Let's Not Bomb Iran

Bret Stephens over at the New York Times—who sometimes comes across as the world's last doctrinaire neoconservative war hawk—seems to have learned nothing from recent events in Venezuela. He spent months banging the war drum in favor of a U.S. regime change effort to topple Maduro and install democracy. In the end—he got the war he wanted, but not the democracy. So it goes. 

Now—apparently without any self-reflection or reassessment of this strategy—he has moved right along to doing the same thing with Iran. In multiple recent columns in the paper, he has called for a U.S. attack to overthrow the Islamic Republic in favor of—I don't know; whoever fills the void? (A role which presently appears most likely to be filled by the son of the former deposed Shah, that ruthless CIA-backed autocrat best known for the terror inspired by his secret police.)

Historical Comparisons

 It's hard to win an argument with this administration by drawing historical analogies—when they themselves seem so eager to embrace all the worst chapters of American history. 

Just yesterday, I was writing on this blog that the administration's actions in Venezuela were all too reminiscent of U.S. expansionism in the 1846 Mexican-American war. 

Permabear

 I was reading in the Wall Street Journal yesterday about the career of the value investor Jeremy Grantham, sometimes known as the "Permabear." He has been saying for years—if not decades, at this point—that the entire equity market is in a bubble. We're talking more than just an "AI bubble" here. Plenty of people think those stocks are criminally overvalued right now. Grantham does them all one better—he thinks that the pricing of the entire stock market has gotten unmoored from any rational relationship to underlying earnings and other measures of intrinsic value. 

He's probably right; and this week is offering him a measure of vindication. Panic about new AI tools—and how quickly they can be used to build software performing a wide variety of specialized functions, with minimal if any knowledge of coding required—has sent software stocks into a tailspin. This "Anthropic" effect has been enough to pull down the larger tech sector for a few days, plus the larger stock indices—the Nasdaq and S&P 500—that are most reliant on it. Meanwhile, investors are "rotating out" into previously less favored parts of the market: mid-caps, foreign stocks, "defensive" sectors, etc. 

The Two Disillusionments

 I wrote the other week on this blog that the spectacle of what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela right now is enough to destroy any lingering idealism of any political species—whether of the right or of the left. Marco Rubio's testimony before Congress last week—in which he explained in detail how the U.S. is harvesting the proceeds of oil wealth that it is extracting from the South American country at literally the barrel of a gun—was the final capstone in this edifice of disillusion. 

Suppose you were a leftist idealist still smitten with the rhetoric and mythology of the Bolivarian revolution. If you hadn't had your "Kronstadt" moment yet—if Maduro's stolen election and his arrest and torture of hundreds of political dissidents hadn't been enough to convince you that this "revolution" was going the way of other Stalinist debacles past—then surely the spectacle of Maduro's own top henchwoman now openly collaborating with the Yankee imperialists for the sake of mutual profit should be the final nail in the coffin. 

Ministerial vs. Radical Evils

 There is a certain type of dialectical philosopher who is always trying to convince us that the good things we want to believe in are already present, implied as a necessary consequence, in the bad things whose existence we are forced to acknowledge. 

Albert Camus says that the rebel's metaphysical rejection of the universe implies a standard of ultimate values according to which that universe is found wanting. Ergo, nihilism actually incorporates and necessitates its opposite: there is thus "a path through nihilism that leads beyond nihilism." 

Not Good at Eating

 After much badgering over the past few months, my sister finally talked me into watching Kpop Demon Hunters on Netflix this week. I had to grudgingly admit, by the end of it, that I had enjoyed myself. It was pretty good and quite fun—even for someone who went in prepared to dislike it. 

One scene toward the beginning, though, struck me as an odd choice. The three main characters are taking a plane ride to get to a venue for a show. A flight attendant brings them their midday meal, and they fall upon it ravenously. "Carbo load!!" they shriek, before stuffing their faces with gimbap. 

Los Eternos Indocumentados

 Jean Guerrero had a fascinating piece in the New York Times the other day about Trump's recent bizarre (and no doubt, to many, inexplicable) interference in Honduran politics.  

Of course, there are any number of reasons why Trump would suddenly decide to pardon the former Honduran strongman Juan Orlando Hernandez—after he was convicted of a conspiracy to smuggle cocaine to the United States—and back the same candidate in the country's recent elections as the MS-13 criminal syndicate. Maybe it's just that he identifies with all would-be authoritarians and crooks; maybe it's just his innate love of gangsterism and corruption showing through.