Mathis Bitton
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Articles by Mathis Bitton
Cómo la IA puede ayudar a abordar la toma de decisiones colectivas
La toma de decisiones colectivas no es una ciencia exacta. Los procesos rotos, la sobrecarga de datos, la asimetría de información y otras inequidades solo agravan los desafíos que surgen cuando grandes y dispares facciones con diferentes objetivos intentan trabajar juntas.
Chinese leaders have a long history of strategic deception
In September 2015, President Xi Jinping stood in the Rose Garden next to President Barack Obama and made an unambiguous commitment: China had “no intention to militarize” the artificial islands it was building in the South China Sea. The statement carried the solemn authority of a great power — a promise between world leaders, witnessed by the international community. Yet within three years, satellite imagery revealed military-grade airstrips stretching across previously submerged reefs.
Opinion - Chinese leaders have a long history of strategic deception
In September 2015, President Xi Jinping stood in the Rose Garden next to President Barack Obama and made an unambiguous commitment: China had “no intention to militarize” the artificial islands it was building in the South China Sea. The statement carried the solemn authority of a great power — a promise between world leaders, witnessed by the international community. Yet within three years, satellite imagery revealed military-grade airstrips stretching across previously submerged reefs.
Standing Athwart the Ed-Tech Revolution
Bulletin boards and shelves of worn paperbacks still line the walls of American classrooms, but virtually every surface now holds a charging station or a mounted screen. Students sit in rows, faces illuminated by the blue glow of their district-issues tablets. Teachers move among desks, but their primary interaction with students happens through “learning-management systems” where they monitor progress in real time.
Michel Houellebecq’s Prophecies
Michel Houellebecq is a writer of the after—after history, after God, after politics, after romance, and after happiness. He chronicles a world in which we watch ourselves live, poisoned by irony, oscillating between nihilism and hedonism, until the difference between the two becomes imperceptible. Houellebecq captures this post-world without adornment. His characters are lonely, sexless, and impotent. They seek something higher and seldom find it. They try to escape from their condition but cannot.
The Plight of the Turkeys Original
Culture Peter Singer's new book makes a compassionate case for your Thanksgiving turkey. Published November 23, 2024 When it comes to the morality of eating animal meat, human beings make many dubious distinctions. Cows make delicious steaks and burgers, but we are horrified at the thought of horse meat. Cats and dogs roam freely inside our houses, yet pigs get made into bacon. We wag our fingers at our whaling ancestors but hungrily consume tuna salad sandwiches.
Can Liberalism Be a Way of Life? Original
Culture Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book passionately argues for fairness and freedom. By Published November 16, 2024 A great deal of academic work is often rather bloodless. The impersonal stylistic norms of the ivory tower make it easy to forget that academics also love, hate, lust, resent, envy, and in general experience the whole gamut of human emotions.
The Unbalanced Republic
Published November 11, 2024 “When the three natural orders in society, the high, the middle, and the low, are all represented in the government, and constitutionally placed to watch each other, and restrain each other mutually by the laws, it is then only, that an emulation takes place for the public good, and divisions turn to the advantage of the nation.” John Adams Of course we shouldn’t trust the people. That’s one of the basic American ideas.
The Foreign Policy of a Second Trump Administration
The next president is inheriting a lot of geopolitical chaos. Published November 11, 2024 Jamie welcomes Rich Goldberg, a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and former National Security Council staffer during the Trump administration, to discuss the future of U.S. foreign policy under President-Elect Donald Trump. Together, they explore key strategies, potential challenges, and the incoming administration’s approach to global diplomacy.
Our Best Stuff From the Week Trump Won Again
The former president returns to the White House, this time with a popular-vote victory. Published November 9, 2024 Hello and happy Saturday. We were ready for just about anything for the election. We published a guide to swing state election laws and procedures, Tuesday’s Morning Dispatch laid out when polls closed and explained when to expect results. The Dispatch Politics team talked to both Republicans and Democrats about how they’d feel if their side lost.
Because of, or in Spite of, Trump? Original
Making sense of the former president’s election win. Published November 9, 2024 People are throwing the word “landslide” around willy-nilly this week, and while President-elect Donald Trump certainly won a decisive victory and did so in much stronger fashion than his 2016 squeaker, landslide it ain’t. Trump will end up with 312 electoral votes, adding Nevada to his 2016 haul.
The Electorate That Wasn’t
Published November 9, 2024 Jonah is rested, retrospective, and ready to discuss the beleaguered Democrats and those purporting that if you’d only listened to them, everything would have gone differently. He dives into the decisive issue of inflation, the Harris campaign’s refusal to break with the Biden administration, the danger of conflating Republican issues with “white issues,” and the problem with the idea of a political mandate.
Raging Against the Experience Machine Original
The 20th-century American philosopher Robert Nozick once coined a thought experiment that has since become a classic in “Introduction to Ethics” classes: the “experience machine.” Imagine, he proposed, that a machine could grant you any experience you wanted. You could travel the world, taste the finest foods, experience intense love—the machine would know no bounds but those of your imagination.
Raging Against the Experience Machine | Opinion
Now Stunning Footage Reveals Ocean Floor Absolutely Teeming With Spider Crabs Off the coast of Chile and Peru, along the entire western length of South America, the seafloor takes a sharp, steep plunge deep into the Pacific … 16 hours ago Trump Victory Drives Wave of Quitters From X Platform Over to Threads There’s a popular type of post-election post on Threads: Users saying they’re ditching X, the app known as Twitter before it was bought by Elon Musk, …
The Rules-Based International Order vs. ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ Original
Anne Applebaum’s 2020 book Twilight of Democracy includes tales of how her once-normie conservative friends jumped into the deep end of the populist, conspiracist pool. It was a dismaying read then, but four years later—following massive reversals, stunning hypocrisies, bewildering flip-flopping, a newfound penchant for well-done steak with ketchup—it also has an uncanny quality. That vague feeling of reading a week-old newspaper is actually a testament to Applebaum’s perceptiveness.
Libertarianism Needs Careful Tweaks, Not Wholesale Updates
Politics The ideology has room for improvement, but its core remains sound. Published September 23, 2024 In a recent essay, Georgetown Law professor and libertarian legal scholar Randy Barnett offered a provocative indictment of American libertarianism. The movement needs several updates, he argued, most notably regarding what he considers to be abuses of private power.
More Than the Washington CliffsNotes Original
Carlos Lozada, an opinion columnist at the New York Times and former book reviewer at the Washington Post, has taken it upon himself to do something rarely done in Washington: the homework. Over several years, he has read (typically multiple times) the new texts of contemporary American politics—the campaign biographies, the presidential memoirs, the staffer tell-alls, the “Trump books”—and documented his journey in hundreds of articles.
A Map for Those ‘Lost in Ideology’ Original
In common parlance, the word “ideology” summons a slew of negative connotations. The term often functions as a negative epithet, a demarcation between those who understand reality as it is and those lost in wishful thinking. He who deems others as “ideological” casts himself above the political fray. In his own mind, he becomes a champion of facts against falsehoods, of common sense against absurdity.
The Five Crises of the Fifth French Republic
France, which has always had a masterly aptitude for converting even the portentous crises of its spirit into something charming and seductive. —Friedrich Nietzsche Two species of jacquerie have punctuated French life, and the nation’s image in the media, in recent decades. The first, a pattern of simmering riots in the banlieues, has its roots in the autumn of 2005, when two teenagers died while running away from the police.
Review of "Liberalism Against Itself" by Samuel Moyn
Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, Samuel Moyn (Yale University Press, 240 pp., $27.50) The battle over liberalism is also the battle over the word “liberalism.” In recent years, this semantic and substantive debate has set two main camps in opposition. The first, championed by the post-liberal Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, sees liberalism as a never-ending search for individual autonomy.
"A World After Liberalism" Review
A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, by Matthew Rose (Yale University Press, 208 pp., $28) Matthew Rose opens A World After Liberalism with a diagnosis: “We are living in a postliberal moment.” The statement doesn’t imply that all liberal institutions have crumbled (though some have) or that all liberal politicians lose elections (though some do).
America's Next Aristocracy
The construction of functional hierarchies is a fundamental task of political theory. Like biological organisms, human systems need centralization to coordinate their activities in harmony. Faced with ever-increasing complexity, modern societies have built institutional pipelines to harness talent, tackle long-term challenges, and organize collective action at scale. Some regimes are more egalitarian than others, but all cultivate an elite that shapes and directs the polity—consciously or not.
De Gaulle’s State of Tomorrow
Technocratic power has become the core backbone of industrial civilization. Incapable of managing complex modern forms of social organization, legacy political structures have outsourced their responsibilities to an army of credentialed bureaucrats. The abdication of the statesman marks the rise of the expert, a political player who wields a different kind of authority.
The Rise of Post-Liberal Man
Ancient philosophers did not analyse political systems in terms of individual rights, distribution of powers, and legitimacy. Instead, they focused upon the kind of citizen that a specific regime-type produces, the virtues it inculcates, and the values it promotes.
BITTON: Cultivating innocence
Mathis Bitton 10:32 pm, Apr 27, 2021 Staff Columnist “Yale students are incredibly mature.” I can hardly count the number of times that I have heard this statement, often uttered to celebrate the student body’s work ethic and dedication. At Yale and beyond, we applaud those who “grow up” faster than most, these precocious heroes who escape from the grip of immaturity to embark on a never-ending quest for personal achievement.
BITTON: Plato is infrastructure
Mathis Bitton 11:29 pm, Apr 13, 2021 Staff Columnist “The government should be a referee, not an active player.” These words, uttered by the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, would have baffled our pre-modern ancestors. For Plato’s contemporaries, politics did not stop where the workings of the invisible hand began. Instead, ancient political thought placed the question of the good life at the center of regime.
BITTON: Mother tongue
Last week, a small group of French politicians, intellectuals and journalists put forward an unexpected proposal: Replace English with Latin as Europe’s official language. At first, this idea may sound ridiculous, if not downright reactionary. At worst, we can accuse the proposal’s defenders of nostalgia, which, to cite George Ball, is a “seductive liar.” Is the promotion of Latin but another way to idealize the ancients? Is it an attempt to reconstruct a chauvinistic “Western” identity?
BITTON: Leap of faith
Last week, I learned that a friend of mine was getting married. Ecstatic, I picked up the phone and congratulated her. She sounded happier than ever, and justifiably so: To find such rapture in otherwise gloomy times is no easy task. For hours, she walked me through every detail of the ceremony, every fold of her dress, every napkin, every song. She radiated unfiltered joy, a contrast to the performative veneer of happiness behind which quarantined Yalies hide their frustrations.
BITTON: The post-liberal synthesis
Mathis Bitton 1:06 am, Feb 17, 2021 Staff Columnist Last week, Senator Mitt Romney proposed an unexpectedly ambitious plan to reform America’s child allowance programs. Combining and expanding existing welfare benefits, the Romney plan would help parents by providing $350 a month for kids five and under, and $250 a month for kids up to 17. It’s also important to note that the proposal phases out for large, wealthy families such as Romney’s.
BITTON: Decadence and revolution
Much has been, is being and will be written about January 6, 2021. The supporters of a sitting president of the United States stormed the Capitol to stop Congress’s joint session from certifying the Electoral College vote. For a couple of hours, the world’s most iconic democracy looked like a shambolic mobocracy, with scenes of insurrection and chaos broadcasted across the globe.
BITTON: The scent of cowardice
This autumn, France witnessed three terrorist attacks on its soil. The response of the international community has been nothing short of shameful. It began last month, when a man stabbed two people outside the former office of Charlie Hebdo — the suspect later admitted that he wanted to punish the magazine for its famous cartoons of the prophet. Weeks later, a middle school teacher was beheaded for displaying the very same caricatures during a class-discussion about free speech.
BITTON: An alternative American story
Mathis Bitton 12:40 am, Oct 21, 2020 Staff Columnist A few months after the pandemic’s outbreak, I spent a couple of weeks at my grandparents’ small farm in Southern Morocco. The intimate village setting, with the corn fields, the wandering sheep and the chirping song of the cicadas contrasted with the neo-Gothic buildings facing my dorm room.
BITTON: Faith and place
As a non-Catholic, I do not often find myself reading papal encyclicals, or letters written by the Pope that reflect upon questions of morals and doctrine. But last week, some friends of mine urged me to take a look at Pope Francis’s most recent one. Entitled “Fratelli tutti,” the document focuses upon the themes of fraternity and social friendship.
BITTON: Days of future past
Mathis Bitton 1:16 am, Sep 23, 2020 Staff Columnist Our present moment encourages the reconstruction of forgotten relationships and identities. From urbanites who left their Midwestern hometowns to college students who had begun to experience independence, many are now rediscovering their roots, the people with whom they grew up, the landscapes they left behind. These chains that bind us to our communities and neighbors, usually hidden, now reemerge as palpable sources of humanity.
BITTON: Class struggle
Mathis Bitton 10:24 pm, Sep 07, 2020 Staff Columnist Affirmative action is a phrase that has accumulated a slew of contradictory connotations. For the vast majority of Yale students, this practice represents an engine of social change, a great equalizer and a necessary bulwark against institutional white supremacy. For the Trump administration and large portions of the American right, affirmative action is itself a discriminatory practice hiding behind the veil of social justice.
Emmanuel Macron: French President Loved Abroad, Loathed at Home Original
French President Emmanuel Macron waves as he visits Beirut, Lebanon, August 6, 2020. (Thibault Camus/Pool via Reuters) In Lebanon and elsewhere, the French president’s foreign policy has proven masterful. But his domestic failures spoil his achievements abroad. Last week, the Spectator rightly compared Emmanuel Macron to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia.
Populist Movements: Critics Should Pay More Attention to Their Causes
President Donald Trump greets supporters during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, January 30, 2020. (Leah Millis/Reuters) Those who deplore the consequences of populist movements should pay more attention to their causes. NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE ‘P opulism” is a term that has accumulated a slew of negative connotations.
China Economic Threat: Liberal Democracies Must Unite Against Beijing's Expanding Influence
Workers rope a container ship at a port in Qingdao, Shandong Province, China, February 11, 2020. (China Daily via Reuters) As Sino–American relations continue to deteriorate, liberal democracies need to unite against China’s ever-expanding economic influence. NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE O ver the past few months, the United States and China have clashed over technology, territory, economics, and political influence.
Mathis Bitton: The great British comeback
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The Great British Comeback
The Great British Comeback Critics thought that post-Brexit Britain would fail to stand up for the liberal world order. Boris Johnson proved them wrong. Read Full Article »
The Great British Comeback | National Review Original
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gestures as he speaks during a coronavirus news conference inside 10 Downing Street, March 19, 2020. (Leon Neal & Pool/Reuters) Critics thought that post-Brexit Britain would fail to stand up for the liberal world order. Boris Johnson proved them wrong. Many commentators thought that Brexit would mark the end of Britain’s involvement in foreign affairs.
Civil Unrest: Aeschylus on 2020 Politics
Demonstrators scuffle with NYPD police officers as they try to march trough Times Square during a protest against racial inequality in New York City, June 14, 2020. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters) The collapse of the public–private distinction has turned our national conversation into a zero-sum gladiatorial contest. “How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” — Marcus Aurelius The genealogy of the state has long been a subject of philosophical inquiry.
Charles Péguy’s Forgotten Life in No-Man’s Land
In France at the end of the 19th century, modernity became the battleground for a collision of dogmatic worldviews. On one side were arch-conservative Catholics and disheveled aristocrats holding on to a disappearing order. On the other were anti-clerical progressives who believed that Marxism was the solution to all of life’s most puzzling complexities.
Robert P. George & Cornel West Friendship Has Much to Teach America
Robert P. George and Cornel West on Firing Line. (PBS/via YouTube) Two public intellectuals, despite their differences, share a remarkable friendship that has much to teach America. NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE A s politics becomes a battleground where clashing worldviews, frustrations, and experiences collide, the notion of “civility” finds itself attached to a slew of contradictory connotations. For some, civility is the convenient mask of cowards, a noble veil behind which enablers hide their turpitude.
France’s Failed Color-Blind Experiment | National Review
A demonstrator attends a protest at the Place de la Republique square following the death of George Floyd, Paris, France, June 9, 2020. (Christian Hartmann/Reuters) For centuries, France has been a bastion of universalism. But the country is witnessing the gradual fracture of its Enlightenment ideals. In 1784, Immanuel Kant published Answering the Question: What Is Enlightenment?, a short essay that would become the cornerstone of a world-changing philosophical movement.
Andrzej Duda - Populist Nationalism Could Reshape the European Right Original
Polish President Andrzej Duda attends a meeting with local residents following his victory in a presidential election in Odrzywol, Poland July 13, 2020. (Marcin Kucewicz/Agencja Gazeta via Reuters) Last week, the arch-conservative Polish president clung on to power. His brand of populist nationalism could reshape the European Right.
Radicalism’s Perils: Amid Upheaval, Resist Prefabricated, Totalizing Ideologies Original
Albert Camus, 1957. (Robert Edwards via Wikimedia) In times of political and economic upheaval, we must resist the siren calls of prefabricated Theories of Everything. “People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers. My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother.” — Albert Camus, 1957 The great French intellectual said those words at a student debate in Stockholm, days after accepting his Nobel Prize in Literature.
Moderation in Islam: Return to Koranic Principles to Counter Fundamentalism
(Lawkeeper/iStock/Getty Images Plus) Fundamentalists are gaining momentum across the Muslim world, but their conception of Islam relies on a flawed reading of the Koran. NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE L ast week, Islamists blocked the construction of the first Hindu temple in Islamabad, Pakistan. The project was meant to symbolize tolerance in an age of radicalism. Instead, controversy has turned it into an emblem of dogmatism in the Muslim world.
Xu Zhangrun and the Chinese Communist Party’s Betrayal of Confucius | National Review Original
Tourists and students look at a Confucius statue at a Confucian temple ahead of the country’s annual national college entrance exam in Beijing, China, June 4, 2016. (Jason Lee/Reuters) A scholar of the country’s philosophical tradition become the latest critic of the government to be silenced for his views. In the ancient world, Greek and Roman intellectuals acted out the principles of their ethical systems.
Coronavirus Crisis & EU: European Project at Crossroads
European Union flags fly outside the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, April 10, 2019. (Yves Herman/Reuters) A €750 Billion virus-recovery plan could pave the way to a federalized European state. It could also destroy the EU forever. World War II left an indelible mark upon Europe. The continent found itself shattered. In the quiet ruins of wrecked Western European capitals, the survivors arose to enshrine and preserve their recaptured independence.
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