Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 4 of 411

Us vs. Them / Our Government vs. the Government

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On May 30, 2025

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I think it’s clear that democracy and capitalism don’t work together. Capitalists always wind up buying the government, and the only solution is a Great Depression-sized catastrophe to help reset capitalist wealth. But then, over time, they will capture the government again.

This isn’t to say much good may not be done at various times. Usually, after things get bad enough, a generation winds up in power who is determined to make government work “for the people” because they’ve seen what happens when it doesn’t. War, revolution, poverty, depression, and so on. The second generation staggers on. They don’t really understand in their bones that government must be made to work for the people, and they compromise, but they keep it going, more or less. Then the third generation says, “Hey! If we ran the government for us and the people who can afford to pay us the most, well, we could live very, very well. Who cares about the “people?”

Often, the third generation needs to lie to themselves. They believe some intellectual charlatans: Milton, Friedman, Laffer…and later on, Fukuyama (of “We’ve won, it’s all over, it’s the end of history!” fame). The fourth generation doesn’t even pretend. It’s their government, and you peons can suck it up. (Everyone from Bush Jr. to Bush Sr. thought that neoliberalism was garbage, even as he implemented some of it. Billy Clinton appears to have been a true believer and made it work on sheer brilliance and micromanagement.)

But there’s another problem with representative government: Much like with the police, most people who want the power of government are the sort of people who shouldn’t have it.

What happens, one way or the other, is that government is run by people who run it for themselves, not for the people. It’s “the government,” not “our government.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I’ve come down on the side of sortition. Just pick leaders based on a lottery. Then run some medical tests on the ones chosen, to make sure they aren’t chronically sick or mentally disabled. Give them ten-year terms so they are in office long enough to have some institutional knowledge and have elections every two years for one-fifth of the number.

Anyone who serves gets a full pension of three times median income for the rest of their lives, and is disallowed from any other income. If you aren’t willing to do that, you can decline office.

I’m quite positive that random people who know that they’re going back to being almost regular citizens whose income is dependent on how society performs in the future will do a better job than normal politicians.

Oh, there are plenty of details to sort out, to be sure, but this is far more likely to produce “our government” than the current regime.

The next article on this subject will be on the next important change: How we do taxation? How do people contribute to “our government” and “society?” Spoiler: Taxing money is not the right way.

 

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

China Is Going to Win the AI Race

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On May 28, 2025

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Yeah, it doesn’t seem that way, but it’s how it will turn out. What China’s doing is embracing actual open AI (unlike the company named Open AI). Open source and open standards. Everyone outside North America and maybe Europe is going to prefer that, and those who set the standards control the tech. On top of that, American AI is frighteningly expensive; no one in the US is making any money. Every query costs more to produce than is earned, even from customers who are paying, let alone all the free accounts.

Deepseek is much less expensive per query, however. The idea of capitalism is to, y’know, make money? There’s a limit to how much money Softbank can throw at AI if it doesn’t start providing at least some returns.

Further, American-style AI requires massive amounts of energy, and guess who produces the equipment needed to quickly build more generation capacity? (If you need more than one guess, you haven’t been paying attention.)

Every hyper-scale or “AI-ready” data-centre campus needs its own sub-station and a bank of step-down transformers big enough to deliver 50-150 MVA per site. Add the grid-side upgrades that utilities must make to back-feed those loads, and each incremental gigawatt of GPU capacity pulls several hundred megavolt-amps (MVA) of new LPT demand.

Roughly 80 percent of U.S.’s large power transformers (LPT≥100 MVA) are imported and lead-times have ballooned from 50 weeks (2021) to 120-210 weeks (2024), and the lone domestic GOES mill provides only a fraction of what new AI loads will require.

China dominates both finished-unit exports and nearly half of global GOES output; it also supplies critical sub-components such as tap-changers and bushings. GOES now fall under Beijing’s 25 percent retaliatory-tariff list and new export-licence regime.

Export licensing is China’s retaliation for the US “don’t sell China chips or lithography machines” regime. I’m sure they won’t drag their feet or outright deny exports to the US, when the US has explicitly restricted “AI” chips to attempt to cripple China’s AI industry. I mean, turnabout isn’t fair play, amiright?

Thing is, China has proved very good at using what they can get, or make themselves, and they’re making fast progress on chips, with the possibility of creating a new class of chips which out-performs anything the US has looking very likely. The US, on the other hand, cannot ramp up production of transformers on any reasonable timescale.

Reap, sow. Fuck around, find out, etc.

As for AI destroying all jobs, well, no. It makes mistakes too often, and in anything that matters even a one or two percent serious error rate is unacceptable.

I, at least, will laugh myself sick when Silicon Valley gets its lunch eaten by the Chinese on AI. I mean, it’s sad, because Silicon Valley bros are so humble, never brag and never lord it over anyone else. It’s not like they’re assholes whose entire business model is based on gouging and taking value from everyone else, and it’s not like modern “AI” is based on the most vast theft of other people’s work in history.

And them Chinese, man, who do they think they are? Embracing open licenses and open standards and actually trying to make a profit, like they have real competitive markets or something? Commies can’t do Capitalism better than America!

 

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The End of America as the Essential Consumer Nation

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On May 26, 2025

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For ages, everyone needed access to the American market. I used to call the US, “the consumer of last resort.” If you wanted to get rich, if you wanted to industrialize, if you wanted to scale, you needed the American market. Europe sold to the US, Japan sold to the US, South Korean and China sold to the US. This requirement is why Japan was forced to sign the Plaza Accords, which basically destroyed their future. Oh, life in Japan is fine now, but it’s no longer the roaring Tiger of the 80s.

But the US has lost its place, which is why China was able to laugh in its face when Trump tried to use tariffs against it. His assumption was that China needed the American market. This was true 20 years ago, maybe true ten years ago, but it’s not true now.

But wait… there’s more!

Not so pretty, is it? And unlike America, Chinese consumers aren’t in debt. Their market isn’t based on a deck of cards or predatory lending meant to lock consumers into never ending debt payments.

Looks a lot like America in the 50s and 60s, actually.

China’s growing fast, and certain respects, they’re growing smart.

China is building nuclear plants 2 to 4 times faster than the West and 3 to 7 times cheaper”

Further, China is building far more renewable energy than anyone else, and MAGidiots beliefs aside, it’s working out just fine for them. Ninety percent of new power in China is renewable.

You can see this on this lovely map:

Indeed, for the first time ever, China’s increasing energy demand happened at the same time as a reduction in CO2 production. If there’s a hope for us on climate change (there really isn’t, but still) it’s that China is the primary industrial power AND its leaders and population aren’t idiots who think climate change is a hoax or that it’s real but ignoring it is good for the economy.

Now this isn’t to say that China’s all wonderful or anything. They have high speed trains and they’re electrifying based on renewable energy and to a much lesser extent nuclear fast, but they still have an insane car-centric society.

Still, they’re more sane than any other major country, by a fair margin.

China is now the world’s largest consumer, industrial producer, ship builder, drone maker, auto manufacturer, leads in about 80% of tech fields, produces more scientific papers and patents than any other country, has 8 of the world’s top 10 research universities (Harvard is the only American university on the list, at , but…. recent events are not promising), the most electricity production and the cleanest energy mix of any major country.

The idea that China and the US have a serious rivalry is laughable. The US has lost. It’s like Britain in 1920. It’s all over, except, possibly, for the shooting.

 

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Open Thread

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On May 24, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. No vax/anti-vax this week.

The Embassy Shooter’s Manifest

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On May 23, 2025

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From Ken Klippenstein, written by Elias Rodriguez

The Embassy shooter’s manifesto is short, to the point and entirely sane. I won’t wring my hands and say I think he was wrong, I will merely note that it is illegal to kill Israelis, and that unlike the butchers of Gaza, he will be punished.

Explication

May 20, 2025

Halintar is a word that means something like thunder or lightning. In the wake of an act people look for a text to fix its meaning, so here’s an attempt. The atrocities committed by Israelis against Palestine defy description and defy quantification. Instead of reading descriptions mostly we watch them unfold on video, sometimes live. After a few months of rapidly mounting death tolls Israel had obliterated the capacity to even continue counting the dead, which has served its genocide well. At time of writing the Gaza health ministry records 53,000 killed by traumatic force, at least ten thousand lie under rubble, and who knows how many thousands more dead of preventable disease, hunger, with tens of thousands now at risk of imminent famine due to Israeli blockade, all enabled by Western and Arab government complicity. The Gaza information office includes the ten thousand under the rubble with the dead in their own count. In news reports there have been those “ten thousand” under the rubble for months now, despite the continual making of more rubble and repeated bombing of rubble again and again and the bombing of tents amid the rubble. Like the Yemen death toll which had been frozen at some few thousand for years under Saudi-UK-US bombardment before being belatedly revealed to stand at 500k dead, all of these figures are almost surely a criminal undercount. I have no trouble believing the estimates that put the toll at 100,000 or more. More have been murdered since March of this year than in “Protective Edge” and “Cast Lead” put together. What more at this point can one say about the proportion of mangled and burned and exploded human beings whom were children. We who let this happen will never deserve the Palestinians’ forgiveness. They’ve let us know as much.

An armed action is not necessarily a military action. It usually is not. Usually it is theater and spectacle, a quality it shares with many unarmed actions. Nonviolent protest in the opening weeks of the genocide seemed to signal some sort of turning point. Never before had so many tens of thousands joined the Palestinians in the streets across the West. Never before had so many American politicians been forced to concede that, rhetorically at least, the Palestinians were human beings, too. But thus far the rhetoric has not amounted to much. The Israelis themselves boast about their own shock at the free hand the Americans have given them to exterminate the Palestinians. Public opinion has shifted against the genocidal apartheid state, and the American government has simply shrugged, they’ll do without public opinion then, criminalize it where they can, suffocate it with bland reassurances that they’re doing all they can to restrain Israel where it cannot criminalize protest outright. Aaron Bushnell and others sacrificed themselves in the hopes of stopping the massacre and the state works to make us feel their sacrifice was made in vain, that there is no hope in escalating for Gaza and no point in bringing the war home. We can’t let them succeed. Their sacrifices were not made in vain.

The impunity that representatives of our government feel at abetting this slaughter should be revealed as an illusion, then. The impunity we see is the worst for those of us in immediate proximity to the genocidaires. A surgeon who treated victims of the Mayan genocide by the Guatemalan state recounts an instance in which he was operating on a patient who’d been critically injured during a massacre when, suddenly, armed gunmen entered the room and shot the patient to death on his operating table, laughing as they killed him. The physician said the worst part was seeing the killers, well known to him, openly swagger down local streets in the years after.

Elsewhere a man of conscience once attempted to throw Robert McNamara off a Martha’s Vineyard-bound ferry into the sea, incensed at the same impunity and arrogance he saw in that butcher of Vietnam as he sat in the ferry’s lounge laughing with friends. The man took issue with McNamara’s “very posture, telling you, ‘My history is fine, and I can be slumped over a bar like this with my good friend Ralph here and you’ll have to lump it.'” The man did not succeed in heaving McNamara off a catwalk into the water, the former secretary of state managed to cling to the railing and clamber back to his feet, but the assailant explicated the value of the attempt by saying “Well, I got him outside, just the two of us, and suddenly his history wasn’t so fine, was it?”

A word about the morality of armed demonstration. Those of us against the genocide take satisfaction in arguing that the perpetrators and abettors have forfeited their humanity. I sympathize with this viewpoint and understand its value in soothing the psyche which cannot bear to accept the atrocities it witnesses, even mediated through the screen. But inhumanity has long since shown itself to be shockingly common, mundane, prosaically human. A perpetrator may then be a loving parent, a filial child, a generous and charitable friend, an amiable stranger, capable of moral strength at times when it suits him and sometimes even when it does not, and yet be a monster all the same. Humanity doesn’t exempt one from accountability. The action would have been morally justified taken 11 years ago during Protective Edge, around the time I personally became acutely aware of our brutal conduct in Palestine. But I think to most Americans such an action would have been illegible, would seem insane. I am glad that today at least there are many Americans for which the action will be highly legible and, in some funny way, the only sane thing to do.

I love you Mom, Dad, baby sis, the rest of my familia, including you, O*****

Free Palestine

-Elias Rodriguez

 

What Do You Call Two Dead Nazis?

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On May 22, 2025

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A good start.

So, someone killed two Israeli diplomats in D.C., and everyone is crying crocodile tears and screaming about anti-semitism. (One of them was a Christian fundamentalist, as an aside.)

These two diplomats are agents of a genocidal state. Their job is to keep the weapons and ammunition flowing to Israel so that Israel can kill more Palestinians, wipe out the last remaining hospital, torture Palestinians, rape Palestinians (including, it appears, with dogs), deliberately snipe children in the head, cause a huge famine, and turn every building in Gaza into dust.

And I’ve left a number of sickening crimes out.

So, am I sad they are dead? No. Am I going to pretend I give a shit when someone who supports genocide winds up dead? No. Every single pious well-wishing for Biden is the equivalent of wishing Petain, the leader of Vichy France, who helped the Holocaust along, a good life.

All of these people are knowingly involved in genocide. They have had many opportunities to stop supporting mass murder, and they have refused every single one of them.

They are all, forgive me for using the word, evil. The bad guys. Torture. Rape. Mass murder. Deliberate killing of children.

It is my dream that every single one of them will eventually hang from the neck for their crimes. No exceptions. I think it would be wise to add the corporate leadership of companies like Palantir and Microsoft, both of which are helping the genocide along.

This is a moral stance, but it is also a pragmatic stance. People who have gotten away with genocide once are not the sort of people anyone wise wants in their society, or in a position of power anywhere. Once could easily become twice.

You don’t even have to give a damn about Palestinians. You just have to have good judgment, and a concern for your own neck and the lives, rectums, and limbs of people you care about.

From the neck. Unil dead. For everyone who knowingly aided or committed genocide.

(Addendum): If this is someone lashing out in rage at any Jew and just happening to kill two Israeli diplomats I can only say, “Thank God he killed evil people,” and note that the reason that people are conflating “Jewish” with “Zionist,” as I have written repeatedly, is that Israel constantly says they’re the same thing, and then goes on to mass murder children, rape, torture, and so on. Some people are going to believe them, “Oh, Israel is Jewish, not Zionist. The Israelis say they’re the same thing, and so do many non-Israeli Jews. I guess they know what they’re talking about.” Nobody and nothing causes more anti-semitism in the world than Israel itself. For them to cry crocodile tears about anti-Jewish racism after plastering themselves with the Torah then covering themselves in the blood of children is nauseating.

And, for a little leavening of the anger and rage, a classic:

Treasury Bond Auction Is Extremely Weak

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On May 21, 2025

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Whoa, Nelly!

•U.S. 20Y Yield: Spiked to 5.097%, up +10.7 bps intraday. •10Y Yield: Rose +11.1 bps to 4.592% •30Y Yield: Jumped +10 bps to 5.067%

This caused stocks to trend down and even the dollar. Simply put, the US is adding a lot of debt, reducing revenue by cutting taxes, and there’s wild amounts of uncertainties due to Trump’s tariff and trade policies. Bond traders are worried, Japan is reducing its Treasuries’ holdings, and everyone is looking imploringly at the Federal Reserve.

As a friend quipped, “the economy is perfectly healthy, as long as we keep it on life support.”

Which is to say the likely result is that the Federal Reserve will have to step up and start buying Treasuries again. The last time it did that was during Covid.

“Print more money to bail out elites.”

But here’s the problem. The US really is trouble. Yes, in principle the US can print as much money as it wants, like any sovereign that issues its own currency. But that’s not the issue. The question is, “What does the money being printed produce?”

QE has essentially produced richer elites, more monopolization, a poorer general population (a recent study found 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a “decent” lifestyle), and higher prices. You could also say it has funded a less competitive US that is falling further and further behind in technology.

It’s what you spend money on that matters. All QE has EVER done is make it so that current elites stay in power, keep getting richer, and are rewarded for driving Americans into the ground at very accelerating speeds.

The Fed can’t rescue the US from spending its money to do all the wrong things. That requires legislative and executive action. Those parts of the government, however, are even more fickle and stupid than the Fed, which is like saying that Mount Everest is taller than K2. Technically true, but both are so tall (stupid) that it beggars belief.

If there’s something the US can do wrong right now, it’s doing it wrong, and it if it isn’t, it’s a legacy policy they haven’t gotten around to fucking up yet.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Attempt to Find a Democratic Joe Rogan or Beat the Right Online Will Fail

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On May 20, 2025

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Open your wallets, donors:

At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”

Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?

Here’s the deal: There will never been a popular, centrist online presence which is stronger than the right-wing populist one. Centrists don’t do popular. They don’t have the instincts. It’s all about pandering to elite and PMC ideology — think Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and their ilk. They can run numbers, sure, but no one gets super worked up. No one who wasn’t going to vote Democratic no matter what loves them.

Rogan is a populist. He was willing to go left, he’s willing to go right. He’s not going to go Centrist. There will never be a centrist Joe Rogan.

This is a symptom of a larger problem.

Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.

If by “left-leaning” they meant left, this would be theoretically possible, but what they mean is centrist:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media-like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

It’s been memory-holed, but there was a time when the left was stronger than the right online — vastly stronger. In the 2000’s, the days of the so-called Netroots or blogosphere, it wasn’t even close. The big names were left-wing, and the biggest right-wingers did numbers that were one-tenth of theirs.

This was widely acknowledged. There were mainstream press articles about the right-wing’s online problems.

Then Obama took power, and the word went out: If you’re a Democratic operative or donor, you should stop funding Netroots, and if you don’t, well, you will be frozen out of work as an operative, and if you’re donor, your interests will not be prioritized.

It was there, I was an insider, and I know. The combination of Google and Facebook systematically driving advertising revenues into the dirt, along with some other issues (basically related to Democratic core voters lack of any actual principles other than, “Our party is always right, the Republicans are always wrong, and the left owes us their votes and has nowhere to go”), Netroots died. It took a few years, but the job was done.

The Netroots’ mantra was, “more and better Democrats.” We fundraised for Democrats, but we also primaried Democrats we considered bad. This was unconscionsable to Democratic power brokers. We were supposed to be entirely an adjunct and not interfere in internal Democratic politics at all. So, they put Netroots down like a diseased dog.

Democrats want a cheering section. They don’t want anyone who will do anything but promote the candidates chosen by insiders.

That’s NOT how a popular online movement works. It isn’t how any of the movements which have been successful on the right worked. They all primaried Republicans they didn’t like and pushed policies they believed in — even if the party didn’t agree.

So donors can throw as much money as they like at the problem, but unless they’re willing to fund the actual left, and to understand that funding doesn’t mean they get complete control, they will fail.

It would be better to encourage already existing, left-wing populist figures and give them some funding, as opposed to trying to astroturf a new online movement.

But then, an already-existing figure might say, “Free Palestine” or “Biden is senile,” and they can’t have that.

No one will really trust an astroturfed “left-wing” figure, and they won’t grow to huge stars.

You can have effective, powerful left-wing online populists, or you can have court eunuchs who always back the party line.

Choose one.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

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