The Shame of Naomi Wolf

It couldn’t have happened to a finer human being and a more serious scholar-activist. That’s right, get ready for the Schadenfreude… this time for authoress Naomi Wolf.

You recall Naomi Wolf. She shot to feminist stardom by writing a book called The Beauty Myth, wherein she argued that women who purchase accoutrements to look more beautiful are really dupes of the vast right wing conspiracy. Then she threw off all of said accoutrements and stripped bare… intellectually speaking. She wrote a biography of the vagina. The reason was clear: if you want people to respect you for your mind, you should oblige them to obsess about your vagina.

Next month Wolf is bringing forth a new opus, called Outrages, where in she shows herself to be outraged by what she calls the “criminalization of love.” Among the claims she makes is that numerous gay males were executed for practicing sodomy in nineteenth century England. As she discovered during an interview with the BBC, she simply gotten her facts wrong. It was bad enough that anyone was prosecuted for homosexuality, but the truth was, no one was ever executed. One wonders whether Wolf will note in her book the instances where gays in Iran, for instance, have been murdered by the regime. Don’t hold your breath.

Why had she gotten the facts wrong? Simply put, she read the phrase “death recorded” and assumed that it meant that the individual in question has been executed. In truth, the phrase meant at the time that the judge had decided that the individual should not be executed. A simple error, one that had been missed by Wolf’s publishers, editors and her dissertation advisor at Oxford.

Anyway, Ann Althouse is on the case (via Maggie’s Farm):

During a BBC interview, Wolf got the humiliating news that the term "death recorded" did not mean what she assumed, that a death penalty was carried out, but the complete opposite, that the judge determined that the person should not be executed.

The Guardian offers an expanded view:

After Thursday’s BBC Radio interview, [the BBC interviewer, historian Matthew] Sweet said he felt the error did call Wolf’s central argument into question. “I think her assumptions about ‘death recorded’ have led her to the view … that ‘dozens and dozens’ of Victorian men were executed … I have yet to see evidence that one man in Victorian Britain was executed for sodomy,” he said, while the historian Richard Ward said it was a “pretty basic error”.

Althouse is rightly exercised by the fact that her publisher and the New York Times are running cover for Wolf. Why so? Perhaps because Wolf is a celebrity intellectual who leans toward the far left.

Althouse explains:

I see that a spokeswoman for the U.S. publisher of the book — “Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love" — is saying there was an "unfortunate error" but "we believe the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds."

How can the publisher say "the overall thesis of the book ‘Outrages’ still holds"? Or, to be precise, they still "believe" it holds? The only way I can make sense of that is to perceive Houghton Mifflin Harcourt not a publisher of works of history, but in the business of ideology and propaganda, where the believing is all that really matters. Of course, the "overall thesis" survives. In ideology and propaganda, your overall thesis is the foundation and you're going to continue to build upon it, no matter how many efforts collapse. Just throw out those bad materials and go get some different materials and rebuild on the same foundation. Could something be wrong with the foundation? The question isn't even comprehensible in the business of propaganda.

Good point. In our era of ideologically driven polemics, facts do not matter. If the facts do not support the politically correct opinion, then we need only find new the facts. Point very well taken.

The Times is being equally charitable:

The NYT is being as kind to her as possible, I think. Here's how it describes her:

A prominent author who has written several works of feminist and cultural criticism, Ms. Wolf is known for books such as “The Beauty Myth” and “Vagina: A New Biography.”

She's "prominent." She gets on the talk shows. But why? Were any of the books that made her "prominent" based on good scholarship? Where are the serious scholars — the principled, devoted historians and philosophers — who didn't get on the shows because Naomi Wolf made books that had an attention-getting, stimulating "overall thesis"? It's an unresearched thesis of mine that such people exist.

Propose the right ideas and they will let you get away with anything, even with egregious errors of fact.

Althouse adds that the incident does not make Oxford University look very good. The old standards of academic rigor have been tossed aside in favor of ideology:

So this book was an Oxford PhD thesis?! Wow. Oxford needs to account for itself. There's a brand that ought to mean something. Do the thesis advisers there rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking? Did the NYT attempt to talk with Stefano-Maria Evangelista? Can we get him on the air at BBC.

What's Wrong with Vegan Diets

If you’ve never heard of Vikki Mikkonen, you get extra credit. Mikkonen is a Finnish blogger and lifestyle guru. You know the type: a maniac for bodily purification and spiritual uplift. Until recently she had been selling the virtues of the purest vegan diet.

The Daily Mail reports on her dietary habits:

… Virpi believed herself to be eating the healthiest of all diets: gluten-free, grain-free, dairy-free, meat-free, refined sugar-free. And what’s more, she’d built a career inspiring others to eat it, too.

And she touted her diet's virtues to her many followers:

As ‘Vanelja’, Virpi is an award-winning blogger and entrepreneur championing plant-based eating. She has written four cookbooks, which include vegan alternatives for ice cream, pizza and cakes, and has 164,500 followers on Instagram.

Though based in Finland, she writes her blog and best-selling books in English, and this, together with pretty photos of her recipes on Instagram, has earned her a sizeable following among British foodies. Vogue called her ‘social media gold’.

Think of her as the Finnish equivalent of Deliciously Ella, the British food writer and creator of the coconut-and-oat energy ball which costs £1.79 a piece. Virpi’s version: Dreamy Blueberry Thyme cake, a ‘raw cheesecake’ made from dairy-free oat milk.

Bu then, she got sick. Not only that, but she started, at age 37, to go into menopause:

Early last year, Virpi Mikkonen was alarmed by the appearance of a rash on her face.

There were other problems: a bout of flu that was hard to shift; crumbling nails; feeling low; and, most worrying, her periods stopped. A blood test revealed her follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) levels had sky-rocketed to the level at which women hit the menopause. Virpi was 37 and having hot flushes.

‘I thought, what’s wrong with me? I am healthy, I exercise,’ Virpi says. ‘I was really scared.’

So, she consulted an expert in Chinese medicine. The problem, by the terms of Chinese medicine:failing to cook food was producing an organic dysfunction, or some such:

She sought help from a specialist in Chinese medicine, who diagnosed a ‘yin deficiency’ (health depends on a balance of yin and yang, according to traditional Chinese medicine). She said Virpi should stop eating so much raw food — yet salad, juices and smoothies were the backbone of her diet.

Breakfast, for instance, consisted of a cold-pressed juice of celery, cucumber, fennel and parsley. Lunch was a salad of spinach leaves, watercress, cucumber, fennel and chickpeas with a sprinkle of sunflower, pumpkin and sesame seeds.

‘She said everything had to be cooked, warming and earthy,’ Virpi recalls. Even more radical, the specialist said Virpi had to start eating animal products — daily. Virpi hadn’t eaten meat for 15 years, apart from when pregnant with her daughter Alva, now seven.

Lo and behold, eating animal products has improved her health:

But now she’s given up veganism, she feels much better.

‘I felt I had run out of fuel, totally,’ she says. ‘I was empty.’ She is now particularly fond of bone broth, a bone stock she has as a hot drink or adds to stews and soups. She’s also eating eggs, which is a major departure because she used to refer to them as ‘miscarriages of chickens’.

The effects have been dramatic. ‘It’s amazing. I feel energetic, motivated. I’m sleeping better, the hot flushes and aching in my body have stopped.’ Best of all, her periods have returned. She was so relieved she danced round her flat. ‘I thought, OK, now I am back on track.’

Virpi has been reluctant to tell her followers what happened, because veganism is like a cult. People who belong are wildly judgmental. They will trash you unmercifully if you abandon the true faith and become an apostate:

Dana Shultz, who lives in the U.S. and runs Minimalist Baker, a vegan recipe blog, was inundated with criticism when she announced she was going back to animal products after suffering digestive issues and hair loss.

Jordan Younger, aka The Blonde Vegan, received virulent attacks on social media, including death threats, after she wrote a blog post revealing an eating disorder and her decision to give up veganism.

They are not alone for having returned to real food, and often for the same reason. Veganism had made them sick:

This year has seen a series of vegan vloggers confess they are now eating animal foods, including Londoner Tim Shieff, 31, a YouTuber known as the ‘vegan prince’, who revealed he’d abandoned his plant-based diet because it was making him ill.

‘I had some joint issues, chronic fatigue, and mild depression,’ he said. ‘My whole body felt like it was shutting down.’

He immediately felt better for eating meat: ‘I was so shocked . . . My depression lifted, joints feeling better, energy back in my body.’

I know you are skeptical about Chinese medicine, but a London physician explains that veganism produces a cholesterol deficiency. And that cholesterol deficiency can be bad for some people. So much for the anti-fat brigades:

London-based hormone specialist Dr Marion Gluck believes diet-induced low hormone levels could lie behind Virpi’s health issues.

‘There are lots of reasons for an unexpected early menopause — stress, trauma, lifestyle changes,’ she says.

But diet can also be a factor. ‘Cholesterol,’ Dr Gluck adds, is ‘the building block for all our hormones. Only animal products and fish contain cholesterol and it’s very, very important.

It doesn’t work for everyone. It didn’t work for me. The problem was not being vegan, per se, it was the vegan diet and my stressful lifestyle.

‘Our body does produce some cholesterol, but a big part comes from our food.’

A plant-based diet could result in very low levels of cholesterol. ‘That is probably what happened and why her periods stopped,’ says Dr Gluck. ‘When she started eating animal products she could make hormones again.

And beyond the cholesterol deficiency, vegan dieters often suffer from a protein deficiency and also from deficiencies of creatine and iron:

It’s much harder to get enough protein on a vegan diet, and lack of protein can make someone ill,’ says Jane Clarke, nutritionist and founder of Nourish, a website offering dietary advice and recipes for people with health problems.

‘Protein is the basis of every living cell. Lack of it can compromise your ability to fight off disease and make you feel depleted. It’s also hard to get enough omega-3s, essential fatty acids that reduce inflammation and are usually found in fish.’

‘Another reason you might feel unwell on a vegan diet is that you don’t take in enough creatine. This is only found in meat and fish and our body uses it to help generate energy in our muscles. Without it you can feel exhausted.’

Lack of iron is yet another potential problem. ‘While you can get iron from green leafy vegetables, you have to be very careful about not having enough.’

What's Wrong with Weed?

Here’s some news you can use. As more and more American states and municipalities legalize marijuana, researchers in Canada have just discovered that smoking weed is bad for your brain. Especially if you are of the adolescent persuasion. In truth, it’s really bad for your brain. It’s even worse than alcohol.

The Daily Mail has the story:

Regularly smoking cannabis can affect teenagers so severely that they end up three years behind their classmates in terms of brain development, a landmark study has found.

The results of the investigation, which involved almost 4,000 secondary school children in Canada, led researchers to conclude cannabis is more toxic for youngsters’ brains than alcohol.

Persistent use of the drug seriously affected basic reasoning skills – while it also had a disastrous effect on self-control, they found.

Smoke more weed and you won’t be able to think straight. This might explain the behavior of some of our younger political leaders… though we have no direct evidence of marijuana usage.

And if weed does make children stupid and out of control, it might even increase their chances of becoming schizophrenic:

Meanwhile, a separate study has found hard evidence that the main psychoactive compound in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), causes changes in the brain that trigger schizophrenia.

In the high school study, researchers at Montreal University studied pupils from the time they entered the Canadian seventh grade – aged 12 or 13 years – for four years.

More weed makes children more stupid:

Professor Patricia Conrod, professor of psychiatry at the university, said not only did they find cannabis users tended to do worse than non-users, but also that those pupils who smoked cannabis saw their results deteriorate when their use of the drug increased.

She told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We had really expected alcohol to have a more powerful effect [on brain health] than cannabis, but that didn’t seem to be the case. In terms of neuro-development, it’s now looking like cannabis might be quite a risky drug for young people.

‘If you’re a cannabis user, and you used it this year and last year, your level of inhibitory control in the tenth grade is lower than that of a seventh grade non-user. So you lose three years of development.’

So, if you were wondering what’s wrong with American youth, add weed to the list.

The Problem with Business Casual Attire

A wise word from the highly estimable Miss Manners. This time, in relation to dress codes, the kinds that are going out of style in American business.

Think about it. The press is flooded with stories suggesting that certain members of the business community take a far too casual attitude toward other members of the business community. They seem to have gotten the impression that they are not entirely there to do business… but to engage in the kinds of casual encounters that ought rightly be relegated to Craigslist. Now, you might think, if you wanted to diminish the number of unwanted casual encounters in the workplace, that it would be best to have more formal dress codes.

But, the great minds of American business have decided that they really need to make the office more casual… to ensure that everyone is confused about why they are there and what they are to do.

Excuse this slight digression, which is not entirely on point. So, we turn to Miss Manners to restore our vestiary decorum.

Anyway, today’s letter writer is puzzled by his staff. In truth, he has a staff of one. And he has allowed his employee to dress like a common prole at work. It’s his office and one imagines that he has the right to allow his staff to do as it pleases. But, one day the boss needed to make a presentation. And he needed to have his assistant present. So, he recommended that his assistant dress in “business casual” attire. Guess what, his employee did not know what that meant. That's the charitable interpretation.

Here, without further ado, is the letter:

I own a small company and have one employee. Sean does a fantastic job at the office, but dresses rather casually. I am okay with this, as it is just the two of us in the office, and I want everyone to be comfortable.

We are now doing new client presentations, and I need Sean's expertise at these. I've asked him to dress in "business casual" attire for these events. However, he arrives on the day of the presentation with scuffed shoes and pants/shirt that are mismatched and below what I would consider business casual.

I know the clients will see this as unprofessional, and it may impact our ability to win new work. I suspect he may not have the background or knowledge to know how to dress properly for these situations.

I don't want to be rude or overstep my bounds within the workplace, but how much can I direct his wardrobe? If he doesn't own the proper attire, is it unreasonable to ask him to purchase it?

Who but Miss Manners could instantly get to the bottom of this. The problem lies in the common, everyday locution: business casual. As Miss Manners points out, it is an oxymoron. No manager should set policy by using incoherent phrasing. And he should certainly not to do by employing oxymorons:

He probably thinks he already complied. “Business casual” is an oxymoron, vague and undefinable, so Miss Manners hardly blames its hapless followers for interpreting it as they wish.

It is not unreasonable for you, as his employer, to require a certain dress code, but you must be specific. “These clients are a bit more formal, so business attire — a button-down shirt, dress shoes and pants that are not jeans or overly pocketed — is probably warranted. I know that we are generally more casual in the office when it is just us, but we want to make a good impression in order to help win the account.”

While you do not have to offer any other assistance with this, making sure that his salary is commensurate with the ability to purchase new clothes would not be remiss. Nor would the recommendation of a good shoe polish.

San Francisco: The Radical Left in Charge

As the old saying has it, states are laboratories for democracy. Today, we extend the thought and say that certain cities are laboratories for rule by Democrats. In America’s largest coastal metropolises, Democrats rule. For all intents and purposes, there are no Republicans.

Today, for instance, the New York City school commissioner is hard at work trying to destroy the city’s public schools. He is firing white administrators. He is telling school principals to give special privileges to minority children. He wants to dumb down New York’s premier high schools, in the name of diversity.

And yet, New York is not quite in the league of San Francisco… now become America’s urban basket case. It is worth noting that the city is home to House Speaker Pelosi… who is hard at work slandering the president of the United States. As for her home district and the state it belongs to… they are literally going to shit. Very wealthy people like Nancy Pelosi will throw a few crumbs at the downtrodden and the disadvantaged, but, beyond that, they do not care.

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo has laid out the case against the rich liberals who run San Francisco and America’s other great cities. If I were to quibble I would say that these people no longer deserve to be called liberal or progressive. They are leftist radicals.

To be perfectly fair, even though Manjoo is correct to show that wealthy leftist radicals tend to exercise outsized influence on these cities, the political leaders are elected by the people. And most of the people are not very wealthy. Thus, the people elect leftist radicals to run the cities, because leftist radicals often promise something for nothing. And the people who voted for them end up with crumbs for nothing. But, at least, the city’s leadership is diverse. One hopes that this affords proper consolation for citizens who are dodging hypodermic needles and human feces on their walk to work.

Manjoo explains what is going on in San Francisco, California. We have reported on it before. It is unquestionably bleak. California houses large numbers of billionaires and still ranks as the most impoverished state in the nation. It’s an oligarchy, stupid. The rich and the rest:

To live in California at this time is to experience every day the cryptic phrase that George W. Bush once used to describe the invasion of Iraq: “Catastrophic success.” The economy here is booming, but no one feels especially good about it. When the cost of living is taken into account, billionaire-brimming California ranks as the most poverty-stricken state, with a fifth of the population struggling to get by. Since 2010, migration out of California has surged.

The basic problem is the steady collapse of livability. Across my home state, traffic and transportation is a developing-world nightmare. Child care and education seem impossible for all but the wealthiest. The problems of affordable housing and homelessness have surpassed all superlatives — what was a crisis is now an emergency that feels like a dystopian showcase of American inequality.

And yet, it’s not really American inequality. It’s the kind of inequality produced by failed leftist policies. Picture today’s San Francisco:

Yet the streets there are a plague of garbage and needles and feces, and every morning brings fresh horror stories from a “Black Mirror” hellscape: Homeless veterans are surviving on an economy of trash from billionaires’ mansions. Wealthy homeowners are crowdfunding a legal effort arguing that a proposed homeless shelter is an environmental hazard. A public-school teacher suffering from cancer is forced to pay for her own substitute.

Manjoo emphasizes that San Francisco is run entirely by Democrats. It has become difficult to blame it on Republicans when there are no Republicans. Of course, there is always the fallback: blaming it on capitalists and white privilege. The latter is especially peculiar since a city like New York, under comrade de Blasio, has declared war on white privilege:

At every level of government, our representatives, nearly all of them Democrats, prove inadequate and unresponsive to the challenges at hand. Witness last week’s embarrassment, when California lawmakers used a sketchy parliamentary maneuver to knife Senate Bill 50, an ambitious effort to undo restrictive local zoning rules and increase the supply of housing.

It was another chapter in a dismal saga of Nimbyist urban mismanagement that is crushing American cities. Not-in-my-backyardism is a bipartisan sentiment, but because the largest American cities are populated and run by Democrats — many in states under complete Democratic control — this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.

The shame of the left… an apt description. One thing these leftists do not want is less restrictive zoning laws and more housing. To balance that opinion, we should note that new housing, unless it is public housing, is likely to be very, very expensive housing. So, one does not see exactly why it will solve the homeless problem. Perhaps more supply will drive down cost, but that assumes that the new housing will not just attract more wealthy people.

More importantly, Manjoo indicts the rich radicals of San Francisco for being hypocrites, for being willing to do anything whatever to keep certain people out of their neighborhoods:

Then there is the refusal on the part of wealthy progressives to live by the values they profess to support at the national level. Creating dense, economically and socially diverse urban environments ought to be a paramount goal of progressivism. Cities are the standard geographical unit of the global economy. Dense urban areas are quite literally the “real America” — the cities are where two-thirds of Americans live, and they account for almost all national economic output. Urban areas are the most environmentally friendly way we know of housing lots of people. We can’t solve the climate crisis without vastly improving public transportation and increasing urban density. More than that, metropolises are good for the psyche and the soul; density fosters tolerance, diversity, creativity and progress.

And also:

Yet where progressives argue for openness and inclusion as a cudgel against President Trump, they abandon it on Nob Hill and in Beverly Hills. This explains the opposition to SB 50, which aimed to address the housing shortage in a very straightforward way: by building more housing. The bill would have erased single-family zoning in populous areas near transit locations. Areas zoned for homes housing a handful of people could have been redeveloped to include duplexes and apartment buildings that housed hundreds….

The bill had garnered support from a diverse coalition of business and advocacy groups, and its sponsor, State Senator Scott Wiener, had negotiated a series of compromises with some of its fiercest opponents. Polls showed the measure to be widely popular. For the first time, something extraordinary looked possible: California’s wealthy homeowners would abandon their restrictionist attitudes and let us build some new housing.

What happened to the new San Francisco housing bill? You guessed it: they shelved it.

Nope. Instead, Anthony Portantino, a Democratic state senator whose district includes the posh city of La Cañada Flintridge and who heads the appropriations committee, announced that he’d be shelving the bill until next year. In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, he worried that the law would spur lots of people to move near residential bus routes, which he suggested would alter the character of enclaves like his.

Of course, a housing bill is not going to right the good ship San Francisco. Perhaps, some homeless encampments in Nancy Pelosi’s front yard would get her attention.

And yet, San Francisco is a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state. Manjoo compares the situation to the Republican policy of building walls:

What Republicans want to do with I.C.E. and border walls, wealthy progressive Democrats are doing with zoning and Nimbyism. Preserving “local character,” maintaining “local control,” keeping housing scarce and inaccessible — the goals of both sides are really the same: to keep people out.

“We’re saying we welcome immigration, we welcome refugees, we welcome outsiders — but you’ve got to have a $2 million entrance fee to live here, otherwise you can use this part of a sidewalk for a tent,” said Brian Hanlon, president of the pro-density group California Yimby. “That to me is not being very welcoming. It’s not being very neighborly.”

As I said, wealthy radical leftists do not care about other people. They care mostly about themselves. Whereas the Republican policies are designed to control borders in order to defend the nation, radical leftist hypocrites want merely to maintain their own level of creature comfort.

Tom Friedman on Chinese-American Competition

It is not very nice to say it, but when was the last time that anyone cared about Thomas Friedman? When was the last time the world stood up and took notice of Friedman’s New York Times op-ed column? OK, your memory does not go back that far.

To the extent that mine does, I recall that in a seemingly endless series of columns Friedman was arguing that the solution to our and the world’s woes lay in a carbon tax. It didn’t matter what the problem was, a highly regressive tax on carbon was the Friedman solution.

No wonder people tuned him out. If you know what a writer is going to say before he says it, you are going to tire of him, no matter who he is.

Anyway, Friedman offered some begrudging praise to President Donald Trump in his column last Tuesday. He did so while addressing a point that most politicians, even those of a Democratic persuasion, agree upon. They all agree that Trump is right to take a hard line in negotiating with China over trade. When the trade negotiations broke down a little while back, everyone understood that China was at fault, for reneging on certain already agreed-upon matters. One can only conclude that the Trump policy has gotten the Chinese authorities somewhat flustered.

As of now, the Chinese tactic of shutting down grain purchases, to undermine Trump politically in the Midwest, seems not to be working.

So, discussions seem to have broken down, but one understands that both sides have an interest in finding a middle ground. And that both sides must enact a sufficient number of face saving gestures to make it appear that they are not backing down or yielding to pressure.

One must also note that while Chuck Schumer and other Democrats applauded the Trump approach, leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden has already claimed that China is not a problem. As you recall, former Defense Secretary and former CIA director Robert Gates has notably pointed out that Biden has been wrong on every major foreign policy for the past two decades. At least, he's consistent.

As for Friedman, he usefully puts the China-America contention into perspective.

Since the 1970s, the U.S.-China trade relationship has been pretty constant: We bought China’s toys, T-shirts, tennis shoes, machine tools and solar panels, and it bought our soybeans, beef and Boeings.

And when the trade balance got too out of whack — because China grew not only by hard work, by building smart infrastructure and by educating its people, but also by forcing technology transfers from U.S. companies, subsidizing its own companies, maintaining high tariffs, ignoring W.T.O. rulings and stealing intellectual property — Beijing placated us by buying more Boeings, beef and soybeans.

These points are worth emphasis. It would be shortsighted to attribute China’s economic ascent merely to the fact that it cheats on trade. Though, to be sure, it does. The other reasons why China is advancing have to do with hard work, infrastructure investment and a good educational system.

Some Americans still value hard work, but most prefer lives of entitled leisure. We have fallen woefully behind in infrastructure investment. If you want to plumb the depths of the question you should ask yourself where all of that 2009 Obama administration shovel-ready infrastructure spending went. As for America’s educational system, thanks to Common Core and to political correctness and identity politics it has been failing spectacularly.

As for the value of stolen technology, Friedman offers a chilling example:

And how much money did China save — to subsidize its own companies — when its military stole the plans for Lockheed Martin’s F-35 stealth fighter and then made its own carbon copy, avoiding all the R & D costs?

And then, China has started flexing its muscles. We need to emphasize the point. What will we do when China can foster technological innovation without having to steal anything from anyone? Now, many high tech advances are not based on stolen intellectual property:

And then some changes too big to ignore set in. First, China under Xi announced a “Made in China 2025” modernization plan, promising subsidies to make China’s private and state-owned companies the world leaders in supercomputing, A.I., new materials, 3-D printing, facial-recognition software, robotics, electric cars, autonomous vehicles, 5G wireless and advanced microchips.

This was a natural move for a China aiming to leap out of the middle-income ranks and to reduce its dependency on the West for high-tech. But all these new industries compete directly with America’s best companies.

Surely, this gives us far less leverage:

If the U.S. and Europe allowed China to continue operating by the same formula that it had used to grow from poverty to compete for all the industries of the future, we’d be crazy. Trump is right about that.

Of course, Friedman feels obliged to point out that Trump is wrong to see it as a war. How Friedman knows this, I do not have a clue. In truth, a great deal of what the respective governments have been saying is face-saving posturing. And Trump always makes clear that he has a close friendly relationship with the Chinese president. Someone briefed him on the importance of such relationships when dealing with Asian leaders. He has obviously learned the lesson.

Friedman does not think that Trump understands that the negotiations can be win/win. I recommend that we await further developments before we try to figure out what the Trump attitude really is:

Where he is wrong is that trade is not like war. Unlike war, it can be a win-win proposition. Alibaba, UnionPay, Baidu and Tencent and Google, Amazon, Facebook and Visa can all win at the same time — and they have been. I’m not sure Trump understands that.

As for Xi’s attitude, all we know now is that his right hand man, his leading trade negotiator, Liu He, agreed to provisions of a new trade agreement that were overruled in Beijing. We ought to note that someone lost face over this:

But I’m not sure Xi does, either. We have to let China win fair and square where its companies are better, but it has to be ready to lose fair and square, too. Who can say how much more prosperous Google and Amazon would be today if they had been able to operate as freely in China as Alibaba and Tencent can operate in America?

The new competitive arena is in 5G telecommunications equipment. As Huawei takes a dominant international position, it opens the world’s communications to Chinese intelligence services. Of course, the Trump administration has been responding:

In particular, 5G equipment like that made by China’s Huawei, which can transfer data and voices at hyperspeed, can also serve as an espionage platform, if China’s intelligence services exercise their right under Chinese law to demand access.

Indeed, the controversy around Huawei shines a spotlight on this whole new moment: Huawei increasingly dominates the global market for 5G infrastructure, which used to be controlled by Ericsson and Nokia. America’s Qualcomm is both a supplier of chips and software to Huawei and a global competitor.

As it happens, the Chinese government is not allowing the free market to work its magic when it comes to telecommunication. Friedman does not say it, but he seems to suggest that we need a more coordinated policy to direct America’s energies, the better to become more competitive:

But the Chinese government has curbed competition against Huawei in China — by both foreign and Chinese companies — to enable Huawei to grow bigger, more quickly and cheaply. Huawei then uses that clout and pricing power to undercut Western telecoms and then uses its rising global market dominance to set the next generation of global 5G telecom standards around its own technologies, not those of Qualcomm or Sweden’s Ericsson.

And then there is the question of values-- of values like trust, which means, what is the collected data being used for. And of values like the rule of law, which means, not stealing intellectual property:

In the old days, when we were just buying China’s tennis shoes and solar panels and it our soybeans and Boeings, who cared if the Chinese were Communists, Maoists, socialists — or cheats? But when Huawei is competing on the next generation of 5G telecom with Qualcomm, AT&T and Verizon — and 5G will become the new backbone of digital commerce, communication, health care, transportation and education — values matter, differences in values matters, a modicum of trust matters and the rule of law matters. This is especially true when 5G technologies and standards, once embedded in a country, become very hard to displace.

Somehow or other the best laid plans about China’s growth and development have been proven short sighted. One notes, as Friedman does not, that the feckless insouciance of the Obama administration, echoed now in the words of always-wrong Joe Biden, gave China licence to militarize the South China Sea:

Instead of China getting richer and becoming more of a responsible stakeholder in globalization, it was getting richer and militarizing islands in the South China Sea to push the U.S. out. And it was using high-tech tools, like facial recognition, to become more efficient at authoritarian control, not less.

So, we all agree with Friedman that we hope that this can be resolved without going to war:

All of this is now coming to a head in these trade talks. Either the U.S. and China find a way to build greater trust — so globalization can continue apace and we can grow together in this new era — or they won’t. In which case, globalization will start to fracture, and we’ll both be poorer for it.