Putinism considered as an ideology

By way of comments in Ta-Nehisi Coates blog, we have this analysis from conservative commentator Anne Applebaum: video and PDF.

It fascinates me how the conflict between Ukraine and Russia has begun to shift alliances among Western intellectuals. I previously would have had no reason to quote Applebaum, and I am not sure I trust her (defender of child rapist Roman Polanski, adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute) even now. But she may have some good ideas.

More Ukraine and Multi-polar Global Politics

The Ukrainian Education Minister Serhiy Kvit The Ideology of the EuroMaidan Revolution. (Kiev post op-ed, 24 March 2014.) I am far more inclined to credit this than Putin's creepy neo-Stalinist rants.

On 2 May 1998, New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, to my astonishment, did something sensible: for an op-ed piece he interviewed George F. Kennan, who was 94 at the time, on the expansion of NATO. I suppose it would be wrong to reproduce all of Kennan's remarks, but I will quote some bits:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. … We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. … It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong.

As was often the case, it seems that Kennan was right.

Why Hiring Prejudice Against the Long-term Unemployed?

Paul Krugman links to a study on long-term unemployment which finds: “it’s really hard to get employers to look at people who have been out of work for an extended period, so any sustained increase in long-term unemployment tends to become permanent.”

Which is interesting and important. But rather than look at the macroeconomic issues raised, I'd like to ask: why this is employer policy? It isn't random: hiring managers, HR managers, or both are choosing not to hire people who have been out of work for a long time. Why?

Global Environmental Disaster: It's Not Just Climate Change

This is the panic post.

Most greatly I fear environmental and biological catastrophe, not just climate change, but also the collapse of crop yields due to disease, the collapse of animal husbandry due to diseases we cannot manage, the collapse of fisheries, the obsolescence of all current antibiotics due to overuse and the emergence of new plagues.

When overpopulation is described in most older Western fiction, the vast growth of cities is the subject. To Robert Heinlein, all the towers of Manhattan were slums, regardless of how happy the residents were. (It's in Tramp Royale, if you want to read the man's own words on the subject.) But long before we feel the crowding, our vast population and use of resources will drive systemic disaster. Randall Munroe recently reminded us that our livestock outweigh us, and that all wild mammals are a tiny fraction of mammalian biomass. If human civilization collapses, from where will come the resources of a wild ecosystem, to rebuild the earth? If the salt shall lose its savor, from where will you resalt it?

And then there is nuclear power. Many scientists, most notably planetologist Jim Hansen, regard nuclear power as a solution to our current energy woes. But I do not believe we are competent to make effective use of it. As with overpopulation the dangers are different than those of the scare stories. It is true that most of the scare stories about nuclear power are wrong: power reactors cannot turn into nuclear bombs, waste can be disposed of if we are willing to undertake the effort and reactors can be designed that will produce fast-decaying radioisotopes that will become harmless in centuries rather than millenia. Yet the land around Chernobyl is so poisoned that even decay takes place more slowly. If we use nuclear power carelessly, over time, it will poison more and more of the earth and, as with fossil fuels, the temptation to misuse nuclear power will always be present. Better, I think, to start now, to reduce our population and develop sustainable non-nuclear energy technology. We would have done best to start decades ago, when the risks became apparent. By the time Al Gore published Earth in the Balance in 1992, it was old news: Gore was summarizing existing results. But we are stuck, and not acting. In some ways we are even making matters worse.

I look for hope from unexpected quarters. When Heinlein wrote Tramp Royale in 1954, he believed that population would continue to grow vastly, and this would lead to resource wars. Instead, contraception became widely accepted, which Heinlein couldn't imagine was possible, and the Green Revolution increased agricultural outputs sufficiently to prevent both these things. We are still not in a good way, but neither have we had global disaster. We may hope for more unexpected good news. Nonetheless we have much hard work before us, if our world and our civilization are to survive.

Books and articles

1. Gore, Albert. Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1992.
2. Heinlein, Robert A., Tramp Royale. Baen Books, 1996, ebook. (Original completion date 1954. If you're tempted to read this, be warned that that the book and Heinlein's prejudices have aged badly.)
3. Munroe, Randall, "xkcd 1338: Land Mammals," self-published web comic.
4. Nuwer, R., Forests Around Chernobyl Aren’t Decaying Properly. Smithsonian Magazine, March 2014.

Babes in the Multipolar Woods

Listening to US officials activists on Russia's conduct around the Black Sea is an exercise in depression. We have, on the one hand, the hawks, who want yet another open-ended intervention, on another the Putinists (who, astonishing to me, include several leftist sites and bloggers who really ought to know better), on yet a third the Ukrainianists, and on a fourth the European Union apologists.

What all of these have in common is a near-total disconnection from reality. These authors are flailing. What possible military response can the USA make? How can the EU respond without Russia freezing its own citizens? How can any military action be undertaken in Ukraine without jeopardizing the east-to-west flow of gas and oil?

As I foresaw, we are now again in a multipolar world, with regional superpowers and small states squeezed between them. No-one now alive has lived It has been 75 years since we lived in such a world. All the old wrong answers are being dragged out again. To not engage is to turn vast parts of the world over to tyranny. To engage as though each conflict has no wider implications is to be outmaneuvered. And there is something new, which the old multipolar world did not have: the threat of global environmental destruction. I fear a rebirth of Kissengerism, where lives by the hundreds of thousands and populations in the millions are spent for political purposes. I remember that the old multipolar world ended in global war and I hope that this one does not end in rising seas and mass starvation.

On 538 and Vox

538 (Nate Silver, editor-in-chief) and Vox (Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief) are turning out to be disappointments, with Silver hiring climate denialist Roger Pielke and Klein hiring Cato Institute crank technology policy commentator Ted B. Lee (no relation to Tim Berners-Lee.) Alas, I don't think these are going to fail, for the same reason that Fox News is not going to fail: these are funded propaganda operations, not honest news or commentary operations. Silver and Klein seem to be getting financial support because they’re thought safe centrists by the people who make the financial decisions. There’s plenty of that already in the media. So why should I care what these sites have to say?

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

Both Silver and Klein have excellent analysis skills. If they do this for a while they're going to turn themselves into hacks. And that would be a shame.

If someone was willing to do a reality-based site, do journalism, I’d subscribe in a heartbeat.

MH370: Looking At The Possibilities

1. Well-planned theft. Objection: there seems no way the craft could have been landed undetected. How could that have been the plan?
2. Attack.
3. Mechanical failure. Objection: it was awfully well timed.
4. Pilot suicide. Objection: There seems no motive and no sense in the method. If suicide was the intention, surely the pilot could simply have crashed the plane in the Gulf of Thailand?

Only attack has no obvious objections. In this scenario, some sort of sabotage, perhaps a bomb placed to disable the ACARS system and depressurize the flight deck, leaving the craft to run out of fuel and crash. The attack was executed at just the right moment for the plane to be lost.

I suppose it could have been accident, but this is unlikely. Avionics do not usually fail in a way that also disables flight deck crews. The timing — just the right moment for the craft to be lost — is also unlikely. Still, unlikely things do somethings happen. (Since I wrote this article, but before I published it, Chris Goodfellow has proposed electrical fire as a possible accidental failure mode. I can see that as a possibility, but the timing is awfully suspicious.)

Why…? Now we go into cloud-cuckoo land. Provoking an international media event, raising anger and drawing attention to something — but what? —, seems the most likely motivation. Cui bono?