Weekly Grounding #14
News, links, writing
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. I hope they help ground your thinking in the midst of media overload. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
Without further ado, here’s this week’s Weekly Grounding:
“The Democrats’ Nonwhite Working-Class Problem Reemerges”
- discusses an overlooked aspect of the latest New York Times/Siena poll: “Biden’s weakness among nonwhite working-class (noncollege) voters.” He points out the striking fact that “Biden leads Trump by a mere 16 points among this demographic. This compares to his lead over Trump of 48 points in 2020. And even that lead was a big drop-off from Obama’s 67-point advantage in 2012.” Teixeria focuses on five areas where the Democratic Party seems significantly out of step with nonwhite working-class voters: “structural racism,” “public safety,” “transgender athletes in team sports,” “renewable energy,” and “Biden administration accomplishments.” I highlighted Teixeira’s forthcoming book with John B. Judis, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, back in Weekly Grounding #4 and would recommend some of his recent analysis at , such as “Brahmin Left Vs. Populist Right.”
“The Myth of Global Grain Shortages”
Jayati Ghosh analyzes the causes of global food shortages for Project Syndicate: “In the early stages of the Ukraine war, especially between March and June 2022, the Big Four grain traders reaped record profits and revenues. Cargill’s annual revenues were up 23 per cent, to $165 billion, while Louis Dreyfus’s profits soared by 80 per cent. These gains reflected price hikes that were not aligned with real-world demand and supply dynamics. Moreover, grain futures markets experienced a flurry of activity between April and June 2022. Financial investors, including pension funds, increased their share of long positions in the Paris wheat futures market from 23 per cent in May 2018 to 72 per cent in April 2022. Ten ‘momentum-driven’ hedge funds reportedly earned $1.9 billion by capitalising on the food-price surge triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Instead of preventing or containing such financial manoeuvres, regulators in the United States and the European Union allowed them to continue unabated.”
“China’s High-Tech Field of Dreams”
David Goldman waxes poetic about 5G, automation, and AI in this article for Asia Times: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is underway in China, although its applications are limited to a few big installations. Some of the productivity gains are remarkable. Near Shenzhen, this writer visited an automated factory where Huawei manufactures thousands of 5G base stations a day, adding to the 2.3 million that China already has installed out of 3 million worldwide. It has several assembly lines that each require 15 workers, compared to nearly 80 workers three years ago. Most of them are there to check that the automated assembly and testing equipment is doing its job properly; only one stage of assembly required human hands.” The quote from Huawei Cloud division CEO, Zhang Pingan, on the company’s new AI model is particularly chilling: “Its job is to go deep into all walks of life.”
“The West and China Share the Same Fate”
This is an excerpt from
’s extended essay at , entitled “The China Convergence.” I haven’t read the longer piece yet, but Lyons develops a strong thesis here: “This is the truth behind why China and the West, for all their proclaimed differences, share the same managerial hubris, are tempted by the same growing technological powers, and are sheltering the same elite insecurities and delusions. Even as they roil and clash, they are converging on the same destiny: the same socially engineered submission of everything human, real and free to technocratic nihilism and the false reality of an all-encompassing machine-government — to a total techno-state.” I made a similar argument back in early 2022 in my essay, “The Left’s Problem with Technology”: “Though each nation may strive for technological superiority over the other, America and China share the goal that these new technologies must be developed and applied as soon as possible in order to usher in a new age of 5G-driven ‘progress.’ Like the ‘scientific’ and ‘utopian’ socialists of yore, American and Chinese political elites—despite their significant differences—find themselves paradoxically unified on the question of technology.”
Michael Lind offers a scathing critique of the troubling resurgence of eugenicist thinking in quarters of the American conservative intelligentsia for Compact Magazine. I reviewed Lind’s 2020 book in “Populism, Political Realignment, and the Professional-Managerial Class,” which was largely a critique of the elite takeover of the American left. This essay serves as an important complement to that book in its criticism of dangerous and dead-end elitism on the right: “In today’s era of left-wing suppression of legitimate topics of discussion, eugenicons lure readers by claiming that they alone dare to discuss taboo questions. Among these: Why do black Americans as a group commit proportionally more violent crimes than some other ethnic and racial groups with similar levels of poverty? And why have Jews been so successful in many professions in Europe and the United States since the 18th century? The eugenicon tells us that we must choose between only two approaches: woke leftism, which attributes all disparities among groups to ongoing white racism, and hereditarian ‘realism,’ which teaches that black people have ‘criminogenic;’ bodies, while there are other mysterious genes that explain why so many Jewish-Americans are accomplished violinists, academics, and standup comedians.” Lind continues: “From the standpoint of the eugenicons, ‘the multiracial working class’ is doubly damned—it is working class and multiracial: two forms of dysgenic inferiority rolled into one. The eugenicons can have no policy program for the working class, other than encouraging its members to consider availing themselves of contraception, abortion, and assisted suicide to ensure that there are fewer of them on their side of the ‘bell curve’ to drag down the high-IQ elite on the other end.”
- draws on the thought of Marshall McLuhan to explore the nexus of technology and political philosophy in contemporary America at : “McLuhan knew the reassemblage of human beings and of organized humanity was a high art even before electronics sent all culture and cultures diving into the dumpster. But those heights are not at all necessarily sacred ones. The grand electric-age politics of reassembling human matter into ‘totalitarian’ form, even or especially at the great cost paid out in the material treasure of human blood, has itself been replaced in the minds of the ruling elite, insurgent and established factions alike. Both, whether they want to maintain control or seize control over the apparatus of reassembly, want to do so bloodlessly. After all, the bots are bloodless, as are the digital doppelgangers of each person copied into the system. ‘Retribulation,’ wrote McLuhan, meaning repayment, ‘is the universal mode in every kind of organization, regardless of geography or ideology.’ For your service in becoming the lifeblood of the artificial being built to take world power in a bloodless coup, your repayment is in worldcoin, a currency of mind as without spirit as the new regime is without blood — that is, heart.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Feel free to share in the comments.