As Things Fall Apart

Posted on Thursday 23 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Trump’s war against DEI isn’t actually about merit;
  • How despite claims of merit, those executive orders were shoddily written;
  • How Trump prioritizes white Christian patriarchy;
  • Comments from Heather Cox Richardson, Paul Krugman, and Robert Reich;
  • How conservative response to that Bishop reveals themselves to be Old Testament zealots;
  • Short takes;
  • Allan Pettersson Symphony #5

Evidence: his Cabinet picks.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 23 Jan 2025: Donald Trump’s war on DEI is not about “merit”, subtitled “Executive orders attacking DEI are about promoting unqualified white men over diverse candidates”

Title and subtitle pretty much say all, but it’s worth quoting Marcotte:

Donald Trump lies about everything, but the lies strewn throughout his executive order shutting down diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, policies in the federal government are especially taxing on one’s credulity. Efforts to improve diversity, the order reads, “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” This paean to the importance of “excellence” and “hard work” comes from a man who, a mere five years ago, looked a row of medical researchers and doctors in the eye and suggested he understood science better than they did, despite having not studied it for a day of his life. He then theorized that Lysol and bleach be used to treat COVID-19 patients “by injection inside, or almost a cleaning, because, you see, it gets in the lungs,” aware of the basic scientific principle that painting your lungs with poisonous substances will kill you.

The new executive order insists that recruiting diverse applicants is “diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination.” It was signed by a man who has nominated Pete Hegseth, an understudy Fox News host, to run the Department of Defense. Hegseth’s only prior administrative experience comes from running two small-time charities into the ground, resulting in his removal from leadership. This ode to the value of skills and knowledge comes from the same half-literate president who also nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run Health and Human Services, even though Kennedy claims cognitive decline from a brain worm and also refuses to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence showing that vaccines are safe and effective. The only reason the alleged testament to “merit” is even readable is because someone other than Trump wrote it. The “merit”-loving president famously can’t get through a 240-character social media post without multiple grammatical errors and misspellings.

All three of these men embody the concept of incompetence, but they are white, straight and male. When Trump or any MAGA devotee is talking about “merit” or “excellence,” that is what they mean: whiteness, straightness and maleness.

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As for merit…

Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, 21 Jan 2025: Trump’s First Flurry of Executive Orders Plagued by a Surprising Problem

The problem: the executive orders Trump signed on Day One were shoddily written, by amateurs or AI.

Dahlia Lithwick: We saw some shoddy, shoddy lawyering in some of these new executive orders. And I want to note that the one promise, for at least the last six months, as I understand it, was that these Project 2025 jobs were going to be ready from Day 1. That the greatest minds in the conservative legal movement were beavering away for months to make sure that when all of this went into effect on Day 1, or Week 1, it would be bulletproof. And this is not bulletproof. Some of it looks like it was written by A.I. or by a first-grader using A.I. And I just want to flag that one of the reasons Donald Trump lost a whole lot in the first four years of Trumpism was because of crap lawyering by crap lawyers cutting corners and doing a bad job. It seems to me that would’ve been the one lesson they learned.

Mark Joseph Stern: It was surprising to see how poorly drafted and poorly reasoned some of these orders were. There are formatting errors and typos that repeat over and over throughout different orders, which reveal that copy-and-paste was used. I am convinced that generative A.I. was used to write some of these orders, including the one renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, which has this bizarre word salad about the beauty of the Gulf that I think came straight from a robot. And I they’re really poorly lawyered on the whole—there are declarations of law that are just false, that are wrong, that do not even attempt to justify themselves.

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One more.

LGBTQNation, Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 22 Jan 2025: Donald Trump’s inaugural address was an ode to white Christian patriarchy, subtitled “Where do I even begin?”

On the topic of “merit,” Trump’s choices for his second cabinet and advisory positions lay bare the myth of meritocracy since most of his picks are unqualified for the positions they will likely hold and were chosen either on account of their enormous wealth or due to their television celebrity on conservative media.

For example, Trump has tapped a record 13 billionaires to work directly with his administration. For many, their “merit” lays primarily in their massive donations to Trump’s campaign and their willingness to continually kiss his ring and bend their knees so often that soon they will require hip and knee replacements.

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Checking in with my favorite columnists (some still call them “thought leaders”) — which, these days, means their commentaries on Substack or personal sites or podcasts. Or even Facebook.

Heather Cox Richardson, January 22, 2025:

Marc Caputo of Axios reported today that Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of all the January 6 rioters convicted of crimes for that day’s events, including those who attacked police officers, was a spur of the moment decision by Trump apparently designed to get the issue behind him quickly. “Trump just said: ‘F*ck it: Release ‘em all,’” an advisor recalled.

Rather than putting the issue behind him, Trump’s new administration is already mired in controversy over it. NBC News profiled the men who threw Nazi salutes, posted that they intended to start a civil war, vowed “there will be blood,” and called for the lynching of Democratic lawmakers. These men, who attacked police with bear spray, flag poles, and a metal whip and choked officers with their bare hands, are now back on the streets.

That means they are also headed home to their communities. Jackson Reffitt, who reported his father Guy’s participation in the January 6 riot and was a key witness against him, told reporters he fears for his life now that his father is free. Jackson recorded his father’s threat against talking to the authorities. “If you turn me in, you’re a traitor,” his father said, “and traitors get shot.” “I’m honestly flabbergasted that we’ve gotten to this point,” Jackson told CNN. “I’m terrified. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

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Paul Krugman, 23 Jan 2025: Trump, Energy and MAGA Brain, subtitled “Drilling down on a right-wing delusion”

One key to understanding many of the destructive policies coming down the pike is to realize that Donald Trump suffers from what I’ve been calling MAGA brain, although it actually predates Trump. I’d define it as the belief that effective governance comes from being harsh and unfeeling, putting aside namby-pamby, dare I say woke, concerns about stuff like protecting the environment or respecting civil liberties.

You can see MAGA brain at work on multiple fronts, but the immediate issue is Trump’s energy policy, which may ultimately be even more destructive than his tariff policy or his immigration policy.

In his inaugural address Trump declared a national energy emergency, even though we don’t have any such emergency. In fact, America’s energy position is the strongest it has been since Dwight Eisenhower was president. Seriously.

But if you suffer from MAGA brain you more or less have to believe that we’re in an energy crisis, just as you have to believe that our cities are being ravaged by migrant crime. MAGA says it must be so, so what are you gonna believe, MAGA or your lying eyes?

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Robert Reich, 23 Jan 2025: What you can do, subtitled “Ten ways to resist Trump II”

Mostly familiar items from earlier lists. Such as his media sources he relies on for the truth. I’ll quote a couple more.

5. To the extent you are able, fund groups that are litigating against Trump. Much of the action over the next months and years will be in the federal courts. The groups initiating legislation that I know and trust include the American Civil Liberties Union, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, Center for Biological Diversity, Environmental Defense Fund, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Common Cause.

I’ve donated to ACLU for decades, along with eight or ten others (PFAW, etc). I renew all my magazines and causes every March. Perhaps this year I’ll add some from Reich’s list. Note he includes Heather Cox Richardson.

7. Urge friends, relatives, and acquaintances to avoid Trump propaganda outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, X, and, increasingly, Facebook and Instagram. They are filled with hateful bigotry and toxic and dangerous lies. For some people, these propaganda sources can also be addictive; help the people you know wean themselves off them.

That never works.

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More evidence of hypocrisy on the right. They claim to be Christians, but they’re really Old Testament zealots, the modern expressions of the most basic, primitive, tribal, human nature.

MediaMatters, 22 Jan 2025: Right-wing media attack Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde after she asks Trump to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared”

During the inaugural prayer service, Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde urged President Donald Trump to “have mercy” on undocumented migrants and LGBTQ kids, and right-wing media responded by calling her a “fake bishop” with “deranged political beliefs,” saying her sermon was “heretical” and “satanic,” and claiming she was “forcing left-wing platitudes down everyone’s throat.”

Followed by a list of specific responses, all reprehensible. This is all about very selective reading of the Bible, and basic tribal thinking.

For example:

The Guardian, 23 Jan 2025: Rubio instructs staff to freeze passport applications with ‘X’ sex markers, subtitled “Secretary of state tells staff ‘sex is not changeable’ in email following Trump executive order on gender”

Once again, evidence of conservative black and white thinking. Male female, nothing in between, despite real people who exist now and have always existed. Conservatives are simple-minded. I would not be surprised if racial categories on passports were reduced to white/non-white. That’s all that matters to them.

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It’s significant how Trump responds to expressions of Christian charity.

Politico, 22 Jan 2025: Trump launches savage attack on bishop who asked for ‘mercy’ for minorities

Subtitle: U.S. president calls the clergywoman a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” “ungracious,” “nasty” and “not compelling or smart.”

It’s noticeable partly because it illustrates Trump’s very limited vocabulary.

Are there any real Christians out there — those who prioritize what Jesus said, rather what Moses said, because isn’t that what “Christian” means? — who are willing to push back against this vile person they apparently voted for? I’m not holding my breath. Which confirms my ideas about their hypocrisy.

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Short takes.

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Listening while writing this blog post: Pettersson 5. Pettersson’ best, or most accessible, symphonies, were 7 and 8, or maybe 7 through 9, or maybe 6 through 9, or maybe this one too.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Lunacy, Music, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

What Our Time Will Be Remembered For

Posted on Wednesday 22 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Doing next to nothing, while the world burned.

  • Our time will be remembered for nothing else than our inaction on climate change;
  • David Wallace-Wells searches for a silver lining;
  • A book I’m reading recalls similar conservative resistance to action on the ozone layer and acid rain;
  • How humans are responsible for our future, and can’t keep blaming “acts of God”;
——

OnlySky, Dale McGowan, 21 Jan 2025: The unforgiven generations, subtitled “We will be remembered for nothing else.”

The generations currently in their third or fourth act—Baby Boomers and Gen X, born roughly 1946 to 1980—have contributed a dizzying mix of positives and negatives to the world. We created the internet and personal computing; remade arts and entertainment in good and terrible ways; spurred incredible economic growth, then killed the middle class; opened up greater access to higher ed, then saddled a generation with crushing debt. We were the ones who put cultural diversity on the front burner, then said “just kidding” in the voting booth. We changed the essence of parenting and childhood for better and worse. We brought torture and imprisonment without charge back into vogue. We stopped a pandemic in record time with a vaccine that we then refused to take. We elected a gifted president who surrounded himself with talent and intelligence, and we elected an autocratic narcissist whose damage has only begun to play out.

None of it will be remembered for long.

Decades from now, even centuries, the adults of the past 50 years will be associated with one thing only: climate inaction. And we will not be forgiven.

Recalling the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, US slavery and the Civil War, the exploitation of workers in the early Industrial Revolution, Naziism.

But we will be remembered with greater contempt than any of these.

The reason is this: No other fumbling of the ball will pass on as much daily human misery to the future as our failure to respond to the climate crisis when we still could. No one feels the negative consequences of the demise of Res Publica or the Ancien Régime every morning. But the consequences of a climate that has spun irretrievably out of control will be woven deep into every part of the human experience for centuries to come.

The piece concludes: Only poor excuses remain.

There are so many excuses and explanations for pressing the accelerator as our planet approached the cliff: The tragedy of the commons (in which individuals or nations acting in their own self-interest overexploit or destroy a shared resource, to the detriment of everyone including themselves), ignorant denial (“temperatures have always gone up and down”), concerns about job losses, simple inconvenience and short-term greed, the relative abstraction of it all, and the slowness of the pot’s boiling, with the most serious consequences delayed.

The generations facing first heatwaves, droughts, and powerful storms, then dramatically rising sea levels, devastating floods, and intense agricultural stress, then Amazon die-back, the displacement of millions, the collapse of polar ice sheets, ecosystem failures, mass extinctions, food and water insecurity, and a decimated global economy—all now expected before 2100—those people will certainly find it hard to understand our far-reaching selfishness, and even harder to forgive.

And of course, if any one person will be seen as representing this short-sighted intransigence, it will be: Donald Trump. Because the US, in some sense, still leads the world. And the condemnation by future generations will fall through onto all those who voted for him.

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The author of THE UNINHABITABLE EARTH (review here) searches for a silver lining.

NY Times, David Wallace-Wells, 22 Jan 2025: Trump’s Paris Withdrawal Is Grimmer This Time

The line of destructive executive action on climate was entirely predictable on President Trump’s Day 1: withdrawal from the Paris agreement, a threat to clean-energy subsidies, a promise to ban offshore wind and radically accelerate the energy permitting process (though that last one contains, potentially, some upside). It’s not yet clear how all this will net out — executive actions are memos in search of policy, and the slow decline of emissions has proved pretty stubborn lately. But it isn’t likely to be salutary, and the symbolism is undeniably grim.

Grimmest, perhaps, was the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement — which, though it is a rerun of what he did in 2017, takes place in a very different global environment.

Eight years ago, when Trump made a show of exiting Paris while “Summertime” played in the White House Rose Garden, it helped kick off a remarkable period of worldwide solidaristic backlash — the global climate equivalent of the liberal “resistance.” We owe much of the climate progress of the last decade to that resistance — to climate protesters, sympathetic prime ministers and presidents and legislators, entrepreneurs and banks and asset managers who understood the urgency of action clearly enough to see it as a financial opportunity, too.

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Coincidentally today I’m reading a book called THE MISINFORMATION AGE, subtitled “How False Beliefs Spread”, by Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, a book from 2019 that I’m just getting around to. Its thesis is that misinformation spreads in social settings (not because people are stupid, or subject to psychological biases), something I’ve suspected for some time, but the second chapter, “What Is Truth?”, discusses two examples of how scientific ‘truth’ is disputed by those who have vested interested in maintaining the status quo, i.e. doing nothing to ameliorate climatic threats. The ozone layer, and acid rain, both understood centuries ago but which were recognized as active threats in the 1970s. Science is never absolutely certain, so DuPont pushed back against (trivial) uncertainties to maintain manufacture of CFCs. Studies of acid rain were conclusive, but in the early ’80s Reagan appointed a member of the advisory committee on the subject who concluded that the cheapest thing to do was to do nothing. And so nothing was done, until Reagan left the White House.

But both were eventually solved, by acknowledging the science.

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We see this again and again. As humanity fills up the planet and has ever-increasing effects on the biosphere and the climate, some people perceive the consequences and want to take action; others deny the evidence either because they are stupid (some of them are; they can’t perceive consequences beyond the very short-term) or selfish. The latter don’t care about the future; they are more interested whatever benefits them right now. So it is, apparently, about Trump, and his fans.

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Here’s another way of putting this issue. Humans are responsible for their own future. We can’t keep blaming things on God. And those who do are dim, or selfish.

Vox, Bryan Walsh, 22 Jan 2025: There are no “acts of God” anymore, subtitled “The Los Angeles wildfires show the influence of humanity in the world — and our inability to control it.”

Originally, an “act of God” was largely a way for insurers to get out of paying claims. At a time when risk assessment and prevention was still primitive, natural disasters and other acts of God were generally not covered, because there was no way to insure against what was still unforeseeable.

But as both the insurance industry and risk prediction matured, that category began to shrink. Storms could be forecast; seismic zones could be identified; flood zones could be calculated. Insurers could price specific policies for specific risks with greater and greater confidence; if we couldn’t always prevent a disaster, increasingly we could at least see it coming and know why, and therefore prepare. It wasn’t the gods or God who made the earth move — it was the movement of tectonic plates.

The writer discusses the problem of evil, and Greek ideas of gods.

The environmentalist and tech thinker Stewart Brand has a quote that always stuck with me: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.”

…
The problem is, we are not good at it. Being gods, I mean — not yet. I believe that the Los Angeles wildfires are largely the result of human action, or inaction. The greenhouse gases we’ve pumped into the atmosphere, contributing to the “hydroclimate whiplash” that primed LA’s forests to burn. The housing and insurance policies that put too many homes in a wildfire danger zone, too many of which were built to burn. The small mistakes of judgement in the governmental response to the fires, and the bigger errors of overconfidence that made it possible to believe that such a place as Los Angeles could exist where it did, and everything would be fine.

But the precise combination of factors that led to the fires, and the precise series of actions to take Los Angeles into a safer future — that is much, much harder to know. Which doesn’t stop the avalanche of voices who are perfectly confident in exactly who is at fault and what we should do. It’s a pattern I see in global challenge after global challenge, from artificial intelligence to pandemics to climate change. And I believe that attitude is why, increasingly, the aftermath of a disaster isn’t unity, but division. Each side is convinced they alone know who is at fault, and they alone know how to fix it.

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I’m tickled how Paul Krugman, now on Substack every day, concludes each column with a video of a song, as I’ve done intermittently over the years. Today, I’ll copy his. A live version of “In Your Eyes.” One of the best Peter Gabriel songs.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

Party of Hypocrites

Posted on Tuesday 21 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s pardons of the January 6th rioters was an act of contempt, and a violation of the Constitutional standards he claims to uphold;
  • Trump and his minions show contempt for an Episcopal bishop at Washington’s National Cathedral who pled for mercy to gays and transgenders;
  • Connie Willis on Biden’s pardons and the rationales for them that Trump and his fans cannot comprehend.

Following directly from previous post. What Trump did do on his first day in office was pardon some 1500 rioters (he called them hostages!!) who attacked the Capital in 2021. So much for the party of law and order (thought it’s not the first time).

NY Times, Opinion by the Editorial Board, 20 Jan 2025: Trump’s Opening Act of Contempt

On Jan. 6, 2021, Philip Sean Grillo, a former Republican district leader in Queens, jumped through a broken window at the U.S. Capitol with a megaphone. He pushed his way past a line of Capitol Police officers and opened the exterior doors of the Rotunda to allow other rioters to enter the building and trash it. “We stormed the Capitol!” he exulted on video, and was seen smoking marijuana and high-fiving other Donald Trump supporters who were fighting the police. “We shut it down! We did it!”

Nearly three years later, a federal jury convicted Mr. Grillo of multiple offenses. But he did not lose heart: Last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison, he had a special taunt for the federal district judge who sentenced him, Royce Lamberth.

“Trump’s going to pardon me anyways,” he yelled at the judge, just before he was handcuffed and led away.

He was right. On Monday evening, several hours after President Trump was inaugurated, he fulfilled a promise he had repeatedly made to pardon nearly all the rioters who attacked and desecrated the Capitol in 2021 to prevent Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. Mr. Grillo and about 1,500 other rioters received full pardons from Mr. Trump, while 14 others received commuted sentences.

A presidential pardon for Mr. Grillo not only makes a mockery of his jury’s verdict and of Judge Lamberth’s sentence. Mr. Trump’s mass pardon effectively makes a mockery of a justice system that has labored for four years to charge nearly 1,600 people who tried to stop the Constitution in its tracks, a system that convicted 1,100 of them and sentenced more than 600 of them to prison.

Most important, the mass pardon sends a message to the country and the world that violating the law in support of Mr. Trump and his movement will be rewarded, especially when considered alongside his previous pardons of his advisers. It loudly proclaims, from the nation’s highest office, that the rioters did nothing wrong, that violence is a perfectly legitimate form of political expression and that no price need be paid by those who seek to disrupt a sacred constitutional transfer of power.

Say what you will about the pardons Biden issued —

The presidential pardon system is usually abused in modern times by departing presidents giving a final gift to cronies, donors or relatives, and those breaches of trust are bad enough. Mr. Biden issued dubious pardons to his son and, as he walked out the door, several other family members, as well as pre-emptive pardons to an array of current and former government officials for noncriminal actions, all to protect them from potential Republican retribution — an expansive use of pardon power that further warps its purpose.

But what Mr. Trump did Monday is of an entirely different scope. He used a mass pardon at the beginning of his term to write a false chapter of American history, to try to erase a crime committed against the foundations of American democracy.

— Trump interpreted this, in his simple-minded way, of being evidence of guilt. Because his rioters were obviously guilty! And so — yet again: projection.

The piece ends:

On his first day back in public office, Mr. Trump provoked the danger that the judge dreads, setting loose hundreds of people found guilty of participating in a violent assault on the nation’s Capitol — not because they committed no crimes but because they committed their crimes in his name. In doing so, he invites such crimes to happen again.

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And

Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 20 Jan 2025: The right’s propaganda machine gets its Jan. 6 pardons

President Donald Trump’s January 6 pardons mark the culmination of the MAGA media’s yearslong campaign to remove the stain from his supporters’ violent assault on the U.S. Capitol — and for their own culpability in that attempted coup.

On the first day of his second term, Trump is apparently giving clemency to every participant in the January 6, 2021 insurrection. Speaking to reporters while signing executive orders in the Oval Office, he said he would be signing full pardons for “approximately 1,500 people” while providing six commutations. He appears to be wiping the slate clean for all of what he has ludicrously termed the “J6 hostages,” including hundreds convicted of violent assaults on law enforcement. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of crimes including seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack and sentenced to 22 years in prison, is getting out tonight.

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And

Slate, Aymann Ismail, 21 Jan 2025: The Trump Pardons That Will Haunt America

On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed dozens of executive orders that sought to reach into nearly every corner of America life. Yet that was overshadowed by Trump’s unprecedented, sweeping pardons and commutations for nearly all of the roughly 1,500 people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among those pardoned were high-profile figures convicted of seditious conspiracy and violent assaults that left dozens of police officers injured. Though Trump had promised the move, its broad scope reportedly surprised even members of his inner circle. Just days before being sworn in as vice president, J.D. Vance told reporters that the most violent perpetrators “obviously” shouldn’t be pardoned.

The piece is an interview with Jacob Ware, co-author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.

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More on the theme of Republican/conservative hypocrisy.

NPR, 21 Jan 2025: Bishop confronts Trump during sermon at inaugural prayer service

During a prayer service at Washington’s National Cathedral Tuesday, the Episcopal bishop of Washington directly confronted President Trump while he and Vice President J.D. Vance were seated in the front row.

“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, as she appeared to look towards the president.

“There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

This came just one day after Trump issued a slate of executive orders, including one which has a section dedicated to “recognizing that women are biologically distinct from me,” one that declared a national emergency at the country’s southern border and issued several others related to immigration, including one attempting to do away with birthright citizenship.

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Trump and his fans were enraged.

JMG, 21 Jan 2025: Cultists Rage After “Woke” Bishop Urges Trump To “Find Compassion” For Migrants And LGBTQ Children [VIDEO]

A round-up of responses to that sermon, from various X tweets, which I’ll excerpt:

  • JD Vance starts laughing and Melania Trump is smiling at the National Prayer Service when they hear “let us pray for the most vulnerable.”
  • This woman should never step foot in the National Cathedral again — in any capacity.
  • Todd Starnes: Franklin Graham tells me on my podcast that the National Cathedral has fallen into the hands of LGBT activists. So, it’s not surprising this “lady bishop” spewed hate at Donald Trump today. National Cathedral has become a sanctuary of Satan.
  • The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.

WWJD? It continues to astonish me that conservatives who claim to revere Jesus, and the Founders, continually defy both. Trump and his minions are all vile. And I don’t know why the supposed “Christian” base of his supporters does not see that. Clearly I’m misunderstanding something. I am wrong for taking Christians at their word, perhaps. I should have learned better by now.

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There are too many commentaries about Trump and the inauguration and his first day to keep up with. But I’ll quote from SF writer Connie Willis’ post yesterday; she understands.

Facebook, CW Daily’s Post, 20 Jan 2025: Some Thoughts to Get You Through Inauguration Day–and the Next Four Years

–Biden pre-emptively pardoned a number of people Trump and Kash Patel have announced their intention of going after: Dr. Fauci, General Mark Milley, the members of the January 6 Committee (including Liz Cheney, Trump’s number one target) and all their staffers, plus the police officers who testified before the January 6th committee.

–Biden said of the pardons: “The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgement that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense. Our nation owes these public servants a debt of gratitude for their tireless commitment to our country.”

–Here’s Dr. Fauci’s response, which I think is pitch perfect: “Let me be perfectly clear: I have committed no crime, and there are no possible grounds for any allegation or threat of criminal investigation or prosecution of me. The fact is, however, that the mere articulation of these baseless threats and the potential that they will be acted upon, creat immeasurable and intolerable distress for me and my family. For these reasons, I acknowledge and appreciate the action that President Biden has taken today on my behalf.”

–The sputtering fury from MAGAs and Republican Congressmen and Senators, screaming that they’ll go after them in state courts and open new investigations into their actions, shows that these pardons were completely necessary. Thank God Biden did it. And that he did it at the very last minute so that Trump didn’t have the chance to forestall the pardons.

These motivations are too subtle for Trump and his fans to understand, apparently. To them, everyone is guilty, but if Trump has the power, he’ll pardon the guilty on his side. Because it’s not about law and order, it’s about his tribe vs. everyone else.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Politics | Leave a comment

A New Cycle of Doom: Trump’s Second Inauguration

Posted on Monday 20 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • What I said about the inaugurations 4 and 8 years ago;
  • About Trump’s inauguration this morning, a fact-check of his speech, and how he did not place his hand on the Bible;
  • Paul Krugman on lies, David A. Graham on Trump’s 19th-century imperialism, Frank Bruni on Trump’s most memorable line;
  • And AP’s site tracking Trump’s presidential promises, which I look forward to checking frequently.

So this time I did watch Trump’s inauguration. My habit in recent years is to watch an hour and a half or so of the Today Show beginning at 7am, for news updates in the first 20 minutes, and then in the background as I dress and eat breakfast and glance at the newspaper (which I read more thoroughly over lunch). This morning coverage of the inaugural began right at 7am Pacific Time, 10am Washington DC time, so it was hard to avoid.

Eight years ago I did not watch the inauguration. Here’s what I wrote then:

I’m not sure I can still keep watching the TV news, including the Today Show. I cannot stand watching the vile, despicable person with his fourth-grade vocabulary who seems to be our new president, nor the simpering propaganda minister Kellyanne Conway, who, if Trump really did shoot someone on 5th avenue, would come on TV the next morning to explain how what he did was perfectly appropriate, and, anyway, Hillary.

There seems to be nothing that Donald Trump can say or do, however vile, that his supporters will not defend, and condemn anyone who does not.

Kellyanne Conway, of course, is long gone. For all that Trump demands loyalty from those he hires to work for him, he has remarkably little loyalty towards them. So many of them turn out to be incompetent or “not very nice people” or whatever other fourth-grade words he uses, and get fired.

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Four years ago, I did watch Biden’s inauguration. Here’s what I wrote then:

What most struck me today — aside from the moving, traditional inauguration ceremony, with its speakers and singers — were several articles about how supporters of QAnon are apparently astonished that its claims didn’t come true — that Trump didn’t triumphantly appear to arrest or kill Biden and rescue all the babies the Satanists were going to slaughter.

With a bunch of links about Trump, in various ways.

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Today, then. Much was made of Trump wanting to be inaugurated, or perhaps speak, at precisely 11:47 local time, for some kind of symbology of his being the 47th president. They missed it by about 14 minutes. If I understand correctly, Biden’s term ended at noon precisely, and Trump wasn’t sworn in until 12:01pm.

Trump’s speech was oddly deadpan, which commentators said meant he read it from a monitor without extemporizing, but full of his usual nonsense anyway. The US is a disaster, we’re being taken advantage of, yadda yadda. But a new golden age of America begins today. He characterized the past four years as a disaster, with Biden sitting right there. He repeated lies and misrepresentations and oversimplifications.

Trump and his fans don’t believe in facts, but the fact-checkers soldier on.

CNN, 20 Jan 2025: Trump’s inaugural address, annotated and fact-checked

He emphasized God, a clear appeal to the MAGA crowd, and to the Constitution, though his goals involve repealing one of the amendments. He lied about record inflation. The US already produces more oil than any other country. He wants to end every kind of responsible action to fight climate change; drill, baby, drill. He still thinks tariffs will solve everything. He wants to end government censorship, which means fact-checking, which means he wants conservatives to be able to lie on social media. He’s going to pass a law declaring that there are only two genders — yet another example of conservatives needing to reduce everything to black and white, despite evidence, despite the testimony of real people. (What is he going to do with those real people who do not feel themselves to be black or white?)

My favorite fact-check, which I don’t have a link to at the moment, is that Trump rails against immigrants as “asylum seekers” because he thinks “asylum” means “insane asylum” which is why he keeps repeating that point. It doesn’t. He’s a dimwit.

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Trump didn’t place his hand on the Bible while he took his oath of office. Imagine the outrage if a Democrat did that.

Salon, Nicholas Liu, 20 Jan 2025: Trump fails to place hand on Bible when being sworn into office

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Paul Krugman, 20 Jan 2025: The Lies of the Powerful Are Still Lies

Trump ran a campaign based entirely on lies, and his victory doesn’t make those lies true. No, the price of bacon didn’t quadruple or quintuple. No, America isn’t experiencing a vast wave of crime driven by immigrants.

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We all got to see how tall Barron Trump is.

The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 20 Jan 2025: The Gilded Age of Trump Begins Now, subtitled “His second inaugural address promised a ‘golden age,’ but the ideas in it evoked the late 1800s more than any recent presidency.”

Trump invoked a new “golden age.”

Perhaps it would be more aptly called a Gilded Age. Trump was joined in the Capitol Rotunda by many of the nation’s richest and most powerful men, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg. The attendance of the business titans was rendered conspicuous by the small space.

Just as significant was his invocation of “manifest destiny,” a rather outmoded, even embarrassing, concept about American having a divine right to expand and conquer other people.

The speech was saturated with 19th-century imperialism. Trump announced that he would order the name of America’s highest peak to be changed from Denali back to its old name, Mount McKinley, and he extolled the 25th president’s use of tariffs. (Left unmentioned was the fact that William McKinley was beloved, and bankrolled, by the plutocrats of his era, and twice defeated the populist William Jennings Bryan.) Trump also said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America,” and he promised to “pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars,” invoking the controversial slogan of expansionism. Picking up an idea he had voiced in recent weeks, he also vowed to seize the Panama Canal from Panama.

And his presumption that

“I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said, describing the failed assassination attempt against him last summer. “Over the past eight years I have been tested and challenged more than any other president in our 250-year history.” (Perhaps he forgot that McKinley was more than just grazed by an assassin’s bullet.)

That appealed to the MAGA crowd, no doubt.

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Frank Bruni discusses some of the same points.

NY Times, Frank Bruni, 20 Jan 2025: The Line in Trump’s Speech That Will Echo in Time

Not about being saved by God.

His strangely subdued manner contradicted a ludicrously colossal agenda and an even more colossal sense of self. It’s said that our most distinctive traits intensify as we age, and Trump is that maxim made president (again), his vindictiveness and vanity at their peak.

In one of his speech’s other most memorable lines, he claimed, “Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history.” That’s a crazily reductive read of the American story. I wonder what God would say about it.

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What I’m looking forward to is checking sites like this, over the next months and years.

Associated Press: Tracking Trump’s presidential promises, subtitled “Donald Trump made a lot of big promises during his 2024 run for the White House. The Associated Press is tracking some of them. Here’s a look at whether Trump is delivering on key commitments”

He can sign executive orders, but there’s no way he can lower the price of groceries, all by himself, among many other things. Which, if you believe them, was a priority among his MAGA voters. Will they ever realize they’ve been had?

— Perhaps I should add this. I’m not interested in score-keeping his list of ‘promises.’ It’s easy to sign a stack of executive orders. I’m interested in whether, and how quickly, Trump and his fans realize that all his extravagant promises about what will happen in the world won’t happen soon, if ever. He’s already broken the one about ending the war in Ukraine on Day One, for example. And has admitted it will be ‘hard’ to lower grocery prices. He talks as if he’ll not only be president, but a king, or even a wizard, who can wave his magic wand and just make things happen. No, he’s a huckster.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Politics | Leave a comment

For Certain Values of Great

Posted on Sunday 19 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

From Facebook, a few days ago. The science fiction writer Robert Charles Wilson attempts to summarize the current condition in a single sentence.

Facebook, Robert Charles Wilson, 11 Jan 2025: via David Gerrold.

The concentration of wealth is driving novel communication technologies that are creating a tsunami of misinformation that enables the emergence of far-right political entities that further protect and capture wealth by gutting democratic governance and suppressing knowledge about climate and environmental emergencies through the devaluation of education and science at a time when artificial intelligence begins to transform the nature of war and competition for resources risks armed conflict between nuclear-armed nations no longer constrained by a liberal ideology of cooperation and human rights.

Inequality and oligarchs, check. Misinformation, check. Suppressing knowledge about climate change, check. AI, check. …

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NY Times, Opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 15 Jan 2025: You’ll Never Guess Who Trump’s New Favorite President Is

When was America great? What does MAGA want to go back to? Trump never says exactly.

And yet Trump does have a sense of when America was great. You can see it in the substance of his second-term agenda. What does he want to do with another four years? Trump seems to imagine an American autarky: a closed nation, self-sufficient and indifferent to the rest of the world.

And

Imposing tariffs, expanding territory, a new Mexican war and a traditional vision of the American people — these are what the nation needs, Trump says, to be “great again.” In which case, MAGA cannot possibly refer to anything in the 20th century, when the United States essentially built the modern international order, as much as it must refer to some time in the 19th century, when the United States was a more closed and insular society: a second-rate nation whose economy was far smaller and less prosperous than our own.

And so Trump is obsessed now with President William McKinley, who occupied the White House from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. The Guilded Age, when the rich got richer.

Indeed, as a billionaire himself, Trump has every reason to look back to the late 19th century as a golden age, a time when wealth was an even more direct path to political power than it is now. A time when the American political system sputtered and struggled under the weight of endemic corruption. When with enough cash on hand, a railroad magnate or a steel baron could buy a set of politicians for himself, to do with as he pleased. It was a time when public power was too weak and limited in scope to stand as an effective counterweight to private fortunes, and where the laboring classes were under the heel of powerful corporations, whose allies in government were often ready and willing to use force to stifle discontent.

(As my discussion of Lakoff suggested: reducing the power of the government gives the wealthy opportunities to become more wealthy.)

And so:

If what Trump idolizes is some part of the 19th century, then to “make America great again” is to make the United States a poorer, more isolated place, whose economy and government is little more than an engine of upward redistribution for a handful of the wealthiest people on the planet.

In fairness to the incoming president, there is no reason to think that he has any of these precedents in his head. What he has, instead, is a deeply rooted sense that the world is a fundamentally zero-sum place and that American greatness means that others must be diminished. His zero-sum, social Darwinistic intuitions are echoes of an earlier age of reactionary aggression and shameless avarice. There is no such thing for Trump as a positive exchange or a mutually beneficial relationship. There is only winning and losing, the dominant and the dominated.

I’ve said this before too: conservatives view life as a zero-sum game, while the arc of history has been advancement for all via non-zero-sum games. Trump is the epitome of tribal mentality. And apparently many many people are sympathetic to his worldview.

Posted in conservatives, Culture, Politics | Leave a comment

Immigration, Economic Growth, and the Limits of the Planet

Posted on Saturday 18 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • NYT has ideas about regulating immigration, given the assumption that America needs more people;
  • Paul Krugman looks at economic growth (and Scott Bessent);
  • But neither of them addresses the impact of continued economic growth, or expansion of the population, on the Earth’s biosphere and the survival of the human race.

I find this piece interesting, but for reasons different than a concern about the immigration crisis.

NY Times, Opinion by The Editorial Board, 10 Jan 2025: A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess

The problem is immigration, the board says, and the inability to regulate it. (But the real problem is something else, I would say.)

There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year.

Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.

In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities might disappear. The challenges prompted Fumio Kishida, then the prime minister, to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

I have two or three reactions. First, this concern about a shrinking population is also part of the right-wing’s panic machine. You hear this especially from Musk. Have more babies! And in other countries: Japan, mentioned above, and China, which repealed its one-child policy meant to control overpopulation. Second, this is a legitimate problem, in some sense, as some argue, for reasons like the unsustainability of keeping the older population alive with a shrinking base of younger people to pay social security taxes, or occupy the jobs needed to take care of those olders.

But third, taking the bigger picture, humanity cannot simply keep expanding its population indefinitely, without further ruining Earth’s ecosphere and exacerbating climate change, which is a far bigger problem than putting a strain on public services.

I’ll summarize the pieces recommended “three big shifts in federal policy” to solve current concerns.

1. Prevent illegal immigration;
2. Expand legal immigration;
3. Deal humanely with the illegal immigrants already here, including the “Dreamers.”

Versions of this tripartite approach were once embraced by political leaders in both parties. But in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status, while Republicans increasingly portrayed even legal immigration as a negative force in American life. The influx of immigrants into the country, in record numbers in the modern era, has overwhelmed red and blue state approaches. Both parties need a reality check.

…
Mr. Trump, for his part, is mistaken to portray immigration as a drain on the nation’s resources. He should be condemned for his routinely bigoted portrayal of immigrants, often in defiance of the facts, as a danger to the American people and to the nation’s identity.

Instead, immigration ought to be regarded as an investment in the nation’s future.

The piece goes on at great length with examples of immigrants’ stories. But it never deals with the issue of an indefinitely expanding population, and its strain on the Earth’s biosphere. *That* is the real issue, the existential problem to be solved: How can humanity adopt a “sustainable” existence on Earth that does not threaten its ability to sustain us? This will entail massive shift in cultural assumptions and priorities, and an end to the idea that the economy needs to “grow” indefinitely. That, I recall someone saying, is the policy of the cancer cell.

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As it happens, we have this complementary piece from Paul Krugman.

Paul Krugman, Krugman wonks out, 17 Jan 2025: Voodoo, MAGA Style, subtitled “Republicans still believe in magic-based policy”

Beginning:

Patriotism is still, I guess, the last refuge of scoundrels. But for the past 45 years or so — ever since Reagan — economic growth has come a close second. The left isn’t completely free from this nonsense, but mostly what we see are right-wing politicians justifying cruel and/or irresponsible policies — massive tax cuts for the rich, harsh treatment of the poor and working class — with the claim that all will be well because these policies will unleash rapid economic growth.

Donald Trump has brought his own brand of nonsense, with claims that tariffs can make foreigners pay for everything. But the old voodoo is still very much part of the mix.

And then he talks about Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary.

The other day I wrote about Trump’s team of economic yes-men, but I didn’t say anything about Bessent, who was widely regarded as a relatively conventional, reassuring pick. Yet Bessent’s “3-3-3” economic plan — or maybe it’s just a concept of a plan, since he has provided no specifics about how he might achieve his goals — is full-on magical thinking.

I won’t talk right now about Bessent’s implausible claims that he can increase oil production by 3 million barrels a day or reduce the budget deficit to 3 percent of G.D.P.; Catherine Rampell is good on these. Instead, let me narrow the focus to his claim that he can raise economic growth to 3 percent.

And then follows many charts and technical discussion — remember this Substack blog is called “Krugman wonks out.” I’ll reproduce just the first one here, above, which he refers to as “a stylized picture of how the economy behaves over time.”

Yet Krugman doesn’t challenge the presumption that the goal is indefinite economic growth. What he does is challenge how Republicans think they can accomplish this; thus the allusion to “voodoo economics.”

Well, Republicans believe, or claim to believe, that they can sharply raise productivity growth by cutting taxes on the rich. You could say that claim is unsupported by evidence. But that’s too weak; in fact, it’s powerfully rejected by the evidence.

With more charts.

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I’ll save kibble for next time.

Posted in conservatives, Economics, Politics | Leave a comment

Lakoff on “Privateering,” and the Consequences of Shrinking the Government

Posted on Friday 17 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

More things are fitting together. Conservatives, be careful what you wish for.

Chapter 7 of the Lakoff book, THE POLITICAL MIND, which I passed over in my review, is about what he calls “privateering.”

This is when government services are handed off to private corporations. (As those guys who want to cut the government by $2 trillion would have to do.) The process involves enablers, dismantling acts, privateers themselves, and so on. (Lakoff goes into detail.) The results increase profits for stockholders and executives of those corporations, at the expense of the government’s mission to protect and empower citizens. And, crucial point, the public ends up paying much more for those services than they would have through their taxes.

(Lakoff’s basis, as I didn’t quite spell out in my review, is that progressives, driven by empathy, think the government has a moral mission to provide protection, and empowerment. That that’s what government is for. In contrast to conservatives’ obsession with hierarchy, obedience, and discipline.)

In fact I read about one example a about a year ago (on a plane flight back from Austin), without realizing it was an example of a larger issue. This was in Cory Doctorow’s novel The Bezzle, a contemporary novel about a forensic accountant, a ponzi scheme on Catalina Island, and the privatization of California’s Department of Corrections. The effects of that privatization include making it much more difficult, and expensive, to visit prisoners because, well, the private owners are mostly interested in “how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy.” (Per the description on the Amazon page.)

So this has really happened. Lakoff provides three other examples, as of the Fall of 2007. First: Blackwater, the private army of mercenaries (called security guards), that fought the Iraq War, charging the US government $445,000 per security guard—who were earlier trained by the government at taxpayer expense. Second, the FDA, whose funding was cut, sending responsibility for drug testing to the pharma companies. Who then fudged many of the results, because, well, profits win out. Third, health care. Health insurance companies make their money by denying health care. (Thus the rage of the guy who murdered that HealthCare CEO a few weeks ago.) Their overhead is far higher than Medicare’s. Americans resist the idea of universal healthcare (as somehow being socialist?) while being fine with police and fire service (that are just as ‘socialist’). Conservatives, who somehow think people don’t “deserve” health care, prefer privateering it. Which, as it happens, makes (conservative) businessmen more money.

The motivations of government agencies, no matter how inefficient you think they might be, are fundamentally different from the motivations of private organizations. Conservatives seem not to realize that.

Lakoff’s point is that privateering isn’t always bad, but we need to ask whether the moral mission of the government is compromised or not. And what does cognitive science say? That anything can be framed.

Stepping back. What are conservatives primarily concerned about? Small government, and big business. See now how those things fit together? Despite the naivete and cynicism (not skepticism) about what “big government” or the “deep state” actually does, and the inevitable inefficiency that comes with any kind of bureaucracy, I suspect there’s very little that the government does that someone wouldn’t complain about it if weren’t there. So if conservatives blast the government and push to privatize everything, why would that be? Not just to keep the government out of their private lives. But because a few of them, at least, will make a lot more money.

So all those conservatives who advocate a small government should be careful what they wish for. If the government shrinks, most of its services will be provided by someone else. Who then? People whose primary motive is profit. And that’s how the rich get richer. And private citizens end up paying more for services that used to be provided by the government.

Posted in conservatives, Economics, Politics | Leave a comment

Cynics, Conspiracies, and the Oligarchy

Posted on Friday 17 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • RFK Jr. is a cynic, not a skeptic;
  • Conservatives would rather punish California than deal with the climate crisis;
  • Paul Krugman on how Trump has no plans, only yes-men;
  • Why the decline of DEI is a worry;
  • Peter Thiel now apparently really believes the conspiracies he’s been floating;
  • MAGA is getting an oligarchy, not lower grocery prices;
  • Trump has found two, even three, MAGA allies in Hollywood to give made-up positions to;
  • The common good vs. putting conditions on California wildfire aid;
  • Crossing the 1.5 degree mark and the descent into nationalism.

It’s always been necessary to clarify the difference between a skeptic and a cynic. RFK Jr. pretends to be the former, but is really the latter.

NY Times, Paul A. Offit, 13 Jan 2025: Don’t Call Kennedy a Vaccine Skeptic. Call Him What He Is: A Cynic.

The news media labels Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a vaccine skeptic. He’s not. I’m an actual vaccine skeptic. In fact, everyone who serves with me on the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine advisory committee is a vaccine skeptic. Pharmaceutical companies must prove to us that a vaccine is safe, that it’s effective. Then and only then will we recommend that it be authorized or licensed for use by Americans.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, is a vaccine cynic, failing to accept studies that refute his beliefs. He claims that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine causes autism, despite more than a dozen studies performed in seven countries on three continents involving thousands of children showing that it doesn’t.

…
When Mr. Kennedy says he wants vaccines to be better studied, what he really seems to be saying is he wants studies that confirm his fixed, immutable, science-resistant beliefs. That’s not skepticism.

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Similarly, in the way conservatives deny reality:

Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 13 Jan 2025: Republicans see the LA wildfires as an opportunity to punish California, subtitled “People who refuse to do anything about the real crisis we’re facing, climate change, pounce straight to punishment”

But I confess that I am shocked at the monumental lack of grace, empathy and compassion coming from the right as this horrific emergency unfolds. … [T]the right-wing media, influencers and Republican politicians have been stunningly callous about this ghastly event, even for them.

Simplistic reactions.

Where does this madness come from? As historian Rick Perlstein pointed out in this piece from back in 2016, Trump likely got it originally from conspiracist Alex Jones. More recently, as you can see from that speech, it was former congressman and current CEO of Trump’s Truth Social media platform Devin Nunes who apparently filled his head with a simplistic tale about a big “valve” that Newsom (and Gov. Jerry Brown before him) refused to turn on to fill Southern California with all the water it could ever want because they want to save a “little fish.” (This piece at Vox lays out what this is really all about if you’re interested but suffice it to say that nothing Trump, Jones or Nunes said applies to Los Angeles or these wildfires.)

And from Trump:

Not one word of sympathy for the victims of the fire or any promise to follow through on federal help for the area. And one lie after another.

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Paul Krugman: Trump still has no plan.

Paul Krugman, 15 Jan 2025: Trump’s Team of Economic Yes-Men, subtitled “Or, why he still has no plan”

Donald Trump won in November because many voters believed that he would bring down grocery prices; Republicans apparently still think he will, even though he himself admitted — after the election, of course — that it would be “very hard.” Here’s a clearer picture, via Briefing Book, showing that while Democrats, like most economists, expect inflation to rise under Trump, Republicans believe that he will somehow stop it dead in its tracks:

[ see graph above ]

But what will he actually do? Even though he will take office in just a few days, we have almost no idea.

That’s not because the Trump team is keeping its plans closely held, nor is it because there are major factional fights. All the evidence suggests, instead, that Trump’s economic team still doesn’t have any plans, or even concepts of plans. All it has are some half-formulated thoughts about how to cater to Trump’s prejudices without doing massive economic damage.

He never had a plan for replacing Obamacare, either.

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Conservatives going backward, that’s what they do. Just let white men run the world, things will be fine!

Washington Post, Perry Bacon Jr., 15 Jan 2025: We should be very worried about the decline of DEI, subtitled “It’s another indication that the United States is going backward, only four years after the George Floyd protests.”

Diversity, equity and inclusion was never the whole solution. But it was a small part of the changes we need to create a country where Black lives, lesbian lives, female lives and others are truly valued and respected. That DEI is dying as Trump is set to begin his second term isn’t an accident but part of the same story. America’s moral arc is not bending toward justice — and I don’t know when it will again.

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Case study of the flaws in human nature that result in commitments to things that are not true.

The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, 15 Jan 2025: MAGA’s Demon-Haunted World, subtitled “Peter Thiel is the latest pro-Trump luminary to take a conspiracist turn.”

The essay opens with this open secret (to those outside the MAGA cult):

Just two years ago, Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox News showed that many right-wing influencers didn’t believe a word of the stuff they were peddling to their audiences. In text messages that surfaced during litigation, top Fox anchors and executives poured scorn on the idea that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, even as the network amplified that conspiracy theory to its audience. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it,” Tucker Carlson wrote in one message.

Then:

Today, though, some of the country’s most mainstream, most influential conservatives are stoking paranoid conspiracism—and seem to genuinely believe what they’re saying.

Peter Thiel and JFK, the coronavirus, Jeffrey Epstein’s death. And how the writer came to realize that Thiel really believes this stuff.

The correct response to uncertainty is humility, not conspiracy. But conspiracy is exactly what many of those who are influential in Trump’s orbit have succumbed to—everything must be a product of the DISC, or the deep state, or the World Economic Forum, or other sinister and hidden controlling hands.

We see this every day, as I keep pointing out; everything out of the ordinary must be *caused* by some conspiracy. Things can’t just happen. It’s all about narratives, how everything must happen for a reason. Concluding:

What can we learn from this kind of credulity? First, that maintaining an appropriate level of skepticism is the intellectual discipline needed to navigate the rest of the 2020s. Yes, the legacy media will get things wrong. But that doesn’t mean you should believe every seductive narrative floating around online, particularly when it’s peddled by those who are trying to sell you something.

The second lesson is that, no matter how smart a person might be in their business dealings, humans are all prone to the same lizard-brain preference for narratives over facts. That makes choosing your information sources carefully even more important. If you spend all day listening to people who think that every inexplicable event has a malevolent hand behind it, you will start to believe that too. The fact that this paranoia has eaten up America’s most influential men is an apokálypsis of its own.

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Now you’re just getting an oligarchy, MAGA fans. Not lower grocery prices.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 16 Jan 2025: Tech billionaires expose MAGA’s “populism” con job, subtitled “MAGA ‘populism’ was always an inch deep — Trump’s billionaire-palooza proves it”

The entirety of Donald Trump’s con artist schtick to bamboozle his followers was perfectly illustrated in one recent photograph. In it, the president-elect sits grinning maniacally next to fellow rich white guy James Quincey, CEO of Coca-Cola. Clutched in Trump’s famously short fingers is an expensive, specialty-made “commemorative” Diet Coke.

…
On Tuesday, NBC News reported that tech billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg will all have prominent seats on the platform at Trump’s inauguration. The symbolism is unmistakable. Those seats are usually reserved for family members, former presidents, and prominent politicians. Giving those seats to billionaires signals loudly that this is a new era of oligarchy, without even an attempt to feign allegiance to pre-Trump notions of government for and by the people. President Joe Biden was alarmed enough to make this issue the focal point of his final speech in office.

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” Biden said in his 17-minute farewell address from the Oval Office Wednesday night.

There was a section of Lakoff’s book, the one I recently reviewed, about “privateering,” a concept that’s apt here. Let me follow up on this another time.

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Great subtitle.

Salon, Alex Galbraith, 16 Jan 2025: Trump nominates Voight, Stallone, Gibson as ambassadors to Hollywood, subtitled “Will the last Californian ally Trump calls to serve in a made-up position please turn out the lights?”

Donald Trump has always been a showman, but he’s looking for a little help to break through in Tinseltown.

The president-elect and former game show host gave in to his “Apprentice”-honed instincts on Thursday, kicking off a mad dash of Cabinet nominations on Thursday with a bit of razzle-dazzle. Trump tagged actors Mel Gibson, Sylvester Stallone and Jon Voight to serve as his ambassadors to Hollywood, hoping the trio of MAGA allies could help usher in a new “Golden Age of Hollywood.”

Being a cosmopolitan kinda town, Hollywood has very few prominent right-wingers (slash conspiracy theorists), and Gibson and Voight are by far the two most prominent. Stallone is a borderline case, as the article explains, but perhaps three positions are better than two. Note how it’s always about recapturing a lost “golden age.”

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Trump identifies all the fellow tribalists he can find, and declares everyone else the enemy.

Robert Reich, 17 Jan 2025: The LA fire and the common good, subtitled “Are we all in this together or are we on our own?”

When conservatives are in charge?

Trump has spent much of the past week complaining — and lying — about California’s water policies, falsely claiming that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to deal with the fires. (The actual problem is that hydrants haven’t had enough water pressure to deal with the huge, sudden demand.)

Trump is now blaming the fires on migrants. He posted a claim this week that taxpayer “funds are diverted to illegal immigrants,” and then “an illegal immigrant comes and sets your house on fire and the fire department doesn’t have the resources to put it out.”

Now Republicans are talking about putting conditions on federal aid for wildfire relief — as if the Biden administration put conditions on southern states for hurricane relief, or as if some senator from Nebraska knows better how to prepare for wildfires than actual firefighters in California.

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The root cause of the fires is staring us all in the face, but conservatives would rather blame people they don’t like. (And/or they simply don’t understand the evidence and the conclusions the evidence implies.)

Slate, Eric Holthaus, 13 Jan 2025: Last Year Was the Hottest Year in Recorded History. Buckle Up., subtitled “Crossing the 1.5 degree mark isn’t as bad as you think. It’s worse.”

To me, the real consequence of crossing 1.5 degrees isn’t that any one thing breaks at 1.5 degrees. It’s that we’re slipping away from an era in which the community of nations came together for the common good of humanity—and moving toward an everyone-for-themselves descent into nationalism. It’s that any urgency we’ve felt so far, any actions we’ve taken, hasn’t been enough.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Narrative, Politics | Leave a comment

Jonathan Haidt, THE ANXIOUS GENERATION

Posted on Thursday 16 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled “How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”
(Penguin Press, March 2024, 385pp, including 90pp of acknowledgements, notes, references, and index.)

Here’s the latest by the author of one of my favorite books, THE RIGHTEOUS MIND (review ends here), whose past couple books have directly addressed current social issues. In 2018 there was THE CODDLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, co-written with Greg Lukianoff, (review here). (Lukianoff went on to write THE CANCELLING OF THE AMERICAN MIND with a different coauthor, in 2023; I haven’t read it yet.) Now we have by Haidt alone this book, about the effects of smartphones and social media. As causing mental illness.

Right away I am skeptical. Anyone with a sense of history, particularly the history of technology, will recall moral panics about this or that new device or medium. Radio, TV, comic books, paperback books, video games, cable TV. Actually, all the way back to printed scrolls! Which, one of those ancient Greeks or another felt would undermined the ability of students to *memorize* what they needed to know. Yes all these things changed how some people led their lives. Were they reasons to panic? Only to conservatives, who want nothing to change, for whom the past is always idealized. Haidt’s target here is social media, especially through hand-held devices, and their affect on adolescents. Especially girls. Causes of mental illness? Certainly conservatives of the past foresaw moral evil in comic books, not to mention racy movies and TV shows. But illness?

On the other hand, the topic of how much screen time is suitable for kids has been in the conversation for years. Parents and TV hosts debate about what age their kids should get their first smartphones. Or be allowed to have social media accounts. Students are distracted by their phones during class, so some schools prohibit their use, asking students to check-in their devices during the day.

I’ll summarize Haidt’s the book with the stipulation that this is another book I sampled, carefully, but did not read every word of. Too many books, etc. Haidt made it easy since, like some other authors (Deutsch comes to mind), he helpfully summarizes each chapter with a page or so of bullet points at the end. So my methodology of going through this book was, for each chapter, to read the bullet points first, and summarize them in my own notes, then go back and page through the chapter alert for any colorful graphs, photos, or anecdotes, and sometimes take additional notes. It also helped that probably half the content here is similar to ideas in that CODDLING book.

I’ll mention that, to my surprise, this book has been on bestseller lists ever since it came out, some nine months now. On the latest NY Times hardcover nonfiction list, this week, it’s back at #1, after 41 weeks on their list. And it’s #3 on this week’s Publishers Weekly list, a list which helpfully tracks how many “units” the title has sold in the past week, and to date. This book has sold over 500,00 copies to date, more than any other title on the nonfiction list. So clearly the book and its concerns are resonating with many people.

So then, to give the author’s premise its due. Part 1 is about “the surge of suffering.”  Haidt claims that data show a rise in teenage anxiety, depression, self-harming, and suicide beginning around 2010, among Gen Z, the first generation who went through puberty with smartphones. And has lots of charts, in this chapter, showing these data. So something more than moral panic is going on. He claims it’s all related to smartphones, particularly the release of the iPhone in 2008, and later the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons on social media sites.

Part 2 is about “the decline of play-based childhood.” We’ve evolved into cultural creatures, in which children need time to learn. Play is the work of childhood; puberty shouldn’t come too fast. Free play is necessary; mistakes are not very costly. Children use both a conformist bias and a prestige bias: peer pressure, and needing to stand out. (Aside: these are examples in which so-called psychological “biases” are not only useful, but crucial, so that children don’t have to learn about the world entirely by themselves. It’s when adults don’t outgrow such biases that they become a problem. This conformist bias is what Adair meant in the item #1 in my review which references page 67.3.) Social media feeds on the prestige bias, indicated by likes, shares, and comments.

Children are by nature anti-fragile. (The Codding book covered a lot of this.) They need play, even risky play, yet parents (at least in the Anglo world) because more fearful, elevating safetyism above all else. Their ‘defend mode’ overrode children’s ‘discover mode.’ Early puberty involves much brain rewiring, and safetyism blocks experiences needed to learn to manage risk, and develop self-governance. As do smartphones. Meanwhile, the rites of passage that marked adolescent transition to adulthood have largely become eliminated in Western societies. Perhaps even a secular society might need such sets of milestones, beyond the traditional ones of ages when one can see certain movies, drive a car, buy alcohol and vote. Author proposes a set of milestones. Age 6: family responsibility, age 8 local freedom, age 10 the age of roaming, age 12 apprenticeship, age 14 beginning of high school, 16, beginning of internet adulthood, 18 legal adulthood, 21, full legal adulthood.

Part 3 is about “the rise of the phone-based childhood.” The four foundational harms are social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. These are amplified by screens, which adolescents spend 7 hours a day looking at. Face-to-face time has dropped; sleep has declined in quality and quantity; smartphones create interruptions; and social media is designed to be addictive.

Girls are more affected by social media than boys; they’re more visually oriented, and motivated by communion; they’re concerned about reputation, and their aggression is often expressed as trying to harm the reputation of other girls. Boys are prone to “failure to launch”; Japanese men, to “hikikomori.” Social media allowed them to become internalized. And it provided them with unlimited hardcore porn. Some boys became addicted to videogames.

Haidt discusses Durkheim and the idea of a scale of divinity, along which people can feel lifted up, or pulled downward. The sacred or the profane. Phone-based life pulls downward, and is contrary to the practices of religious and spiritual communities, in several ways. There’s a “God-shaped hole” in every human heart, and phone-based life offers only trivial content. [[ Well I take exception to both points, as have others; on the second, you can find whatever you want via your phone, if you want to. ]]

Finally Part 4 discusses “collective action for healthier childhood.” Again I think some of this was covered in Coddling. There are four types of collective response: voluntary coordination; social norms and moralization; technological solutions; laws and rules. Laws overprotect children in the real world, under-protect them in the virtual world. Tech companies should develop better age verification features. Schools should encourage more free play and recess. And they might go phone-free. And parents should become gardeners, not carpenters, i.e. don’t try to mold children directly. Give kids unsupervised free play. Delay introducing phones; find tech-free camps, exchange programs, part-time jobs, take a gap year. A free-range childhood is more likely to produce competent young adults, but it takes parents getting over their own anxiety.

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I don’t dispute most of the book, and we do hear of efforts by parents and schools to manage kids’ involvement with their phones. But the tech companies aren’t helping; if anything, just in the past couple weeks, they’re sucking up to Trump by making things worse. (Pretending that pointing out lies is somehow suppression of conservative views.)

And at the end, I’m still skeptical. Hasn’t human society gone through many shifts in lifestyle, and how children are raised, over thousands of years? Just imagine the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to living on a farm tending crops and raising animals. Wouldn’t the farmer’s kid envy the freedom of the free-reign child? (This is what some of the Bible stories were about; see here.) But human nature is flexible, and adapts as circumstances change, perhaps via what Wilson called “gene-culture coevolution,” which is to say that as circumstances change — e.g. new technology — there will be differential effects on various people, some better suited to the new order, others less. Followed by differential reproduction. Thus the growing cosmopolitan mentality, which might eventually overtake the tribal mentality (if humanity is to survive).

I still suspect this book amounts to a conservative screed about how life was better in the old days. Or, “Kids these days! They don’t know how good we had it”. But I’ll think about this a while longer. It’s certainly a book about how technological change affects people, which is a principal concern of science fiction. And I’ll think about examples of parents and kids in my own life.

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Competence Is Beside the Point

Posted on Wednesday 15 January 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Several items today about the confirmation hearings for Pete Hegseth and Pam Bondi; “Anonymous smears” and “I am not familiar with that statement”; competence isn’t the point, loyalty and disruption are.
  • The consequences of a “woefully uninformed electorate” and whether humanity might survive existential crises that the uninformed cannot comprehend.

My initial reaction to hearings like those today of potential cabinet members is to wonder, is that the best Republicans can do? Can they find no one with more experience for their proposed jobs, no one without clouds of accusations of financial or sexual or alcoholic impropriety? No one with a clue? As this first piece notes, those are the wrong questions. Trump doesn’t *want* smart or virtuous or principled people; he wants people who are unswervingly loyal and will follow his orders without question. That they’re dumb is therefore a feature; that they cheat on their wives is a feature, because it reassures the cultists that when *they* cheat on their wives, it’s OK, because everyone does it! This is the morality of the Republican party. It doesn’t matter that they’re all incompetent.

Slate, Fred Kaplan, 15 Jan 2025: That May Have Been the Most Antagonistic Confirmation Hearing I’ve Ever Seen, subtitled “Is Pete Hegseth qualified to run the military? Wrong question.”
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Posted in conservatives, Lunacy, Philosophy, Politics | Comments Off on Competence Is Beside the Point