North American housing crises are manufactured. There are no limiting resource constraints. Limited zoning limits the number of houses. Fewer houses means for expensive houses. There are other factors at play, but zoning is the disproportionate cause for high prices across the continent.
YIMBY may be associated with the Left and all its social dysfunctions and annoyance these days, but the economic consensus on this one preceded the Left's adoption of YIMBY. Pretty much the only dissent you see, academically, is from the further Left, who ultimately wants only publicly owned housing and is offended by the sheer existence of market rate housing and, even then, their work sucks.
A century and a half ago, NYC had more than a million utterly impoverished immigrants dumped on it when the city and the immigrants were vastly poorer than they are today. This was no problem, from a housing perspective: They threw up a bunch of apartments and tenements and housing stayed under 15% of even the very low income of those immigrants.
laxam
1mo ago
It's very bare minimum and the numbers are small, but I was surprised to see this pop up.
laxam
1mo ago
While all true, the other three Democratic judges in dissent prove that it's still very easy to just spike the procedural issue and vote your interest, anyway.
laxam
1mo ago
It's especially surprising because there was just an election last year where the Democratic judge was elected on pretty much straightforward partisan electoral lines: Abortion. And he's in the majority on this one.
Looks like there is an ounce of integrity left in that body.
laxam
1mo ago
The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.
laxam
2mo ago
Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian
Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.
laxam
2mo ago
The 'crit' term is older than Delgado and actually originally applied to the predecessors of the critical race theorists like him: the critical legal theorists. Once the critical race theorists began to think of themselves as a real distinct group in the 80s and 90s, they were actually the crats, as opposed to the crits, who they were reacting against.
laxam
2mo ago
No, I'm saying the moral foundations on which that international order are built are the same as the moral foundations on which a rights based worldview are built. Throwing out the one costs you the other.
laxam
2mo ago
Thus, it may be formally correct, according to the "rules-based international order"/maps drawn up by Anglos and their allies, that the 1948 war constituted an initial attack by the Lebanese against Israel, but if you don't put much stock in Western mapmaking then it is easy to instead see as a desperate attempt by a people to resist the occupation of part of their lands.
That rules based international order is what gives them any rights in the first place. Without it, they're peasants who need to be taught their place, so complaining about them being attacked by the greater power is foolish. If they didn't want to be hurt, they should have stayed out the way, like the little people have been doing for millennia.
laxam
2mo ago
Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points.
I have bad news about the modern world.
laxam
2mo ago
Something I've often wondered about lately is how the world went from a system where winning territory by military conquest was just the way things were done, to our current system where the idea that one country would invade its neighbor for such base motives as gaining territory is viewed as scandalous.
American hegemony. While the particular details of a Wilsonian internationalism weren't carried forward entirely intact, the system of global diplomacy supported by the American foreign policy Establishment in the aftermath of WWII was premised on the idea of sovereign nation states participating peacefully in international institutions that respected human rights understood in an American sort of way (sort of).
That, combined with nuclear weapons, made territorial conquest Problematic. It actually still happens and countries even mostly get away with it from time to time, but it rests less easily on the global consciousness than it did in 1780 or even 1880.
laxam
2mo ago
Article 5 can't be triggered by Europeans joining someone else's defensive war.
laxam
2mo ago
American treaty obligations. Tripwire forces. Things that represent an actual threat to Russian attempts to use military force to restart the conflict.
laxam
2mo ago
Acknowledgement of reality. A peace deal now without hard guarantees is just a pause, a frozen conflict so more can be taken in the future.
laxam
2mo ago
Ukraine... gets its independence and neutrality guaranteed by ... Russia
Ukraine already has that. What else you got?
laxam
2mo ago
Well, it would be more productive if you could explain what you think are the relevant ways in which the analogy fails
I did, right at the beginning: there were many more powers involved in the international politics of WWI than there are in the Ukraine war.
On top of that, we have a sufficiently high contrarian population that going too hard for your side might even just wind up generating sympathy for the other side directly.
They don't need me for that. Western contrarians have decided Russia is Really The Good Guy all on their own (well, mostly).
laxam
2mo ago
Well, no, the power with the largest degree of choice was Austria: Serbian politics were determined by terrorism and nationalism, so no individual politician had any real ability to stop radicals from doing radical things. But Conrad really was an individual driving force behind the 'Preventive War' against Serbia. While he had allies and supporters, if he had been able to show restraint the war would not have happened when it did. And, if the war did not happen when it did, the window on the German General Staff's plan for avoiding unwinnable two front war was closing as the Russian Army modernized.
You likely would have seen, then, an 18th century style Diplomatic Revolution and return of a waltz of powers as Russia became the clearer threat to the balance of power and Germany lost confidence in its ability to win even a swift two front war.
Of course, the actual best outcome for everyone would have been Frederich William accepting the Crown from the Gutter and a unified Germany coming into existence with responsible government from the start, without the Prussian military apparatus as an independent political power within the state, and with the conservative Junker class on a socio-political backfoot. Or, alternatively, the sequence of events leading to Mayerling never goes off and Franz Josef bumps his head a little hard sometimes in the 1890s, replacing the old reactionary with a young, liberal King-Emperor. Or the first Alexander was a bit more prudent on that cold winter day and the iron hand of the second (and the inept hand of his son) never got near the Autocracy.
Alternative historical speculation is hard and uncertain.
laxam
2mo ago
To the extent that all conflicts can be described as about 'overlapping war goals', yes, and all war is a failure of diplomacy.
The whole exercise just seems to be about embedding the same old Russian gripe about NATO expansion in more respectable, historiographical context. Learned and wise. Except anything is analogous to anything at a high enough level of vague generality.
laxam
2mo ago
Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.
Isn't it awesome how you've learned that all those things the people in the circles you moved in twenty years ago believed were wrong and all the things the people in the circles you move in now believe are right?
Some historically conservative states (mostly in the South) are pretty good about Just Building. Montana is probably the best example of a state which has recently reformed its laws to make it easier to Just Build, and they're pretty much a former red-tinged swing state.
So yeah, not wrong.
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