"Title I authorizes the President to identify specific goods as 'critical and strategic' and to require private businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for these materials."
If you invented a new kind of power source, and the government determined that it could be used to efficiently kill enemies, the government could force you to provide the product to them under the DPA. Why should AI companies get an exemption to that?
A few days ago Hegseth threatened two mutually exclusive things: invoking the Defense Production Act or declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk. Today he went with the latter [https://x.com/SecWar/status/2027507717469049070]. That is the main topic now. What they did is basically the exact opposite of invoking the Defense Production Act.
I think the article is overlooking an important category of corruption where social norms treat certain acts as theoretically immoral but in practice impose little to no social sanction for such acts.
In places like India, for example, taking bribes is just standard practice. It carries so little social sanction that it’s like jaywalking here in the US. People acknowledge it’s technically illegal, but it carries so little social sanction that people don’t consciously need to rationalize it. The same thing with cheating in schools, which is normalized in India and has become almost as normalized in the U.S.
The “power” focus for corruption is not useful. Corruption by people without power is more harmful to society than high level corruption. People skimming off the top is undesirable, but survivable. But ordinary people taking bribes and cheating grinds society to a halt and makes it impossible to develop societal wealth.
This is well evidenced in the development of asian countries in the 20th century. South Korea has plenty of corruption at a high level. But it’s clean at the lower level, and as a result it’s been able to become a rich society. By contrast, India has crippling corruption at lowest levels of society that imposes a huge drag on routine transactions and daily life.
As someone from a constitutionally socialist and culturally collectivist society, the idea of American millennials embodying either seems to me like cosplay. You guys are so allergic to imposed social obligation you won’t even care for your own parents in their old age. What kind of “collectivism” could you possibly practice?
Collectivism means the subordination of individual autonomy to the governance of the collective according to the needs of the collective. You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family and radiating in rings out from there. I’m not sure Americans can even understand the collective mindset, much less practice it.
On the one hand I want to agree with you but on the other hand you went from "some people just cannot tolerate any social obligation" to "You’re a cog in a machine and your purpose is to serve the collective—starting with your family" makes me extremely distrustful and not want to share a society with you. What if the machine is running for a very few at the top ? What if the collective is oppressive and does not respect your bodily autonomy ? What if your family is a bunch of authoritarian psychopaths ? Then what are my resources as an individual ?
> What if the machine is running for a very few at the top ? What if the collective is oppressive and does not respect your bodily autonomy ? What if your family is a bunch of authoritarian psychopaths ? Then what are my resources as an individual ?
In my collectivist culture, the answer to those questions is "just deal with it." That's the bargain of a collectivist society. The collective will support you, but in return you owe the collective a complex web of social obligations from birth. I happen to think it makes sense,[1] but I'm not trying to persuade you to live in a collectivist society. I'm just explaining the concept.
[1] I'm married to someone from the polar opposite culture: an Anglo-Protestant from the west coast of the U.S. She once explained to our kids that they didn't have to give family members hugs if they didn't want to. She called it "bodily autonomy." I found this concept extremely bizarre.
We don't embody it, not by a long shot. We're old now.
I'm speaking about 20 years ago, when getting any kind of peer or social circle respect had the prerequisite of subscribing to socialist utopian ideals, and it wasn't something that was hard to foster in America's dead-end job work culture (which is where you work when you are young). This is urban/suburban America, where most people live.
From what I can tell this was the same with Boomers (they were the OG hippies afterall) and I see the same ideas in today's crop of young people.
The youth however hold little sway over the direction of the country, they're not actually that invested, so by the time they are having an impact, many have already received their first shots of the euphoric side of American capitalism, a career that gives them power and money (after years of wading through dead-end/entry level hell).
My point is that they didn't meaningfully embody collectivism even when they were younger. Collectivism is rice farming culture. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00142.... You work together within a rigid social structure and share communally in the proceeds. But you have to precisely follow your socially prescribed roles because that system only works when everyone does what they're supposed to be doing. This is true even in developed countries that are more collectivist. Subordination of the individual to the collective is a big deal in Japan and Scandinavia. In both places, it's taboo to stand out in the crowd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante. Individualism is necessarily in tension with collectivism and socialism. Individualism promotes status competition, and when status competition exists, communal sharing in the proceeds of collective labor becomes impossible.
American millennials were hyper-individualistic and rejected socially prescribed roles even when they were young. What they wanted wasn't collectivism, it was a higher status within capitalism. Which is why, as you observed, the sentiment evaporated once they achieved that status. I'd make the same point about Gen Z. They want to think they're socialist and collectivist. But they all want to be online content creators and influencers--jobs that only exist in hyper-consumerist, capitalist societies!
This is not a criticism either of collectivism or millennials, by the way. I think Republicans screwed up the concepts during the Cold War era by successfully labeling Democrats as collectivist. What you have in the U.S. is more accurately described as two strains of libertarianism, one that emphasizes social liberty and the other that emphasizes economic liberty.
I think you may be focusing on this with a lens that isn't incorrect—and is in fact very worldly—but which fails to account for individuals' behavior on their own terms.
You define your own notion of collectivism and make claims about how it is necessarily in conflict with other principles, when in reality millennials aren't a monolith, collectivism isn't a monolith, and individualism isn't a monolith. Cultures and subcultures renegotiate the meaning of every -ism they import, and they practice these -isms only as bundles of other, historically correlated -isms.
When the American youth say they want collectivism, they are not saying they want a return to authentic rice farming culture. Most of the time, they are mourning the systematic loss of third places, they are mourning the obliteration of social safety nets, they are mourning the lack of public projects, they are mourning the death of individually influenceable local politics. At the same time, they do not want rigid social roles ordained from above (because "above" is powerful and corrupt). They also do not want a parochial existence taking care of grandma (because the elderly are in greater number and need than ever, and our infrastructure and way of life is ill suited to efficiently meeting these needs). None of this is contradictory cosplay. It is simply a fusion of individualism and collectivism that is unlike that which has existed before, as a result of cultural factors that are themselves unlike that which has existed before.
I agree that terms don't have fixed meaning, but the terms still have certain essential characteristics. I'd argue that what millenials want is more accurately described as a form of hyper-individualism. It seems superficially collectivist because they want more government spending, and the GOP convinced everyone that anytime the government pays for something that's communism. But the spending is actually in service of individualism. It's directed to freeing individuals from the social obligations they would have in a more collectivist society. E.g., they want social security to free them from the obligation of caring for their parents. Then they want free child care to free them from the reciprocal obligations they would incur if they relied on their parents for childcare. They want payments for kids, so they can be freed from the obligations of marriage. They want free education, but they want to choose their course of study, not receive training in whatever jobs the government determines need to be filled in the economy.
And the reason I'm quibbling about whether you label this "individualist" or "collectivist" is that it helps explain what happens as these people get older. Why did the seeming collectivism of the baby boomers in the 1960s give rise to a period of extreme libertarian individualism in the 1980s? I think that makes more sense when you realize that what happened in the 1960s was not collectivist, but instead a surge of individualism coupled with a rejection of obligations imposed by traditional society. Viewed that way, it makes total sense how the baby boomers went on to create an economy that was characterized by the rejection of social obligation.
Fair enough. I disagree somewhat with your characterization of why the youth wants these things (for example, I have never, not once heard of an American advocating for child benefits in order to "be freed from the obligations of marriage"; it typically comes from people anxious that you cannot support a family on a single earner, and wanting to spend more time with kids), but I'll grant that individualism is alive and well in the US, and has been at least since the boomers.
This is a good explanation of the Irish Machine in Chicago, corrupt white governments in the south, and Somalian welfare scams in Minnesota. It also explains the endemic corruption in tribal or clan-oriented societies like Afghanistan.
Conversely, radical universalist regimes—even bad ones like the Taliban—can cut down on corruption. https://www.americanprogress.org/article/tackling-corruption.... It’s possible that the low levels of corruption in New England, compared to the rest of the country, is the legacy of the radically universalist Puritans.
According to polling, yes: https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/02/politics/confederate-flag-pol.... For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s, was a liberal show about southern boys fighting corrupt politicians and greedy businessmen.
Now you can say “hey, maybe you shouldn’t have picked that particular flag as a symbol to mean ‘fuck the Patriots.’” That was the result of propaganda by Lost Causers in the early 1990s. But that doesn’t change the fact that the symbol was repurposed over a long time period and generations grew up associating it with ideas that were quite different from what it originally represented.
> For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s ....
For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS.
You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. I once use the phrase “atomic bomb of patent law” half a dozen times in a brief to describe inequitable conduct doctrine. It’s a quote from a line of federal circuit cases. Co-counsel from Tokyo sent us a polite email asking if we can reduce the number of times we say “atomic bomb” out of consideration for the Japanese company that would be co-signing the brief.
The Federal Circuit obviously didn’t mean to suggest that inequitable conduct findings vaporize entire patent families the way the atomic bomb vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese families—even though that’s the only thing atomic bombs have ever been used for.
> You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them.
So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will.
(I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)
The "Young Patriots" in the 60s were a white far-left anticapitalist antiracist group, part of the Black Panthers' Rainbow Coalition. They flew the confederate flag. The Panthers were okay with it, go figure.
> I sincerely believed that we were in a post racial world.
I grew up in a post-racial world as a "brown" immigrant in a deep red Virginia county in the 1990s. My daughter, meanwhile, developed a strong "brown" identity from her teachers in our deep blue state. I don't blame Obama for it. But there was a definite shift in thinking during his administration where the distinct politics of black democrats--which is highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons--became generalized to the hispanics and Asians that democrats sought to court. It was a couple of years into the Obama administration that someone called me a “person of color” for the first time, as if you can properly group people together based on skin color.
> highly focused on racial identity for obvious reasons
This is something I get but it always buffles me. Shouldn't it be the opposite? Shouldn't they, in their own interests, and the interest of groups they aspire to represent, attempt to unite people above skin-color differences and emphasize our human aspect?
In order to bring people together, it's necessary to acknowledge the harms that have been caused. That is part of repair and trust building. Germany had war crimes trials. South Africa had truth & reconciliation. The US can't paper over the ways in which marginalized populations have been harmed, especially since large parts of the country either don't believe harm has been caused or activity endeavor to perpetuate that harm.
> Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed.
There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect.
Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's?
My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.
> Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
It's an analogy: If the relationship isn't self-evident, then I chose a poor analogy.
> They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. ...
Would it be unfair to summarize this position as — ultimately — "yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's a problem for you and your family, not for me and mine"? (Perhaps we even leave out families, so that in life it's sauve qui peut, every man for himself?) The societal group-selection disadvantages of that position are obvious, I'd think — most military organizations recognize that sauve qui peut is a hallmark of defeat by others who have better unit cohesion, which comes in part by putting your shipmate's welfare on at least an equal footing with your own.
The short YouTube video I linked to is worth the time. TL;DR (paraphrasing Barry Switzer): Some people like to think that they hit a triple in life but conveniently forget that they were born and raised on second base, while some other people's antecedents were forced to bat with balsa wood yardsticks and to run with 50-pound weight vests — that is, if they were allowed to step up to the plate at all.
Have you been paying attention to who the US elected and the people who elected him? They definitely deny systemic racism and are here for ICE targeting non-white people.
Otherwise similarly situation people in the present are already being grouped together into categories and treated differently...undoing that is the work that needs doing.
If people were being treated differently in the present in large numbers, progressive efforts would be focused on enforcing anti-discrimination law rather than on remedial measures such as affirmative action.
Perhaps, like me, you grew up in the era of the great "Melting Pot". At that time (I was young, it was the 1970's) it seemed fine. Come to the US, melt together with us (okay, it was a little weird, but like some kind of stone soup, I got the gist).
By the time I got my Education degree in college though the melting pot was out. Cultures coming to the US don't want to abandon their language, their foods, music… these are a part of their culture and heritage they want to still celebrate.
It slowly became clear to me that this was correct—further, it enriches the U.S. to accommodate it. (Mardi Gras down in New Orleans comes to mind as an example—a little poorer the U.S. would be to have tossed that in the name of homogeneity.)
The problem is that culture isn’t just food and music. That’s the tip of a much deeper iceberg: https://commisceo-global.com/articles/intercultural-training.... When I immigrated to the US, I dressed like an American I listen to American music. I ate American food, but my mom still socialized me like a Bangladeshi. All the little adjustments and guidance that parents give their small children throughout the day—that’s different between cultures. I didn’t realize how different it was until I started started raising kids with my Anglo-Protestant wife. (And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.)
Culture is substantive it’s a type of social technology. It’s strongly influences the kinds of societies and communities that people create. I’m having a discussion with my dad right now about American individualism. From his Asian perspective, Americans don’t care about each other because they have very weak family ties compare compared to Bangladeshis. I thought that too. But what I realized is that Americans teach their kids to love abstract systems snd rules over people. For example, Americans spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about sharing or not littering. Whereas Bangladesh, she spend a lot of time socializing their children to follow rules about how to address, elders, or how to reciprocate, affection, or other social norms that are designed to foster kinship relationships within a more tribal social structure.
> And I’ve come around to agreeing with Anglo protestants that food is a distraction. It’s for survival not enjoyment. So it doesn’t make society better to have a diversity of food.
Oh I'd love a heated argument over that! And I'm sure plenty of Americans, including a lot of protestants, would disagree with your conclusion, too.
On a more meaningful note, wouldn't it be wonderful to have an amalgamate with the best of these worlds - including sharing, socializing, addressing elders properly etc. and not littering.
I’m from the subcontinent, so I’d love to live in a place where families stay together like India but has public order and good governance like Massachusetts. Where is that place? Good governance (stable, efficient, low corruption, free—not just in the formal government but across society’s institutions) and public order is a luxury reserved for a handful of the world’s population. Basically Scandinavia, a few states in the U.S., and the Anglo countries (UK, AUS, CAD, NZ). Where else? Japan and Singapore come close, at the cost of pretty top-down management of the population.
And for places that don’t have order and good government, progress towards those things is non-existent. People in my home country of Bangladesh have spent their 55 years of independence doing everything they can to remain poor and dysfunctional. They just held sham elections (again) after overthrowing the government (again). And the guy in charge of the sham elections was a Nobel Laureate lauded by the international community.
So I’m much more afraid of the few islands of prosperity regressing to the global mean than I am aspirational about trying to have it all. I’ll endure donuts cut in half and running out of food at potlucks in return for order.
I was raised, quite deliberately on my parent’s part, not to have any racial identity. I don’t think anything good can come out of reminding white people that I’m “brown”—especially in the educational and workplace contexts where it’s become common to really emphasize those differences. I think that actually makes people more racist in their treatment of individuals: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen....
I guess liberals have more faith in white people’s capacity to not be racist than I do. I don’t think people can simultaneously emphasize differences but not treat people differently as a result. The only workable approach to having a multi-ethnic society is to synthesize disparate people into a new group, like America did with the category of “white people” or China has done with the category of “Han Chinese.” And ultimately I suspect even that is a fragile status quo.
There are synergies to having the high end stuff and the low end stuff in the same place. The story of IBM developing System 360 mentions the benefit from the ladies who wound the wire core memory and the guys who designed the computer on the same campus in New York. We gave that up when we outsourced the “menial” stuff abroad.
The point is that high end and low end manufacturing are intimately related. You can’t outsource your low end manufacturing without your high end eventually collapsing.
The U.S. still manufactures high end products in some fields. But in many areas we have lost the high end as well as the low end. E.g. we can’t compete with the Chinese in electric cars.
Because it’s important to have the domestic capacity to build the most sophisticated products. Political power is downstream of manufacturing capacity. The countries that have sophisticated enough centrifuges that they can refine weapons grade plutonium derive an incredible amount of political power from that fact.
Remember that, after World War I, the U.S. had most demobilized its military. The Japanese had more aircraft carriers than the U.S. in 1941. That’s why Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—it thought it could win!
But while the U.S. was weak militarily, it had been the largest industrial producer since the late 19th century. Within a couple of years of Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had built a bigger air force and navy than the rest of the world combined.
That’s why it’s better to be able to make Mac Minis in Houston. Because you can repurpose those facilities to produce electronics for warships instead of having to buy parts from countries you might be at war with.
"Title I authorizes the President to identify specific goods as 'critical and strategic' and to require private businesses to accept and prioritize contracts for these materials."
If you invented a new kind of power source, and the government determined that it could be used to efficiently kill enemies, the government could force you to provide the product to them under the DPA. Why should AI companies get an exemption to that?
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