Obsidian Wings

More stuff

by liberal japonicus

I thought I should open a thread for more talk. There's lots of Ukraine stuff to read about, and here are a few things that caught my eye

This Vox article about Putin's war strategy

If you aren't familiar with Bellingcat, check them out

I wouldn't put a huge amount of weight on this, but reading Putin's speech in the Guardian makes me think there might be something.

I'm obviously quite interested in China's take. I feel like they were taking a realpolitik line, so this pressure to be more clear is quite interesting. This earlier article notes the following interesting points.

Putin may have shown his respect for China by delaying the invasion until after the Winter Olympics, but China was not consulted about the invasion. Chinese diplomats ridiculed forecasts of an invasion, and left many citizens in situ. The deeper partnership agreement signed with Russia on 4 February, the opening day of the Beijing Winter Olympics, was predicated on no invasion. China benefits from the existing world order, and finds the instability unsettling. The prospect of Russia being cut out of the Swift payment system may benefit Chinese efforts to build an alternative, but the short-term disruption is worrying.

It was noticeable, for instance, on Friday that Russia offered high-level talks with Ukraine in Minsk, albeit on unacceptable terms, after a conversation between Putin and President Xi Jinping.

Before the vote, the Chinese foreign minister took three calls from the foreign secretary Liz Truss, the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, and Emmanuel Bonne, diplomatic counsellor to President Emmanuel Macron. China said in those calls it reiterated its support for non-interference, and the UN charter, but also expressed sympathy with Russia’s sense that it was threatened by Nato’s five successive rounds of expansion.

I recall all the claims about an 'Alliance of Autocracies' and how this was 'a pact against America'

But it's a hard habit to break. This Time article from 1 week ago carries the title "China's Support for Russian Aggression Toward Ukraine Confirms the West's Worst Fears" Man, no PLA troops streaming into Kyiv, and where are the Nicarauguan and Cuban paratrooper? Worse Red Dawn remake ever...

[that sarcasm shouldn't be taken that I don't take the invasion of Ukraine seriously. It's just that when you make cartoon villians, you aren't really going to understand what is happening.]

Anyway, a new space for your rants, have at it!

Ukraine, Elaine Gu and nationalism

by liberal japonicus

Though we've not talked about Ukraine much, I see a few rumblings. A lot of outlets shared Fiona Hill's shade on Trump, cause clickbait baby! but the whole interview has a lot more stuff.

https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-health-economy-fiona-hill-1cb4fee8f64b41479468a07eb32ad304

If news outlets had done another deep dive into the cesspool that was Trump's foreign policy, that would have justified highlighting it, but I just saw a crack at Trump and we are moving on. I was hoping that things like this

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/24/ukraine-ambassador-yovanovitch-tape-trump

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/01/donald-trump-marie-yovanovitch-recording

Might have been discussed, but I've not seen any mention of it in these articles.

Separately for Hill's observations, it also reminds me that Saule Omarova was smeared

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/12/saule-omarova-smeared-as-a-communist-withdraws-nomination.html

And before her, Alexander Vindman
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/29/republicans-accuse-colonel-vindman-jew-fled-soviet-persecution-dual-loyalty/

Perhaps this is too slender a connection, but there is this

https://warontherocks.com/2022/02/passports-as-pretext-how-russias-war-on-ukraine-could-start/

And one big leap deserves another. I think the Elaine Gu question of citizenship is actually related. I think I've watched less than 3 minutes of the Winter Olympics, but I have read a lot about people opining about Gu
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/18/how-citizenship-row-clouded-eileen-gus-olympics-chinese-american-skier
as well as Zhu Yi
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60298544

Of course, someone like Bill Maher might confidently opine that Russian and China are birds of a feather, but for me, it just suggests that the whole edifice of nationalism and passports is a house of cards.

Anyway, a thread to talk about something different.

Being a woman in India vs. China

by liberal japonicus

I've been getting notifications for Noema Magazine (https://www.noemamag.com/) that often has articles on topics that might be in the wheelhouse of folks here. I'm tempted to toss up several of them, but rather than do that, if folks find an article they are interested in, send it in and I'll make it a post.

The magazine has had a slew of interesting articles and several are on China, but rather than post all of those (by different authors), I thought I'd post this one, which has some interesting observations and carves out a relatively clear cut niche.

https://www.noemamag.com/i-would-rather-be-born-a-woman-in-china-than-india/

The question was almost impossible to answer in the abstract without taking the lived realities of different individuals into account. It was just as wrongheaded to conflate a Muslim dissident in Xinjiang with a business tycoon in Guangzhou as it was a Dalit (“untouchable”) night soil worker in the Indo-Gangetic plain with a software engineer in Bangalore. But even as I resisted being forced into a definitive answer, given the multiplicity of unavoidable caveats, I increasingly, and unexpectedly, found myself plumping for China over India when it came to gender. Women in China certainly did not have it easy, but “easy” is relative.

Growing up, my literary imagination had been fattened on a steady diet of narratives of oppressed Chinese women, from O-Lan, the long-suffering protagonist of Pearl S. Buck’s classic “The Good Earth,” to the grandmother of writer Jung Chang, whose feet were bound at the age of two, as detailed in her bestselling family history, “Wild Swans.”

As a result, I was unprepared, imaginatively, for the sheer physicality of women in China that I immediately noticed upon arriving in Beijing in the summer of 2002. Chinese women inhabited public spaces in a way that was impossible in most parts of India. They didn’t walk as though folding themselves inward to be invisible to passing men. They didn’t avoid eye contact. They rang their bicycle bells loudly. Sometimes they loitered. They were often brash, elbowing their way to the front of queues.

There is some interaction here with class. I don't believe that India has never experienced something within its history that has upset the class structure to any great extent. The article also makes this interesting observation:

Arguing the benefits to women of China’s Communist Revolution is certainly open to debate, but what’s even more controversial is this: In the post-Mao era, for more than three decades (1979-2015), China experimented with the world’s largest demographic engineering effort, the one-child policy, under which a large percentage of the country’s population was restricted to having a single child. The impact on China’s sex ratio was devastating. Many families secretly aborted female fetuses; at the time I lived there, around 117 boys were born for every 100 girls — one of the most skewed gender ratios in the world.

But in India, without any equivalent demographic restrictions, that gender ratio was almost as bad: 110 boys for every 100 girls. And there were districts in states like Punjab and Haryana where it spiked to a horrifying 130 boys for every 100 girls.

There was, moreover, another side to the one-child policy coin that benefited female children in China. Preeti Choudhary, a village council representative from Faridabad, in the Indian state of Haryana, was visiting Beijing as part of a youth delegation when she asked me: “If, in Haryana, we also made it compulsory to have only one child, what couldn’t the women achieve?” She argued that being freed from the burden of raising several children was empowering. Moreover, if a family could only have one child, all resources would be made available to feeding and educating that child, regardless of gender.

As synchronicity would have it, I was looking at this paper, which had this observation:

Underlying these “child penalties”, we find clear dynamic impacts on occupation, promotion to manager, sector, and the family friendliness of the firm for women relative to men. Based on a dynamic decomposition framework, we show that the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has increased dramatically over time, from about 40% in 1980 to about 80% in 2013.

I'm still trying to turn this over. While for the individual, I'm sure that the 'child penalty' (which the authors are, in their conclusion, say they are "agnostic about the potential welfare and policy implications of our findings. Although the term “child penalty” may have normative connotations, we do not draw any normative conclusions here.") is 'a penalty', if the analysis is extended to the family unit, what would happen. Anyway, have at it.

An it's all connected open thread

by liberal japonicus

First a classic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

So, I realize that this is pretty much true with every generation, such that you have the meta-joke of the neaderthal telling his offspring that Ugh had to kill wooly mammoth with bare hands, he have no fancy club. But I'm really struck by the number of posts that come up on my FB feed that are basically valorizing 'the good old days'. We had jungle gyms that we could fall off of! We didn't have no stinking seatbelts! We had jello molds for dessert and were happy!

Funny thing is, it seems to be confined to folks posting in English who are from the states, with a little fill-up from Brits. Now, I don't range over other languages, but it does seem that, while not an Anglo-American tic, is certainly something that you don't see all over the place here in Japan. The discourse doesn't seem to have a lot of 'you kids don't know how good you have it'.

I thought about this when the question of fiscal responsibility popped up. I was trying to think of how that would be in Japanese and I don't think that the conversation is anywhere near as present as it seems to be in the West. And you don't seem to have the voice on the street automatically attributing failures of personal living to a problem with their bootstraps. Teaching here in Japan, some of my foreign colleagues tend to view individualism as an unalloyed good, something that we have to constantly push students toward. I've always been a bit suspicious of that, a feeling that has only intensified as time has passed.

I did want to butress this point with some reference to the savings rate, sagely observing that Japanese have a much greater savings rate than other countries, such that it serves as a counter example to the life-cycle theory. Alas, I was undone by the data.

• https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=884604
• https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8927.pdf
• https://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/library/dp/2020/DP1102.pdf

Anyway, a rambling note as an excuse for a open thread. So what else is new?

Are we screwed yet? Yet another brick in the wall

by liberal japonicus

So many idiots, so little time. 3 economists tell us that the lockdowns had no effect on the death rate. I don't like to crap on other fields of study, but if you aren't going to include all the inputs (like anti-vaxx sentiments and open resistance to measures), seems a bit off, eh? I note that the study was just European and US situations (imagine that!) and did this:

Researchers excluded nearly 83 studies for consideration — including some that supported the efficacy of lockdowns. The most notable of which is a 2020 study published in the journal Nature that concluded that European lockdowns helped avert between 2.8 and 3.5 million deaths in the first months of the pandemic.

The Johns Hopkins researchers only wanted to study death rates: They discarded any study that examined the effect of lockdowns on hospitalizations or case rates.

ffs...