I don’t often agree with Megan McArdle, but when she’s right, she’s right:

So there's a certain trust gap. Especially because the way we talk about things like immigration and trade is in this universal morality which declares that a US citizen has no more moral weight than someone outside the US.

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) July 27, 2019

Right on. For the past 30 years, much of the left and a large part of the right has told Americans that they are “deplorables” if they don’t want their job replaced with an immigrant willing to work double-shifts at $4 an hour under the table, and that the immigrant due to their lack of privilege has more of a moral claim to this terrible job than an American citizen.

That’s what I mean, partially, when I say that neoliberalism has taken over all of the thought and discourse. It annexes morality claims about human rights and human worth into its domain, conflates them with the needs of the market (which is itself equated with a natural force) and then declares that anyone that doesn’t support this unholy miscreation is a racist cretin.

In a very real sense, then, under the dominant neolib thought structure and societal organization (and everyone will hate me for this), supporting ill-conceived notions like “open borders” is more racist than the opposite as it imbues greater moral worth and more notional rights on those with different-colored skin rather than everyone having the same natural rights by virtue of simply being human.

Of course, it doesn’t work this way in the real world, but I am talking about liberal utopia dream world here — which in reality are just ramifications into dreamspace of current conventional neoliberal thought structures.

After all, Consuela has a right and a duty to wipe your nana’s doody.

Wind is outpacing coal as a power source in Texas for the first time.

Fifteen years ago the conventional wisdom is that this was absolutely impossible and would never happen in Texas or anywhere else. Remember that when you hear centrists claim that universal health care and free or very cheap college education is impossible.

“Computerized daily life risks assuming a form that certain ideologues find interesting and seductive: the individual atom or family molecule inside a bubble where the messages sent and received intersect. Users, who have lost the dignity of the citizen now that they figure socially only as parties to services, would thus lose the social itself, and sociability. This would no longer be the existential isolation of the old individual, but a solitude all the more profound for being overwhelmed by messages.”

— Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, 1981 (!!)

The Roots of Boeing’s 737 Max Crisis: A Regulator Relaxes Its Oversight.

No. This was only the proximate cause. The deeper cause is the idea of “shareholder value” dominating all other concerns, stemming in turn from the overarching dominance of neoliberal thought, of which shareholder value ideation is a subset. This better explains both the regulatory lassitude and regulatory capture of the FAA and Boeing’s billions and billions in share buybacks in lieu of designing a plane that did not routinely crash into the ground.

But that sort of analysis is not one you’ll find, ever, in the NYT.

Liberals, it’s time to forget the Mueller-fuelled impeachment fantasies.

This was obvious all along, but centrist (fake liberal) fantasies are most of the discourse. That some semi-senile old Republican cop was going to be this grand liberal savior is the biggest delusion since the Satanic panic in the 1980s. Could you be any more clueless?