- Against Trump and Musk;
- Anti-DEI is whitewashing the history of the Underground Railroad;
- Jill Lepore on Elon Musk and his retro ideas;
- A Vox piece about astrology that panders to believers;
- And about Brandolini’s Law, in which debunking misinformation takes an order of magnitude longer than creating it in the first place.
The major political news today is about the protests staged yesterday against Trump and Musk, in all 50 states. Here’s a set of 29 photos of them.
The Atlantic, Alan Taylor, 6 Apr 2025: Photos: Nationwide Protests Against Trump and Musk
Yesterday, more than 1,200 demonstrations were held across the country, described by organizers as a “National Day of Action,” against the policies and actions of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Thousands took part in these “Hands Off!” protests, gathering and marching in small towns, big cities, and state capitols. Gathered below are images from some of the demonstrations in Massachusetts, Georgia, California, Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Arizona, Washington, D.C., and more.
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Otherwise, there’s the steady flow of more-or-less outrageous moves by the current administration to dismantle the government and to erase history.
Washington Post, 6 Apr 2025: Amid anti-DEI push, National Park Service rewrites history of Underground Railroad, subtitled “Since Trump took office, the park service —- an agency charged with preserving American history —- has changed how its website describes key moments from slavery to Jim Crow.”
…a Washington Post review of websites operated by the National Park Service — among the key agencies charged with the preservation of American history — found that edits on dozens of pages since Trump’s inauguration have already softened descriptions of some of the most shameful moments of the nation’s past.
Some were edited to remove references to slavery. On other pages, statements on the historic struggle of Black Americans for their rights were cut or softened, as were references to present-day echoes of racial division. The Post compared webpages as of late March to earlier versions preserved online by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Changes in images, descriptions and even individual words have subtly reshaped the meaning of notable moments and key figures dating to the nation’s founding — abolitionist John Brown’s doomed raid, the battle at Appomattox and school integration by the Little Rock Nine.
I goes on at some length. Specific examples:
A reference to other “enslaved African Americans” in that region was changed to “enslaved workers.”
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Proclamations that the students “opened doors” for others pursuing “equality and education around the world” were edited on at least six pages to remove the word “equality.”
The general theme of efforts like these to soften history is to avoid saying anything that would discomfort whites. To discomfort whites by reminding them of what their ancestors did would be “divisive.”
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Jill Lepore.
NY Times, Jill Lepore, 4 Apr 2025: The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk
The theme here is:
Mr. Musk has long presented himself to the world as a futurist. Yet, notwithstanding the gadgets [ … ] few figures in public life are more shackled to the past.
Lepore sees US history much as Heather Cox Richardson does, and reflects on a key turning point.
In 1932, when civilization stood at another fork in the road, the United States chose liberal democracy, and Franklin Roosevelt, who promised “a new deal for the American people.” In his first 100 days, Mr. Roosevelt. signed 99 executive orders, and Congress passed more than 75 laws, beginning the work of rebuilding the country by establishing a series of government agencies to regulate the economy, provide jobs, aid the poor and construct public works.
Mr. Musk is attempting to go back to that fork and choose a different path.
Thus,
Much of what he has sought to dismantle, from antipoverty programs to national parks, have their origins in the New Deal. Mr. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration provided 8.5 million Americans with jobs; Mr. Musk has measured his achievement by the number of jobs he has eliminated.
And then explores Musks’ grandfather Joshua Haldeman:
a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.
Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.
Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.
And:
Technocrats argued that liberal democracy had failed. One Technocracy Incorporated pamphlet explained how the movement “does not subscribe to the basic tenet of the democratic ideal, namely that all men are created free and equal.” In the modern world, only scientists and engineers have the intelligence and education to understand the industrial operations that lie at the heart of the economy. Mr. Scott’s army of technocrats would eliminate most government services: “Even our postal system, our highways, our Coast Guard could be made much more efficient.” Overlapping agencies could be shuttered, and “90 percent of the courts could be abolished.”
Some fascinating history I was unaware of. Technocracy failed because democracy succeeded, Lepore explains. She goes on to consider Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” of statements:
We can advance to a far superior way of living and of being.
We have the tools, the systems, the ideas.
We have the will. …
We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. …
We believe in greatness. …
We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.
This sounds like a lot of science-fictional visions, but also like fascism.
Muskism isn’t the beginning of the future. It’s the end of a story that started more than a century ago, in the conflict between capital and labor and between autocracy and democracy. The Gilded Age of robber barons and wage-labor strikes gave rise to the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism, the first Red Scare, World War I and Fascism. That battle of ideas produced the technocracy movement, and far more lastingly, it also produced the New Deal and modern American liberalism. Technocracy lost because technocracy is incompatible with freedom.
There’s also the problem identified in that book The Misinformation Age (review here) in which complex technological issues are voted, if indirectly, by a general population that doesn’t know what they’re talking about. How would we solve this problem without instituting a technocracy, or a fascist government? I’ve long thought that some basic literacy test (in science, technology, and civics principally) might be required to be able to vote, but of course that raises all sorts of additional problems. (Once again, I think of those Facebook/TikTok videos of people on the street who cannot answer the question of what continent they’re standing on.) I don’t have even a provisional conclusion about this.
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A perennial issue. That this is nonsense was obvious to me once I considered it at age 12 or 13 — having already the learned the basics of of astronomy — and Carl Sagan was patient enough to explain why it’s nonsense in his book and TV series Cosmos back in 1980. (See my review here, under chapter 3.)
My answer: because most people are not well-educated, and many people prefer simple answers. But let’s see what the article says.
Vox, Alex Abad-Santos, 4 Apr 2025: Why are so many people into astrology?, subtitled “Astrology’s enormous appeal, explained for believers and skeptics.”
This relates directly to the previous item, of course.
The simple answer might be that people around the world find validation and self-reflection in astrology. The idea that the stars and planets can affect our personal lives and shape who we are as people may never convince its harshest skeptics, but for many it makes as much sense as anything else our confusing, frustrating, thrilling, comedic existence has to offer.
It goes on with minutia about sun signs and whatnot.
The gist: All of these things ideally help us tell a bigger story about the person we think we are, the person we were, and the person we aspire to be.
But this piece thinks skepticism about astrology is somehow perverse; it gives no time to any actual scientific reasons why astrology is nonsense, the way Sagan did.
“A skeptic saying, ‘I don’t believe in astrology,’ is like someone saying, ‘I don’t believe in maps,’ or, ‘I don’t believe in instruction manuals.’ Whether or not you choose to engage with it means nothing,” Register says. “You can go through life just fine without maps or instruction manuals and figure it all out yourself, but those tools can make things way easier on you.”
No. That’s nonsense. Maps and instruction manuals have direct correspondence with the real world. Astrology does not.
Big picture: this is part of primitive, tribal thinking, in which perceived patterns are taken as more important than pesky evidence about how the real world actually works. It comforts people, and that’s the best thing that can be said about it. And at worst, it deludes people into thinking they have some understanding, or even control, of a world they don’t understand. That will not end well.
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One more. Via some post on Facebook, here’s the idea of Brandolini’s law. This is the image I saw on Facebook:
Here’s Wikipedia: Brandolini’s law
Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. The law states:
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
The rise of easy popularization of ideas through the internet has greatly increased the relevant examples, but the asymmetry principle itself has long been recognized.
Yet again, this circles back to primitive thinking. It’s easier to believe simple, intuitive things, than to take the time to understand why intuitive things are not true. The obvious examples are left as an exercise for the reader.
This law is analogous to the truism that it’s easier to destroy, than the build. The current administration is bent on destroying what past generations have built.
