Chapters on Socialism

 With the recent resurgence of interest in socialism on the American left, it's worth revisiting John Stuart Mill's Chapters on Socialism as probably one of the best attempts ever to think through systematically both the merits of the socialist critique of capitalist society and the viability of its proposed alternatives. 

Better than perhaps any writer in history on the topic, Mill performs the feat of holding multiple ideas in mind at the same time—and managing to distinguish between them. He is therefore the opposite of that individual William Hazlitt once identified as the great pest of all political life: "the person with one idea." 

Grands Séducteurs

 A friend and I the other weekend sat down to watch Disney's largely overlooked and forgotten contribution to the L. Frank Baum expanded universe, Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco in the title role. 

It took about five minutes into the film before I realized this movie could only have been made before #MeToo. 

AI Over-Production

 The other day on this blog, I was warning about how AI companies don't seem particularly likely to ever attract the level of mass consumer demand they would need to pay off the extraordinary amount of debt they are taking on to build their products. 

This seemed like it could lead to either of two outcomes; both of them bad. On the one hand, the bubble could burst, once investors realize there is not enough revenue forthcoming to justify this capital expenditure; on the other: the government—captained by our current AI-friendly White House—could wade in to try to fill the gap by stimulating demand for AI services artificially. 

People's Actions

 We tend to assume, at least for heuristic purposes, that in a democracy, if people vote for a particular candidate, that means they largely approve of that person's campaign promises. Thus, according to this logic, people who voted for Trump in 2024 must in some sense have "chosen" his worst and cruelest actions in office—particularly since Trump didn't exactly hide the ball on the campaign trail as to his intentions. He had "Mass Deportation Now" signs printed up and distributed to people at the official Republican National Convention. 

But, strange as it must seem, this may not be the case. A recent series of focus groups with Trump voters across the country—discussed on the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast—apparently revealed that, no matter how blatant it may have seemed—to our eyes—that Trump was running in 2024 on a platform of white nationalist authoritarianism, most of the people who cast a ballot for him were not doing so because they backed such a program. 

New Haiti Documentary

 This week, PBS Frontline aired a must-watch documentary about the crisis set off by the Trump administration's decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti. The film opens with footage of people arriving in Cap-Haitien from U.S. deportation flights. The deportees cover their faces with clothes to obscure their identities from gangs, who will kidnap and extort them if they find out they have any ties to the U.S. 

Some of them describe spending years or decades in the United States, earning advanced degrees and contributing to the U.S. economy. One woman says she was a pharmacist with a doctorate. Now, they have been expelled to a country that has been reduced largely to rubble by ongoing gang violence, and where a multinational UN security force is now waging active armed combat to try to wrest some territory from marauding criminal networks. 

Merrie England

 As a young socialist, I generally avoided reading the acknowledged classics of socialist thought. This allowed me to persist in the pleasant and untested belief that someone had worked out a plausible comprehensive theory somewhere for how all this was supposed to work, and I just didn't know about it yet. 

And so, if anyone asked me for my institutional model of socialism, I could gesture to these dense volumes and explain that someone smarter than me must have thought of it already. I was just here as an evangelist for a system that more profound minds had already worked out. How could they not have? Don't you see how thick their books are? 

Beasts of Burden

 New York City apparently passed a resolution this week phasing out the use of horse-drawn carriages over the next two years. 

I thought of a passage in that aching pastoral novel I just read—beloved by many—J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, about the passing of horse-centric civilization from rural England.