Sublime

our standard historical meta-narrative about the ambivalent progress of human civilization, where freedoms are lost as societies grow bigger and more complex – was invented largely for the purpose of neutralizing the threat of indigenous critique.

When we do, we assume the politicians are clients in a patron–client relationship, and we assume their obligations will cloud their impartial judgment.

For example, in Uruk, Mesopotamia, the world’s first city-states were founded on the idea of the king as the good shepherd: the king protected and provided for

last 30 years, where the communist countries became ethnonationalists and the capitalist countries became ethnomasochists.

Turns out that the Milkshake theory is a more colorful and up-to-date version of George Soros’ 1984 Imperial Circle . The core of both arguments is that the US economy is getting smaller relative to the Rest of the World, while the World’s use of US dollars as the international standard of value continues to get bigger and bigger. This creates a po

Think about how enthusiastic Putin has been about the “renationalization of the elites”, and how closely the CCP has been watching Western tactics during the Russo-Ukraine War. They recognize that any commercial linkage with the West is a point of vulnerability during a conflict.

“The Global Economy as an Adaptive Process,” at seven pages and zero equations, is well worth a read. Holland recounts many, now familiar, difficulties in mathematical analysis of economics that assume linearity, exclusively negative feedback loops, equilibria, and so on, before proposing that the economy is best thought of as what he calls an adap