There seems to be an expectation in science that the people who gather a dataset should also be the ones who analyze it. But often that doesn’t make sense: what it takes to gather relevant data has little to do with what it takes to perform a reasonable analysis. Indeed, the imperatives of analysis can even impede data-gathering, if people have confused ideas of what they can and can’t do with their data.
I’d like us to move to a world in which gathering and analysis of data are separated, in which researchers can get full credit for putting together a useful dataset, without the expectation that they perform a serious analyses. I think that could get around some research bottlenecks.
It’s my impression that this is already done in many areas of science—for example, there are public datasets on genes, and climate, and astronomy, and all sorts of areas in which many teams of researchers are studying common datasets. And in social science we have the NES, GSS, NLSY, etc. Even silly things like the Electoral Integrity Project—I don’t think these data are so great, but I appreciate the open spirit under which these data are shared....Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
After decades of turbulence, the world order led by the United States has begun to change, with the 2008 global financial crisis possibly being the turning point and this year signaling a new beginning....
The changing world order is not about the decline of the U.S. but about the rise of other countries, as Fareed Zakaria, a CNN journalist and author of The Post-American World, said. Nevertheless, global governance is set to change from West-led governance to co-governance by the West and East, as the democratization of international relations is a wish shared by all countries.
A multipolar world order and globalization will be the highlights of the new era. Countries across the world are willing to compete and cooperate on the basis of fairness and justice, yet the deadlock between emerging powers and the established ones will continue for some time....
It’s up to the creative community to filter tele-and internet content as the government’s influence in this sphere should be reduced to minimum, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday at a meeting with participants in the Tavrida educational youth forum, commenting on an idea of establishing a kind of a filter for television and internet content to reduce aggressive and crime-related information that is adversely impacting the younger generation.
"What is prohibited by law must be outlawed everywhere - both in the internet and in television, and in other mass media," he stressed. "But everything else must be done only by one way - through filtering by the creative community. If the community elaborates a system of moral and ethical filters it would be right. The government’s say in this process should be if not excluded, then minimized. But better excluded."
The president called to "think together on the establishment of such mechanisms." He said he is in contacts with the CEOs of Russia’s leading television channels and with those "who influence this or that way what is going on in the internet" and these people, in his words, understand the situation and "are trying to change it for the better." "It is difficult to do it - to filter information torrents - in the present-day world. There are grounds to fear that such filtration could be ideologized and society would be stripped of the possibility to receive reliable, open and direct information," Putin added.TASS
New sanctions are coming, whether he wants them or not. NATO expansion and the West’s Ukraine meddling will continue. Encirclement is firmly in place.
It’s difficult to envision where this could lead, short of actual hostilities. Russia’s fundamental national interests, the ones Trump was prepared to accept, will almost certainly render such hostilities inevitable.The National Interest
After Trump announced the existence of the alt-left on live TV, media outlets scurried to tell the world exactly where the term emerged from. CBS explains that it “came out of the conservative media.” CNN, quoting a director at the Anti-Defamation League, describes it as a “made-up term used by people on the right.” Heavy.com writes that “the term ‘alt-left’ began being used by the online conservative media in 2016 before it slowly migrated to more mainstream conservative voices, like Fox News’ Sean Hannity.” (Hannity, who repeatedly uses the term on his TV show, seems to be getting widespread credit.) The British Telegraph newspaper, meanwhile, flatters the president with a power of logodaedaly he definitely doesn’t have, claiming the phrase was “coined by Mr Trump” himself.
None of these explanations is really true. The term “alt-left” was probably simultaneously invented hundreds or thousands of times, always bearing a slightly different meaning depending on its inventor. But up until now, the people who most forcefully pushed the idea of an alt-left weren’t Nazis or 4chan posters or anyone else in the orbit of Trump and pro-Trump Republicans trying to invent a mythical opposite to the alt-right. The alt-left is, first and foremost, a figment of centrist Democrats....
The invention of the alt-left allowed centrist liberals to pretend that something entirely different was going on: They were sandwiched between two sets of frothing fanatics who secretly had a lot in common with each other. It established their particular brand of liberalism, possibly encompassing a few “moderate Republicans,” as the only reasonable ground, besieged by alts....Politico
Donald Trump’s rhetoric, promises and even at times his policies (when they see the light of day) are as far from the neo-con/neo-liberal status quo of contemporary American policies as one could have deemed imaginable for a US President, not long ago.
When one analyses his policy rhetoric, Donald Trump remains something of a Robert Taft style conservative. The defining characteristics of such an ethos is an opposition to foreign interventions and the bloated ‘moral’ (aka immoral) justifications for such wars, a strong sense of tradition and patriotism, a robust defence of both free speech and the American conception of low-church Christianity and perhaps most interestingly “a touch of socialism”....
When asked, “What do you think needs to be done to overcome the racial divides in this country?”, Trump replied,“Well I really think jobs can have a big impact. I think if we continue to create jobs — over a million, substantially more than a million — and you can see just the other day, the car companies coming in with fox- you know, FoxConn. I think if we continue to create jobs at levels that I'm- that I'm creating jobs, I think that's going to have a tremendous impact, positive impact on race relations”.Trump continued, adding,“And the other thing, very important, I believe wages will start going up. They haven't gone up for a long time. I believe wages now, because the economy is doing so well with respect to employment and unemployment, I believe wages will start to go up. I think that will have a tremendously positive impact on race relations. Thank you”.The very notion that relations between social sects can be improved by material gain is a classic tenant of socialism, one which contrasted itself against the determinism of so-called reactionaries as well as against the utilitarianism of classical liberalism....
Considering all this information, it seems unlikely that the United States can remain a liberal country much longer.The paradoxes of liberalism are coming to a head.
If the genuine left is smart, it will take a step back and see this for the gigantic opening it is. Lots of Trump voters are now up for grabs, and if they can come up with a genuine message of economic populism that avoids the typical leftist pitfalls — such as supporting misguided young people dressing up like ninjas, carrying flags and hurling rocks at people trying to give a talk — the opportunity to create a populist movement of immense national significance is there. People across the country are craving it, but they want nothing to do with antifa, political correctness, or aggression against free speech. Noam Chomsky gets it, and I hope others heed his words.
As such, here’s what I would recommend to any burgeoning populist movement wanting to unite the country against oligarchy, as opposed to just becoming a leftist echo chamber. It is the exact same thing I suggested to Trump, but he obviously didn’t listen....
As Sagan and Valentino note, the results speak for themselves. “The main conclusions of these survey experiments are clear,” they write. “The majority of the U.S. public has not internalized either a belief in the nuclear taboo or a strong noncombatant immunity norm. When faced with realistic scenarios in which they are forced to contemplate a trade-off between sacrificing a large number of U.S. troops in combat or deliberately killing even larger numbers of foreign noncombatants, the majority of respondents approve of killing civilians in an effort to end the war.”
The results do strongly suggest the nuclear taboo and norm against targeting civilians have not taken hold, at least among the American public.…
Perhaps the most important lesson of the survey is that it is imperative to cultivate strong, far-sighted leaders to guide the country abroad. After all, respondents suggested they were willing to support a president’s decision even if it was not their preferred choice. The need for far-sighted leadership is especially pressing at a time when improved accuracy is giving America the ability to use smaller nuclear bombs that cause far less civilian casualties. In the wrong hands, these bombs could be tempting to use, even though doing so would let the nuclear cat out of the bag, with uncertain and potentially catastrophic repercussions.The National Interest
The Saker:
Today I want to introduce you to a book whose importance simply cannot be overstated: The Killing of William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder’s Dangerous Deception by Alex Krainer. I consider that book as a *must read* for any person trying to understand modern Russia and where the new Cold War with Russia came from.
Most of you must have heard of the Magnitsky Act or even maybe of William Browder himself. You probably know that Browder was a British businessman who founded Hermitage Capital Management investment fund which Sergei Magnitskyrepresented as a lawyer and auditor. Finally, you must have heard that Magnitsky died (was killed) in a Russian jail while Browder was placed by the Russian government on a black list and denied entry. For the vast majority of you, that is probably as much thought as you ever gave this topic and I have to confess that this is also true for me. I never bothered really researching this issue because I knew the context so well that this, by itself, gave me a quasi-certitude that I knew what had happened. Still, when I read this book I was amazed at the fantastically detailed account Krainer provides to what is really an amazing story.
In his book Alex Krainer offers us the truth and truly shows us how deep the rabbit hole goes....The Vineyard of the Saker
As Congress still swoons over the anti-Kremlin Magnitsky narrative, Western political and media leaders refuse to let their people view a documentary that debunks the fable, reports Robert Parry.Consortium News (Updated Aug. 4, 2017)
President Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon returned to Breitbart News on Friday just hours after parting ways with the White House.
Bannon has reclaimed the title of executive chairman for Breitbart and directed the outlet’s Friday editorial meeting, the website said in a statement on Friday.
“The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” said Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. “Breitbart gained an executive chairman with his finger on the pulse of the Trump agenda.The Hill
Bannon spoke to the Weekly Standard Friday afternoon, shortly after news of his departure from the White Housebroke. He told TWS that his leaving the administration marked a turning point for Trump's presidency.
"The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over," Bannon said. "We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It'll be something else. And there'll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over."Washington Free Beacon
What will — and won’t — change in a post-Bannon White House.The establishment and deep state win. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon gone. What's next?
According to Keynes we live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty – not quantifiable stochastic risk – which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but rational expectations. Sometimes we ‘simply do not know.’ Keynes would not have accepted the view of Bayesian economists, according to whom expectations “tend to be distributed, for the same information set, about the prediction of the theory.” Keynes, rather, thinks that we base our expectations on the confidence or ‘weight’ we put on different events and alternatives. To Keynes, expectations are a question of weighing probabilities by ‘degrees of belief,’ beliefs that have precious little to do with the kind of stochastic probabilistic calculations made by the rational agents modelled by Bayesian economists.Lars P. Syll’s Blog
Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation on economies around the world, for forcing open national markets to trade and capital, and for demanding that governments shrink themselves via austerity or privatisation. The authors cited statistical evidence for the spread of neoliberal policies since 1980, and their correlation with anaemic growth, boom-and-bust cycles and inequality….
There is a recurring theme in public discussions, seemingly embraced by everyone from Steve Bannon to columnists at the New York Times and Washington Post, that we should use protectionist measures to try to keep China from overtaking the U.S. as the world’s leading economic power. This effort is both incredibly wrongheaded and doomed to failure…Beat the Press
But what should be more troubling to Antifa is that its strategy of participating in violence provides a unique opening for right-wing extremists. We are hearing more and more about Antifa not because its anti-fascist message is being disseminated more effectively. Instead we are hearing about it as the bogeyman of white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, and other far-right groups.
Antifa is, in this context, the violent provocateur of the alt-right. Unless and until the left acknowledges this political vulnerability, being able to distinguish Antifa from its ideological opponents will increasingly become a blurry enterprise.This was true back in the Sixties and Seventies when the Black Bloc provoked violence at otherwise peaceful demonstrations. There was a theory that the perpetrators of violence were was agent provocateurs, and there likely was some truth to that in cases. However, it was not true of all cases and perhaps most. The people perpetrating the violence were far left. They self-identified as anarchists. Later this became known as the black bloc.
In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle places the following crucial condition on proper knowledge: we think we have knowledge of a thing only when we have grasped its cause (APost. 71 b 9–11. Cf. APost. 94 a 20). That proper knowledge is knowledge of the cause is repeated in the Physics: we think we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause (Phys. 194 b 17–20). Since Aristotle obviously conceives of a causal investigation as the search for an answer to the question “why?”, and a why-question is a request for an explanation, it can be useful to think of a cause as a certain type of explanation. (My hesitation is ultimately due to the fact that not all why-questions are requests for an explanation that identifies a cause, let alone a cause in the particular sense envisioned by Aristotle.) — Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Professor Bill Mitchell – a major proponent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – will attend a Labour Conference fringe event this September, it’s a rare opportunity progressives must seize.…
Through the mass misinformation that is the neoliberal doctrine, the elites created a set of economic rules which presents them and only them as the indispensable saviours of society, and thus the only entity that must directly benefit from economic policy. They then dressed this fantasy as common sense, aided by their media sycophants whose very positions depend on the continued support from the wealthy classes. Dissent against this destructive order is presented as madness. Obedience is absolute: the poor think they must protect their masters, even at the expense of their own wellbeing.
In fact, every ill of society, every injustice, every incident of exploitation and systematic cruelty, finds its justification in some false economic dogma that goes unquestioned. And that is why the fight for social change goes hand in hand with economic reform....
If this movement belongs primarily to the young, then it is time for them to take the lead. Until millennials arm themselves with strong economic arguments, they will be defenceless when the establishment blames their money troubles on indulgence, their growing personal debt on irresponsibility and their joblessness on laziness. Until millennials can explain why these societal issues are a direct result of economic policy, the establishment will continue to promote them as individuals’ problems. The difficulties presented by a population that has endured 40 years of neoliberal indoctrination cannot be underestimated....
Help the organisers: visit the Crowdfunding page for this event.
Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss MMT at length with Professor Bill Mitchell himself. My objective was to find a way to explain its fundamentals in a way which could be easily understood by anyone, without the requirement of an academic background. He was kind enough to help me in this task.
To understand MMT, it is best to start by comparing it to Neoliberalism.…
It should now be evident why the neoliberal model presents a destructive path. Immediate environmental and human concerns (namely climate change and destitution) are relegated to issues of secondary importance. But to replace this model with that proposed by MMT a number of challenges remain.…
The following are a few basic principles of MMT which must be understood in order to challenge the neoliberal myths:Labour’s economic alternative to neoliberalism
