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today.

I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.

I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.

And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel that their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.

At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here.

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.

The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand.

But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.

[noddy]

what if you never believed in that western supremecy, final solution gibberish in the first place - this whole argument is the chattering class dinner party stuff, fixing the worlds problems over a glass of nice whiskey.

I never accepted our democracy was a final endpoint for us - let alone that everyone else was falling over themselves to emulate it.

this kind of leaves the rest of it irrelevant - nothing changed because their was no change.

[Heracleum Persicum]

NY Times - D. Brooks | Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun [paywalled]

I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.

We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process.

In the 1990s, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involved “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.

This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.

In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.

This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: those of the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.

There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically.

The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion.

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”

Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.

The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.

First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.

Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.

Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.

China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation.

Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and that their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.

In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.

Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.

After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.

The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.

He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.”

It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.

With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.

Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and in some cases seems to be diverging. The economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind.

Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous.

But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.


07brooks-map-jumbo.png


Credit...World Values Survey Association

In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast.

Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.

We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order.

Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization.

In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support.

What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.

Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.

But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.

To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing.

How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today.

I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.

I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.

And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel that their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.

At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here.

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.

The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand.

But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.

Excellent article by DAVID BROOKS .. honestly explaining the situation ..


Well, his facts are correct, his analysis are also correct , but I dont agree with his conclusion

Yes, he right, this a "cultural war", I said in my other posts

But David Brooks concludes with same condescending attitude about other cultures and civilizations

All attributes he mentions in western liberalism that makes Westerners happy, individualism, secularism etc etc, not necessarily would make other cultures and civilizations happy, or not their priority.

Human being is a complex biology, some cultures are spiritual (sufism), some cultures feel (the warmth) happiness in togetherness, some cultures do not cherish materialism, liberty making Westerners happy not same liberty making Indians happy.

Agree that this differentiates now showing within same hemisphere, culture .. in America , Biden folks and Trump folks different cultures .. same as in Iran Ayatollahs and Azari different cultures

But

I have posted in many occasions that :

West, America, must learn how Pomegranates kept Persian empire intact in one piece, peaceful, prosperous , uninterrupted, for 1000 yrs

The secret was, Persian King of Kings let all Satrap .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satrap .. rule the province with their own culture, religion, ethics

Why West thinks there must be war and a winner at the end between western culture, and, say Chinese or Iranian culture ?

If Americans are happy with individualism, and all the rules America has, good for America .. and if Chinese are happy with their collectivism etc etc , good for them

There no guaranty that "too much" individualism is better, same as there no guarantee too much "collectivism" desirable.

Down the road, maybe in 5 generations Westerners will be a bit less individualist, and chinese bit less "collectivism"

David repeats Xi, Putin "authoritarianism" .. this might look from within Western culture as authoritarianism, but in Russian, Chinese, Iranian, Indian (even Arab etc etc) and many other cultures that rule does not feel authoritarianism .. argument could be made those cultures, for many 1000s of yrs historical reason desire "Iron Fist" rule, that is how they feel happy and comfortable as it gives them security etc etc

Concluding :

He explains the situation , but talking again from western condescending and conclusion

.

[noddy]

id mostly agree with that - typed as much above.

more detail here viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4337&start=800#p160314

your one amusing blind spot is getting so frustrated with western supremecy whilst spouting iranian supremecy.

nobody will be queueing up to become more Iranian, this I can garuntee

we all like what we are already, this is the problem with all the final solutions, they exist only in the mind of the solution provider.

[noddy]

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy ... 5586d5344b

this whole 30% rise in the basics - grain, vegetable oil and fuel is going to burn alot of marginal places to the ground.

seems the first is Sri Lanka - the article lists the cockups they made to leave themselves at the mercy of global downturns, but thats neither here nor there.

lots of places dont have 30% extra in them and grain and vegetable oil are huge components of all human diets.

[Heracleum Persicum]

your one amusing blind spot is getting so frustrated with western supremacy whilst spouting Iranian supremacy.

nobody will be queueing up to become more Iranian, this I can guarantee

don't bet on it

Western Joe fed too long with "we the greatest", has no real knowledge of other cultures, going for a vacation to India or Vietnam no being exposed or knowledgeable about other cultures.

Above article says we are in a "Cultural War" .. Easterners, Chinese, Pomegranates, Indians they look deeply into Western culture, take what is good, and reject what is not .. but, West thinks they the greatest and no need to look at other cultures taking the good from those cultures.

Western "liberalism" culture not old, maybe 100-200 yrs .. Eastern cultures 1000s yrs old

Many of my western friends who went (even as) tourist to Iran, came back as (the real) "born again"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHcugV6vgDU&t=9s

MHcugV6vgDU

[Doc]

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy ... 5586d5344b

this whole 30% rise in the basics - grain, vegetable oil and fuel is going to burn alot of marginal places to the ground.

seems the first is Sri Lanka - the article lists the cockups they made to leave themselves at the mercy of global downturns, but thats neither here nor there.

lots of places dont have 30% extra in them and grain and vegetable oil are huge components of all human diets.

My guess is that a lot of people are going to starve and governments are going to fall.

[Doc]

NY Times - D. Brooks | Globalization Is Over. The Global Culture Wars Have Begun [paywalled]

I’m from a fortunate generation. I can remember a time — about a quarter-century ago — when the world seemed to be coming together. The great Cold War contest between communism and capitalism appeared to be over. Democracy was still spreading. Nations were becoming more economically interdependent. The internet seemed ready to foster worldwide communications. It seemed as if there would be a global convergence around a set of universal values — freedom, equality, personal dignity, pluralism, human rights.

We called this process of convergence globalization. It was, first of all, an economic and a technological process — about growing trade and investment between nations and the spread of technologies that put, say, Wikipedia instantly at our fingertips. But globalization was also a political, social and moral process.

In the 1990s, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens argued that globalization is “a shift in our very life circumstances. It is the way we now live.” It involved “the intensification of worldwide social relations.” Globalization was about the integration of worldviews, products, ideas and culture.

This fit in with an academic theory that had been floating around called Modernization Theory. The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized.

In the wider public conversation, it was sometimes assumed that nations all around the world would admire the success of the Western democracies and seek to imitate us. It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized,” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. They’d be more driven by the desire to make money than to conquer others. They’d be more driven by the desire to settle down into suburban homes than by the fanatical ideologies or the sort of hunger for prestige and conquest that had doomed humanity to centuries of war.

This was an optimistic vision of how history would evolve, a vision of progress and convergence. Unfortunately, this vision does not describe the world we live in today. The world is not converging anymore; it’s diverging. The process of globalization has slowed and, in some cases, even kicked into reverse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlights these trends. While Ukraine’s brave fight against authoritarian aggression is an inspiration in the West, much of the world remains unmoved, even sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

The Economist reports that between 2008 and 2019, world trade, relative to global G.D.P., fell by about five percentage points. There has been a slew of new tariffs and other barriers to trade. Immigration flows have slowed. Global flows of long-term investment fell by half between 2016 and 2019. The causes of this deglobalization are broad and deep. The 2008 financial crisis delegitimized global capitalism for many people. China has apparently demonstrated that mercantilism can be an effective economic strategy. All manner of antiglobalization movements have arisen: those of the Brexiteers, xenophobic nationalists, Trumpian populists, the antiglobalist left.

There’s just a lot more global conflict than there was in that brief holiday from history in the ’90s. Trade, travel and even communication across political blocs have become more morally, politically and economically fraught. Hundreds of companies have withdrawn from Russia as the West partly decouples from Putin’s war machine. Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty. In 2014 the United States barred the Chinese tech company Huawei from bidding on government contracts. Joe Biden has strengthened “Buy American” rules so that the U.S. government buys more stuff domestically.

The world economy seems to be gradually decoupling into, for starters, a Western zone and a Chinese zone. Foreign direct investment flows between China and America were nearly $30 billion per year five years ago. Now they are down to $5 billion.

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” This broader context, and especially the invasion of Ukraine, “is burying most of the basic assumptions that have underlain business thinking about the world for the past 40 years.”

Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war.

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. This is not the first time this has happened. In the early 20th century, Norman Angell wrote a now notorious book called “The Great Illusion” that argued that the industrialized nations of his time were too economically interdependent to go to war with one another. Instead, two world wars followed.

The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things. It’s these deeper motivations that are driving events right now — and they are sending history off into wildly unpredictable directions.

First, human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as the thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.

Global politics over the past few decades functioned as a massive social inequality machine. In country after country, groups of highly educated urban elites have arisen to dominate media, universities, culture and often political power. Great swaths of people feel looked down upon and ignored. In country after country, populist leaders have arisen to exploit these resentments: Donald Trump in the United States, Narendra Modi in India, Marine Le Pen in France.

Meanwhile, authoritarians like Putin and Xi Jinping practice this politics of resentment on a global scale. They treat the collective West as the global elites and declare their open revolt against it. Putin tells humiliation stories — what the West supposedly did to Russia in the 1990s. He promises a return to Russian exceptionalism and Russian glory. Russia will reclaim its starring role in world history.

China’s leaders talk about the “century of humiliation.” They complain about the way the arrogant Westerners try to impose their values on everybody else. Though China may eventually become the world’s largest economy, Xi still talks about China as a developing nation.

Second, most people have a strong loyalty to their place and to their nation. But over the past few decades many people have felt that their places have been left behind and that their national honor has been threatened. In the heyday of globalization, multilateral organizations and global corporations seemed to be eclipsing nation-states.

In country after country, highly nationalistic movements have arisen to insist on national sovereignty and to restore national pride: Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Trump in the United States, Boris Johnson in Britain. To hell with cosmopolitanism and global convergence, they say. We’re going to make our own country great again in our own way. Many globalists completely underestimated the power of nationalism to drive history.

Third, people are driven by moral longings — by their attachment to their own cultural values, by their desire to fiercely defend their values when they seem to be under assault. For the past few decades, globalization has seemed to many people to be exactly this kind of assault.

After the Cold War, Western values came to dominate the world — through our movies, music, political conversation, social media. One theory of globalization was that the world culture would converge, basically around these liberal values.

The problem is that Western values are not the world’s values. In fact, we in the West are complete cultural outliers. In his book “The WEIRDest People in the World,” Joseph Henrich amasses hundreds of pages of data to show just how unusual Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic values are.

He writes: “We WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical. We focus on ourselves — our attributes, accomplishments and aspirations — over our relationships and social roles.”

It’s completely possible to enjoy listening to Billie Eilish or Megan Thee Stallion and still find Western values foreign and maybe repellent. Many people around the world look at our ideas about gender roles and find them foreign or repellent. They look at (at our best) our fervent defense of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and find them off-putting. The idea that it’s up to each person to choose one’s own identity and values — that seems ridiculous to many. The idea that the purpose of education is to inculcate critical thinking skills so students can liberate themselves from the ideas they received from their parents and communities — that seems foolish to many.

With 44 percent of American high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, our culture isn’t exactly the best advertisement for Western values right now.

Despite the assumptions of globalization, world culture does not seem to be converging and in some cases seems to be diverging. The economists Fernando Ferreira and Joel Waldfogel studied popular music charts in 22 countries between 1960 and 2007. They found that people are biased toward the music of their own country and that this bias has increased since the late 1990s. People don’t want to blend into a homogeneous global culture; they want to preserve their own kind.

Every few years the World Values Survey questions people from around the globe about their moral and cultural beliefs. Every few years, some of these survey results are synthesized into a map that shows how the different cultural zones stand in relation to one another. In 1996 the Protestant Europe cultural zone and the English-Speaking zone were clumped in with the other global zones. Western values were different from the values found in say, Latin America or the Confucian zone, but they were contiguous.

But the 2020 map looks different. The Protestant Europe and English-Speaking zones have drifted away from the rest of the world cultures and now jut out like some extraneous cultural peninsula.


07brooks-map-jumbo.png


Credit...World Values Survey Association

In a summary of the surveys’ findings and insights, the World Values Survey Association noted that on issues like marriage, family, gender and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the prevailing values in low-income countries and high-income countries.” We in the West have long been outliers; now our distance from the rest of the world is growing vast.

Finally, people are powerfully driven by a desire for order. Nothing is worse than chaos and anarchy. These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can feel like social chaos, like anarchy, leading people to seek order at all costs.

We in the democratic nations of the world are lucky enough to live in societies that have rules-based orders, in which individual rights are protected and in which we get to choose our own leaders. In more and more parts of the world, though, people do not have access to this kind of order.

Just as there are signs that the world is economically and culturally diverging, there are signs it is politically diverging. In its “Freedom in the World 2022” report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline. It reported last year: “The countries experiencing deterioration outnumbered those with improvements by the largest margin recorded since the negative trend began in 2006. The long democratic recession is deepening.” This is not what we thought would happen in the golden age of globalization.

In that heyday, democracies appeared stable, and authoritarian regimes appeared to be headed to the ash heap of history. Today, many democracies appear less stable than they did and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable. American democracy, for example, has slid toward polarization and dysfunction. Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized nations can be just as technologically advanced as the West. Modern authoritarian nations now have technologies that allow them to exercise pervasive control of their citizens in ways that were unimaginable decades ago.

Autocratic regimes are now serious economic rivals to the West. They account for 60 percent of patent applications. In 2020, the governments and businesses in these countries invested $9 trillion in things like machinery, equipment and infrastructure, while democratic nations invested $12 trillion. If things are going well, authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support.

What I’m describing is a divergence on an array of fronts. As scholars Heather Berry, Mauro F. Guillén and Arun S. Hendi reported in a study of international convergence, “Over the last half century, nation-states in the global system have not evolved significantly closer (or more similar) to one another along a number of dimensions.” We in the West subscribe to a series of universal values about freedom, democracy and personal dignity. The problem is that these universal values are not universally accepted and seem to be getting less so.

Next, I’m describing a world in which divergence turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance. China and Russia clearly want to establish regional zones that they dominate. Some of this is the kind of conflict that historically exists between opposing political systems, similar to what we saw during the Cold War. This is the global struggle between the forces of authoritarianism and the forces of democratization. Illiberal regimes are building closer alliances with one another. They are investing more in one another’s economies. At the other end, democratic governments are building closer alliances with one another. The walls are going up. Korea was the first major battleground of the Cold War. Ukraine could the first battleground in what turns out to be a long struggle between diametrically opposed political systems.

But something bigger is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, that is different from the Cold War. This is not just a political or an economic conflict. It’s a conflict about politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morality and religion all at once. More specifically, it’s a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide array of fronts.

To define this conflict most generously, I’d say it’s the difference between the West’s emphasis on personal dignity and much of the rest of the world’s emphasis on communal cohesion. But that’s not all that’s going on here. What’s important is the way these longstanding and normal cultural differences are being whipped up by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world. Authoritarian rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions and status resentments to mobilize supporters, attract allies and expand their own power. This is cultural difference transmogrified by status resentment into culture war.

Some people have revived Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations theory to capture what’s going on. Huntington was right that ideas, psychology and values drive history as much as material interests. But these divides don’t break down on the neat civilizational lines that Huntington described.

In fact, what haunts me most is that this rejection of Western liberalism, individualism, pluralism, gender equality and all the rest is not only happening between nations but also within nations. The status resentment against Western cultural, economic and political elites that flows from the mouths of illiberal leaders like Putin and Modi and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil sounds quite a lot like the status resentment that flows from the mouths of the Trumpian right, from the French right, from the Italian and Hungarian right.

There’s a lot of complexity here — the Trumpians obviously have no love for China — but sometimes when I look at world affairs I see a giant, global maximalist version of America’s familiar contest between Reds and Blues. In America we’ve divided along regional, educational, religious, cultural, generational and urban/rural lines, and now the world is fragmenting in ways that often seem to mimic our own. The paths various populists prefer may differ, and their nationalistic passions often conflict, but what they’re revolting against is often the same thing.

How do you win a global culture war in which differing views on secularism and gay rights parades are intertwined with nuclear weapons, global trade flows, status resentments, toxic masculinity and authoritarian power grabs? That’s the bind we find ourselves in today.

I look back over the past few decades of social thinking with understanding. I was too young to really experience the tension of the Cold War, but it must have been brutal. I understand why so many people, when the Soviet Union fell, grabbed onto a vision of the future that promised an end to existential conflict.

I look at the current situation with humility. The critiques that so many people are making about the West, and about American culture — for being too individualistic, too materialistic, too condescending — these critiques are not wrong. We have a lot of work to do if we are going to be socially strong enough to stand up to the challenges that are coming over the next several years, if we are going to persuade people in all those swing countries across Africa, Latin America and the rest of the world that they should throw their lot in with the democracies and not with the authoritarians — that our way of life is the better way of life.

And I look at the current situation with confidence. Ultimately, people want to stand out and fit in. They want to feel that their lives have dignity, that they are respected for who they are. They also want to feel membership in moral communities. Right now, many people feel disrespected by the West. They are casting their lot with authoritarian leaders who speak to their resentments and their national pride. But those leaders don’t actually recognize them. For those authoritarians — from Trump to Putin — their followers are just instruments in their own search for self-aggrandizement.

At the end of the day, only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of each person. At the end of the day, only these systems and our worldviews offer the highest fulfillment for the drives and desires I’ve tried to describe here.

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.

The Chinese seem very confident that our coalition against Putin will fall apart. Western consumers won’t be able to tolerate the economic sacrifice. Our alliances will fragment. The Chinese also seem convinced that they will bury our decadent systems before too long. These are not possibilities that can be dismissed out of hand.

But I have faith in the ideas and the moral systems that we have inherited. What we call “the West” is not an ethnic designation or an elitist country club. The heroes of Ukraine are showing that at its best, it is a moral accomplishment, and unlike its rivals, it aspires to extend dignity, human rights and self-determination to all. That’s worth reforming and working on and defending and sharing in the decades ahead.

Rome fell because Romans living outside of Rome thought Rome wasn't worth its cost and helped the "barbarians" collapse it.

BTW I listened to Putin talk on a local National Public Radio program the first time he came to the US. He said he was no fan of democracy. I haven't seen where he has changed his mind on that since then.

On the other hand I can see where global elitists of the west have certainly changed their minds on Democracy.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

The truest thing David Brooks writes in that column:

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict

Newpaper men write in templates and David Brooks is no different, and this long whinge is a silly attempt. He has always been supercilious but now we can confirm his confusion on top of it; so why should anyone listen to this confused man?

[Heracleum Persicum]

https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy ... 5586d5344b

this whole 30% rise in the basics - grain, vegetable oil and fuel is going to burn alot of marginal places to the ground.

seems the first is Sri Lanka - the article lists the cockups they made to leave themselves at the mercy of global downturns, but thats neither here nor there.

lots of places dont have 30% extra in them and grain and vegetable oil are huge components of all human diets.

My guess is that a lot of people are going to starve and governments are going to fall.

Yes


Not talking about Africa .. France could set a sample

.

[Heracleum Persicum]

BTW I listened to Putin talk on a local National Public Radio program the first time he came to the US. He said he was no fan of democracy. I haven't seen where he has changed his mind on that since then.

On the other hand I can see where global elitists of the west have certainly changed their minds on Democracy.

.

Each country, Nation, ruling system must cater to their culture and history

Democracy western style not suitable for many cultures, would be counterproductive, in most cases even destructive.

and

"elite" have ruled since 1000s of yrs .. there no such thing as Joe deciding things .. the trick is to make Joe believe he decides.

.

[Heracleum Persicum]

The truest thing David Brooks writes in that column:

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict

Newspaper men write in templates and David Brooks is no different, and this long whinge is a silly attempt. He has always been supercilious but now we can confirm his confusion on top of it; so why should anyone listen to this confused man?

.

Yes, he always been supercilious, since I know him

But I think he sums it up fairly what we at now


Last 50 yrs, things happened one would have never imagined in wildest dream it could happen .. lesson learned is only fools predict things .. world turns on "random" rule ..

.

[Doc]

Nude video of David Brooks !!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogcQ7Z4bh5w

ogcQ7Z4bh5w

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

Above clip funny, Doc



https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/blowbacks ... y-serious/

Blowbacks from Ukraine war will be deadly serious

Rampant inflation, a damaged dollar, and the threat of wider conflict are among the perils awaiting the world

It’s increasingly obvious that the war was provoked by the US and that the US has a vested interest in keeping the conflict going.

Most not buying the American sanctions

The response has been a great disappointment to Washington. Brazil, India and South Africa have elected to stand by Russia as fellow members of BRICS. Even Mexico has demurred and not joined the American-led sanctions.

A spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Wenbin, was tactless enough to point out that 140 members of the United Nations have not signed on. In other words, more than half of the world’s population is not joining the sanctions on Russia.

Sanctions were effective against "helpless" countries .. Iran , Cuba , Venezuela

But now, big boys look at this and say this could happen to us .. and .. building alternatives

America betrayed trust world had put in world system, financial, trade etc

.

[Typhoon]

Shadow Stats | Alternate inflation charts

US inflation ~ 15.5% according the 1980 definition.

[Heracleum Persicum]

Shadow Stats | Alternate inflation charts

US inflation ~ 15.5% according the 1980 definition.

Yes

could be more

Food prices in supermarkets go up every other day

[Heracleum Persicum]

.


https://freebeacon.com/national-securit ... -to-china/

Biden admin turns blind eye to Iran's sanctioned oil trade

Am sure US now even promotes iranian Oil sells

Alternative would be Oil @ 150 $/b
.

[Heracleum Persicum]

.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/19/tech ... itter.html

Elon Musk Races to Secure Financing for Twitter Bid

The world’s richest man is trying to shore up debt financing, including potentially taking out a loan against his shares of Tesla, so he can buy Twitter for $43 billion.

What would be the "economic benefit" for America if Elon Musk syphons $ 43 Billion capital from America's pool of capital that is needed to compete with China in future technology innovations ? ?

Who is "stealing American Jobs" ? ?

Why Musk not invest in Semi Ventures


https://www.rollcall.com/2022/02/04/cos ... investment.

The Semiconductor Industry Association of America .. say a $50 billion investment from the federal government in chip manufacturing would create 10 fabs that would not otherwise be built and would trigger some $279 billion in additional private sector investment.

Feb 4, 2022

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[noddy]

being in control of the media channels has been step one for robber barrons since caveman times.

the economic benefits are huge.

[Heracleum Persicum]

being in control of the media channels has been step one for robber barrons since caveman times.

the economic benefits are huge.

economic benefit to Whom ?

Not to the nation or Joe

To the owner of media channel

Look , $ 43 Billion is taken out of investment pool that should be invested in "wealth generating" ventures

Does Musk buying Twitter create wealth for America ?

In contrary

Tax system should handicap, penalize these kind of deals .. deal which don't create wealth should have a tax promium attached. That premium should go to general public

That is why Chinese are winning .. because capital in America goes to rubbish stuff, either to make Kardashians billionaires or buying twitter

Chinese laughing

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[noddy]

thats just silly, the only difference is it that its no longer Elon Musks money, which is probably a good thing.

its not locked up in a cupboard, all the ex-twitter shareholders have it now, they can do other things with it.

this is how the american market works - the more people spending, the more business happens, the bigger everything gets.