From the article, it sounds like our response to the pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights.
The virus is not agentic, and what they describe are intentional acts by human beings.
The virus is not agentic, and what they describe are intentional acts by human beings.
The scars from the first two really should have healed a long time ago. It'll be a pretty dire future if the COVID response isn't completely unwound, some serious compromises to freedom were made through this.
I have a strong suspicion that American foreign policy wonks still don't understand why we failed in Vietnam; why applying the lens of containment and the same policy everywhere was an asinine idea cloaked in arrogance that has haunted us for decades because of our inability to accept our mistakes. I think this refusal manifests itself as a steady refusal to engage in well-reasoned policy engagements and wasted opportunities to exert US influence in a positive direction.
You see this in the way we celebrated "liberating" Grenada. You see it with the weak humanitarian effort in Somalia. You see it with the increasing reliance on air power and a failure to have firm policy objectives when we do commit land troops.
A nitpick, but Grenada celebrates the US liberation with a Thanksgiving Day holiday, on October 25:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_Day#Grenada
Appearances at the time were misleading. It is one of the few interventions that I think the US got right.
That contrast caused a huge stir in Washington but nothing changed. Americans (forgive my generalization) still prefer dropping bombs to building schools. Hammer, rather than quill.
The US is the only country who requires every single Foreign service officer to learn the local language before being stationed in a country.
The Foreign Service Language institute is the most prestigious language school in the world.
US foreign policy has plenty of problems, but leaning the local culture and language is not one of them.
The Foreign Service and our embassies and consulates are on of the shinning successes of US foreign policy (among many failures).
Each posting has a number of language designated positions, which range from 90% of the total positions in Columbia to 8% in a Iceland (where English is almost universally spoken).
In this example at least 90% of the officers in Columbia are required to speak Spanish (and it's likely that most of the other 10% do as well). If there aren't enough people proficient in a language they will train more at the FSI. In most countries language designated positions are the majority.
So yes it's not strictly required to speak Spanish to be posted in Columbia, but you're only going to be able to get one of the 10% of non language designated positions which aren't likely to be positions that we would think of as diplomatic work.
Additionally when you join the Foreign Service you have 5 years to become proficient in a Foreign Language before you get forced out, and during that time you can only serve in the limited non language designated positions.
Edit: not a defense of US foreign policy, which has been abysmal. Just pointing out that the track record is abysmal across the board.
"cult" is indeed a substring of "culture", but the etymology is likely the other way around. both come from the latin verb "colo", which concretely means something like "till" or "care for" (in the sense of agriculture). it's used more abstractly to mean "worship", but this likely comes from the idea of caring for / tending to an actual effigy or temple of a deity.
I don't disagree with the core point. the rosy image of the USSR respecting local culture does not exactly mesh with my understanding of the history either (though this could be my own ignorance). as an ex-classics major, I simply can't resist the opportunity to engage in some etymological pedantry :)
The real failure in Vietnam was not retreating soon enough, and letting public opinion turn against the war - that did have a huge effect on future US public opinion about other wars, and could have been avoided if they had finished it earlier.
To be clear, I am extremely opposed for what they did in Vietnam and consider that the amount of war crimes and the fundamentally inhumane objectives are to be condemned. But it is pretty clear that the rational objectives that the architects of the war had set were achieved relatively quickly and efficiently, and with long-lasting effects. This was not a blunder.
Neither were Iraq or Afghanistan for that matter. The real blunders of US foreign policy have been the reinstatement of the Shah of Iran (which led to the Iranian revolution), and the continued failures of taking down Iran and Cuba.
I have no idea how you can reasonably claim that the war "prevented any kind of spread of that idea in the area", or that the "rational objectives" were achieved "relatively quickly and efficiently".
The only part of US Indochina strategy that worked was pumping Thailand full of money. Ironically, dangling that carrot could probably have tempted Vietnam into more "market reforms" and fewer collective farms a lot earlier, given that Ho Chi Minh was fond of quoting the Founding Fathers as well as Marx and appealed to the US when he was fighting his anticolonialist war.
Is it a coïncidence that all occurred under a GOP/Republican administration?
Clinton treated the 1993 as a crime instead of an act of war, and prosecuted those that were responsible:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
Meanwhile Bush (really Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) went galavanting into other countries.
Obama was hamstrung by a GOP Congress with (so-called, supposed) deficit hawks that were screaming about deficits, debt, and austerity… which they promptly abandoned they were in power to pass the giant December 2017 tax cut bill:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017
Of course now that Biden looks likely to win they're reverting to form:
> The short version: A Senate GOP strategist privately confided to Bloomberg that a key Republican goal right now is to lay the groundwork to revert hard to austerity, should Biden prevail, crippling the possibility of any serious stimulus efforts next year, even amid continued economic misery.
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/14/how-repub...
Paul Krugman has an entire section on this in his latest book Arguing With Zombies.
22% of all US dollars that exist were created in 2020. Expect some serious inflation to happen in the next few years.
But we are still nowhere near Weimar levels of money printing, so that’s something. Except in places like Zimbabwe and Venezuela of course but that was happening before COVID.
I think you're looking at M3?
Yes, currently 2.94T, up from 2.3T at the start of the year, so 22% of current money would be about 700B out of 3,000B.
From June 2007 to June 2008 went from 1.5T to 2.3T, so it was valid to say in June 2008 that "34% of all US dollars that exist were created in the last year"
On top of that M3 carried expanding:
From March 2007 to March 2009 went from 1.4 to 2.6T, where you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"
Inflation from 1996 to 2006 was an average 2.54%
Inflation from 2006 to 2016 was an average 1.76%
So for the response to the pandemic, measured in M3, to have the same affect as the M3 from 2008, the US would have to create another $1.6T by January 2022. Then you could say "half of all US dollars that exist were created in the last 2 years"
So far the increase is 74B a month, or 1.8T over 2 years.
I don’t see these as mutually exclusive. The state of the economy dictates what we can afford in terms of healthcare, infrastructure, education, defence and much more. It is directly correlated with life expectancy and quality of life. Sure top-line numbers don’t tell the whole story, but they do tell a lot of it.
Of course economic collapse hurts people. But there are only two causes of economic collapse - external stressors, and internal mismanagement.
And the only situations in which they're not the same are when physical disasters permanently destroy significant productive capacity. Everything else should be manageable.
Covid - and the Great Depression - both prove the economy is badly mismanaged. It should be possible to hit a pause button on non-essential activities, keep as many people as possible safe, fed, entertained and possibly even educated, and then hit restart when the threat is over.
"Possible" does not mean "trivially easy." But it does mean "Can be handled successfully with some adjustments and minimal attrition."
This culture just can't do it. Its primary engine is debt-fuelled plutocracy and short-term profit-seeking, and it's so inherently unstable it can't cope rationally with a relatively minor and short-lived challenge like a nasty but not spectacularly deadly virus.
Most popular economic performance metrics are quite distant from the real world effects on most people, largely because measures that incorporate distribution rather than simple aggregates are not popular.
So while the people are the economy in a very real sense, discussion of economic performance impacts of real or hypothetical policy tend to focus on impacts that have a distant, loose relationship to the experience of most people.
I would say that are immediately and direct impacts on the experience of most people.
Every country has let these values fall in one way or another.
For reasons I don't get, the Freedom House picture on this article shows NL as orange, meaning that freedom and democracy eroded during the pandemic. I really wonder what's that about, it seems to me that the government tries very hard (too hard, according to just about every columnist and talk show guest) to respect everybody's personal freedoms. I'm pretty impressed, actually.
The interesting question is why they didn't renew the emergency powers. They arguably weren't constitutional in the first place, but the only real challenge to them came from the conspiracy theorists /anti-vaxxers who got laughed out of court on about a hundred technicalities.
https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/20-08-2020/unlawful-but-ne...
This isn't some crazy conjecture. The book "What Washington Gets Wrong" convinced me.[1] The same phenomenon happens across government, even in the national security, intel and law enforcement areas. In fact, it even happens in corporate America, where the top level execs are fairly well aligned with the interests of the owners, and most of the bad apples are found in middle management to a step or so below the C-suite.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/What-Washington-Gets-Wrong-Misconcept...
Jeff Bezos is the richest person on the planet. He doesn't have all the control, he doesn't even have significant control. Trump doesn't either. Nor does McConnell, or Pelosi, or Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg. They all have a little control, but ultimately even if all of those people worked together they still couldn't control the US.
But I don't think that any middle managers etc are unaccountable individually either, but in aggregate they are.
The value of good leaders is to herd the cats in roughly the right direction, perhaps nudging the direction along the way.