2025-12-13
descent of the asheran
Rebecca Lowe interviews Michael Ignatieff on liberalism. It’s interesting how he describes that “we are faced with a [illiberal] regime”, with is both obviously true but can be interpreted somewhat ironically, given that Carney is still polling well in Canada. It’s actually quite interesting in hindsight, that when Ignatieff was the leader of the Liberal Party, his poor performance was attributed to a lack of political charisma, but I wonder if part of it was that Harper had pivoted the Conservatives towards a more classical liberal direction, which meant that Ignatieff couldn’t really campaign on his ideological beliefs. Instead, what eventually brought the Trudeau Liberals to power was a leftward shift at the expense of the NDP. It’s only with Poilievre’s return to social conservatism in an attempt to ride the right-wing populist wave, that the Liberals under Carney were able to return to being unambiguously the party of liberalism again.
Lorenzo Warby on private property as arising out of social norms which existed as convention before being formalized by law, as an argument against the idea that the state is that which creates property, an argument of socialists which is used to argue against property rights and justify state redistribution.
Razib Khan linkthread includes a comment on books about visionary European rulers, on their inability to leave behind institutions which replicated their particular strengths, resulting in national declines which end up mirroring their rises. The narrative is maybe a little just-so, but it is an interesting idea that if the way you exercise power is through personal action, there may be somewhat of a blind spot in setting up institutions which are not necessary while you are still around. Supporters of any particular faction among the American founders might actually have their ideological opponents to thank for providing an incentive to create institutions which render oneself obsolete, if that’s what is necessary to ensure your particular beliefs are still operating while you are not personally present.
Snowden Todd on the perception of Americans in South Korea. It’s interesting how American culture spread throughout the war while almost hiding it’s identify. Originally this probably assisted in it’s spread by overcoming natural resistance to foreign products, but now arguably it’s limiting it’s impact because it’s American nature is obscured. In many ways, American culture is like Chinese goods; everything is made in China/America, but everyone thinks of their products as arising from the world, and not any particular place.
Stuart Buck innovations linkthread, including mention of the NSF’s new Tech Labs initiative.
Statecraft interview with the Factory Settings team on their experience implementing the CHIPS act.
Advent of Code 2025 has finished with 12 puzzles this year; Peter Norvig’s solutions are worth viewing, and he has also been using them to test the current state of LLM coding capabilities (better than mine).
