The touchy question of how to handle India

 The US has a few things to consider in its attempt to foster a constructive relationship with emerging world power India.

For starters, our immediate neighbor to the north is at a low point in its relationship with that south Asian nation:

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the floor of his country’s parliament to accuse Modi’s government of involvement in the June assassination of a Sikh nationalist—and Canadian citizen—on Canadian soil.

The shocking allegation has brought relations between two Commonwealth democracies in New Delhi and Ottawa to an all-time low. The details surrounding Trudeau’s claims remain murky, but the escalating tensions may nonetheless have repercussions for the complex relationship President Joe Biden is trying to build with the South Asian nation positioned as a potential bulwark against their common rival in China.

The high from the G20 meeting that positioned India as an ascendant world power didn’t last long.  “Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” Trudeau told members of parliament last Monday, visibly angry. “Last week at the G20, I brought [the allegations] personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms.” Biden and other leaders from the “Five Eyes” alliance—an agreement that allows Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to share a broad range of classified intelligence—reportedly also privately broached the topic with Modi at the G20.

Nijjar, an Indian-born Canadian citizen, was shot and killed in June outside the Vancouver-area Sikh temple of which he was president. The Washington Postreviewed security footage from the day of the killing, which shows a multipronged operation to trap Nijjar in the parking lot of his temple. Two hooded assailants—assisted by the driver of a sedan who blocked Nijjar’s pickup truck—fired roughly 50 bullets, 34 of which struck Nijjar. Canadian investigators have not yet apprehended the shooters or their potential accomplices.

In a country that has the largest Sikh population outside of India, Nijjar wasn’t just any temple leader. He was active in the Khalistan movement, agitating for a Canadian referendum to support an independent Sikh homeland in the Indian state of Punjab. The separatist movement has a violent history in India, which reached its height in the 1980s when two Sikh bodyguards assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after she allowed the storming of the Sikhs’ holiest temple in the Punjab. While the calls for an independent Sikh state have mostly died down in India, they live on in the Sikh diaspora.

The Indian government has long claimed Nijjar was a militant—it said he was behind a bombing of a theater in Punjab, which he denied, and in 2020, it designated him as a terrorist. Indian officials also connected him to an alleged attack on a Hindu priest and were seeking his arrest.

India’s ministry of external affairs vehemently denied any involvement in Nijjar’s death, calling the allegations “absurd and motivated,” and accused Canada of harboring terrorists acting against India. Ministry officials have also suggested the accusation was an effort to drum up political support in the Indian Sikh diaspora community, roughly 2 percent of Canada’s population which largely backs Trudeau’s liberal party.

The Khalistan issue has long been a sticky one for India and Canada. India has often claimed Canada is too sympathetic to Sikh separatists. But if things had chugged along alright before, despite their differences, Trudeau’s claims kicked off a diplomatic doom spiral. Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat, which India reciprocated with a Canadian envoy. Ottawa tabled a new trade agreement between the countries, originally set to be negotiated at a meeting in October. Both countries have issued dueling travel warnings for their citizens. In a dramatic move Thursday, India suspended its visa program for Canadians wishing to travel to India and asked Ottawa to downsize its diplomatic presence in India.

“[Canada] announced, with a lot of fanfare, an Indo-Pacific strategy last year,” Ian Bremmer, founder and president of the political risk analysis firm Eurasia Group, tells TMD. “The ‘Indo’ part is basically D.O.A., right? So it is a problem, and I don’t see a near-term resolution.”

If the allegations of Indian involvement in the killing are true, they would represent a stark break in typical conduct between two democracies and a dramatic breach of Canada’s sovereignty. “The Indians absolutely have reason to be angry about the Canadians inadequately responding to their concerns about radicalism and promotion of terror,” Bremmer says. “But there are legal channels that two democracies use to work that through.”

Few concrete details have emerged about the nature of the intelligence that led to Trudeau’s dramatic statement on the floor of the House of Commons. Canadian security services themselves reportedly gathered the “smoking gun” evidence—surveillance of conversations between Indian diplomats in Canada—linking New Delhi with the murder. But U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Cohen said Sundaythat intelligence shared through the Five Eyes network helped Canadian officials draw their ultimate conclusion about Indian involvement, though he refused to say whether that intelligence had originated with the United States. The New York Timeson Monday, quoting anonymous “allied officials,” reported that U.S. officials provided the Canadian government with contextual intelligence after the killing, but officials added the U.S. didn’t have advance warning about the hit or the perpetrators. India has said it has not seen evidence of Canada’s claims.

The rift between the U.S. neighbor to the North and its burgeoning strategic partner in the Indo-Pacific could put the Biden administration in a tight diplomatic spot. Biden officials have insisted on the importance of Canada’s investigation. “From our perspective, it is critical that the Canadian investigation proceed, and it would be important that India work with the Canadians on this investigation,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Friday. “We want to see accountability, and it’s important that the investigation run its course and lead to that result.”

Seemingly mindful of other countries’ attempts to off dissidents from a distance—as Russia has done repeatedly over the last two decades and beyond, and which Iran has attempted to do in the U.S. on several occasions—Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan struck a more forceful tone on what Blinken called “transnational repression” by foreign governments.

But India is a key element in the US effort to hold China at bay:

Biden aims to bolster a threatened global order by hastening India’s rise. As India rises, however, it will act in ways that sometimes challenge the very order Washington must defend. And if Biden’s team believes, as Asia policy czar Kurt Campbell has said, that the US and India have “the most important bilateral relationship on the planet,” then Washington will probably tolerate a lot of bad behavior to keep that relationship intact.

The geopolitical case for US-India cooperation is unimpeachable. Way back in 1904, British polymath Sir Halford Mackinder explained why.

Thanks to the modernization of both technology and tyranny, he wrote, there was a growing possibility that aggressive powers would dominate Eurasia and control its unmatched resources. So the era’s liberal hegemon, Great Britain, must cultivate “bridge heads” on the edges of the supercontinent — Korea, France and India — so it could keep the world in balance by keeping Eurasia divided.

Today, large swaths of Eurasia are ruled by US enemies — a prickly, bellicose China; a vengeful, violent Russia; an expansionist Iran. India, an increasingly prosperous country of 1.4 billion people, may be the key to holding the balance — and particularly to denying China a free hand on land as it also expands at sea.

India is no less critical as a global manufacturing hub, a contributor to resilient technological supply chains, and a diplomatic leader of the developing world. This is why Biden has so prioritized strengthening US-India relations by hosting Modi for a state visit in Washington, helping make the recent G-20 meeting a showcase for Modi’s leadership, and pursuing deeper cooperation across the board.

Yet Biden doesn’t view India as a prospective military ally; he isn’t counting on New Delhi to rush to America’s assistance in a war with China over Taiwan. The idea is simply that America and India share a vital interest in keeping Beijing from dominating Asia and, perhaps, the world. So the US helps itself by helping India develop economically, mature militarily, and otherwise put its power athwart China’s path to primacy.

It’s not all upside. A US president who initially talked about a great clash between autocracy and democracy has taken a very muted approach to discussing the infringement of human rights, civil liberties and political freedoms in Modi’s India — or the incendiary Hindu nationalism in which his government traffics.

Likewise, India hasn’t done much to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In fact, it has benefitted greatly from the war, which allows it to obtain Russian oil at discount rates. And if indeed Modi’s men killed Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada in June, his government is emulating the transnational repression associated with harder-edged autocracies like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The trouble with tying oneself to quasi-illiberal governments is that they tend to do the very things Washington deems corrosive to the liberal order. Indeed, if India is an indispensable partner, it remains deeply ambivalent about the system Biden means to preserve.

India opposes Chinese hegemony, but that doesn’t mean it loves American might. New Delhi wants a multipolar system, in which India stands among the great powers, rather than a unipolar system in which Washington and its allies tower above the rest. And as India’s influence grows, it will demand great-power prerogatives — including, perhaps, the right to trample the sovereignty of other democracies by targeting domestic enemies on their soil.

Right now, Modi’s government believes New Delhi holds all the cards. Indian officials have privately said they just don’t believe Washington will do anything to spoil the relationship, given how desperately America needs support against Beijing. They’re probably right.

This dilemma will govern Biden’s response to Nijjar’s murder. When Russian agents poisoned one of Putin’s enemies on British soil in 2018, there was a coordinated Western response featuring mass expulsions of Russian diplomats. Canada isn’t going to get a similar level of solidarity.

And consider that India is a pretty major player in the  

 

Two divergent - but both intelligently arrived at - views of populism

 Consider this a preliminary working-out of a notion I want to explore in an essay for a new publication to which I've been invited to contribute.

Populism is obviously a force to be contended with, but its contours are not distinct beyond a basic juxtaposition against an elite.

I think Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center does a commendable job framing it as a reaction to the limited choices posed to the Western public, much as social democracy was a century ago:

By 1929, labor-backed parties were powerful everywhere they existed. Five Western nations had labor-led governments by then, and many more would join them by 1940. The nineteenth-century debates between liberals seeking constitutional democracies and conservatives resisting their rise had been utterly transformed into the battle between capital and labor that typified twentieth-century politics.

It’s easy in hindsight to see why this happened. Industrialization upset centuries of tradition as millions of people left farms and towns to work in city-based factories. These people came to see themselves as united by class interest, one that sought to limit the private power held by factory owners and traditional moral authorities such as priests and aristocrats. Armed with the vote, they forced their views to the political forefront and set the terms of debate.

Their rise was fueled by the failure of their foes. Non-socialist parties promised peace and prosperity. Instead, the world experienced war and woe. After the World Wars and the Great Depression, voters everywhere wanted calm. They largely granted social democrats the policies that had driven their ancestors to mad opposition in exchange for continued liberal political freedoms and some semblance of private property and markets. The post-1945 social democratic victory was so thorough that even leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could only claw back some of the ground their ancestors had conceded.

He says something similar seems to be presently afoot:

Populist ideas and themes have also infiltrated major parties in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. Donald Trump is a populist par excellence with his overt nationalism and call to smash elites. Britain’s Tories won their 2019 majority under the leadership of the brash Boris Johnson, who promised to deliver the Brexit voters had opted for three years earlier, as well as significant government spending to “level up” left-behind parts of the country. Canada’s new Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, also opts for “us versus them” themes and targets working-class voters with his policies and rhetoric.

This dramatic surge has already left its mark just as the early twentieth-century social democratic jump did. Back then, existing parties began to create rudimentary welfare states in the hope they would prevent “socialism.” Today, existing leaders rush to limit immigration and subsidize domestic manufacturing, two main demands of the populist right. Fiscal consolidation or austerity seems off the table as traditional center-left and center-right parties compete for the support of economically struggling voters and parties who otherwise might back populists.

This alone would mark populism as an important phenomenon. Social democracy’s prior rise from nonentity to dominant force, however, suggests a more fundamental shift is underway. Populists have already imitated their predecessors’ early achievements. Can they go further and become the paradigmatic twenty-first century political force?

He's candid about how populism is being demographically fueled:

Populist parties tend to draw from less educated, poorer men. These are not society’s dregs: they work rather than draw benefits. But the same trend persists regardless of nation. Populist support drops as income and education rise, and it is almost always higher among men than among women. Populism also tends to draw support from those who identify as Christians but do not regularly attend services. This tendency is less often measured, in part because many western nations are so thoroughly secular that pollsters tend not to ask about religious belief and observance. A statistical study I commissioned, however, found that 2017 support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland rose in Bavaria in direct relationship to Catholic church membership, even after controlling for other factors. This would explain why many populist parties and leaders extol Christian values even as they do not pursue explicitly theological policies.

The demographic solidarity among populists means they have a shared identity that fuels their political activity. They are not, as elites have commonly assumed, motivated solely by transitory anger focused on discrete — hence ameliorable — concerns. They have a worldview based on their experience and framework that encompasses the whole of society. This means they can weather the periodic storms that always beset politics and remain firmly on course.

It's a worldview markedly at odds with what Olsen (and a great many other analysts) call the "elite":

. . . populists want a very different type of society than do the educated, affluent elites whom they battle. Elites benefit from the individualistic society they have created, both economically and socially. Globalization and mass immigration mean they can contract with cheaper foreigners for labor at home and abroad, dramatically increasing their purchasing power. Their education also has trained them to value the novel experience over the traditional one, whether it is searching for exciting new foods or engaging with different cultures. The fact that the rapid adoption of these views has unsettled and disadvantaged large numbers of their fellow citizens does not bother them, so sure are they of their merit and virtue.

Where I think Olsen steps onto shaky ground is when he concludes that populism is so inexorably on the rise that elites had better reconsider their presumptions lest they get run over. Let us remember that the "elites" have the technology and the thrall of upcoming generations to their "novel" ideas. Shiny objects and human nature are a volatile mix.

Olsen's view, in more concentrated form, is what motivated a formerly actual conservative, well-respected for his erudition and measured takes, such as Victor Davis Hanson to burn bridges and go all-in for the Very Stable Genius, arguing in a book called The Case for Trump that a hollowed-out national core was fed up with not being listened to, and that a period of upheaval was just the ticket for serving notice to the muckety-mucks.

Daren Jonescu is having none of it. He sees a different kind of dichotomy, and illustrates it using the issue of Ukraine:

The American government’s old guard establishment in both parties wants Ukraine to lose the war, but slowly. The establishment’s upstart wing, comprised mainly of populists of the right, including the farcically-named House Freedom Caucus, wants Russia to win, and quickly. Neither side is quite willing to state its genuine position directly, at least so far, although the loonier puppets of the populist faction, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, are almost there. But the two groups’ respective positions become increasingly obvious and inescapable over time, being the only reasonable explanations for their respective actions and rhetoric. 

Let it be noted, however, that for all the apparent conflict between them on the subject of the war, in the final analysis they are aiming at the same thing, namely the appeasement of Vladimir Putin and the maintenance of the pre-war status quo, with thousands of dead or enslaved victims of tyranny “over there” being regarded by both sides as an insignificant price to pay for the restoration of “stability.” That is, for all the noisy vitriol between the two factions, they are, in the final analysis, basically arguing about optics, not outcomes — such internal conflict over mere methods and rhetoric being a defining mark of establishmentarianism. The “two party system” operating as always, and, as always, dragging a hundred and fifty million lost souls through the crucible of its ignoble lie, the never-ending “binary choice” election cycle.

The same dynamic, with regional variations, may easily be observed in Western Europe, as the traditional democratic allies maintain, at the leadership level, the same ambiguous voice of “supporting Ukraine, but not too much,” while an undercurrent made up of undersecretaries and rival parties speaks more openly of Putin having been “unjustly provoked” by NATO, and of Ukraine having to accept the sacrifice of its territorial sovereignty in the name of peace. 

Is it any wonder the former free world is so unfree today, and so rapidly accelerating into the gutter of self-annihilation? Its establishments are rotting corpses, decaying in the muck of lustful indulgence and hubristic illogic, and increasingly infested with Marxist flies and populist worms, all seeking, in their superficially alternative ways, to cast off all the institutions, principles, and apolitical wonders that were once the wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence, in the name of their own avarice, perpetual power, and sense of entitlement.

Allow me to here let the cat out of the bag and say that I find Jonescu's assessment more resonant. He takes the longer view, speaking of "wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence."

That is what gets short shrift in most of these exchanges. What I'm after is a worldview impervious to compartmentalization. 

Olsen says populists claim a Christian foundation but are not inclined to attend church. That indicates to me that they're also not inclined to do a deep dive into the very kind of thing we all need to dive into. 

I know that the notion of immutable verities shows up in a lot of the bullet-point-ish summarizations of what conservatism (remember that concept?), but we're always tempted to settle for an uneasy peace at which competing social movements or economic paradigms arrive. 

The real quest human beings are on is that for a slop-proof universal ought. 

And I don't think we can embark on a sound analysis on any level short of acknowledging a transcendent order. Anything less ends in a relativity that ultimately resolves nothing.

 

 

 

Another clash of competing leftist interests

 The most recent post here at LITD dove into the irony of a countercultural icon, Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone co-founder, who checks off the proper boxes right down to coming out as gay after a marriage that produced a son, getting ousted from the board of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which he also co-founded) for telling a New York Times interviewer that he finds white male rock titans more substantive interviews than female or black ones.

Today we look at another deliciously ironic loggerheads: organized labor versus the climate alarmists:

If you want to understand why the United Auto Workers union is striking now, look at the three factories it chose to target for its first wave shutdowns.

The General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri, makes the Chevy Colorado and the GMC Savana. The Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, makes Ford Rangers and Ford Broncos. And the Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio, makes Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators.

What do all these vehicles have in common? Unlike electric vehicles that lose money, these vehicles are among the Big Three’s most profitable products. They are also exactly the type of vehicle President Joe Biden wants to eliminate by 2032, when his new regulations mandate that two-thirds of all cars sold in the United States must be EVs.

Not only do EVs have fewer parts than gasoline models, which means fewer jobs for auto workers, but every plant that produces mufflers, catalytic converters, and fuel injectors will have to shutter, either permanently or long enough for a complete overhaul to make EV parts.

Biden’s obsession with EVs has essentially made all UAW-organized factories in the Midwest obsolete. Why would a car company invest there when they could build a new factory in a state where workers aren’t forced to join unions?

It's all I can do not to digress here and go on a diatribe about Biden's presumption that he can insert himself into the workings of the free market - which, to reiterate the basics, boys and girls, is merely the sum total of the millions of agreements to which buyers and sellers arrive daily, ideally without government interference - by executive diktat, no less. But let's stay focused.

Current UAW president Shawn Fain may not be collectivist enough for the Trotskyists, but he's a pretty classic figure for a labor activist.  He comes from the heart of flyover country - Kokomo, Indiana - where his dad was police chief and two of his grandparents were UAW members who worked at a Chrysler facility there. Fain himself went to work at the Chrysler castings plant as an electrician in 1994 and pretty much immediately started climbing the union ranks. 

In the current situation, he champions the position that union members ought to continue to get paid even if an automaker shutters a plant. 

I do need to digress a bit here and get into the question of what is and isn't a right. 

Fain and his ilk take it as a given that there is some kind of right to a livelihood. Making things that are desirable into "rights" is how we got government involvement in health care - an aspect of life that figures into the current auto industry strike situation.

It's actually understandable that he would conclude thusly. Cars, as well as self-propelling transportation generally, and communications technology, too, came on the scene at the outset of the twentieth century with such impact that by the 1920s, they were a given. And they were made in factories by people earning hourly wages. 

But just as their arrival on the cultural landscape was a manifestation of how unbridled human inventiveness could introduce drastic changes, innovation continued apace and wrought further changes. The 1980s forced the Big Three to move over to make way for foreign car makers to erect US plants. And many of those have stayed non-unionized, which should have been a sign to the UAW that its ability to make demands had limits. 

And now comes another wave of change, albeit not born of human inventiveness but the heavy hand of the state.

So who's going to blink first as the climate alarmists, backed by the coercive power of government, go toe to toe with the UAW, which is still locked in a mindset that sees the mid-twentieth-century model of the town factory guaranteeing generation after generation a secure lifestyle? 

There's a way to avoid this scenario of bad alternatives, if anyone is interested. 

Let people buy the kinds of cars they want to buy, and remove all government - and union - interference in how they're priced - which, to a considerable degree, is still based on the carmakers' costs.  Then we can see what the market says about what the cars are worth.

ADDENDUM: I don't know if this qualifies as a digression or not, but the Very Stable Genius is going to skip the second Republican presidential candidates' debate in order to address the UAW. It's pretty obvious what he's doing: striving to take some of the wind out of the sails of Biden's expression of support for the union. It's of a piece with what he recently said about Florida's six-week abortion ban. When the VSG hedges his political bets, he's not particularly sly about it.

Trump has no principles. He does anything he does in order to see if it will bring him glorification. 

Yeah, I guess that was a little bit of a digression. But it's good to know where the charlatan of Mar-a-Lago fits into the current situation. 

 

 

Jann Wenner and late-stage cancel culture

 The rock-journalism pioneer has made himself a case study in how an inartful comment can cast a pall on a lifetime of achievements, regardless of context:

 Jann Wenner, who co-founded Rolling Stone magazine and also was a co-founder of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, has been removed from the hall’s board of directors after making disparaging comments toward Black and female musicians. He apologized within hours.

“Jann Wenner has been removed from the Board of Directors of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation,” the hall said Saturday, a day after Wenner’s comments were published in a New York Times interview.

Wenner created a firestorm doing publicity for his new book “The Masters,” which features interviews with musicians Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Pete Townshend and U2’s Bono — all white and male.

Asked why he didn’t interview women or Black musicians, Wenner responded: “It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni (Mitchell) was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test,” he told the Times.

“Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level,” Wenner said.

Late Saturday, Wenner apologized through his publisher, Little, Brown and Company, saying: “In my interview with The New York Times I made comments that diminished the contributions, genius and impact of Black and women artists and I apologize wholeheartedly for those remarks.”

He added: “I totally understand the inflammatory nature and badly chosen words and deeply apologize and accept the consequences.”

About the above-mentioned context: Wenner, at the time a UC Berkeley student, co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 to serve notice that rock and roll had come of age, that its high-profile performers of the day, and indeed everything in its orbit, was worthy of serious coverage, that the days of 16 and Tiger Beat had passed. In the first issue, there was a deep dive into the finances of the recently held Monterrey Pop Festival. The piece looked objectively at what did and didn't work about the first rock festival, looking at its organizers as neither exotic types on the edges of mainstream entertainment nor icons of a counterculture that readers were expected to champion without question. 

Wenner was mentored by Ralph J. Gleason, jazz critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. He quickly learned how to get musicians to discuss their stylistic flourishes and influences. The first wave of record critics he brought on board - Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Fong-Torres - may be seen in retrospect as so steeped in the rock milieu as to give short shrift to a broader historical consideration, but they took that milieu seriously. They articulated the inescapable arrival of rock as a cultural force to be reckoned with in a tone that cemented that status.

When Wenner expanded the magazine's editorial scope to include political and cultural stories, he started in with the over-the-top gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, which was in keeping with the rock ethos. As time went on, he started running the work of Tom Wolfe and P. J. O' Rourke, who established themselves as independent thinkers who, while thoroughly understanding the countercultural impulse, resisted being in thrall to it. Wolfe and O'Rourke both soon came to gain status as right-leaners at an interesting moment in the history of conservatism. They also wrote for The American Spectator, at the time a freewheeling publication also founded in 1967 in a college town at the forefront of the burgeoning counterculture (Bloomington, Indiana). (TAS has since undergone several morphings of its identity and currently seems uncertain of where its position on the spectrum is.)

In 1977, Rolling Stone published a tenth-anniversary issue, and aired a commemorative television special, It was widely noted at the time that the former exuded the magazine's original spirit, but that the latter was a silly suck-up to the entertainment-industry machine that had established hegemony over what was left of any notion of a counterculture. 

Wenner expanded his publishing empire. One late-70s offering was Rolling Stone College Papers, an acknowledgment that RS had become a brand and was indeed geared toward a specific demographic. It was as if Wenner was intentionally catering to the younger siblings of those adolescents to whom Gloria Stavers had targeted 16 twelve or so years earlier.  

Another move that indicated dilution of the original impulse was Us, a People magazine knockoff that went all-in on gossipy fawning of celebrities of all types. 

Men's Journal was an attempt to flatter the rugged-young-male-adult-seeking-a-defintion-of-masculinity-suited-to-an-age-of-diminishing-demands-for-brute-strength demographic.

Still, throughout it all, Wenner maintained those friendships he talked about in the New York Times interview. And why shouldn't those guys maintain those friendships? There was no longer anything outlaw about any of them. Like any other figure upon whom the populace, with notable fickleness, conferred hoopla, they were mainly famous for being famous.

Wenner eventually had to go public with his years of sexual recklessness. That culminated in announcing he was homosexual:

Wenner, who has been out as gay for decades, cultivated a raucous, bisexual culture within the walls of his magazine empire, according to a new book by Joe Hagan called Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine. 

A passage in the book quotes a former employee who said Wenner "fancied himself as a sort of polymorphous-perverse William Randolph Hearst." "'He told me he had slept with everyone who had worked for him,'" said Glenn O’Brien, who joined Rolling Stone in 1973 and quit after what he said were Wenner’s unwanted advances.

One level on which Wenner's heave-ho from the Rock Hall of Fame board is discussion-worthy is the irony of a mainstream popular culture that would still like to see itself as the rebellious foil to a mainstream having to look at what had actually motivated one of its most venerated icons through the years.

But there's an even larger context in which to put this. The counterculture, long germinating and in its peak flowering stage in the 1960s, has been predicated on dismantling Western institutions and norms distilled over centuries. At its core, it's nihilistic. 

One could take issue with specific examples of black and women artists Wenner mentions in the NYT interview, and that's no doubt already being done.

For instance, within the context of taking rock seriously, I would imagine Joni Mitchell would have made a most interesting interview for Wenner's collection. By mid-career, she had collaborated with, and cultivated friendships with, a number of serious jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter. She was levels above boilerplate promotional prattle about latest tours and albums.

But consider another context: that of her status as perhaps the supreme embodiment of the feral decadence of the 1970s Laurel Canyon scene. 

Consider Wenner's mention of Marvin Gaye, unquestionably in the pantheon of R&B immortals, but also a soul beset by sexual obsession and the attendant personal-life messiness that culminated in his getting shot by his father in a money dispute. 

I'd also like to take a look at another angle. Wenner mentions that, of his interviewees, one of his strongest friendships is that with Bruce Springsteen. For my money, that speaks volumes about how Wenner looks at rock and roll generally. As I noted in a Precipice post about Springsteen's Super Bowl Jeep commercial, there's always been a vacuousness about Springsteen that Rolling Stone types were desperate to ignore in their quest to make high art out of rock:

. . . when I look back over the entire arc of his career, including those first two albums, something becomes clear: he’s always been full of himself. In his early days, he was clearly aspiring to be some kind of encapsulation of rock’s development to that point. He’s always been out to make the Great American Rock Album.

So now Wenner comes in for blackballing for not passing muster with the current arbiters of identity assumptions. Just deserts and all that.

And then there's the deliciousness that another quick-to-find-the-correct-side-to-take type will find in seeing the raised-fist crowd eat its own.

But if one steps back for a view of yet wider scope, one can see that it's all destined to crumble in folly. It was hollow from the get-go. 

Nobody was ever interested in linking admirability with such traits as nobility, humility, or wisdom gained by adhering to tradition.

So Wenner's disgrace makes perfect sense. 

 

 

Gavin Newsom hates human advancement

 Oh, does the title seem a bit hyperbolic?

I'm not sure what else you'd call this:

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change.

The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday.

The suit also claims that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and BP — as well as the American Petroleum Institute industry trade group — have continued their deception to today, promoting themselves as “green” with small investments in alternative fuels, while primarily investing in fossil fuel products.

It seeks to create a fund that oil companies would pay into to help the state recover from extreme weather events and prepare for further effects of climate change. It argues that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars on responding to climate change, with costs expected to rise significantly.

Talk about inflamed language:

“The companies that have polluted our air, choked our skies with smoke, wreaked havoc on our water cycle, and contaminated our lands must be made to mitigate the harms they have brought upon the State,” the suit says.

Villainizing those in the business of bestowing comfort, convenience and safety on American society, extracting the energy form that has raised living standards and life expectancies exponentially all over the world for over a century. 

Real smart.  

 

 

China's badly sagging internally, but that doesn't mean it doesn't pose a threat on the world stage

 Michael Schuman, a Beijing-based writer for The Atlantic, says that years of trying to mix free-market activity (private companies) with heavy-handed statism (industrial policy, regulation) has taken the wind out of China's sails:

China’s jobless college graduates have become an embarrassment to Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The unemployment rate among the country’s youth has reached an all-time high, putting the country’s severe economic troubles on display at home and abroad. In August, Xi’s administration decided to act: Its statistics bureau stopped releasing the data.

But Xi can’t hide China’s economic woes—or hide from them. The problems are not just a post-pandemic malaise, or some soon-to-be-forgotten detour in China’s march to superpower stature. The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes.

The news should not come as a surprise. Economists and even Chinese policy makers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.

Contrary to the assumptions of many commentators in recent years, China may never overtake the United States as the world’s dominant economy if current trends continue. In fact, it’s already falling behind. 

Once again, we're seeing that central planning is a poor way to gauge what a country is going to need, Over-investing in housing, factory capacity, railways, etc. has resulted in a debt level three times that of the size of the country's economy.

Xi once talked a good game about moving in a sensible direction, but the initiatives he talked about never got off the ground:

Early in his tenure, Xi seemed to accept these imperatives. In 2013, he signed off on a Communist Party reform blueprint that pledged to give the market a “decisive” role in the economy. But the reforms never happened. Enacting them would have diminished the power of the state—and thus Xi’s own power. China’s leader was unwilling to trade political control for economic growth.

The more power Xi has commanded, the heavier the state’s hand in the economy has become. Xi has relied on state industrial policy to drive innovation, and he has imposed intrusive regulations on important sectors, such as technology and education. As a result, China’s private sector is in retreat. Two years ago, private companies accounted for 55 percent of the collective value of China’s 100 largest publicly traded firms, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics; in mid-2023, that share fell to 39 percent.

People's incomes are going in the wrong direction for domestic consumption to take up the slack.

So the way to project an image of continuing power, it seems, is to act like a menace in the western Pacific:

China’s navy has launched its largest-ever manoeuvres with an aircraft carrier in the western Pacific, according to foreign defence officials and analysts, as Beijing flexes its military muscle to push back against the US and its allies.

 

The Shandong, the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s second aircraft carrier, was on course on Tuesday to converge with more than 20 other Chinese warships in waters between Taiwan, the Philippines and the US Pacific territory of Guam, said two Asian security officials.

 

“This is by far the largest number of ships we have seen training with any Chinese carrier so far,” said Su Tzu-yun, an analyst at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a defence-ministry backed think-tank in Taipei. “They are expressing their displeasure with the various military exercises that have been under way in their periphery.”

 

Taiwan’s defence ministry counted 20 PLA warships in the waters around the island in the 24 hours to early Tuesday morning. It did not give any detail, but the disclosure followed its announcement on Monday that the Shandong had sailed through the Bashi Channel, which separates Taiwan from the Philippines, into the Pacific. Japan’s military also reported the passage of eight PLA naval vessels into the Pacific via the Miyako Strait, south of Okinawa.

 

One east Asian national security official said the vessels spotted by Japan — six missile destroyers and two frigates — were continuing in a direction that indicated they would meet up with the Shandong. A separate Asian military official said some of the PLA vessels operating near Taiwan were also following the carrier.

When Marxist-Leninists with big egos reach this stage in their fortunes, they aren't too concerned with what international organizations and multinational corporations think. 

This situation is going to continue to get more raw and real for all of us. 

 

New Right nastiness and a young woman's innocuous video

 Am pleased to see Zack Kessel at National Review come to the defense of Julia Mazur:

Julia Mazur, an ex-Tinder employee . . .  hosts the Pretty Much Done podcast, which addresses relationships with a focus on “the most important one we’ll ever have: our relationship with ourself.” On her show, according to a self-described friend of hers from college, Mazur “talks about breakups, relationships, and trying to love yourself at any stage you are in.”

Mazur became X’s main character after a video she posted on TikTok — in which she describes her Saturday as a single, childless woman in her late 20s as consisting of such activities as sleeping in, binge-watching television shows on Netflix, and teaching herself how to make shakshuka — went viral. She closed out the video with a paean to freedom, saying her ability to do essentially whatever she wants makes up for however upset she might be by her not having a husband and children:

I say all this to say, whenever I’m hard on myself about why I’m not married and I don’t have kids and I should be further along at 29 (almost 30), I wouldn’t wanna do anything else this Saturday. I know that you can do all these things when you have kids and you’re married, and I understand, but the effortlessness and ease of my life — just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I wanna make or the Beyoncé concert I wanna go to — really pays off when I’m hard on myself for not being where society tells me I should be in life.

Everything Mazur talks about should seem relatively mundane. She does not have a husband or children, so she doesn’t have the responsibilities that would come with them. It’s a silver lining in a situation she seems to understand might not be ideal. You might think such a video describes pretty basic stuff that is not worth getting worked up about. You’d be wrong. 

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh posted the TikTok on X on Sunday, writing that Mazur’s “life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realize how depressing this is.”

There’s plenty that could be said about the experience of a single, childless woman in her late 20s. I obviously have very little practice being one, so I’ll address something else: the sheer nastiness in Walsh’s post. His attack on a woman who’s simply trying to appreciate what she has in life is emblematic of a broader problem on the right: the conflation of “conservative” with “jerk.” Walsh is by no means the only offender, with many other right-wing influencers solely focusing on “owning the libs.” The “owning” often stoops to bullying.

Look, Mazur could indeed be held up as a poster child for the vacuousness of the lives of millennials. She is indeed a number in the collapsing-marriage rate, and her choices of ways to aesthetically nourish herself, and her seeming lack of community and connectedness are the opposite of heartening. 

But Neo-Trumpists just have to slather a dollop of attitude on any observation they make. As Kessel says, there's no higher priority for them than "owning the libs."

Kessel commendably then steps back and takes a more aerial view of the ways in which the New Right is decidedly not what we'd known as conservatism prior to 2015:

This is a real problem for conservatism. Over the past decade or so, many elements of what once constituted the movement have crumbled, especially within much of the right-wing media ecosystem. Small government? That’s old-fashioned. Clear, universal ideas of morality? So archaic. A globally engaged United States? That’s “not where the voters are,” and even if it was, America isn’t necessarily the good guy. 

The difference between actual conservatives and the New Right is that conservatism has a vision for a society in which everyone would be truly happier. The other bunch just wants to stomp the bad guys into the dust. Problem is, the bad guys will rise again at some point, demonstrating the cyclical nature of this level of political activity. That is, unless the yay-hoos institute such an authoritarian system that they can't.

No, thanks.