doglatine
2mo ago
Discussion starter, but something I'm sincerely interested in and don't have strong opinions about: do modern Western states (e.g., the US, UK, Japan) have more or less state capacity than they did 20, 40, 60 years ago?
The concept of state capacity seemed to enter mainstream geopolitics wonkery about a decade or so ago, and I find it very useful. I'm sure most of you have heard of it, but in short it refers to the ability of the state to accomplish its policy goals through the use of military, industrial, infrastructural, economic, and informational resources. Each of these is important, but I'd flag that informational resources have a special role insofar as they directly feed into the efficiency by which other resources can be deployed for ends. For example, a piece of infrastructure like a new dam or a rail network may advance policy goals or it may be a waste of time and money, and informational resources will help the state predict which will be the case.
Two other key points to note. First, state capacity of course does not only refer to internal state capacity (i.e., resources proper to the state), but also the ability of the state to persuade or coerce domestic non-state actors such as corporations to co-operate with the state's goals. Most of the major players in WW2 - Britain, the United States, but also Germany and Japan - drew most of their state capacity from these more indirect mechanisms. Second, state capacity is hard to directly assess for the simple reason for it is a fact about potentiality rather than actuality: outside of wars or similar crises, there are good reasons both political and pragmatic for the state not to use the full force of its coercive power.
Recent or ongoing test cases for state capacity in the West include the COVID pandemic, ramping up of basic munitions production like 155mm artillery rounds (especially in Europe), and the new vogue for industrial policy in critical industries like ship-building in the US. My gut instinct is that right now, state capacity in the West is historically at a very low ebb, possibly lower than it has been for more than a century, and that this may be helpful for understanding the behaviour of governments. However, I don't have strong confidence in this assessment, and would love to hear what others think.
doglatine
2mo ago
Cf. the hygiene hypothesis. I think there’s a good case to be made that having early exposure to a representative range of evolutionarily relevant stimuli helps individuals to calibrate in multiple domains. If you never have anything concrete and immediate to stress about (eg, periods of food scarcity), then your “stressful event” hedonistat doesn’t have a clear signal, and ends up calibrating in a more stochastic way to regard commonplace stimuli (eg someone being rude to you at the coffeeshop) as threatening.
I suspect one reason this might not show up in the data (or be argued for by academics) as much as it should is the confound from heredity. Yes, if you look at modern American kids who are exposed to trauma, you’ll probably find less well-adjusted adults, but that’s because a huge amount of the potential trauma in your critical windows of development comes from your parents and immediate family, and if they’re fucked up, it raises the chances you will be too. I think this helps explain why eg WW2 concentration camp survivors often go on to live happy lives, in seeming contradiction to the modern narrative that even isolated traumatic experiences fuck you up. Maybe also explains why PTSD is a relatively modern phenomenon in warfare, or at least a hell of a lot more common than it used to be. If you'd had a sibling or two die in childhood and friends die in everyday violent altercations, then maybe a battle is less likely to traumatise you.
Of course, there’s also the chronic/acute distinction. If you’re abused by a primary caregiver throughout childhood, that will also lead to long-term miscalibration of your hedonistat, because most humans have historically been reasonably good at looking after their kids.
doglatine
2mo ago
One issue that’s lurking in the background of your post is that most parents in the West massively overindex on the marginal impact of parenting, largely due to major misconceptions about the relative contributions of genes versus environment. The best act you can ever do for your kids is picking a high quality spouse to have them with. As for parenting time… did you know that contrary to the public handwringing about kids growing up zombified by TV and YouTube, parents in the West today spend roughly twice as much time with their kids as parents did 50 years ago?
While you can definitely fuck your kids up, there’s minimal difference on children’s outcomes between good and great parenting (though there’s a caveat here I’ll come to in a second). This is the whole thrust of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and I agree with his big picture.
I honestly think most kids today are horribly overparented, mostly to the detriment of their parents’ free time, but also a little to the kids’ detriment insofar as they don’t acquire autonomy and self-confidence as easily. I have lots of friends whose lives have been transformed by having kids in ways that don’t seem very fun. They live by a rigid schedule of violin practice, swimming lessons, reading hour, and so on, and they don’t have any spontaneity. My wife and I by contrast are lazy as fuck parents. Our kids learned early on that “mum and dad have their own lives and priorities” and they should too. Obviously we cook for them and clean for them and have fun family days out, as well as lots of nice spontaneous family time, but my average day isn’t drastically different from how it used to be before the kids arrived. Other parents are often amazed at how much free time we seem to have and honestly a big part of it is because when my wife and I are watching a movie we just tell the kids to buzz off and go for a bike ride or read a book.
To go back to my point about overindexing on impacts of parenting, I think the real problem is that people are over indexing on the wrong thing, long-term childhood outcomes, with empirically dubious motivation. Instead life is much better if you prioritise “how can my spouse and I and the kids have a fun chill time.” Of course that assumes you’re a competent adult whose idea of a fun time isn’t shooting up fentanyl or getting blackout drunk every night but with that proviso I think it’s a good parenting mantra. And I also think if people could learn to just relax about parenting rather than treating it like another demanding job then that would help at least slightly boost TFR.
doglatine
2mo ago
Tucker Carlson is probably the most prominent journalist on the entire American right. In terms of impact on the public imagination, this is broadly equivalent to Rachel Maddow or Anderson Cooper giving a softball interview to someone who says that Mao and Stalin were misunderstood heroes.
It's a bit weird how late the Republican party was to discover wokeness, in the sense of the nascent leviathan of the media-academic-activist IDpol-complex. I remember already by 2014 there was a growing unease among classically liberal academics at the massive and comparatively new cultural revolution that was being impressed on young people, but very few people on the American right recognised the threat until comparatively recently; and of course, even when they did, it was usually pretty cringey (think Jordan Peterson/Elon Musk interview).
doglatine
2mo ago
It probably won’t come as any surprise to those of you that know me, but this is where my sympathies for the new American right evaporate. I disagree with the object-level historical take, not least because I think that moral feelings — especially the “rights of small nations” — played a key role in influencing British and American geopolitical strategy in both WW1 and WW2, and Hitler’s cavalier takeover of numerous small neutral countries (Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands) massively violated that important international norm.
More acutely, though, this seems like disastrous political strategy from reactionary elements on the American Right. There are so many easy wins to be had against progressivism, from defending the value of markets and pushing back against affirmative action to attacking the bizarre and incoherent ideologies of contemporary critical race theory and gender self-ID. Why on earth would you jeopardise these favourable battlefields to tilt at ideological windmills that the large majority of Americans and Westerners consider sacrosanct? Bad and stupid ideas, but also bad and stupid strategy.
doglatine
2mo ago
One simple solution would be to make parents of young children Priority Candidates for all government jobs. In other words, to hire someone who doesn’t have at least one child under ten at home, you need to show there are no viable candidates who do.
The nice thing about this policy is that it could be sold to both left and right in different terms. For the left, it’d be about reducing the child-rearing associated with careers, and it pattern matches to affirmative action. For the right it’s about raising TFR.
The best thing about this is that I think it would encourage people to have children younger too. Very often climbing the early rungs of the ladder is more difficult because there are more viable candidates for any one position. You can imagine professional couples in their early or mid 20s saying things like “if we want a shot at the big leagues we should have kids before we’re 30.” And while this would only apply to government jobs in the first instance, soft pressure could be put on private employers to copy it.
Thanks to the whims of the Youtube algorithm, I just had the pleasure of listening to an exhilarating British public debate from 2014 on the motion "Britain Should Not Have Fought in the First World War", featuring several eminent historians, primus inter pares Max Hastings. If anyone has a free 90 minutes, I recommend it, both because the object-level question is an interesting one, and also because of its relevance to contemporary culture war issues. I have thoughts on both myself, but I'll put under spoiler tags below. I will say that while my opinion on the issue didn't flip on a dime, it made me more sympathetic to the case that Britain shouldn't have intervened.
OBJECT-LEVEL ISSUES
I was very grateful for the question towards the end addressed to Max Hastings about whether Britain should still have gone to war with Germany had Belgium not been invaded. His answer involved some prevarication, amounting to the claim that right or wrong it would have been politically impossible to intervene without the invasion of Belgium. However, I think it cuts to some quite central moral issues in the debate. As much as all speakers attempted to couch things in terms of realpolitik, most of us believe, I think, that sometimes it's important to go to war for principles and reputation even to the detriments of one's interests. This question loomed especially large at the very end of the debate when John Charmley made clear that he thought Britain should have stayed out of the Second World War as well, even going so far as to say words to the effect that while Hitler would have killed a lots of Poles and Jews, that wasn't a reason for us to spill our own blood and treasure. That was already a risque claim in 2014, I think, but is now wholly outside of the Overton Window (more on that below). It took a surprisingly long time for anyone to raise Germany's explicit aims for the war, summarised later in the Septemberprogramm, and the practical realisability of these are key, to my mind, in assessing whether the war was in Britain's interests. It was clear already in 1914 that Germany did not merely seek to extract an extra province or two from France and liberate Poland from Russia, but to decisively settle the European balance of power. Without Britain's intervention at the Battle of the Marne, I think it likely they would have succeeded, and the European continent may have settled into German hegemony. History would not have ended, of course, but it would have led to several very fraught decades for Britain, perhaps forcing a war on much worse terms. I was surprised that the role of the United States was not discussed at all. In any counterfactual scenario where Germany defeats France and remains hostile to Britain, the only plausible way Britain could have hoped to win a cold war against it would have been via explicit or implicit alliance with the United States. But how likely would this have been? On the one hand, the United States would not have had the direct provocations of unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman Telegram. However, I imagine that a Continental Europe unified under a single power would also be a source of concern to the US. I would have appreciated some more evaluation of this question.
META-LEVEL ISSUES
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doglatine
2mo ago
One important angle to the problem of Hollywood being woke and out of touch is that it’s been exacerbated by intensified political self-sorting in different industries including Hollywood. I imagine it’s actually gotten harder to find competent conscientious screenwriters young screenwriters in LA who aren’t politically progressive. So even if you want to appeal to middle America, it may be hard to find people able to do so with requisite skills and experience.
doglatine
2mo ago
I’m glad we can talk about this but I’d disagree on your assessment of the war at present. A few quick notes —
(1) It’s a little misleading to say that Germany has vowed to stop new aid. The article you helpfully reference explains what this means, namely that “future funding would no longer come from Germany's federal budget but from proceeds from frozen Russian assets.” While there’s still some wrangling to come here on fine details, this is a very large pot of money that help sustain Ukraine for the foreseeable future.
(2) I’m not yet fully sold on the wisdom of the Kursk campaign, as its success criteria are more strategic than operational, for example, in boosting Ukrainian morale, reassuring Western backers, or weakening Putin’s position. The reallocation of troops from the Donbas to Kursk will probably hasten the fall of Pokrovsk, which will be the most significant Ukrainian setback since Bakhmut, but unfortunately this had been on the cards for a while.
(3) I would disagree that the Ukrainians are losing the conflict through attrition. While the last 9 months have seen creeping Russian progress in the Donbas, the conflict is extremely unlikely to be settled via seizure of land or conventional military breakthrough. Instead it is likely to be resolved via collapse of political will or industrial-economic capacity. Ukraine has some disadvantages here (being a smaller country by population, for example), but also some notable advantages. On the political front, most Ukrainians see the conflict as a war of national survival, and on the industrial economic side, it has deep-pocketed allies in the West.
(4) Overall the picture for Ukraine is considerably better than it was 6 months ago, which is not to deny that it is still extremely challenging. The new mobilisation bill has been passed and has implemented and the previously precarious manpower shortages will likely start improving in the autumn as new mobiks enter the field. Russia’s much-feared summer offensive has taken territory but has not led to breakouts or encirclements. A Trump presidency now looks considerably less likely than it did even a couple of months ago, and there is a very good chance that a Harris White Housr would be even more hawkish on Russia than the Biden-Blinken administration. F-16s are now in service, with more to follow. Long-range missile and drone attacks on Russian energy and transport infrastructure have continued, and Ukraine announced just this week that it had successfully tested its first ballistic missile. Meanwhile the Russian economy looks increasingly fragile, with central bank interest rates at 18%, their highest for two years, and signup bonuses for new recruits are approaching eye-watering levels.
None of which is to say it’ll be plain sailing. For example, I still think there’s a very real (though still <10%) chance that Russia will use nuclear weapons as a last resort strategy. However, I’m considerably more optimistic than you.
doglatine
2mo ago
I'm not eligible to vote in the US but as a citizen of an American cultural colony I've definitely fallen for the vibe shift too. I always suspected Harris had some undeveloped potential but I really liked her DNC speech and it made me feel things. Lots of good lines, especially this moment. Low on wokeness, high on muscular optimism, high on American exceptionalism. Put me in mind of Reagan's "morning in America" in terms of vibes.
doglatine
2mo ago
Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -
(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.
(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.
(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.
(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.
(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.
So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.
doglatine
2mo ago
OpenAI are leaning hard into anthropomorphic design with their new voice features. These are unlike anything I've seen (or rather heard) on other platforms, and they're just rolling out a big update - Ethan Mollick had a good recent piece on it. While the idea of talking out loud to your AI may seem unnecessary, I've found it fits into a very useful niche in my workflow - e.g., getting an interactive lecture on long car journeys, workshopping a lecture while waiting for a train. And it's the one version of ChatGPT I've had success at pitching to older people in my life.
However, I suspect most of the revenue long-term from AI will come from B2B services. OpenAI are doing pretty well here - I don't have the exact figures, but chatting AI policy with some major (non-AI) firms, around half of them I've interacted with have service contracts with OpenAI (not Google, or even Microsoft) for an internal secure version of ChatGPT. However, these internal versions are typically worse than the off-the-shelf model, which is slowing employee adoption.
All in all I think it's way too early to write off OpenAI. OpenAI (and Anthropic) are definitely doing something a bit different by explicitly leaning into anthropomorphic design, as opposed to the Google/Microsoft/Apple model where LLMs should be utterly generic and boring and predictable.
I think the special status of Islam in the West is only partially explained by concerns of cultural sensitivity. No other religion or faith group has the same degree of coddling, and I find it hard to see any explanation other than the fact that Islamists are willing to commit violence if they feel their religion has been besmirched (see relevant Onion image.). Similarly, when it comes to racial issues, the groups that get the greatest degree of toleration and indulgence from the state are those that are most willing and able to take to the streets and engage in civil disorder.
This is not because Western governments are supportive or tolerant of civil disorder - quite the opposite. There is a keen (if sometimes sublimated) awareness in Western governments of their weakness when it comes to combating internal disorder. Simply put, we no longer have the state capacity to engage in large scale reprisal violence against citizens, even disobedient ones. The only reason this hasn't led to the collapse of governments is that this same decline in state capacity for violence has been mirrored by a reluctance among the wider population to engage in large-scale civil disobedience. In this regard, I disagree with your claim that Western states could really crush even the violent minority of Islamists if they wanted to; policies like collective punishment, reprisal violence, mass deportation, and so on are utterly anathema to the liberal sensibilities of both the modern state and its officers. Even if it were in the interests of the state and its officers to enact such measures, we are incapable of doing so. Consequently, minority groups that have the persistent ability to commit violence against the state must be bought off by any means necessary, while more widespread currents of disorder must be preemptively quashed, because their manifestation would be fatal to the collective game of make-believe that underwrites state power.
I should also clarify that I think the real risks of a persistent gender imbalance in politics don't take the form of violence directed specifically against women or aimed against women's influence in politics. The more plausible scenario of concern is one in which a large majority of men, especially young men, feel alienated by political outcomes and take matters into their own hands - a politics of gender, but not about gender. In such circumstances, the underlying gender gap in political outlook would be an implicit rather than explicit consideration, motivating young men to violently pursue political ends that on an object-level have nothing to do with masculinity or femininity.
doglatine
3mo ago
Broadly agree with all of the above, but I think it's a bit simplistic to suggest that the only way for Group A types to utilise their advantage in violence is to take over the government and then push for the wholesale disenfranchisement of Group B. Consider the massive and disproportionate amount of power wielded by Islamists in the West over things like blasphemy because of the willingness of a small percentage of their number to commit acts of violence when they perceive their religion to be insulted (I'm sure other similar groups come to mind). Willingness and ability to commit violence can be a political superpower when wielded in the right ways, such as in contexts that allow governments to save face by symbolically punishing the most violent elements while cutting deals with non-violent 'moderates'.
I recently saw a provocative bit of 4chan greentext concerning politics and gender. I'll reproduce it here as follow -
[W]omen leaning left men leaning right... is a problem. You see, the reason we have elections is because they are a cheaper proxy than war. In elections, the biggest side wins, which would probably be the case with war too. But in elections, no one dies, and you don't have to spend money on weapons etc. So it's a good proxy. However, it doesn't work when one side is significantly weaker than the other, such as when women are on one side and men on the other. In this case, even if the women outnumber the men and would vin an election, the women would not win a war, and so the proxy is no longer an adequate proxy.
And if we were to switch from elections to war it would be one side that is mostly women against another side that is mostly men. Men would win easily with very small casualties. So why would men consent to be ruled by elections when they could more easily win a war? This is why women never should have been allowed to vote. It nullifies elections as proxies for war, and we end up having to have war instead.
As far as analysis goes, this is obviously not especially sophisticated or historically grounded. However, it does pose an interesting problem, which is perhaps better framed in more general terms, since it applies as much to Red Tribe and Blue Tribe as it does men and women.
Imagine that the electorate of a democratic country (call it Exemplavania) comprises two political groups, A and B, constituting 40% and 60% of the electorate respectively. As a result, Exemplavania's government is run largely in accordance with the interests of group B. However, group A is significantly more powerful than group B in terms of its capacity for violence. Under what circumstances is this arrangement sustainable?
It seems to me that it's not trivial that it's unsustainable. In particular, a sustainable model might involve the following: (i) the ongoing costs to Group A of Exemplavania being run by Group B are low. (ii) the one-off costs of Group A enacting a violent revolution to enfranchise their own power are high. (iii) all members of the polity do some form of temporal discounting. In this case, members of Group A might rationally conclude that it's not worth the hassle of an uprising.
Nonetheless, I do worry a bit that political polarisation along gender lines is unsustainable. Notably, women's suffrage in most Western countries was not the result of women using violence to coerce men into accepting them as political equals. Rather, it was the result of successful ideological persuasion of male franchise-holders, achieved in no small part via the critical contributions of women to the collective industrial efforts in World War 1. Insofar as women's political tendencies remained broadly aligned with a large proportion of men (or powerful enough men), as they have done more or less until now, this arrangement seems pretty stable. However, if we see continued political polarisation along gender lines, as we've seen in South Korea for example, and this leads to political outcomes that are strongly disfavoured by a large majority of men, then at some point the decision to enfranchise women may be in jeopardy.
Curious what others think!
doglatine
3mo ago
I’m a huge fan of this trend. Not in a pervy way, to be clear. Or at least, not primarily in a pervy way. With two young kids barely out of diapers I far more strongly associate boobs with breastfeeding than anything else. But boobs are great, they’re a nice-looking part of the human anatomy, in the same way as toned abs or beefy biceps, and best of all they’re not hostage to the fortune of BMI in the same way as bellies. My idea of the ultimate dystopia in terms of how humans dress would be something like radical Islamism where everyone has to wear drab colours and clothes that make them look like walking phone booths and conceal the natural beauty of the human form. So hurrah for bralessness and the greater familiarity with boobs it bequeathes.
(Also, women obviously still choose to wear them when it matters, whether for comfort or style. I assume we’re talking about the baseline here)
doglatine
3mo ago
Yep, exactly my thoughts. This is why if you’re ever doctoring documents (shame!) you should doctor then print then rescan.
doglatine
3mo ago
I think that’s all on the money, but China wouldn’t need to transplant dissident Americans to Shanghai in order to make mutually beneficial trades with Western dissidents (if anything, that would rather defeat the point). I’m thinking instead of actions like, eg, creating or funding thinktanks and NGOs across Europe and the US that champion ideas like civilisational states, the danger of radical Islam, the importance of assertive state-led assimilation of minorities to the dominant culture, etc.. Basically turn Chinese state capitalism into a more general ideological package that can be pitted against the perceived failures and weaknesses of current liberalism, and use Western dissidents to promote it, as the Soviet Union did with Communism. Could be some very substantial geopolitical gains for minimal costs.
doglatine
3mo ago
I'm surprised China in particular isn't making better use of the internal division in the West. Russia is far better at it, despite having some deep comparative disadvantages (it's much harder to pitch Russia as the model of an advanced society than China, for example). I'm sure there are many disaffected people in the West with declining loyalty to the state who would be very happy to work with China for minimal perks, or even just the joy of sticking it to the man. This was a critical element of Soviet soft power during the Cold War, and if China was smarter they'd be exploiting it now.
doglatine
3mo ago
You may be right, but who cares? There’s no invisible umpire. No-one is going to think “Gosh, maybe I am being a little unfair on my political opponents by mocking them untruthfully.” The Republican right needs to find something meaner and funnier or accept Kamala as the new Regina George.
doglatine
3mo ago
For my part, it seems like the primary epistemic sin of the left is Biodenialism. It underpins so much confused and counterproductive discourse about inequality, race, and gender. Among the most prominent defenders of this ideology in the West have been highly educated white women. The more examples we get of cases where Biology Matters, Actually, the greater the likelihood of an emergent class consciousness among the segment of society that most ardently defends Biodenialism. In this regard, the olympics are very elucidatory, as are cases where trans women misbehave in women’s prisons etc.. The correct responses from the Bio-pilled segment of the political sector should probably still be accelerationism.
I agree with most of this, but I also think that the financialisation of many Western economies probably has exerted a significant toll on industrial state capacity. My suspicion is that the US couldn’t pull off the same feats it managed in WW2 or much of the Cold War because it simply doesn’t have enough welders, factories, machine shop operators, aeronautical engineers, stevedores, and so on.
Likewise, while I think the narrative that “we don’t build things any more” is largely false, we’ve certainly transitioned into building different kinds of thing, with an emphasis on bits over “its”.
I’m less sure about other forms of state capacity. While the US was able to enforce COVID rules fairly effectively, this doesn’t impress me much; largely the rules were about convincing people to refrain from doing certain things and enforcing this. It’s less clear to me that the US could, for example, mobilise an additional 10 million military personnel as it did over the course of WW2.
If I’m focusing on war scenarios here, it’s because the possibility of a war with China looms large here. While the opening days of any such war will draw on stockpiled munitions, in any prolonged conflict the US will be sorely tested in its ability to rapidly regenerate stockpiles and replace losses, especially of surface combatants.
I’m eager to have my pessimism here overruled, but there are times when the tide goes out and you realise which states have been swimming nude, and I worry the US isn’t wearing trunks.
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