Good morning. Hello. How are you? #747
Mass shootings, Jan 6th, China policy, you know, real happy stuff.
Good morning. Hello. How are you? All well? Happy Friday. That’s nice, innit? I am excited. I have friends coming to visit this weekend. Stereolab is playing. Should be a nice little weekend. Maybe Home Depot if there’s time.
It’s issue #747. I loved 747s they were so magical and amazing. I don’t remember the first time I was on one, I remember a time when I was sixteen, but I know I’d already been on one. I know the last time I was on one was in 2009 on a Korean Air flight to Seoul from NYC. The second to last time was in 2005 on a JFK-Heathrow flight on Air India, which was awesome. Really good food on Air India and I love the decor. Great airline. Magical airplanes, just amazing. I may think travel is dumb now but man I will still love 747s till the day I die. Planespotting. The best. Maybe when I retire I’ll go full circle in life and be one of those people who takes pictures of rare plans for Airliners.net. My dad worked at the airport my whole childhood, I worked at the airport after college. Travel is terrible but sitting in an observation deck looking at airplanes? Magical.
There was a mass shooting over in Raleigh last night. Forty-five minutes away. Not the closest city but I suppose we do live in the “Raleigh Durham” area, one could argue. It was on a greenway — one of those park paths along a river. That is disturbing to me. Not a mall or some other mass gathering place. Just… a park path. Teenage boy in camo, surprise surprise.
I started seeing the Tweets while Emma and I were catching up on the Jan 6 hearing, watching the video exhibit with Pelosi making all those phone calls interspersed with the rioters. Harrowing and awful, even if you’ve seen similar video a bunch. A profoundly unpleasant sensation, reading about a mass shooting happening right now while watching a bunch of people try and overthrow the government. And a bunch of people belong to a political party that is, you know, against overthrowing the government and against mass shootings but somehow they’re the bad guys. Hookay. I can imagine a Republican reading this and saying “that’s not fair we’re against mass shootings too” and, like, yeeaaah. The most generous interpretation is that Republicans are against mass shootings like I am against The Bachelorette: an unfortunate side-effect of modernity, but one that must be tolerated not like I’m for banning The Bachelorette or anything. Are you really against something if your opinion of it is “yeah, I’ll tolerate that.”?
God we’re so useless. This dialog from this week’s Rick and Morty (forgive me for quoting Rick and Morty here) was really so spot on:
Dinosaur: “Surely there was some point between gunpowder and… something called Amazon Prime that you folks had to think ‘Are we supposed to be running a planet? Wouldn’t we rather make Marvel movies?’ How many Marvel movies are there?”
Soldier: “Twenty-nine and forteen more on the way.”
Dinosaur: “See you love doing that. And we love helping new life forms gain their footing. So now that we’re back, we can respectfully take it from here.”
I guess you had to see the accompanying list of “human innovations” for it to really click:
Gunpowder
Anime Bodypillows
Celebrity Presidents
Jazzercise
Gluteal Implants
Marvel Movies
Comment Sections
Domestic Terrorism
Crocs
Amazon Prime
Fluffernutter Sandwiches
Capitalism
Anyway.
Joe Biden is going all out on China and I stopping them from getting high end semi-conductors and all of the stuff someone needs to make high-end semiconductors. I guess, like, this is stuff to make the hot new latest semi-conductors, 3nm or 5nm or whatever they’re up to (down to). I guess they can… still make older semiconductors? I am not entirely clear on this. But I guess the idea is that over time, we will have better semiconductors than the Chinese, which will give us an edge in AI and weapons and such. It seems to me you could probably make some pretty good AI with 7nm semiconductors and that we’ve made a lot of really solid weapons the past 100 years without 5 and 3 nm semiconductors but I am definitely no expert. China is only the fourth largest semiconductor manufactuer, and the first three are democracies, though, so I guess that is good.
I don’t know. I mean, what are we supposed to do here. The government of China is bad! Of course Roger Waters would tell us that we are the worse country and sure, whatever, but we are not actively locking up millions of people — oh wait yes we are. But I guess in the end voting is still the thing that makes the difference, right? And we let more people vote than China? Shit we’re like one third the size of them and we let more people vote in absolute numbers. Haha that’s not true either, people in China vote! What a thing. Gawd.
Here is an area on which I’m on firmer ground: I remember vividly the debates during the Clinton administration about re-granting China Most Favored Nation Trading Status, which had been again cancelled after Tiennamin Square. The argument everyone gave then, and when we did the same for Russia in 2000, was that trade brought peace. Trade brought nations closer together, countries did not go to war with each other when they traded heavily, no two countries with McDonalds have ever gone to war to each other or whatever pop-culture Economist rule-of-thumb du jour was in vogue at the time.
So…. guess what! None of it worked! None of it! Russia is at war with “the West,” China is just… plotting? Relentless in its own direction, we’ll sell you shit and buy your shit but we are not changing our ways and we’re just going keep on going. And, I mean, more power to them, I guess, but where is it written that we’re supposed to keep helping them become the dominant superpower on the earth? Trading with China did not bring about Democracy. It did not free the Tibetans or the Uyghurs. It did bring people out of poverty. We helped do that. It is done. Other countries have poverty too. It made sense to focus on China first because that’s where the most poor were. China can take care of itself now.
I’m not really all for starting a trade war. Ten, even five years ago I think I would have found these export controls kind of depressing and sad. I still do, but I also think they are probably the right thing these days?
Also we really gotta put an end to this Tik Tok insanity. Make them sell it to an American country or kick them out. Every country on earth shoulda banned Facebook, I wouldn’t have blamed them one bit. “UK bans Facebook because it’s terrible,” the imaginary headline says. “Yep, checks out, fair play,” I would have responded.
I’m no expert here and I freely admit this is a hugely complex situation. I also view myself mostly as a globalist who wishes countries did not exist in the way they do now. But I also recognize the reality on the ground. Pretending the world is a democratic utopia and pushing free trade accordingly in hopes you can fake it till you make it did not work. It is perhaps one of the greatest intellectual stumbles of the 20th century, the entire premise proved massively, painfully, embarrassingly incorrect. I don’t know what will work but it seems that keeping doing the same thing is maybe not the smartest approach. Maybe a bit more standing up to bullies is necessary, and, yes, this includes the US.
The classically trained economist in me is saying “but Rick extrapolate this out accordingly, every country blocking trade with a bunch of countries it believes does something offensive. Global trade slows, economic growth stalls, our ability to continue to pull the Global South out of poverty is massively impacted.” And yes, that is exactly what a classically trained ecomomist would say. There is probably some truth to it. But my god, classically trained economists are wrong, so often, and, you know, if your social science is still struggling with incorporating the concept of, you know, morality after two hundred years, (forgive me Ostram and Sen) maybe we should take things with a grain of salt.
Maybe a pivot towards Africa’s democracies is in order. Maybe we should, you know, acknowledge Taiwan is a country if we want to keep buying semi-conductors from them. Maybe that one country, the Netherlands or whatever, that has that one factory that is the only one on the planet that makes that one part every semi-conductor factory needs should stop selling to the US until we, you know, reckon with our prison population. I can’t say I’d be too upset about that.
This is incoherent. These are thoughts running through my head. I don’t have the answers but I think I am probably okay with Biden’s tougher stance on China. I don’t think we have a lot of choice.
Okay Walmart time. Amurrca!
Here’s a new goth playlist for you. I wonder if I should just have a “goth” playlist, like I do with the shoegaze. A decades-old genre that is still going strong with tons of new bands? Yeah, maybe just one playlist, merging the new and old. It would definitely speed things up on the delivery of goth music to my readers. But this one, at least, is new goth. So much great new goth out there. Sometimes I cheat and put, like, a new YYYs song on here that sounds gothy but mostly, these bands are committed.
Have a lovely weekend! See you Monday.
Whoops forgot the playlist link: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6CVeCqV7DVt8repVwuWxP8?si=c2105e3524bb4438