Why Did I Save Those Three Items?

People who wonder about the contents of the defunct website Vote.net may never be able to see any of it. Except for the three items I highlighted last week.

Why those three? There was a stochastic element to the rescue operation, I grant you. But the three I selected might well go into a time capsule entitled "things politically conscious people were talking about in the spring of 2022." Let us go over why.

My "Science" item was not about science, in any purist sense. Nor was it about technology news, because the tech developments that provide some grounding for it are old "news" indeed. It was about the global competitive structure for one particular well-established technology. Greater China (a phrase one uses to combine Taiwan with the PRC) dominates the world of semiconductor manufacture.

Taiwan alone, a smallish island, manufactured 22.4% of chips created anywhere in 2020. The People's Republic, that huge dragon with a curved belly near Taiwan, accounts for another 20%.

The United States has a vital interest here. Our most important industries are completely dependent on the continued flow of semiconductors, and it would not be wise to allow too much power over that flow to fall into the hands of Beijing. Naturally, then, the U.S. has an interest in Taiwan's continued de facto independence.

My Taiwan piece for Vote.net back in April may be said to have foreshadowed the determined decision of the Speaker of the House to visit that country, of more recent vintage.

Also in April I wrote a Health piece on Australia and its national commitment to universal access to health care. There is a political party in Australia that echoes in some ways the views we know of in the U.S. as distinctively Trump's. They can't really say "build a wall," because they have no land borders. But they do have an intense "stop the boats" sentiment.

Yet even THAT party must affirm that it has been defamed unjustly by anyone who even hints that they want to dial back on the universal coverage commitment. The lesson (unexpressed): once a nation makes such a commitment, it is very difficult to reverse it. That should be a reason for caution about embracing it.

The third item that I saved last week from the wreck of Vote.net was the expressly political one on Macron's re-election as President of France. In my mind that event was and still is intimately connected with the role of the Republic of France in holding together a broad global alliance against Russia in Ukraine.

I would have assumed, until last week, that if Donald Trump in his exile in Mar-a-Lago were closely following Franch political matters, his interest would have been focused on that point, too, although in his case I would presume sympathy for Putin, one of those "strong men" for whom his knees go weak, would have him routing for LePen.

But no ... last week we discovered the real reason he closely followed material about the President of France. Our intelligence agencies apparently have information on Macron's sex life, and Trump is nothing if not prurient.

At any rate, you may now have a better idea why I think each of those three items is a point for a pointillist painting of our time.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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