MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The best outcome for Harris, and also the most likely outcome where the debate makes a large difference (I agree with other commentators that the debate is unlikely to change anything and that the most likely outcome is that both candidates have been effectively sedated by their teams and we get a mediocre snoozefest where nobody takes risks), is that she manages to put Trump on tilt and he spends a large part of the debate rambling incoherently. Double points if he rambles incoherently about the 2020 election because that makes him look like a bad loser.
I don't know what are the best attacks to put Trump on tilt, but I assume Harris has people on her team who do have an idea. The critical point is that the target audience is Trump, not the people watching on TV. The cliche one is to talk about how small his hands are.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Ending wars was so popular that Biden also basically didn't start any new wars.
I don't think that Trump surrendering the the Taliban was that popular - it is just that the Republicans managed to pin the blame on Biden (who was in office when the final US pullout from Kabul was due under the surrender agreement Trump signed in Doha in Feb 2020.
FWIW, I think that Trump was right to surrender to the Taliban (there was no pro-US government in Afghanistan worth defending) and Biden was right to implement the surrender agreement rather than ratting on it the way the Deep State wanted him to. But I notice that "Biden pulled out of Kabul and bad things happened as a result" is an attack the Trump campaign are running on, notably at the Arlington press stunt, so I assume the people making the decisions think that this is a good line of attack.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Surely the more important point about David Miliband is that he was supposed to be the Leader of the Opposition in the UK after Labour lost the 2010 general election, but lost the leadership election to his more left-wing brother Ed and left for American in a huff.
The most important thing about International Rescue is that it is a secretive organisation based on Tracey Island which built a number of Elon-Musk-esque flying machines. The original agent on terra firma was Lady Penelope, but in this day and age a politician is needed rather than an aristocrat.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
They easily could have afforded to put enough cops in the streets to massively crack down on crime. But they did not do it.
At least in London, they did do it. The Metropolitan Police is founded in 1829 and expanded in 1839 - the low crime in Victorian London was the result of effective policing. By the time Arthur Conan Doyle was writing, his readers could assume that Lestrade had ordinary crime under sufficient control that Holmes could focus on weird stuff, and it was entirely plausible that the leader of organised crime in London was a man like Professor Moriarty and not the sort of person who ends up as a gang leader in places where crime is less well controlled.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Polls by the big mainstream pollsters are loss-leaders for said pollsters' commercial market research operations. Accurate polls are a better advert than message-concordant ones.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
If Hitler had merely done the Holocaust, he'd be in the top 0.01% of leaders in terms of murdering his own people. That's not normal by any reasonable definition.
It doesn't affect the argument, but this is a common trope which gets my goat, so I am going to stick an oar in. The Holocaust was mostly not Hitler murdering his own people - most of the German and Austrian Jews escaped. The Holocaust was mostly a genocide of Jews in Nazi-occupied territory - with the numbers being dominated by Polish and Ukrainian Jews because Poland and Ukraine had the largest Jewish populations. Hitler was in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of militarily unnecessary massacres of conquered populations but probably not the top 0.01%. (Genghis Khan says "Hi!") Whether you consider "his own people" to be Germans, Austrians, or both, he wasn't even in the top 1% of world leaders in terms of murdering them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Before his rise to power, Hitler was definitely backed by German industrialists.
This is true, but Marxists overstate its importance for obvious reasons, and this rubs off on normies who read textbooks written by people who read academic papers by Marxist historians. Germany was not a bourgeoisie-ruled society before WW1 - the Kaiserreich had a functional warrior-aristocracy of men who had von in their names, lived off inherited landed wealth, spent their youths as army officers, and if successful would move into the General Staff, politics or both. The pro-regime middle-class was what we would now call the PMC of civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, Lutheran priests* etc. This PMC group plus rural voters were the base of the DNVP, which was the main right-wing party in the early Weimar Republic.
Hitler's key useful idiots were mostly aristocrats. von Papen had a classic aristocratic career of army followed by politics. von Schleicher and von Hindenberg were career generals. The others were PMC - Ludwig Kass (the Centre Party leader who convinced his party to vote for the Enabling Act) was a Catholic priest. You can argue about whether Hugenberg was PMC or an industrialist, but his background looks more PMC on balance - his father was a civil servant, he did a PhD in economics, worked as a civil servant for 17 years, worked as a salaried manager at Krupp's for 10 years (being made de facto CEO based on a personal intervention by the Kaiser), spent the money he made at Krupp's buying newspapers, and was a press baron by the time he became DNVP leader.
Before Hitler became chancellor, communists were strictly anti-Nazi.
This is false. By 1928 the KPD reliably followed orders from Moscow, and whether Moscow wanted them to actually oppose the Nazis or not depended on the twists and turns of Stalin's foreign policy. During the critical period in 1932-3, Stalin was more worried about the democratic parties restoring a functional western-oriented Germany than he was about a Nazi takeover, so the KPD focussed on trying to take left-wing votes off the SPD and weakening the Weimar government by direct action (occasionally co-operating with Nazi SA or DNVP-aligned Stahlhelm to do so).
and both knew that the other side winning would result in their side getting purged and losing.
The KPD leadership had plans to flee to Moscow if it looked like they were losing. Most of them successfully got out, although party leader Ernst Thalmanm didn't.
- The role of Catholics in pre-WW2 Germany was complicated and I don't think I understand it. They were the majority in Bavaria, a substantial minority elsewhere, and appear to have participated fully in society, but you also see a huge amount of elite anti-Catholicism going on. The Nazis seem to be more pro-Catholic than other right-wing factions in Germany.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population.
The supply chain for high-end semiconductors includes multiple single-supplier components, with the single suppliers being spread across three continents. It seems more likely than not to me that we really need a whole planet to support a 3nm fab, and that 3nm fabs would cease to exist if the number of high-IQ people in first-world countries halved.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
"Rights of small nations" overlaps strongly with "Don't bitchslap the British Empire and expect no response" in practice.
British grand strategy between the end of the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1668 and the Brexit referendum in 2016* was built around preventing the emergence of a hegemonic power in Continental Europe. Putting a neutral Belgium slap bang in the middle of the most convenient invasion route between France and Germany was part of that - it prevents either side converting a temporary force advantage into a Sedan-tier victory by successful maneuver warfare. So from a British perspective the 1839 Treaty of London guaranteeing Belgian neutrality wasn't just a "scrap of paper" - it was core to British policy in the same way that the current "rules-based" international order is to US policy. Accordingly, violating Belgian neutrality without asking the British nicely suggests that the Germans don't take Britain seriously as a Great Power able and willing to defend its interests, and was therefore perceived by the part of the British establishment that didn't already favour a full defensive alliance with France as a bitchslap, and produced (largely without thought on the British side) an appropriately robust response.
The bitchslap in WW2 is even more blatant. At Munich, Hitler tells Chamberlain that Nazi grand strategy is about reversing Versailles, and that the Sudetenland is the last major territorial adjustment needed to complete this project**. Germany signs a treaty explicitly guaranteeing the borders of rump Czechoslovakia, and Chamberlain sells Munich to the British people on the basis that it is "Peace in Our Time". When Hitler invades the rest of Czechoslovakia six months later, he is basically saying to Chamberlain and the British voter "I have altered our agreement. Pray that I do not alter it further." This goes down differently when it is said by the Empire vs when it is said to the Empire by a short Austrian corporal with one ball. Both AJP Taylor and Orwell (in The Lion and the Unicorn) agree that the resulting British policy was a largely unthinking response to being bitchslapped.
* This is one of the reasons why I agree with this blog post suggesting that the core supporters of Brexit were assuming the EU would collapse following the withdrawal of the British net budgetary contribution - I'm pretty certain that not even the Brexiteers saw the UK facing a united, hostile Europe as a good outcome.
** This is more plausible than the modern schoolboy version of history says it is - AJP Taylor in the serious-but-moderately-heterodox Origins of the Second World War points out that Hitler had plans for a second Munich-style deal to avoid an attack on Poland, and had it worked he was not expecting to grab any Polish territory - just to annex Danzig (which was a majority-German city under League of Nations administration, where the local Nazis dominated local elections) and get better transit terms for German rail freight crossing Polish territory between contiguous Germany and East Prussia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Jew-hunting was likely transitory and once the exigencies of war vanished would very likely have disappeared*
I think Jew-hunting would disappear because the Jews disappeared. Pre-war Nazi policy was to encourage Jews to emigrate, and it was mostly successful - per Wikipedia there were 523k Jews living within the 1933 borders of Germany, and only 163k were left to be Holocausted. If the policy had continued for another decade there would have been sufficiently few Jews left in Germany that Hitler could have had the last few murdered discretely, or paid the British to let them into Palestine. The industrial-scale genocide machinery of the Holocaust was "needed" because:
- Hitler conquered territory with much higher Jewish populations than pre-war Germany.
- The war made emigration impossible
- Hitler started to worry about losing the war, which set a time limit on resolving the Jewish problem.
The Holocaust makes most sense as a last-ditch move by someone who thinks he can achieve some of his long-term geopolitical goals by killing Jews even as he goes down to an ignominious defeat on the battlefield. If you think that Hitler's basic view on the JQ was the same as modern right-wing anti-Semites (I don't, but the argument is too long for this post), then he was not wrong.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Coming from the perspective of someone who learned vehicular cycling techniques in order to use my bike as a practical form of transport in a place (Cambridge UK) where this made sense, there is an underlying assumption that you are cycling on city streets (reasonable - rural distances are too far to cycle) with a design speed of 30mph or less (true almost everywhere where the street plan was laid out pre-WW2). This is consistent with speed limits in towns which are 30mph in the UK and 50km/h in the EU and Canada. (The US has a 25mph speed limit in neighbourhoods in most states, but critically the street plan is designed to force through traffic onto arterial roads with higher speed limits).
From an urbanist perspective, if the traffic is moving faster than 30mph then either you are in a rural area (in which case biking is a slightly weird recreational activity, not a form of transport), on a freeway (where biking should be banned anyway and alternatives exist), or the cars are dangerously too fast.
Vehicular cycling makes a lot of sense for sober, competent, adult cyclists who are trying to get somewhere in a hurry cycling on city streets where the actual speed of traffic is 30mph or lower. In my experience, this is the only use case where cycling makes sense anyway, but I am aware that my views on urban transport (best articulated by this guy) are considered weird by both sides of the culture war.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Communism today still has a lot of left-over cachet from the Cold War, where it was perceived as the alternative to Western capitalism and liberal democracy.
It is worth noting that social democratic parties who reject the Russian Revolution as a model and "Communist" as a label and kick out tankies come into being almost immediately - the first unequivocal example being the SPD/USPD split in the 1918 German revolution. By 1922 the dominant left-wing parties in the UK, France and Germany are all explicitly anti-Communist.
All of Germany is north of Minneapolis and Halifax (to choose two famously cold North American cities). This doesn't matter as much as you think if you are doing utility-scale solar, because you can pitch south-facing panels to match the latitude so they face the midday sun directly. (You need more space between panels so they don't shade each other, but in the world we live in utility-scale solar is investment-limited, not land-limited.) If you are just sticking panels to roughly-south-facing pitched roofs the way most subsidised solar installs do, then it matters a lot.
The other issue is that most of the Midwest is a semi-desert, and therefore sunnier than Europe. Minneapolis gets 2711 hours of sunshine a year. Halifax, which is coastal, gets 1962. Berlin gets 1728 and Munich gets 1777.
There is a reason why the UK has more installed wind than solar, despite solar being a generally superior technology.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I think you have to be careful with some of the early Cold War material because the McCarthy era anti-communists were anti-communist in much the same way that modern anti-racists are anti-racist - while they did oppose communism, they were far more interested in using it as a stick to beat their domestic political opponents with than actually defeating it.
In particular, the Canadair advert makes far more sense if you read it as using the spectre of communism to oppose secular education (which was a live political issue in several Canadian provinces at the time) rather than using the spectre of secular education to oppose communism. The same could be said about propaganda linking Communism to a wide range of centre-left causes including civil rights, unions, feminism, and water flouridation.
During the Cold War, "Communism is the ideology of the people who are pointing nukes at us and invading our allies" was probably the best argument against it from a normie perspective. In the early Cold War UK, "Remember the Nazi-Soviet Pact" was also a powerful argument. This was particularly important because "We were the people who opposed fascism first and most consistently, including through being the base of the Resistance" was the best argument made for Communism by the western European Communist parties post-WW2.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Is this a big increase in the annual flow of immigrants in the last few years, or is it that the accumulated stock has reached the point where people complain? Also, are the numbers driven by points-based immigrants or is there another route that is driving things?
I am asking because there is a fairly widespread theory of immigration politics in the UK (and to a lesser extent Australia) that it's the sovereignty, not the numbers, and that the success of the Canadian and Australian points systems was proof of concept that you could have mass legal immigration without a public revolt as long as you the system appeared to be under control, including low illegal immigration and low "obviously undesirable" immigration (criminals, Islamists, dole-bludgers etc). Dominic Cummings even put out a Substack saying that Brexit had successfully detoxified the immigration issue because mass immigration was no longer being imposed on us by foreigners. (Reader, the type of mass immigration that most bothered people was mass Muslim immigration, which never was).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
When I was a kid, I still had French and Latin textbooks that said that "gender" was a technical term in linguistics and genders were groups of things that used the same pronouns, noun declensions, verb conjugations etc. In English, grammatical gender is only relevant to pronouns. But in languages where grammatical gender is a bigger deal, it is obviously a separate concept from biological sex or the social roles around it that managed to acquire the name "gender" in English in the 2nd-wave feminist era. (At least in correct French as promoted by the Academie Francaise, grammatical gender is a property of the noun and does not change based on the biological sex of the referent, hence "Madame le Ministre" as the honorific for a female government minister).
Googling suggests that the technical grammatical sense was the only meaning of "gender" in English in the first half of the 20th century. Resources on both sides of the political fence seem to agree that the modern use begins with notorious genital mutilator and paedophile enabler John Money in the 1950's, so depending on how you define Money's views (I don't recommend going there) there is a pretty strong case that the trans movement was using the term before the feminists were.
I wonder if part of the acceptance of the modern use of "gender" is that educated English-speakers are less likely to be familiar with the grammatical meaning because formal grammar (and particularly formal French or Latin grammar) is no longer taught in schools.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
If blank slateism is true, yes.
Although the sex/gender distinction is still useful even in the real world where blank slatism is true. In a sane society (i.e. one which sets up a default where men are gently steered towards being Real Men TM and women are gently steered towards being Real Women TM) gender is a structure built on top of biological sex. Some of that structure (like war being for men and child-raising for women) is close to the root and necessary, and therefore conserved across cultures. But "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" is an accident of certain western cultures.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
The LDS Church is notoriously full of affinity frauds and MLMs. When arranging my babymoon, I remember wondering why hotel room rates were so high in SLC in the summer, and discovering when we got into town that there were two large MLM conventions on at the same time. Sitting at one table in the brunch room at the Grand American Hotel planning a hike while at the next table over a Mormon with a blinged-out name badge was explaining to two evangelical churchladies with rather less blinged-out name badges how they could convince their church members that God wanted them to buy MLM crap was an eye-opening experience.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
and a job as a Lecturer (no idea if this implies full tenure) for four years
In the traditional British system of academic titles, "lecturer" is the lowest of four grades of permanent academic staff (lecturer/senior lecturer/reader/professor) which loosely correspond to the tenure track in the American system. American-style tenure doesn't exist, because all UK employees benefit from protection against unfair dismissal after two years full-time work on a permanent contract. Taking 14 years to be promoted from lecturer to reader (per Wikipedia) was quite normal at the time for academics who were not seen as superstars by their colleagues.
So if we are going to draw a direct equivalent to the US system, Higgs was 4 years into his first tenure-track job when he published his Nobel paper, but the importance of the paper wasn't recognised for another decade+.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Coup has two meanings in a way which makes this confusing. The term derives from the French "couper" meaning "to cut" in common French but closer to "to strike" in fencing terminology, which is where the relevant English idioms get the word from, including coup d'etat, coup de theatre, coup de grace etc.
So we have "coup" meaning an achievement analogous to a well-executed hit in fencing - the dictionary describes it as "successfully achieving something difficult" but I think it is only idiomatic if the achievement is an apparently sudden and surprising victory in an adversarial setting analogous to a duel. In this case Pelosi and other Democratic elites removing Biden cleanly is clearly a coup.
We also have "coup" used as a shorthand for "coup d'etat" - specifically the idea of a sudden violent replacement of a government (although again "coup" is only idiomatically correct if the success is so spectacular that only minimal violence is actually needed - otherwise it is a civil war or a revolution). The replacement of Biden by Harris is clearly not a coup d'etat - the rules as written were followed and there was no threat or use of violence.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
(whereas 3 body problem only won the Hugo award, which I agree is meaningless now)
If it hadn't been for "puppy" votes brought in by Vox Day as part of an attempt to gank the Hugos, Three Body Problem would have lost to Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor. So it wasn't just a meaningless award, it was a meaningless award with an asterisk
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
If most successful professionals are excluded from the professional-managerial class because they are partners in their firms, then surely it would just be the managerial class?
The original Barbara Ehrenreich essay defining the term is less helpful that I would expect. It defines "self-employed professionals" as part of the legacy petit bourgeoisie (which she calls the "old middle class" and consistently with mainstream Marxist theory but incorrectly predicts is on the way to extinction) when she is trying to define the PMC at the beginning, but later on in the article she gives accountancy as an example of a core PMC job even though accountants are frequently self-employed professionals. Ehrenreich also says that class should be defined based on the economic substance and cultural context of class relationships, not on legal forms. The emphasis of the article is on the role of the PMC in disciplining the working class to accept capitalism, not how they get paid.
Having read the essay, it is obvious that Ehrenreich didn't think about lawyers while writing it, but based on what she did say I think she would call it as follows:
- I think she would assign all lawyers who work for large businesses (or government departments that interact with them) into the PMC, with the distinction between in-house lawyers, associates in law firms, and partners in law firms as formal rather than real - they are all boot-boys for the real capitalists who are paid for their skilled labour, not for access to their own capital. The exception is that a subset of Biglaw partners are sufficiently close to power that they are part of the ruling class. (Ehrenreich talks about this in the context of the management hierarchy of large companies, where she says there is obviously a fuzzy boundary between middle managers who are PMC and executives who are functionally part of the capitalist ruling class even if as non-owners they are not technically bourgeois on a strict Marxist basis).
- She would definitely put all white-collar professionals in the criminal justice system including lawyers into the PMC on functional grounds, again regardless of how they get paid.
- The partners in the small law firm that does small business and private client work are petit bourgeois. The status of the associates is not clear - they are not performing PMC functions, so they probably count as skilled workers. This type of firm doesn't have very many associates anyway because a competent lawyer with 5-10 years' experience who still isn't made a partner is better off starting their own firm than continuing to work as an associate.
Ehrenreich explicitly says that trying to assign non-petit bourgeois status to individuals based on asset ownership was foolish as of 1977 when she wrote the essay because the function of the bourgeoisie was mostly being performed by large companies with non-owner senior management. So I don't think she would find the argument that partners in law firms are capitalists exploiting the associates decisive.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
I think you are using "PMC" in a non-standard way if you think that partners in law firms are not part of it. A "class" is a group where movement in or out is somewhat exceptional - an associate making partner is completely usual.
To me the defining features of the PMC (as opposed to other elite and elite-adjacent groups) are:
- A self-image as engaged in meritocratic competition and tribal values that reflect this (including a much stronger work ethic than traditional elites). A rejection of explicit dynastic privilege (while still doing everything they can to help kids get ahead, because even the PMC is the product of evolution).
- Allocating more status to formal education than it deserves.
- A focus on professional networks (formed in explicitly professional contexts where spouses are usually absent and children always are) over traditional social networks (mostly formed at dinner parties with spouses present). This has an important impact in the way that privilege is transmitted - traditional elites would personally introduce their teen and young adult children to important social contacts purposively, whereas PMC elites pay for their kids to have access to high-end networking opportunities (e.g. Harvard) but expect them to do the networking themselves.
- Revolving doors based on those networks as an important way of making money in the second half of your career.
- Low ownership (relative to income and social status) of tangible capital other than primary residence (except when obfuscated through mutual funds)
- Avoiding situations where they have line management responsibility for social inferiors (except when obfuscated through outsourcing orgs) - this includes both the types of jobs that PMC members seek out and the way they run their households. A lot of gig economy apps got built because PMC members in Silicon Valley were willing to pay to put a computer into the loop to obfuscate the fact that they were hiring servants.
- Urban orientation
- National (and international) orientation as opposed to local - in general elite-adjacent PMC members in the major cities treat local elites in the sticks as food animals.
In America, I would say that the boutique law firm partner who is making a mid-six-figure income based on the combination of "what he knows" and "who he knows" built up over 20 years of experience including stints in Biglaw and government work is at least as archetypally PMC as the 20-year GS-13 career bureaucrat. See this Substack or this FT Alphaville post for some discussion of the unusual degree to which the UK economy depends on this kind of person. Money quote - "The UK is the Saudi Arabia of miscellaneous business and professional services."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2mo ago
Sam Altman was pretty clear that most of the startup founders Y Combinator funds come from PMC backgrounds. The original interview with Tyler Cowen where he talks about it is now behind a paywall, but this blog post has the key quotes.
ALTMAN: There’s a statement here that’s just bad about the world, but I think if you look at most successful founders, they are pretty smart, upper-middle-class people. They are very rarely the children of super successful people. They are very rarely born in real poverty. They are very rarely the absolute smartest people who otherwise would win a Fields Medal. They are never dumb, but upper-middle-class, pretty smart people that have grit and drive and creativity and vision and edge and a different way of thinking about the world. That is what I think I’m good at spotting, and that is what I think are good founders. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why that’s a sad statement about the world, but there it is.
Part of what Y Combinator has done (and Altman has also written about this at length) is to turn "founding a startup" into gamified meritocratic competition with a facially similar progression to moving through the junior-to-middle ranks at McKinsey or Goldman. Paul Graham (but not Altman) also did pitched early acquisitions as good for founders, which matched the McKinsey/Goldman pitch of "do this for a few years and move onto your real career with cash in your pocket and an impressive CV." The reason to do that is to make "found a startup straight out of Stanford" a more appealing option for PMC strivers, and therefore shift the universe of startup founders in a way which matches YC's comparative advantage.
I don't think salaried employment is part of what defines the PMC. Lawyers, accountants, and (in the US) doctors are core PMC members who (if successful) end up as owner-partners in their practices. Wall Street types get most of their income in what is in effect commission. Genuine entrepreneurship is exceptional for the PMC, but it is exceptional for everyone. And VC money is designed to de-risk entrepreneurship for founders so the amount of skin in a game a founder has is closer to the Biglaw partner who sets up his own boutique firm than the chef who remortgages his house to buy a restaurant.
"Is able to threaten to destroy a building with sufficient credibility that nobody invests a large sum of money building it" is a very, very low bar. "Is able to build the things it wants to build" is a much higher bar.
Nimbystan has higher state capacity than countries which can't prevent unauthorised construction at all, but lower state capacity than countries that can choose whether or not to build things and execute on either decision.
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