Friday, July 31, 2020

Os conservadores dos EUA a tornarem-se revolucionários?

When conservatives become revolutionaries, por Damon Linker (The Week):

The conservative intelligentsia keeps returning to authoritarianism. (...)

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the right in our time is evolving in the direction of rejecting the regular transfer of power between two legitimate political parties within a liberal frame. In its place, the reactionary conservatives oscillate wildly between support for revolution when its opponents win elections and endorsement of authoritarianism when it manages to gain power.
E, relacionado com isto, um artigo de há uns meses sobre um dos ideólogos nessa nova direita nos EUA, Adrian VermeuleNudging Towards Theocracy: Adrian Vermeule’s War on Liberalism, por James Chapelle (Dissent Magazine):
One of the most serious and dangerous critics of liberalism today is a Harvard Law professor and recent Catholic convert named Adrian Vermeule. Less ambitious conservatives hope to reinvigorate Christian virtue with the tools of persuasion and localism. This has been the position of Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, for instance. Vermeule recognizes, rightly, that this is unlikely to work. He styles himself as a defender of “integralism”—the idea, essentially, that the state be subordinated to the Catholic Church, and that the state use its awesome power to create and defend the particular moral community that the Church imagines. The exact contours of this state are hard to discern, especially as many of his recommendations are made with a Trumpian smirk (albeit masquerading as a Swiftian one). It would certainly ban abortion and pornography, and it would likely mandate Catholic education in schools. It is hard to see what place would be made for homosexuals or religious minorities in such a state. What he has said does not bode well for religious tolerance: he has argued that atheists should not be allowed to hold office, and that Catholic immigrants be given priority over Muslims, Protestants, and Jews.

Uma direitista explicando à direita o que é o "racismo sistémico"

How to explain systemic racism to non-liberals like me, por Megan McArdle ("Jane Galt", para quem ainda se lembre dos blogues do principio do século):

Why is covid-19 killing more black people than white people in America?

For many on the left, the answer is easy: “systemic racism.” That answer drives conservatives bonkers. (...)

Conservatives, I understand why you feel this way. But on this issue, the left is, well, right. (...)

Let’s start with what “systemic racism” is, which is not “systems full of racists.” (...)

Well-designed studies show that discrimination against various signifiers of “blackness” persist in our labor markets. (...)

Note that this could happen even if the people making discriminatory decisions have no particular animus toward black people. All it takes is a slight preference for people whom they perceive to be “like me.” That even slight preferences can cascade into dramatic effects is illustrated by something that many of us on the right complain about a lot: the left-wing skew in mainstream cultural institutions. The enduring legacy of slavery is a uniquely stubborn and pernicious problem in American history, of course, but some of the social dynamics operate similarly.
Já agora, para um raciocínio semelhante mas vindo da esquerda, Racism as Emergence, por Chris Dillow.

Uma coisa que me ocorre é que a ideia de "racismo sistémico" (isto é, que a sociedade pode funcionar de maneira racista, mesmo que os indivíduos que a compõem não sejam pessoalmente racistas) não deve ser difícil de compreender para economistas com uma formação clássica/neo-clássica, familiarizados com a ideia de que a interação de milhões de decisões individuais podem dar origem a resultados macro-sociais independentes das intenções dos indivíduos - no fundo, uma variante da "mão invisível" de Smith (além disso, estão familizarizados com as duas palavras que respondem a argumentos como "então aquele sem-abrigo branco tem «privilégio branco»?": "ceteris paribus").

Thursday, July 30, 2020

O paradoxo dos "cisnes"

Acerca das discussões sobre se a epidemia ou mesmo a crise de financeira de 2008 foram "cisnes brancos" (isto é, coisas previsíveis) ou "cisnes negros" (acontecimentos imprevistos mas com grande impacto), uma coisa que me ocorre é que, paradoxalmente, a ocorrência de "cisnes negros" é um "cisne branco" (no sentido de já estarmos à espera que possa ocorrer algo de imprevisto).

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

A divisão nas "milicias" norte-americanas

Militias’ warning of excessive federal power comes true – but where are they?, por Amy Cooter (The Conversation): 

Militias and many other Second Amendment advocates have long argued that their primary desire to own firearms – often, many of them – is rooted in a need to protect themselves and their families from a tyrannical federal government, or to discourage the government from becoming tyrannical in the first place.

But with the mayor of a major U.S. city warning that “tyranny and dictatorship” have already arrived on the streets – in the shape of unidentified federal troops using questionable tactics – militia groups appear reluctant to throw their lot in with protesters. In fact, many have been supporting government action to suppress peaceful demonstrators. (...)

As a scholar of the U.S. domestic militia movement, I have seen in recent months a new divide emerging in these groups.

Some, often calling themselves the “boogaloo movement,” see the current political unrest as an opportunity to wrest power from an overbearing federal government. Others support police and their enforcement of strict law and order, even if that means authorities using powerful weapons and overwhelming force.

Monday, July 20, 2020

"Agitadores vindos de fora da cidade"

Feds Send Outside Agitators To Escalate Conflict in Portland, por Elizabeth Norman Brown, na Reason.

Trump vai governar por decreto?

"President Trump and top White House officials are privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies — starting with immigration, administration officials tell Axios."


Scoop: Trump's license to skirt the law, por Alayna Treene e Stef W. Kight (Axios)
President Trump and top White House officials are privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies — starting with immigration, administration officials tell Axios. (...)

Yoo detailed the theory in a National Review article, spotted atop Trump’s desk in the Oval Office, which argues that the Supreme Court's 5-4 DACA ruling last month "makes it easy for presidents to violate the law." (...)

The first test could come imminently. Trump has said he is about to unveil a "very major" immigration policy via executive order, which he says the Supreme Court gave him the power to do.

Thursday, July 16, 2020

Evolução das opiniões sobre a liberdade de expressão (remake)

Há quatro anos escrevi este post sobre o assunto, onde concluí (baseado no General Social Survey) que, pelo menos nos EUA, as pessoas que mais defendiam a liberdade de expressão eram as nascidas entre 1940 e 1979, e que a partir de 1980 há uma inversão.

Atendendo às recentes polémicas sobre a "cancel culture" e como de qualquer maneira o GSS já tem mais dois anos de inquéritos (o post anterior foi feito com dados até 2014, e já foram realizados mais dois GSS em 2016 e 2018), vou regressar ao assunto.

Para quem não sabe, o GSS é um inquérito com montes de perguntas que é feito, normalmente, de 2 em 2 anos nos EUA (desde 1972).

Provavelmente o mais relevante seria ir ver os dados para Portugal ou então para o conjunto do mundo "ocidental", provavelmente usando o World Values Survey, mas eu não sei mexer nisso.

Monday, July 13, 2020

Santa Sofia e as estátuas

Há quem faça um paralelismo entre a transformação do museu de Santa Sofia numa mesquita e o derrube de estátuas de pessoas acusadas de racismo ou colonialismo (exemplo).

A mim parece-me que o melhor paralelismo com a estátuas foi mesmo a transformação da mesquita de Santa Sofia num museu em 1934 - ambas decisões impulsionadas por uma elite culturalmente "progressista" com a intenção de sinalizar a rutura com séculos de história anteriores considerados como obscurantistas.

Thursday, July 09, 2020

A "cancel culture" de que pouco se fala

Protestors Getting Hit By Cars, por James Joyner (Outside the Beltway).

A researcher has documented 66 separate incidents since May 27.

Wednesday, July 08, 2020

Uma análise crítica ao CHAZ/CHOP


[Clicar aqui para ler tudo]

Saturday, July 04, 2020

Manifestação conjunta Black Lives Matter / Boogaloo contra a violência policial

Uma thread no Twiiter sobre isso (uma passagem: «It's almost as though the "boogaloo bois" are actually not just a bunch of white supremacists and nearly every article written about them over the last year has no understanding of what it actually is»).

"Hamilton" e as divisões no "progressismo" norte-americano

Isto é de 2016 (pior ainda - acho que é de 2015 mas alterado em 2016), mas se calhar continua atual - como a popularidade do musical "Hamilton" entre os Democratas norte-americanos (ou pelo menos entre a sua elite) pode ser visto como um sinal de se estarem a concentrar apenas em questões como o anti-racismo, deixando de lado a luta de classes económica.

Recorde-se que Hamilton pode ser visto como um dos fundadores da tradição política que veio a dar origem ao Partido Republicano, enquanto o seu adversário Thomas Jefferson de certa forma ser´´a o fundador do Partido Democrático.

How Lin-Manuel Miranda taught liberals to love Alexander Hamilton, por Matthew Yglesias

Miranda's Hamilton so perfectly matches the sensibilities of mainstream Obama-era Democrats that the Democratic National Committee turned an early November Hamilton performance into a fundraiser.

And it reflects an ongoing, albeit somewhat subtle, split among contemporary Democrats. All factions of the current party are supportive of racial justice causes and immigration reform, and all factions are supportive of making rich people pay higher taxes to finance social spending.

But to someone like Bernie Sanders and his supporters, crushing the political power of the rich is the central political cause of our time — the key from which everything else follows. This worldview is incompatible with both the spirit of high-dollar, star-studded fundraising events (which, indeed, Sanders eschews) and with the idea of celebrating Hamilton and the Hamiltonian tradition in American politics. Not coincidentally, it also has a somewhat strained relationship with some of the racial justice and immigrant rights causes ("the billionaires," for example, are clearly not the primary impediment to the policing reforms sought by Black Lives Matter nor to obtaining a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants) that helped inspire the historiographical revisions that are the basis of Miranda's Hamilton.

But Sanders's perspective is currently a minority one in the Democratic Party, and the dominant faction that includes both Clintons and Barack Obama offers a distinctly Hamiltonian look for the original party of Jefferson.