The origin of the problem began with what was at first a crucial and good idea: that all human groups are equally imbued with “culture” that defines and integrates those who belong to it. But this initially good idea over time developed an unfortunate consequence…

Cultural relativism, as it became known, was effective at pricking the (often racist) idea that only some people (mostly, the upper classes of northwest Europe) had capital-C Culture, whereas everyone else was culturally inferior — a barbarian or a savage.

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Nils Gilman

@nils_gilman

Sep 22, 2023

It’s really not hard to define “woke” — it’s “social justice”-focused culture warriors, e.g. people who seek to disrupt the hegemony of patriarchal, heteronormative, white-centered institutions — especially by policing cultural codes of various sorts. lareviewofbooks.org/article/critic…

By contrast, the central focus of “the left” is about *promoting economic leveling.*

Both left and woke aim to de-privilege incumbents — which is why the party of incumbent power restoration often conflates them — but their social ontologies of privilege are radically different.

The concept of “intersectionality” was invented quite precisely to bring these orthogonal political ontologies of oppression and liberation into, if not alignment, then at least productive, collaboration-oriented dialog. YMMV on how well this has worked.

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Nils Gilman

@nils_gilman

Sep 3, 2023

What are "planetary politics"? A thread:

The basic units of politics frame who belongs to a political community, which in turn define what Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes as “what sorts of political actions and political problems are possible or impossible.”

Political units establish the limits of politics in two senses: in a jurisdictional sense, they define where, who & what is ours to rule (and who & what is someone else’s); and in a conceptual sense, they outline what counts as politics, that is, what questions are up for debate.

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Nils Gilman

@nils_gilman

May 20, 2023

Beijing is about to discover, just as DC did in the 1970s/80s, that loans to the Global South for infrastructure, made during a time of low real interest rates & a commodity boom, are not going to be paid back. As before, this will be painful for everyone. fortune.com/2023/05/18/chi…

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1345033751747706880

This is why I’ve been saying for years that BRI is less of a dastardly plan that an act of supreme and pernicious foolishness

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1345033751747706880

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1607786118279475200

What’s truly incredible to me is that over the last couple of decades China looked very carefully at the postwar American approach to steering development in the Global South — which ended in disaster (I wrote a book about it) — and decided essentially to replicate it wholesale:

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1607786118279475200

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Nils Gilman

@nils_gilman

Mar 25, 2023

So yesterday I had one of the hands-down weirdest experiences of my life. Bear with me, for a longish thread. 1/16

The setting: Fort Irwin, in the Mojave desert. Irwin is one of two main CONUS sites for training U.S. soldiers for land combat, which involves LARPing highly elaborated simulated combat scenarios. More on Ft. Irwin here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Irwi… 2/16

This was billed as a chance for a small, hand-selected group of us to "observe" how simulated combat training takes place. (My group was interested in this because we're current studying the phenomenon & effects of "recursive simulations.")

But that's not exactly what we got...

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Nils Gilman

@nils_gilman

Mar 23, 2023

Playing with the term "retroactive risk fallacy" to describe the situation where, when a simulation of some bad future provokes a policy response that prevents that future from taking place, some people will retroactively claim that the forecast scenario was nonsense.

4ex, say a public health model predicts that an erupting pandemic may kill millions. Public health officials respond by imposing coercive measures, successfully preventing those deaths. Then, since the bad event didn't happen, some will claim that the coercion was unnecessary.

This creates a paradox: the greater the success of a policy intervention in preventing a forecast risks from taking place, the more skepticism will emerge about whether the forecast risks were really as bad as the forecast suggested.

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