Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, on the one hand, there is a desire to live on the basis of your convictions, even if they produce results that may be difficult and arduous for you and require a lot of fortitude to sustain and persevere through.

And then there's a desire for peace and order and credibility of institutions, which has a lot to do with predictability and avoiding surprise.

You know, in antiquity, when citizens had to be able to charge each other with pointy sticks, and they might, you know, all of a sudden be ambushed or there might be a bunch of arrows that come out of some place or another, being able to deal with surprise at a very visceral and dangerous level was an ordinary part of citizenship.

In a commercial society where you can do things through things like contract law, it seems to become possible to eliminate, to a much greater degree, surprise.

And insofar as surprise happens, it seems to come out of huge amounts of social activity.

[laughs] Benjamin.

I used to think there was no- Because there's an ultra left thing that the left is doing with

regard to this, of acting as if we live in a post-nation state world where the world is integrated at the level of politics.

The world is integrated economically to a substantial degree, but it has not been politically integrated, which means there's no capacity at the level of the planet to take decisions on controversial issues where there's intractable disagreement in a way that's going to be regarded as legitimate by large parts of the world's population.

If you persist with trying to take these decisions in the absence of a political apparatus that can legitimate them, you're going to run into the limitations of the nation state's capacity to manage stuff that happens in other territories, in other places.

If you want to have an open migration system, then you're going to end up with imperialism because you're going to end up with these nation states trying to influence things that happen in countries that send people to them.

because those countries are gonna be in relation to those states in a way that's going to give those states an interest in what happens in the territory.

So if you say the United States should take anybody who comes from a Central American country or South American country, you're giving the United States a very strong interest in shaping the conditions in that country so as to influence the number of migrants it gets from that country.

Because one complaint I hear a lot in Spain is property values due to all the tourists and mostly actually other people from Europe who buy properties in Spain and inflate the...

Mm-hmm.

This, like, big 5,000-word Blair essay about problems with Starmer.

And, you know, the objection from Blair is that the UK has to prioritize growth, which means prioritizing AI and the tech sector, and the net zero commitment gets in the way of growth, so therefore has to be dumped.

And the one thing that the UK has to be committed to is an increase in defense spending to deal with new geopolitical threats around the world.

And therefore, the UK has to first dump the net zero commitment, make a plan to cut welfare spending over the course of the next few years, with a view to eventually dropping the tax rate.

And that essay, you know, that Blair put out was feted by a lot of people on the internet and in British politics, uh, all over the place, and it caused, you know, Andy Burnham, who is considering a leadership challenge against Starmer, to start hemming and hawing about what had been reported to be his initial plan to make Ed Miliband, who is very committed to net zero, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

He's now suggesting he might keep Rachel Reeves in post.

Do you think this kind of thinking could help us avoid a Thucydides Trap with China?

Or as a, or as a partisan-

A doctrinaire political view.

If it's that, then no, I'm not that, and the reason that I'm not that is, for one, I think that the capacities epistemically, spiritually of the workers are not what they used to be, are not plausibly in line with what they would need to be for Marxism to work at this stage.

And then secondly, even insofar as I could be wrong about that, I also think that suppose you did have, you know, the dictatorship of the proletariat, I am not convinced that the state would wither away.

I'm not convinced that we would not need politics.

I am not convinced that capitalism is the principal reason we have politics, or that, or that society or the social is adequate for managing intractable disagreements.

And this is in part because I think that there will always be some level of, of real meaningful disagreement about what is good, either because some people will not be persuaded that the good is something that they should care about in the first place, because they'll want it defined for them before they will commit to caring about it, or because people in their separate bodies with their separate experiences of life will develop views about what's good that are too much at odds and are too intractably different.

Whereas the assumption of the United Republic, the one world government, is the, is that they're all communists.

But, uh, is the right even in disarray or, or is this a misunderstanding or, I don't know, what all's going on with it?

So the right is definitely populist in much the same way that the left has been populist.

Indeed, you might remember some years ago, populism was assumed to be right-coded much of the time, and people on the left who wanted to be populist had to explain how it was possible to be populist from the left.

So populism, uh, involves a kind of floating signifier.

It can be a term, but often it's, it's a particular leader who can be many different things to many different parts of the populist coalition.

Why do you need this floating signifier leader? Populism arises when the unit that you used to take as the unit that was the base of your activity has fractured or gone away or ceased to be sufficient in itself, and you have to make up for the loss of this unit by constructing an alliance or coalition of other things that don't agree with each other.

And in the course of constructing that alliance, you have to be all things to all the different parts of the alliance.

No?

And so... is a pickety that talks about this emergence of like the student the elite educated left but it's kind of this this sort of uh activism is sort of disconnected from anything actually happening because it's not grounded in a solid base i mean like i'm maybe misremembering a few things there but um

No, this is a good point.

One of the things I like to talk about sometimes is the idea that we're in a kind of middle capitalism.

So we're kind of past the point at which the old proletarian industrial workforce can speak for society or be unified in a way which can drive change.

But also the theories that were launched by the new left of a new university-educated class that could perform that role.

Those never quite came off either.

The university system didn't expand fast enough and far enough to produce a class that could replace the proletariat and perform the role that the proletariat performed.

You can have state

But I guess first and foremost, Ben, what are your, what do you make of this recent deal between, uh, the US and Iran, Israel's reaction, and, uh, what have you?

Yeah, the key thing about this is that it's a memorandum of understanding, an MOU.

So a memorandum of understanding is a deal that occurs at a relatively high level of abstraction.

So it's a deal which includes an injunction to specify the terms in a later agreement.

So in this case, there's a 60-day window to negotiate a nuclear agreement on the basis of the language that's in the MOU.

So the language that's in the MOU is specific enough that the parties think it can serve as the basis for negotiating a nuclear agreement, but it's not so specific that they don't have to now go and negotiate the nuclear agreement.

The MOU isn't equivalent to a nuclear agreement.

I kinda wanna see what you think about all those things.

It's been quite a while, and this war has dragged on longer than people may have expected.

So we just had a really interesting report that the goal initially was to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the president of Iran and to make him really powerful.

This report came out in The New York Times, and they thought that they killed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by accident.

They didn't kill him, but they also did not put him in charge of the country.

Now, some people have retreated to the position that regime change wasn't the goal of the United States.

It was.

And I would go so far as to say that regime change happened, but they didn't get the regime change they were looking for.

No matter what, like-

What are your thoughts on technology as such? We're talking about intelligence and artificial intelligence that comes from technology.

Yeah.

In the old game Dragon Age, there's that expression that the church likes to use in Dragon Age of magic was meant to serve man and never to rule over him.

They're not anti-magic, but insofar as it seems like magic is being used to subordinate man, they'll get very, very aggressive with trying to rein it in to the point even of diminishing significantly people's ability to use it.

I think that there's a need for steering capacity.

So a need for the political to still be able to operate if we're able to say that we are using the technology and that we're not being enslaved by it.

And so My position with this stuff is that technological development is part of the modernization process.

I don't know, but I do wonder... what do you think about the

Mm-hmm.

But it also isn't like the '70s either.

We're not having gas lines.

You know, the things that my dad told me about that happened to him in the '70s with, with gas in '73 and in '79, these things are not being experienced by us either.

We're somewhere in between.

The liquefied natural gas has protected us from a '70s style outcome, but it isn't enough to completely insulate us from what's going on, which is what makes it interesting.

We don't know exactly how much economic damage there is going to be, and people have different views about exactly how much there will be and how soon it will be revealed.

Mm-hmm