The new autocrats

What this episode covers

3:00 DO FISH HAVE RIGHTS? I started this week’s call with an update on a fish story I told a few weeks ago about the lone koi fish I had in my garden pond, the sole survivor of a holocaust perpetrated earlier in the spring by migrating blue herons. He was hiding under a rock, traumatized I assumed, and not eating long past the end of his winter dormancy. I considered leaving him to his own devices. “Eat or don’t eat,” I thought, absolving myself of responsibility. “If he dies,” I reminded myself, “the pond will be a lot easier to take care of.” But instead I decided to go to the fish store and buy five new koi. When I introduced them to the pond my original fish immediately (I’m talking within three seconds) swam out from under his rock and began schooling with them. Today, six weeks later, they are a happy fish family, swimming, eating, mating, playing in the waterfall and in general living the koi dream. What spurred my decision to add new fish was research I had posted a few days earlier by fish biologist Culum Brown revealing how fish are intelligent, social, emotional beings on par with many mammals. Fast forward to this week, when two of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Dish and Ezra Klein of VOX, published an extended interview with Professor Brown. In it he talked about the reality of commercial fishing in our oceans, and the suffering it causes the fish… Every major commercial agricultural system has some ethical laws, except for fish. Nobody’s ever asked the questions: “What does a fish want? What does a fish need?” I think, ultimately, the revolution will come. But it’ll be slow, because the implications are huge. For example, I can’t think of a way to possibly catch fish from the open ocean in a massive commercial way to meet demand that would be anyway near our standards for ethics if we think of them like other animals. Currently, you go out, you catch a bunch of fish, you crush most of them to death in a net, you trawl them up from the bottom of the sea – which causes barotrauma for most of them – you dump them on a deck, half suffocate to death, the ones you don’t want get thrown overboard and die anyway, and the ones you keep go on ice, just to preserve the flesh for market reasons. How do you do that in a way that has the fish’s interests involved to any degree? You can’t. So it’s not surprising that there is some fierce opposition to this idea. It would mean a massive change in the way we do things. It also means a massive change in my (and perhaps your) delusion that if we’re eating fish we’re contributing less to the suffering of our animal brethren. 8:50 DEMOCRACY AND DEVELOPMENT For my main story this week I note a new meme arising among political thinkers: the idea of the modern yet non-liberal state. Two of my favorite columnists, Fareed Zakaria of the Washington Post, and David Brooks of the New York Times, both wrote on this topic this week. Both were spurred by a remarkable speech given by the president of Hungary, Viktor Orban, who as he begins his second term in office gives voice to the idea of a non-Western, non-liberal yet modernized country. As David Brooks wrote in his Monday column “ The Battle of Regimes ”: On July 26 … Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary gave a morbidly fascinating speech in which he argued that liberal capitalism’s day is done. The 2008 financial crisis revealed that decentralized liberal democracy leads to inequality, oligarchy,

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