Jerry Z. Muller

@CliffordAsness How else is ransom going to be paid? And how are the Iranians going to get their funds?

I don’t care who invented the thing where you burn electricity playing a video game 24/7 to generate lights on a screen that for some reason people will currently give you money, goods, and services for, because “fee-yat” bad and thus utter nonsense must be good. Have a nice day.

Whenever you see a bizarre trend in academia, it’s worth asking whether its homegrown or funded from outside. I recently wrote about how the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has worked hard to make “trans studies" a legitimate academic field. Here are some of Mellon's grants 🧵

Lots of weird takes on the Hungarian election result from both left and right here. Peter Magyar is a socially conservative immigration restrictionist who wants to cut taxes and double the defence budget. He criticized Orban for admitting too many guest workers, and wants to increase Hungary's already generous pro-natal incentives. On virtually every issue, his platform is well to the right of centre, by European standards. His foreign policy is to end Orban's alliance with Putin, remove the Hungarian veto on EU loans to Ukraine, normalize relations with the European Union while opposing more Euro integration, and strengthen relations with Eastern Europe's anti-Russian governments, e.g. Poland. His election was not a sudden shift to the left, but a rejection of Orban's corruption, the failure of his interventionist / statist economic policies, and the humiliation of his relationship with Putin.

This was part of a concerted Israeli strike on the apartments of leading Hizbollah members who were meeting on a Zoom call. Those are leading members of an organization devoted to destroying Israel, and have been firing, rockets and missiles into northern Israel regularly in the past weeks. Shteyngart cares nothing about this. He offers wit to the uninformed. I’m so old I can remember when he was actually clever.

Israel continues to bomb its way to peace.

The historical development of this position in Western Europe, schematically put, is this: Nazi Germany murdered the Jews on account of their race; Nazism was a form of nationalism; nationalism is therefore racist – and racism is the great moral evil that must be avoided at any price. To be moral, therefore, is to be post- or anti-nationalist. (link below)

(from my new Substack post) The characterization of Israel as an “ethnostate” is meant to stigmatize it: as if a state based upon ethnic identity were morally abhorrent. That is indeed an increasingly popular view, especially on the political left. The implications are that states are moral to the extent that they are untainted by ethnic identity: that is the essence of the “post-national” ideology. A corollary is that restricting immigration or discriminating in favor of one group rather than another in immigration policy, is impermissible. (cont.)

@davidfrum Good piece on this in Britain. spectator.com/article/why-th…

One of the more remarkable trends of the past 4 years has been the almost total disappearance of environmentalism from left-wing consciousness, and its replacement by various forms of anti-Judaism as the defining test of who is "progressive" and who is not.

I see more and more high-profile progressive accounts doing what I predicted in February.

I received this heartbreaking message from a Jewish professor at @UAntwerpen, who is leaving both the city and the university after four decades. I can hardly express how deeply this saddens and enrages me—especially in light of last week’s craven and disgraceful charade surrounding the honorary doctorate of @FranceskAlbs. "After fifty years living in Antwerp and forty years at the University of Antwerp as student, assistant and professor, I’m leaving. I no longer feel at home in the city and feel completely estranged from my university that has become a hotbed of radicalism and has completely lost its sense of academic values of critical thinking, discussion and genuine diversity of viewpoints. I fear that the student generation that – with the support of the university authorities - has now become indoctrinated and brainwashed to a point of no return. My son who was born and raised in Antwerp and who wears a kippa,  has been called a child murderer on the street by a Flemish person and was told to “get out of here”. At the university the students are shouting that Jews should get out of Palestine. He and his family are leaving too. It just became a bad place for Jews." This is on you, rectors. You have made universities into hostile places for Jews (unless they ritually denounce zionism and Israel). They will abandon you and take all their learning, knowledge and wisdom with them. And don't worry, @UGent, you have scarcely any Jewish professors left to begin with. The great Jewish linguist and classicist Julien Klener has long since retired. When I met him recently, he told me how relieved he is not to have to endure this ideological madness anymore.

Newhouse’s key claims about Israel are that unlike its counterparts in Europe (and in parts of Asia and North America) it has an ethos that creates citizens who are willing to fight for their nation; citizens willing, indeed eager, to reproduce; a dynamic, technologically-oriented economy; a strong sense of collective identity tied to a sense of a shared, historical legacy; and as a result, a society willing to take risks to preserve that legacy. She sees that model replicated in part in other parts of the world, most notably in Modi’s India. That is what she means by “Zionism for Everyone.” Her article does not aspire, as some Jewish critics imagine, to a balanced portrait of contemporary Israel. It’s about the ills of much of the non-Jewish world. open.substack.com/pub/jerryzmull…

A recent article by Alana Newhouse, “Zionism for Everyone: The Real Reason We’re Fighting about Israel,” has occasioned a great deal of discussion and debate, mostly in Jewish circles, and mainly about its characterization of Zionism and of the State of Israel. What these discussions have largely overlooked is that her article in not primarily about Zionism or Israel at all. Rather it is about the effects of the decline of national identity in much of the affluent world, especially in the West, and above all in Western Europe. (from my new Substack post, link in next comment)

The highest quality video of the moon was just released… this is so beautiful.

As a NY transplant, I feel compelled to acknowledge that I'm standing here today on the traditional unceded territories of the Native New Yorkers indigenous to this land, who came here 2 generations ago from Italy. We pay respect to the original peoples of this land

A terrific, brief essay on the fallacious arguments for putting off marriage and family.

One of my favorite job ads in recent years was the classics department wanting someone who studies race and racism and then bragging about how they make all their students take courses in critical race theory.

Here is something that Adam Smith had not discussed. While the workers are degraded by this industrial division of labor, the masters are actually raised by it. For they need to know something about a wide range of things to succeed, and so, as Tocqueville puts it, the master’s mind expands, while the worker’s contracts.

Tocqueville is often portrayed as the prophet of what has come to be called “civil society,” that is voluntary associations outside of market relations. But by “civil associations” he means both non-business associations and business associations. He suggests that the habit of association is mutually reinforcing in politics and in the market. Association in business (such as partnerships) leads people to become familiar with the habits of associating, and this facilitates political association. And, conversely, political association often develops economic associations, in that habits of cooperation learned where material matters are not at risk teach men to engage in joint ventures in business. (from today’s Substack post, “Democracy in Cupidity: Tocqueville on Capitalism in America”)