Dave's Daily Dose 2/3/2022

• Crime shouldn’t be this freaking hard of an issue for Democrats to solve. To me, the solution is clear: Democrats need to demagogue the crap out of the murder clearance rate, which nationally is below 50%.
  
  This is a win on multiple fronts. It puts the screws to cops for being embarrassingly bad at their jobs, not just reactionary racists¹. It focuses on real deterrence — clearance rates have been conclusively shown to be the single greatest factor in deterring most types of crime. It emphasizes the same animating spirit behind Defund The Police: stop wasting cops’ time being municipal tax collectors, and go after “the real criminals”. And it’s got real potential for bipartisan support all the way from city councils to Secret Congress.
  
  There’s just no better way to make Republicans look like hypocrites on crime than this. “While my opponent harps on about longer sentencing, which we’ve already tried and has never worked, I’m trying to get more detectives out there actually solving crimes, without railroading people (which we’ve seen too much of!), and without needlessly hassling you on your way to work just for being a minority.” It’s working-class, focused on social justice, but also law-and-order.
  
  The biggest obstacle is Democrats themselves. The Defund movement already views “defund” as a compromise from “abolish”². To them, this is a zero-sum loss. But that’s stupid! As mentioned, winning on clearance rates is already a form of defunding³, but it also helps us towards our longer strategic goal of building an enduring coalition to defund.
  
  If I had to guess, I’d say Defunders probably thought that the George Floyd backlash was going to get them over the hump, and are stuck in the mindset that they’re still on the 1-yard-line and just need a little help from their allies (us) to get them there, and yet we’re betraying them because… reasons… (“our allies must be racists”, “they’re taking money from [X]”, etc). The problem is, they aren’t, and never were. They may have originally gotten a call on the field for a spot-foul to the goal line, but the refs balked on the replay and gave them a 15-yard gain from their own 40 instead. Still not bad, but there’s more work to do to get to 60.
  
  What winning on clearance rates does is establishes trust with the voters in the middle that Defunders are not all insane. It cedes a core message to Defunders, but promises to actually get enough done on crime to make Defund a more likely reality. I just hope Defunders can get out of zero-sum thinking enough to see the win here. But as I’ve said before, this goes against every single incentive in our electoral system, so probably not.

• I’ve been catching up with terrible TV, and my latest anti-recommendation is truly something that I recommend you DO NOT WATCH: Manifest.
  
  The S2 finale made me finally notice a trope that’s been gaining steam for a long time: “the doomed couple commits to each other while they’re dying, only to then have a last-minute salvation”. Superficially, I think it speaks to this desire to subvert older tropes about tragic romance, and although I think someone with an axe to grind could probably make a case about it having to do with “snowflake culture”, but I don’t have any axes to grind, so whatever.

• World Affairs Hot Take: The semiconductor race is going to be the next major global military-economic competition. First it was guns for several centuries, then it was battleships, then it was nukes, and now it’s going to be silicon.
  
  I think the battleships and guns comparisons are wierdly the most apt. Both technologies were around for quite some time before they became the subjects of strategic arms races; ditto silicon. But since nukes created MAD⁴, the world has been furiously trying to figure out just how we conduct wars without starting a nuclear one. For decades, that came in the form of proxy wars, but since the end of the Cold War, they’ve either fallen out of fashion, or there’s just legitimately not enough to proxy-war over anymore⁵.
  
  Enter silicon. A fashionable take during the Trump era was that we had already been in the middle of a decades-long undeclared global cyberwar, and that Russian election interference was merely the first offensive that couldn’t be buried by a conspiracy among the parties of the conflict to hide it from their publics, lest they be forced into a real war against each other. This was probably overselling it, but not by terribly much.
  
  We’ve already seen cyberwarfare used in the opening stages of conflicts like Ukraine, Georgia, and a few others. It’s essentially an extension of the shock-and-awe philosophy into the digital space: You used to have to bomb the enemy’s command-and-control infrastructure, but that’s well-known to be an act of war, so instead you just temporarily disable them and hope they either cry “uncle”, or at least you can bank on knowing that you’ve softened them up for the real attack. For a while now, people have figured that “virtual warfare” would be conducted using armies of drones, with the popular imagination mainly shaped by books like Fahrenheit 451 and Nineteen Eighty-Four. And to be fair, the drone thing did happen, but it didn’t reach near the level of ubiquity that even a realistic-but-serious application of those books would suggest. I’m hesitant to declare that no drone has even shot down another, but it’s safe to say that we’re not seeing even moderate-scale drone-on-drone warfare.
  
  I think that what’s different here is that cyberwar allows great powers to have virtual wars without permanently destroying each others’ materiel or ending lives. Essentially, we added drones to our arsenal, but we skipped the entire paradigm of drone-dominated warfare entirely, and we appear to be moving directly to virtual warfare. That doesn’t mean no great power will ever fire a drone in anger at another drone. It just means that you can deliver the same payload of “fuck you”-sentiment for far cheaper and at far less risk of MAD with a virus that disables their assets than with a drone that fires an actual missile at an actual drone.
  
  There’s also an economic angle to this. Without hot wars to mobilize total-war-economies around, traditional military power is really only a necessary expenditure to establish the basis for exclusive virtual warfare. To put that another way, without conventional armies, no one would need nukes; without nukes, no one would need cyber capabilities; thus, we all keep nominally spending on our armies and nukes to keep cyber at the edge of the envelope⁶, where we now ruthlessly compete like we once did on battleships and guns⁷. Where economics comes in, is that while nukes are essentially a bottomless money pit, and armies are slightly less of one since they involve more Keynesian-like public spending, building out silicon capacity is an unmitigated win! Instead of hoping for modest Keynesian returns, every dollar spent on silicon production is making you several more. In the same way that writers like Yglesias were recently making the case for energy abundance because it makes countless other problems like desalination more trivial, silicon abundance makes things like “give every child a laptop” more trivial as well.⁸
  
  I think this insight is part of why Xi is pushing so hard on catching China’s domestic semiconductor industry up. And it’s something we need to realize ourselves, not just mindlessly compete on it as a knee-jerk reflex to watching our adversaries compete on it.
  
  Regardless, virtual warfare is pretty clearly the direction of great power war for the foreseeable future. And the semiconductor race will be a major determinant in who wins those conflicts.

1. Which, though true, is a charge that’s frustratingly hard for liberals to get to stick with the American public. That’s kind of why we’re having this conversation now; otherwise, the Defunders and BLM would have won by now.

2. I’ve literally been told this by an activist type. It’s hard for normies to understand, hell, I didn’t even know it until I was told, but I trust this anecdote.

3. Unless the Defunders want to move the goalposts and declare that what they literally spent the last two years arguing is the “real” meaning of “defund” actually isn’t anymore.

4. There are some who might object that MAD was predated by nukes for several decades, but my hot-take-within-a-hot-take is that leaders already intuitively understood MAD, which is why we never had a nuclear war.

5. I think there are arguments for both sides. Syria is the only real proxy war I can think of; Ukraine could have been, but depending on how you look at it, it’s either a one-sided one, or a hazily regionalized competition that still mostly just illustrates my core point that everyone really wants to have great-power wars, but are desperate to have them without getting nukes involved. Perhaps to split the difference, I think the absence of other proxy conflicts shows that the West doesn’t really want to engage in proxy wars even against hostile governments it used to happily meddle with (I’m mostly thinking Africa and SE Asia), while Russia + China’s “Axis of Illiberalism” either (A) doesn’t have the wherewithal to project power anymore (Russia), or (B) has the resources but doesn’t care about anything outside its near-abroad (China).

6. Apply this logic to the Ukraine crisis: Let’s say that Putin declares an ultimatum to Biden to capitulate by next Friday. But we know he’s bluffing, so we tell him to fuck off, and at midnight Moscow time next Friday, he orders his forces into Ukraine. While Bradbury and Orwell would perhaps have Putin sending drones, to be met and shot down by our drones, in reality what happens is that Putin initiates a pre-emptive cyberattack to soften the Ukrainians, but we launch our own counter-cyberattack to shut his down. His forces can’t invade with their asses hanging out their pants like that, so he orders them to stand down, and Biden forces Putin back to the bargaining table.

Now, that’s a fantastical story, so don’t get too hung up on details; the point is that all those conventional forces on both sides — along with the nukes that are keeping us from sending Americans to actually shoot at and get shot at by Russians — are really just there to set up the crisis within which cyber power is what actually wins the day. Whoever’s cyber is the strongest is who wins the confrontation (although intangibles always matter, like they did in the Cuban Missile Crisis), but the confrontation doesn’t happen without going through all the trouble of spending trillions of dollars on putting grunts in place to be not-shot-at in the first place.

7. Okay, maybe at a systemic global level, the relative peace that nukes created allowed globalization to happen, but I’m only talking about from each country’s balance-sheet perspective.

8. Note: Those are going to be the children who go on to become the front-line offense and defense in virtual warfare, so surrounding them with as much silicon as possible is also a military benefit.