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Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
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21 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
1/ In other words, there we were confronted not with a whole series of crises and problems, but with one crisis, amounting to a death wish – an urge to self-destruction – seeping into every aspect of our way of life.
2/ A touch of irony is added by virtue of the fact that this Gadarene course is associated with ostensibly optimistic views whereupon the State may be expected to whither away and mankind to live happily ever after.
3/ [...] Searching about in their minds for some explanation of this pursuit of happiness that became a death wish, the archaeologists ... would be bound to hit upon the doctrine of “Progress”: probably the most deleterious fancy to ever take possession of the human heart."
4/ smbtv.org/muggeridge-tru…

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More from @kofinas

Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
8 Jan
1/ I cannot put into words the heartbreak I feel when I look at what’s unfolding in our country.

We're approaching a precipice. If we don’t find a way to reach some sort of working consensus the situation is only going to become more intractable and quite frankly more dangerous.
2/ The behavior of risk assets in the face of all this uncertainty is perhaps the most alarming data point in a sea of bad news.

There simply is no discernible relationship between value metrics and price. The signaling mechanism sending information between the two is broken.
3/ The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would have described what we are living through today as "hyperreality," a condition in which what is real and what is fiction or narrative are so entangled that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
Read 9 tweets
Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
3 Oct 20
1/ There is an odd defect in the human mind that allows people living under an enormous dam to suffer little anxiety as the reservoir behind it gradually fills to the brim and the concrete walls crack from the mounting force.
2/ In such circumstances, most people will go about their daily business. The specter of sudden catastrophe will remain unthinkable to them, if only because it has not yet happened―as if the ravages of time were positive evidence, instead of something to worry about.
3/ In the aftermath, the same defect will cause survivors of disaster to blame it all on the trigger event, the unforeseen engineering flaw or earthquake or storm that finally burst the dam and brought the water crushing down.
Read 4 tweets
Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
27 Sep 20
1/ We are entering a period in world history where long-standing territorial disputes—so-called “frozen conflicts” mediated for years by the credible force of American intervention—are igniting in violence.
2/ The chaos in Nagorno-Karabakh could easily get out of control and spread beyond the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, becoming yet another proxy war that ropes in Turkey, Russia, and possibly Iran.

3/ There are many such flashpoints around the world. The Taiwan Strait is another. Any breakout in violence there could quickly rope in the United States and its Asian partners into a full-blown military conflict with China.

nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/chin…
Read 7 tweets
Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
26 Aug 20
1/ "At the so-called grassroots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented...
2/ ...by the “gold bugs,” the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled, but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment.
3/ All too often the assumption prevails among our politicians and intellectual leaders that the judgment of the people about such things must of necessity be right and ... to pretend that these demands are altogether sensible and to try to find ways to placate them.
Read 6 tweets
Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
17 Aug 20
1/ In this @HiddenForcesPod, @M_Heffernan and I explore our unhealthy relationship with uncertainty by tackling some of the misconceptions we hold about predictability & the dangers associated with trying to extrapolate from the past an unknowable future.
2/ History, after all, is an incomplete data set; we know this because the future is full of things that have never been here before.

New technologies, new drugs, new genes, new people, & new horizons that were previously unimaginable.

3/ And yet, whether it’s the on-air financial host pumping & dumping stocks to his viewers or the policymaker forecasting unemployment figures & growth rates, false prophets abound.

By speaking in certainties, they exploit our fears, providing answers where only doubt can exist.
Read 4 tweets
Demetri Kofinas Profile picture
3 Aug 20
1/ A little over a week ago, we learned that the Trump administration had ordered the Chinese government to close its consulate in Houston, accusing diplomats there of assisting in acts of economic espionage and attempted theft of scientific research.

nytimes.com/2020/07/22/wor…
2/ The next day, @SecPompeo delivered a monumental speech in which he declared the failure of 50 years of engagement with China and called for the free world to stand up against this “new tyranny.”

3/ The secretary's references to containment and the comparisons he makes between the CCP and the USSR are important, but so are those rejecting any notions of American decline and the inevitability of China’s rise. Image
Read 6 tweets

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