This week: new right and old, California Democrats versus their own, Republicans chase victory in Oregon, Japan prepares for war, why negotiations with Russia will fail, America decapitates a Chinese industrial sector, what we do with the time saved by not commuting, Japanese citypop, the forge of Perisher. Let’s go —
1) “It has become increasingly clear that the political Right in America is not what it used to be … I would like to consider where the older classical liberal view differs from these more recent innovations. I don’t so much intend a cataloguing of policy positions as a quest to find the most fundamental difference, at a conceptual level, between the classical liberal views and their New Right competitors. That main difference – to cut to the chase — is how much faith each group puts in the possibility of trustworthy, well-functioning elites.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/10/classical-liberalism-vs-the-new-right.html
2) “The resignation of Nury Martinez, the first Latina president of the Los Angeles City Council, is a dramatic development that could have wide ranging ramifications for the future of LA politics.”
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/nury-martinez-fallout-los-angeles-race/
3) “A Republican hasn’t occupied the Oregon governor’s mansion since 1987 … That gives the state the unenviable title of the second-longest stretch of unbroken Democratic governors in the nation, trailing its longest-suffering neighbor to the north, Washington State, by just two years. But if there’s any year for Oregon Republicans to end their three-and-a-half-decade gubernatorial drought, it’s 2022.”
https://www.city-journal.org/christine-drazan-eyes-an-upset-in-oregon
4) “Federal officials working on the government response to Covid-19 made well-timed financial trades when the pandemic began—both as the markets plunged and as they rallied—a Wall Street Journal investigation found.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-washington-officials-stocks-trading-markets-stimulus-11666192404
5) “Infrastructure requires careful definition these days. Leftists have recently repurposed the word to describe not pipelines and power grids but social services and public education. Where leftists trod, moderate Democrats and RINOs have followed, muddying the meaning by imposing a broad concept onto what should be straightforward and tangible. This isn’t a trivial problem, because infrastructure, traditionally defined, demands painful clarity from ideologues committed to limited government.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/18/the-central-importance-of-infrastructure/
6) “Since the success of Ukraine's massive counteroffensive in early September, Russian officials have repeatedly raised the possibility of peace talks — even after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree officially ruling out the possibility of Ukraine ever negotiating with Vladimir Putin. Meduza has learned from multiple sources close to the Russian government that the Kremlin has simultaneously been lobbying Western leaders behind closed doors to convince Kyiv to agree to a temporary ceasefire. But according to the sources, Putin has no intention of ending the war; instead, his ceasefire campaign is part of a wider strategy to buy time for training conscripts and replenishing supplies in order to launch a ‘full-scale offensive’ in February or March.”
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/10/14/why-russia-is-pushing-a-return-to-negotiations
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