Such was never good-enough

–At that time: Which way Africa? Kenyatta or Nyerere? At this time: Which way development? Xi or Modi?

–“Which political conditions and cultural practices allow for the expression of fallibility?” Great question, but still: systematically misleading. As in: Do the conditions and practices need to be stable enough for the expression of fallibility or do their very uncertainties undermine fallibility as some kind of stable concept?

–Much of migration talk is about rights without accounting for any absence of emerging better practices across a run of very different migration cases, worldwide.

–If anything is universally ethical, it is to experiment globally only after having canvassed actually-existing practices and ways to modify them.

–Read something like, “Getting the Social Cost of Carbon Right,” and having to ask: Are these people barking mad?

–Xi should abolish the hukou system, expand PRC’s social safety net, enable workers’ organizations to fight for higher wages, distribute dividends from state-owned enterprises to the people, invest more in environmental protection, tax the rich, reign in imaginaries like tianxia, and, well you know the rest . .

No, counter the realists. Instead we should pray that China: doesn’t support a strong yuan, imports high inflation from elsewhere, suffers an even worse demographic crisis, witnesses the world’s largest real-estate collapse and experiences the uprising of the planet’s biggest proletariat. And, oh yes, the West should liberate Taiwan from China like the free-world coalition liberated Kuwait from Saddam’s Iraq.