- America is 24th in a ranking of the happiest countries in the world. Don’t Americans wonder why so many other countries are happier? I suspect they do not. [Update: this is a fairly superficial measure. Even so.]
- Trump and his administration take tactics to cripple the left, without actually debating issues;
- Elon Musk, even as he wants to expand the human population, disdains retirees;
- Short items reflecting the tribal mindset: demons, straws, measles, autism, will of God, the Holocaust, anti-White bias, Hitler-curious, appetite for revenge, fighting free speech, long-term thinking, anti-constitutional thinking.
Admittedly, many Americans, especially the MAGA crowd, don’t care what’s going on in the rest of the world. But don’t any of them wonder *why* people in so many other countries are happier than Americans?
AP News, 20 Mar 2025: Finland is again ranked the happiest country in the world. The US falls to its lowest-ever position
I’ll acknowledge that a primary reason might be that these Nordic nations are monocultural, unlike the US. (But many African nations are monocultural, and they’re unhappy, mainly because they’re poor.)
Country rankings were based on answers people give when asked to rate their own lives. The study was done in partnership with the analytics firm Gallup and the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
“Happiness isn’t just about wealth or growth — it’s about trust, connection and knowing people have your back,” said Jon Clifton, the CEO of Gallup. “If we want stronger communities and economies, we must invest in what truly matters: each other.”
…
Believing in the kindness of others is also much more closely tied to happiness than previously thought, according to the latest findings.As an example, the report suggests that people who believe that others are willing to return their lost wallet is a strong predictor of the overall happiness of a population.
And
When it comes to decreasing happiness — or growing unhappiness — the United States has dropped to its lowest-ever position at 24, having previously peaked at 11th place in 2012. The report states that the number of people dining alone in the United States has increased 53% over the past two decades.
The United Kingdom, at position 23, is reporting its lowest average life evaluation since the 2017 report.
Afghanistan is again ranked as the unhappiest country in the world, with Afghan women saying their lives are especially difficult.
Sierra Leone in western Africa is the second unhappiest, followed by Lebanon, ranking third from the bottom.
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NY Times, 19 Mar 2025: With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left, subtitled “The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world.” [gift link via friend on Fb]
Photo caption: “President Trump and his allies have taken a series of highly partisan official actions that threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.”
If conservatives/Republicans actually had better ideas, they would not need to do this. This is acting in bad faith.
Executive actions intended to cripple top Democratic law firms. Investigations of Democratic fund-raising and organizing platforms. Ominous suggestions that nonprofits aligned with Democrats or critical of President Trump should have their tax exemptions revoked.
Mr. Trump and his allies are aggressively attacking the players and machinery that power the left, taking a series of highly partisan official actions that, if successful, will threaten to hobble Democrats’ ability to compete in elections for years to come.
So far, the attacks have been diffuse and sometimes indiscriminate or inaccurate. But inside the administration, there are moves to coordinate and expand the assault.
A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.
Again, these are like the actions of a foreign power intent on destroying our government. Not debating actual issues, or examining which ones make sense.
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This is scary.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 18 Mar 2025: Elon Musk’s war on Social Security unmasks the GOP’s true disdain for retirees, subtitled “Terms like ‘vampires,’ ‘fraud,’ ‘scam’ and ‘definitely dead’ are how the DOGE leader demonizes elderly people”
While some of us worry that the human population is wrecking the planet, through endless growth and its resultant pollution, others dismiss those effects.
Musk has long obsessed over the idea that low birthrates and the subsequent aging population are “the biggest danger civilization faces by far.” While he tends to emphasize the “more babies” part of the equation to fix this alleged problem, it’s not much of a leap to see that “fewer old people” would also get the job done.
…
The ugly attitude towards elderly people is an inevitable result of the profoundly anti-human views and ideology of Musk and his compatriots in the tech billionaire world. Tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has covered Musk for decades now, explained to the New York Times that the billionaire views himself as “the person who matters the most,” and that “everybody else is an N.P.C. — a nonplayer character,” which is video game slang for preprogrammed characters in a video game.
I’ve seen his dismissal of the vast majority of the population as “nonplaying characters” before. And also his comments about empathy.
Musk and his fellow techno-fascists often cast themselves as the saviors of “civilization,” but that rhetoric is only there to put an ennobling gloss on a deeply sociopathic view: that human beings exist to serve the system, and not that the system is there to serve humanity.
Short Items: Dispatches from the Tribal Mindset
- Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 19 Mar 2025: >Tony Suarez And Hank Kunneman Say Christians Must Completely Annihilate The Democrats (Comment: Well, as long as they depend on prayer and exorcising demons, they will fail utterly)
- JMG, 20 Mar 2025: Watters: Tim Walz Is “Effeminate” For Using A Straw (So many rules for being properly masculine! You can’t eat soup in public? Also, Trump must use straws since he’s complained about the paper ones.)
- PolitiFact, 19 Mar 2025: “A lot of studies” show that getting measles “boosts your immune system later in life against cancers, atopic diseases, cardiac disease.”, and,
- NY Times, Holden Thorp, 20 Mar 2025: I Was Diagnosed With Autism at 53. I Know Why Rates Are Rising. (The homepage title was “There Is No Autism Mystery”. These items are in this group because there’s no science here, just rationalizations for intuitive disgust driven by base human nature priorities for purity.)
- And NBC News, 20 Mar 2025: How the anti-vaccine movement weaponized a 6-year-old’s measles death, subtitled “Anti-vaccine influencers see the child’s death as proof — not of the danger of measles, but of their own debunked theories.” (Also, the ultimate cop-out: the child’s death was “the will of God”.)
- CNN, 19 Mar 2025: Massive purge of Pentagon websites includes content on Holocaust remembrance, sexual assault and suicide prevention (via) (The Holocaust is DEI? Makes since if anti-DEI is really white supremacy.)
- On this note: Washington Post, 20 Mar 2025: Elon Musk, once a tacit backer of DEI, now focuses on anti-White bias, subtitled “Elon Musk, who was raised during South African apartheid, used to steer clear of debate about race. Now, he frequently advocates for White people.
- And: Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley, 19 Mar 2025: This Has Got to Be the Most Hitler-Curious Administration in U.S. History
- Trump’s motivations are petty, and tribalistic. The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 20 Mar 2025: Trump’s Appetite for Revenge Is Insatiable.
- There is only one proper way of speaking, or thinking. NY Times, 20 Mar 2025: How the G.O.P. Went From Championing Campus Free Speech to Fighting It, subtitled “President Trump and state politicians are pushing new laws and policies that crack down on curriculum, protests and speakers.”
- And as I’ve often noted, conservatives don’t do long-term thinking. NY Times, opinion by Patrick Healy and Thomas L. Friedman, 20 Mar 2025: Tom Friedman: Trump Is a ‘Small Man in a Big Time’, subtitled “Nearly 60 days in, the president is failing to engage in long-term thinking.”
- Nor are they interested in division of powers as the core of America’s government. NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 19 Mar 2025: Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional
