The global imbalances created by this dynamic of American borrowing and foreign lending appear stable for now, but if they slip suddenly, that could pose serious dangers for middle- and working-class Americans through soaring interest rates, a crash in the housing market, and sharply higher prices for anything no longer made domestically.

...

With sterling on the verge of collapse, "Eisenhower told them, ‘We are not going to bail out the pound unless you pull out of Suez.’" Facing bankruptcy, the British withdrew. This incident "marked the end of Great Britain’s ability to conduct an independent foreign policy."

...

The question to ask now is not, ‘Is the country living beyond its means?’ The question is, ‘Is the money going to increase the productive capacity of the economy?’

...

"Part of the reason people are spending beyond their means is because they are -- in a way -- witnessing the end of the American dream.” Between 2000 and 2005, even as the US economy grew 14 percent in real terms, and worker productivity increased a remarkable 16.6 percent, workers’ average hourly wages were stagnant. The median family income fell 2.9 percent.

Debtor Nation

In 1922, a year of living dictatorishly, Lenin devoted astonishing time to handpicking intellectuals to be exiled from Russia. In missives to underlings, including a go-getter named Joseph Stalin, he railed against these "bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the intellectuals, the lackeys of capital, who think they're the brains of the nation. In fact, they're not the brains, they're the shit."

...

At its core, as in Dostoyevsky's novels, Russian philosophy skews counter-Enlightenment and idealist, looking like "a branch of German philosophy" in its infatuation with Kant and Hegel. It's highly skeptical of an instrumentalist, technocrat approach to life that scants emotion and spontaneity. (Berdyaev ordained rationalism "the original sin of almost all European philosophy.") In a peculiarly Russian way, it anticipates the ever-present possibility of chaos in human life. Moreover, it's congenitally unable to separate itself from Orthodox Christian mysticism, except when it swings the opposite way to Western, utopian, scientific reason (which played out in both the liberal humanism of Alexander Herzen and Lenin's ruthless police state). It is always impassioned about ideas, as in Belinsky's famous rebuke of Turgenev, reproduced in Tom Stoppard's play The Coast of Utopia: "We haven't yet solved the problem of God, and you want to eat!"

God Before Food: Philosophy, Russian Style

This seemed timely.

"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little," wrote Gore Vidal.

And it’s painfully true that others’ success can be the hardest thing to bear. We measure our status in the world against our friends’, and their spectacular elevation can be deeply unsettling—and doubly traumatic because we don’t want to resent them, but can’t quite manage not to.

They’ve made it, and you haven’t, and perhaps you never will ...

Also check out the Weinberger-Keen debate, The Good, The Bad, and the Web 2.0.

On the success of friends

What is a nerd?

Mary Bucholtz, a linguist at UCSB, has concluded that nerdiness is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

The paper to read is, "The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness", from 2001, when she was at Texas A&M.

This might be an interesting take on the difference between nerds and geeks. But perhaps it's not as simple as that:

Nerds are not simply victims of the prevailing social codes about what’s appropriate and what’s cool; they actively shape their own identities and put those codes in question.

Plenty of Defcon attendees (or WoW addicts, for that matter) would accept the "nerd" label but are a far cry from "hyperwhite". And she has apparently never hung out on IRC.

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white.

I'm sure the black nerd bloggers must be rising up, somewhere, in response to this article.

(See also, day-after coverage from NPR of the same story, including a 10-minute discussion with the researcher and the article's author.)

Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?

Long-time fans of Fukuyama's Trust (*) will appreciate this.

Outside a small family circle, the links of kinship are biologically trifling, vulnerable to manipulation, and inimical to modernity. For all that, the almost mystical bond that we feel with those whom we perceive as kin continues to be a potent force in human affairs.

It is no small irony that in an age in which technology allows us to indulge (*) these emotions as never before, our political culture systematically misunderstands them.

This is also a partial response to the observation by Decius that "People who have different identities tend to fight." This is not unrelated to Tom Friedman's McDonald's Theory:

"No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's."

(*) Acidus should definitely be posting here: [1,2,3,4,5]

Strangled by Roots | Steven Pinker

Decius wrote recently:

There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

I thought of this when I heard the short NPR piece linked here.

Nature writer David Gessner believes you don't have to climb Everest or raft the Amazon to find wildness. It's often found much closer to home, in our backyards and in the experiences of daily life.

Experiencing a Feeling of Wildness [MP3]

Hamilton is right that people love biographies, and he is right about some of the reasons. We learn about ourselves by reading about the lives of other people, for one thing. And biographies of the powerful and the famous that humanize their subjects may play some kind of egalitarian social role. It's naïve, though, to suppose that the forces driving the appetite for "critical, incisive" (that is, highly revealing) biographies are all about democracy and demystification. Secrest is more to the point: people are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people’s lives. They enjoy it excessively. It's not one of the species’ more attractive addictions, and, on the whole, it's probably better to indulge it on the life of a person you have never met.

They ought to call it Other People.

Lives of Others | Louis Menand, in The New Yorker

I was surprised to find out during a campus visits with my son that the '80s are now a big nostalgia craze for college students. To those of us who lived it, it's as weird as nostalgia for polio.

I'm no professor of pop culture, but I have a theory.

Historian Jacques Barzun, in "Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life," wrote: "The point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fulfill them marked for the culture the onset of decadence."

That's "Miami Vice" - a decadent world of stark white rooms in sunny paradise, shadowed by dark evil. Drugs and guns, guns and drugs - the plots are as interchangeable as sides of a Rubik's Cube, nearly always involving smugglers from Jamaica, Haiti, Africa, Cuba, Asia, Costa Rica, Mexico. It's a pink and aqua preview of our 21st century angst over the illegal immigration invasion.

While we're on the subject of Barzun, let's take a dip into the archives:

Bookshelf already full, you say? Pick up your broom, clear away the dust, and consider making that "Harry" disappear.

This is a staggering tribute to uber-critic Jacques Barzun's legendary intelligence and cantankerousness.

What truly impresses here is Barzun's breadth of knowledge; in an age of academic specialization, he is a rare, confident master-of-all-trades.

Read the Koran. Read it as Jacques Barzun suggests: with pencil in hand; underline and circle; with marginalia of surprise, sympathy, outrage, confusion. Annotate - make it your Koran - absorb and comprehend.

We can say that attempts to base a foreign policy on the idea of exporting democracy—as sought by both the Reagan and Clinton administrations — will forever be doomed to failure.

A book of enormous riches, it's sprinkled with provocations.

Who misses 'Miami Vice' '80s? College kids, of all people

What our results suggest is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market "wants" at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history: there is no sense in which it simply "reveals" what people wanted all along. In such a world, in fact, the question "Why did X succeed?" may not have any better answer than the one given by the publisher of Lynne Truss's surprise best seller, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," who, when asked to explain its success, replied that "it sold well because lots of people bought it."

People are like sheep -- or just like sharing

Sodom, BC:

Then the LORD said: "The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out."

While the two men walked on farther toward Sodom, the LORD remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer to him and said:

"Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?"

"Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty, so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike! Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?"

The LORD replied, "If I find fifty innocent people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake."

Hebron, 2007:

The settlers are calling their compound "House of Peace," but are also considering "Martyrs’ Peak."

Hama, 1982:

In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamic extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. How did it respond? President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria's fourth-largest city — Hama — and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since.

This was "Hama Rules" — the real rules of Middle East politics — and Hama Rules are no rules at all.

Baghdad, 2007:

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

"They brought him in one day and brought his head in another."

“I have a question,” he said, pointing to the left side of his head. “... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]