Loose Tabs [Draft File]
This is a safe space for collecting items that may eventually go into
a Loose Tabs post.
This is an occasional collection of newsworthy links and comments,
much less systematic than what I attempted in my late
Speaking of Which posts. The new name comes from my extensive
use of browser tabs. When I get around to cleaning up, I often find
tabs opened to old articles I might want to comment on and/or refer
back to. So
these posts are mostly
housecleaning, but may also serve as a very limited but persistent
record of what 20+ years ago I started calling "the end of the American
empire" and nowadays feels more like "the end of civilization." I
collect these bits in a
draft file, and flush them
out when periodically (12 times from April-December 2025).
My previous one appeared ? days ago, on
January 24.
I have a little-used option of selecting
bits of text highlighted with a background
color, for emphasis a bit more subtle than bold or
ALL CAPS. (I saw this on Medium. I started with their greenish
color [#bbdbba] and lightened it a bit [#dbfbda].) I'll try to
use it sparingly.
Table of Contents:
Laura read me this bit from Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus:
No, surelyI did not want it, and yet — I have been driven to
want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for
the outrageous contempt of reason, the viciosu violation of the truth,
the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and
confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, andblackmail of all
that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old
Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took
away out senses. We drank — for we Germans perennially yearn for
intoxication — and under its spell, through years of deluded
high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must
now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together
with the word "despair" I wrote it. I will not repeat it: not twice
could I control my horror or my trembling fingers to set it down
again.
Topical Stories
Sometimes stuff happens, and it dominates the news/opinion cycle
for a few days or possibly several weeks. We might as well lead with
it, because it's where attention is most concentrated. But eventually
these stories will fold into the broader, more persistent thmes of
the following section.
Last time:
Thanksgiving;
Epsteinmania;
Zohran Mamdani;
ICE Stories;
Venezuela;
Iran;
Jerome Powell. We're probably not done with all of these
(certainly not ICE, although I've oved them into a new regular section
I'm calling
Trump Goes to War (Domestic Edition)).
Epsteinmania: After numerous delays, the Department of Justice
finally dumped a
"large
cache" of documents and media related to its investigation of
Jeffrey Epstein: this one an overwhelming dump of 3 million pages
and 180,000 images.
Noam Chomsky:
Melania: The movie Jeff Bezos spent $75 million on to
flatter the Trumps. This is, of course, a lightning rod for critical
ridicule — which, sure, is a big part of why I'm reporting on
it at all. Given the subject and circumstances, I'm not surprised
that at
Rotten Tomatoes the average of scores given by recognized critics
is 8% (50 reviews). It's likely that most film critics are anti-Trump
to start with, but even if there is a bit of selection bias, that's a
pretty low score, suggesting that the film isn't very good, at least
by common critical standards. (The sample size is pretty decent: it
may be slightly inflated by critics out to slam Trump, but not much.
Moreover, one shoudn't assume that anti-Trump means anti-Melania,
as a lot of people like to think that Melania is secretly anti-Trump
too.) What's much more suspect is that the viewer ratings appear to
be ecstatic at 99% (1000+ verified ratings), for a largest-ever
discrepancy between the ratings of 91 points. I don't know how to
prove this, but intuitively the self-selection bias here must be
huge. Who, after all, would buy a ticket to this particular movie?
No one I know, except perhaps to write a nasty review, and those
people would show up in the critics column. But I find it hard to
understand how anyone would pay money to see Melania. It's
not unusual for right-wingers to mass-purchase books to plant them
on the New York Times bestseller list. Same thing could be happening
here. Indeed 1000 tickets for party operatives promising to follow
up on Rotten Tomatoes would be a drop in the Bezos bucket.
Margaret Hartmann:
[01-31]:
Movie review: Does Melania dream of AI-generated sheep? "The
First Lady's weirdly soulless MAGA lullaby is going to put a lot
of Amazon Prime viewers to sleep." [02-02]:
The Melania movie, explained: box office, reviews, & what
she made. "Why did the notoriously private First Lady film a Brett
Ratner-directed documentary? It might have something to do with the $28
million paycheck." When asked why Amazon is paying $40 million, when
the second highest bidder topped out at $14 million, a "person close
to Bezos" said: "He is doing a deal, offering money to buy the Trump
Family's affection and flattering the president. If you think about
it in terms of costs versus benefit, it is pretty low. It's a smart
investment."
Nick Hilton [01-30]:
First Lady is a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness in this
ghastly bit of propaganda. Maureen Dowd [01-31]:
Slovenian sphinx flick nixed! "It turns out there is no riddle,
no enigma, no mystery, no dark anguish, Melania is not Rapunzel in
the tower, pining to be saved from the ogre imprisoning her. She is
comfortable in the frosty vertical solitude of the tower, swaddled
in luxury." Monica Hesse [01-31]:
Melania promises to take us behind the scenes. There's nothing
to see: Anyone searching for hidden layers will be disappointed:
"we were dealing with a situation that was not an onion but a potato.
Yes, there's a thin protective skin. But after you breach that, no
matter how many times you go after it with a peeler, you're dealing
with pretty much the same pulp." Sophia Tesfaye [01-31]:
Why MAGA won't rally for Melania documentary. Matt Labash [02-01]:
Is Melania the worst film ever made? "It's no small wonder
it's taking such a drubbing. Melania is a personality-study
of a person who doesn't actdually have one." Chas Danner [02-02]:
What critics are saying about the Melania documentary:
"Here are the highlights of their lowlights." This pointed me to
several other pieces cited here, but has much more (and is being
"continuously updated"). Some more sample quotes:
Lauren Collins [The New Yorker]: "For his comeback, [Brett
Ratner] has summoned all the artistic ambition of a local Realtor
who just got a drone." Also revealing:
We are told, for instance, that Melania's father, Viktor Knavs, is an
avid videographer, but the film is devoid of baby pictures, family
mementos, or any of the other low-hanging archival materials that
typically serve to humanize a distant subject. She is a woman without
a past, effacing biography just as her husband erases national
history. (As I noted in 2016, their four-hundred-and-fifty-person
wedding included all of three guests from Melania's homeland: her
mother, her father, and her sister.) Melania says that everything
she does is for "the children," but no actual children appear in
Melania. Nor do pets, friends, hobbies, or music, except in
a sad little scene in which she struggles to sing along to "Billie
Jean," supposedly her favorite song. You almost wince when her
towering adult son, Barron, brushes her off without so much as a
peck on the cheek.
Rick Perlstein "recommends watching the film (if, like him, you
are endlessly fascinated with how the pageantry of the American
presidency is staged)."
Alexandra Petri [The Atlantic]: "The movie reveals how well
insulated she is from anything resembling human life, like a cheetah
in the house of a Russian oligarch."
Heather Schwedel [Slate]: "I'm not sure anyone else could have
made a movie that taught me so remarkably little about its main
subject."
Sonny Bunch [The Bulwark]: "The target audience seemed to enjoy
it fine; the 12:40 p.m. showing at the AMC NorthPark in Dallas was
80 percent full and laughed in all the right places. It preaches to
the faithful with great reverence and they were thrilled to bask in
the golden glow of Trump Tower. But it's fascinating to see so pure
and naked an instrument of graft and propaganda deployed to great
effect on an audience happy to lap it up."
Michael Clark [The Epoch Times]: "In a few days, it's possible I
could be the only U.S.-based critic on RottenTomatoes.com with a
positive review of Melania. As of Saturday morning, the 31st,
the film's critical consensus sits at 6 percent. Under normal
circumstances, this would suggest that I was out of touch and don't
know how to do my job. However, the audience rating is 98 percent,
making Melania the biggest ratings-gap title in Rotten
Tomatoes history." David Yearsley [02-06]:
Melania's music: A view from Berlin, thinking of Bach . . . and
Leni Riefenstahl. Eboni Boykin-Patterson [02-06]:
Rotten Tomatoes desperately claims 'impossible' rating for 'Melania'
is real. Katie Rosseinsky [02-07]:
Rotten Tomatoes addresses 'fake' user score claims for Melania movie
after documentary sets new record. Daniel Parris [2025-08-20]:
Is Rotten Tomatoes still reliable? A statistical analysis. This
predates Melania, but offers some context, and some hints as
to the underlying business models.
The Washington Post:
Major Threads
Israel: Enter "stage two" of
Trump's Gaza War Peace Plan,
which we can now safely say that Trump is implementing in the worst
way possible, through his so-called
Board of Peace. It is worth recalling my [10-21] piece on
Making Peace in Gaza and Beyond, which lays out a different
approach (one which cuts Israel considerable slack, arguably much
more than they deserve, but which could be tolerated if the Trump
and other key Americans decided the war had to end). As I noted
last time, the minimal requirements for any serious peace plan are:
- Israel has to leave Gaza, and cannot be allowed any role in its
reconstruction.
- The people who still live in Gaza must have political control of
their own destiny.
- The UN is the only organization that be widely trusted to guide
Gaza toward self-government, with security for all concerned.
Trump's Board of Peace not only bypasses the UN — forget
that it's theoretically sanction by
UN Security Council Resolution 2803, because Trump already has
— it suggests a new alignment under Trump's personal control,
excluding any nation not willing to bow and scrape up tribute money.
This is reminiscent of Bush's "Coalition of the Willing," but where
Bush's ad hoc club was mere propaganda, this is styled as a plot to
control the world. Not even Ian Flemming has managed to concoct a
villain as megalomaniacal as Trump.
Sam Kimball [01-27]:
Zionist expansion: a first-hand account of Israel's illegal occupation
of southwestern Syria. Tariq Kenney-Shawa [01-30]:
Jared Kushner's "plan" for Gaza is an abomination: "Kushner is
pitching a 'new,' gleaming resort hub. But scratch the surface, and
you find nothing less than a blueprint for ethnic cleansing." Jamal Kanj [02-02]:
Weaponizing America's economy in service of Israel: Not only does
the US subsidize Israel's wars, especially against "their own people"[*],
but the US uses its financial power to punish dissent around the world.
Thus, the US has "sanctioned international courts, punished UN officials,
pressured humanitarian organizations and national leaders who dared to
insist that Israeli crimes be judged by the same standards applied to
all nations." In this context, US sanctions against states like Iran,
Venezuela, Russia, and North Korea are not just acts of war "by other
means," but are threats to other countries of what could happen to them
should they stray too far from US dictates in support of Israel.
[*] One of the most effective propaganda lines used against Saddam
Hussein was that he had "gassed his own people": Kurds resident in
Iraq, suspected of sympathies with Iran during the ongoing war, and
later in open rebellion against Iraq's regime, but still counted as
"his own people." Israel bears at least as much responisibility for
its Palestinian residents, some nominally citizens but most denied
legal rights and standing. Israel is the only nation in the world
where we accept that the political elite can divide the people who
live there into a favored group of "citizens" and others that can
be discriminated against. Ramzy Baroud [02-06]:
On the menu: how the Middle Powers sacrificed Gaza to save
themselves.
Around the World: Formerly "Russia/Ukraine," and that's
still going on, but Trump seems to think the US is enjoying a
unipolar moment like some Americans fantasized about after the
Soviet Union dissolved, and that's having repercussions around
the world. For Trump's own activities, see the next section.
This one will look at the world is reacting, or sometimes just
minding its own business.
David Broder [12-18]:
The new Europeans, Trump-style: "Donald Trump is sowing division
in the European Union, even as he calls on it to spend more on
defense." He's probably confusing several different trends, in
part because Trump's own foreign policy is so incoherent. I expect
his threat to Greenland will spur the re-armament crowd, but not
to buy more American arms. (If they're going to buy arms, they
shouldn't they build up their own arms industries?) Moreover, the
far right, which he has clear sympathies with, is more likely to
turn against the US than nearly anyone in the despised center. Robert Skidelsky [01-30]:
Much ado about a Chinese 'mega-embassy' in London: "British
newspapers and politicians have taken to fighting an imaginary
war with Beijing." Joshua Keating [02-03]:
Is a new US-Russia arms race about to begin? "We're about to lose
our last nuclear arms control treaty with Russia. What does that mean?"
New START, the last of several arms control treaties the US and Soviet
Union negotiated, expires on Feb. 5. The treaty limited the US and Russia
to 1,550 deployed warheads. As both already have many more warheads in
storage, the arms race could be rapid, if either side count think of a
rationale for deploying more. I can't think of one, but the US nuke
industry has been pushing a multi-trillion-dollar "modernization" for
some time.
Trump Goes to War (International Edition): Formerly "Trump's
War & Peace," but not much of the latter anymore. On opening this
file, this includes actual or threatened wars in Venezuela, Iran, and
Greenland.
Rachel Janfaza [02-03]:
The quiet reason why Trump is losing Gen Z: "They wanted fewer
wars. He didn't deliver." Pull quote from a 22-year-old woman in
Ohio: "The 'no new wars' thing is now the biggest joke of my life."
But why is this just a "quiet reason"? Probably because Democrats
don't talk about it. Harris blew the 2024 election by expressing no
qualms about the major wars Biden (Gaza, Ukraine) boosted, let alone
the piddly strikes that had become so routine they're rarely reported.
Clinton blew the 2016 election by trying to come off as the tougher,
more belligerent commander-in-chief. Democrats desperately need to
find a way to stop looking like warmongers. They could start by
relentlessly attacking Trump's tantrums. They could expand on that
by developing a broad vision that puts American interests firmly on
a foundation of peace and human rights. Tara Copp/David Ovalle [02-03]:
Pentagon warns Scouts to restore 'core values' or lose military
support: "The relationship dates back decades, but Defense
Secretary Pete Hegseth has criticized the organization for allowing
girls to join and changing its name from Boy Scouts." The new name
is Scouting America. I haven't paid any attention to them, and had
no idea that they were supported by the military. (Evidently, the
military provides "medical, security and logistical support" for
their National Jamboree, which I only recall due to a spectacularly
off-color speech Trump gave them a few years back. Article includes
a photo of Trump after his 2017 speech.) I joined the Cub and Boy
Scouts in my youth, and some of what I learned there has stuck with
me (as well as some trauma). In my annual music lists, I routinely
note: "As the proto-fascist organization of my youth insisted, one
should always be prepared."
Trump Goes to War (Domestic Edition): This will carry on from
"ICE Stories," and will also pick up skirmishes in the courts. It
isn't a stretch to say Trump's waging war against his own people,
except inasmuch as he doesn't consider most of us to be his own
people.
Andi Zeisler [01-12]:
in Renee Good's killing, ICE's misogyny isn't a side note —
it's the point: "The words of the man who shot Renée Good speak
to the Trump administration's fixation on masculinity." Robert Willis [01-27]:
ICE's terror campaign is part of a long American tradition: "As
a Black man, I know firsthand how often state violence is used to
perpetuate white supremacy in this country." Nicholas Liu [01-28]:
Private prisons are cashing in on Trump's ICE crackdown. They're just
getting started: "Over 90 percent of detained immigrants languish
in prisons that aren't actually run by the government." Chas Danner [01-30]:
How the Trump Team's botched shooting response and blame game played
out: Useful time line here.
- Saturday, 10:05 AM: Alex Pretti is shot by CBP agents
- 10:10: Bovino texts DHS and White House officials
- 10:59: DHS says suspect was armed
- 11:30: first draft of DHS statement circulates internally
- 12:31 PM: DHS suggests Pretti sought to 'massacre law enforcement'
- 1:22: Stephen Miller calls Pretty a domestic terrorist and asssassin
- 2:06: Trump shares photo of gun and asks, 'what is that all about?'
- 2:12: Bovino repeats 'massacre' claim
- 5:35: Noem calls Pretti a terrorist who was 'brandishing' a gun and
attacked agents
- Sunday, 9:13 AM: Bovino says the CBP agents are victims
-
- 10:11: Patel claims Pretti broke the law by bringing a gun to a
protest
- 11:10: Noem changes her tune
- 6:54 PM: Trump says 'at some point we will leave' Minnesota
- Monday, 8:31 AM: Trump says he's sending in Homan
- 9:07: Noem praises Homan
- 1:32 PM: White House distances itself
- 3:24: Bovino is out
- 6:36: The Atlantic reports Noem and Lewandowski could be next
- 10:16: report says Trump pivoted because he didn't like what he saw
on television
- 10:48: news of Trump-Noem meeting emerges
- Tuesday, 9:22 AM: McLaughlin dodges questions about domestic
terrorist claim
- 12:30 PM: Trump says Pretti was not an assassin
- 3:34: Noem camp throws Miller under the bus
- 4:18: Trump announces de-escalation, calls Bovino 'pretty out there'
- before 5: Miller throws CBP and Bovino under the bus
- 5:13: Miller's wife promotes his defense
- 11:19: report details internal war between Noem/Lewandowski and
Miller
- Wednesday, 7:29 PM: White House officials try to dismiss reports
of internal turmoil
- Thursday, 8:28 AM: Homan announces 'drawdown plan' for Minnesota
- 7:12 PM: Trump denies there's a pullback
- 9:24: Noem says 'we were using the best information we had at the
time'
- Friday, 1:26 AM: Trump attacks Pretti
Elie Mystal [01-30]:
The Trump administration arrested Don Lemon like he was a fugitive
slave. They also arrested a
second journalist and two demonstration organizers, charging
them with "conspiracy to deprive the congregants of the church of
their rights and to interfere with religious freedom in a house of
worship."
Trump Regime: This is for stories about what the supplicants
and minions in the Trump administration are doing day-in, day-out to
make America less enjoyable and livable. This includes bad policies
as well as bad actors, but some of the worst are dealt with in other
sections. Trump himself merits his own section, a bit further down.
Donald Trump: As for Il Duce, we need a separate bin for
stories on his personal peccadillos -- which often seem like mere
diversions, although as with all madness, it can be difficult
sorting the serious from the fanciful.
Sophia Tesfaye [12-13]:
Jared Kushner is at the center of Trump's corruption: "From
media mergers to foreign policy, Trump's son-in-law is consolidating
power — and making millions." Thanks to his Middle East portfolio,
he bagged much more graft in Trump's first term than anyone else. Now
he's back as part of Trump's Board of Peace. And he's involved in
"the
biggest media merger in years."
After leaving the first Trump administration, Kushner raised over $3
billion for Affinity Partners, including $2 billion from the Saudi
government's Public Investment Fund. The Saudis' own advisers
reportedly warned Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that Kushner's
record did not justify such an investment, but the crown prince
overruled them. The UAE and Qatar soon followed, adding another $1.5
billion to the pot. As of late 2024, Kushner had still not produced
meaningful returns for these foreign governments, yet he had paid
himself at least $157 million in fees. Forbes now calls him a
billionaire.
Chauncey DeVega [01-29]:
Vice signaling explains Trump's enduring appeal: "Minneapolis
reveals why outrage alone fails to loose Trump's grip." This is a
play on the notion of "virtue signaling," where people do good deeds
just to appear more virtuous — a charge typically leveled at
liberals by people who can't imagine anyone acting altruistically.
Vice signalers want to impress on others how bad they are, often
to intimidate others into submission as well as to elicit approval
from people who yearn to see power used against their supposed
enemies. A big part of Trump's popularity owes to his credibility
as someone who's willing and eager to abuse his power. Garrett Owen [01-30]:
Trump and sons seek $10 billion taxpayer-funded payday in IRS
lawsuit: "Leaked tax returns caused the Trumps 'public embarrassment'
and reputational harm, lawsuit says." Elie Mystal [01-30]:
Want to support the fight against fascism? Boycott Trump's World
Cup. Not much of a sacrifice for me, but I know people this
would be a big ask of. The difference makes me think this would
be a bad idea, but I should note that he's talking about teams
boycotting (and even then, just US-hosted events, as opposed to
events in Canada or Mexico).
Heather Digby Parton [02-03]:
Trump is openly cashing in on the presidency. Jelinda Montes [02-06]:
Trump posts and deletes racist Obama video, sparking outrage across
the political spectrum: "Multiple Republican lawmakers denounced
the post on social media." Algernon Austin [02-06]:
Trump get spectacularly richer, while putting the country on a path
to poverty. The graft you know about, even if the numbers are
hard to fathom. Also unsurprising is Fred Wertheimer's assertion
that in terms of monetizing power, "the president most similar to
Trump is Russian President Vladimir Putin." As for future poverty,
there are many points, including:
About 25,000 scientists have been cut from government agencies. Joel
Wilkins of Futurism concluded that the administration's actions have
resulted in a "colossal exodus of specialized expertise from
institutions important to public health, environmental protection, and
scientific research" and that "[t]he effects are likely to be
catastrophic — and the reverberations could be felt for
decades."
Republicans: As bad as Trump is, I worry more about the
party he's unleashed on America. Here are some examples, both bad
actors and dangerous and despicable ideas.
Sasha Abramsky [01-30]:
An open letter to Congressional Republicans of conscience: "For
the good of the country, it's time to cross the aisle." I have no
doubt this plea is falling on deaf ears, even among the very short
list he mentions. "Conscience" is a dead letter among Republicans.
The last one to claim such a thing was Barry Goldwater, and he was
just striking a pose in defense of the indefensible. Jake Lahut [02-02]:
Nancy Mace is not okay: "Something's broken. The motherboard is
fried. We're short-circuitng somewhere." Ian Millhiser [02-02]:
Republicans are normalizing the one reform they should fear most:
"The Supreme Court is the GOP's most durable power center. It makes
no sense for them to endanger that source of power." He's referring
to efforts at the state level to go to extraordinary legal means to
pack courts in their favor: one example is adding two seats to the
Utah Supreme Court, which has "sided with plaintiffs challenging
Utah's GOP-friendly congressional maps," and "blocked Utah's ban
on most abortions, temporarily stopped a law banning transgender
girls from playing high school sports, and found the state's school
voucher program unconstitutional." He could have mentioned efforts
in Kansas, which thus far have been less successful. Republicans
seem convinced that any power they grab will be permanent.
Democrats: In theory the people we trust to protect us
from Republicans. In practice, they're not doing a very good job,
so I tend to latch onto stories about how to do better (then scoff
at them).
The Economy: Another old section, brought back recently
as I needed to talk about the AI bubble. Now it occurs to me that
I should split that section in two, so tech gets its own following
section, and this deals with the rest of the economy, and what
economists have to say about it.
Eric Levitz [01-23]:
Wall Street buying up houses is good, actually: "The surprising
truth about corporate investment in housing." Really? First he argues
that mega-investors are insignificant so have little effect on prices,
then he changes the subject and argues that they're better because
they discriminate less ("corporate investment in single-family homes
is good for integration"). Levitz has been struggling for some time
trying to get a handle on housing costs — e.g., see [2025-08-26]:
What far-left cranks get right about the housing crisis, which
is a defense of YIMBY-ism that admits it doesn't solve everything.
There are lots of problems with housing and its unaffordability,
but one of the deepest, and most politically intractable, is the
idea that houses should function as long-term investments, indeed
that for most people they represent most of their savings. If we
get to where we have a housing surplus, the immediate effect will
be not just to drive rents down but to reduce the nominal wealth
of a big slice of the middle class. That's going to be a tough
sell, and it's going to require much deeper thinking than YIMBY
considers. (Side point: because Democrats spend nearly all of
their time with donors and lobbyists, they only look for fixes
that open up more profits, and they never consider savings that
are too widely dispersed to organize their own lobbies. Thus,
for instance, they subsidize more green power, but pay little
attention to reducing energy use.) Heather Long [02-03]:
We're in an economic boom. Where are the jobs? "AI is sending
stocks soaring, rich people are spending big, and hiring is at a
crawl."
Technology: Big boomlet here is AI. Some of this will be
on business, and some on the technology itself, not that it's easy
to separate the two.
Sophie McBain [10-18]:
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?: "From brain-rotting
videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it
harder to work, remember, think and function independently." I've
seen cascades of short videos that qualify as brain rot and found
it very hard to pull away from them, but eventually I did, probably
because I have some deeply embedded protestant ethic which keeps me
forever working, allowing entertainment only if it adds to my store
of knowledge and reason. Maybe the problem is that my sort of work
ethic has gone out of most people's groundings. While the traditional
explanation for this is the temptation of sin, I think there's also
a pragmatic consideration: why pursue knowledge if there's nothing
you can do with it? People don't keep up with technology because it's
hard, but also because it's been black-boxed and trade-secreted and
esotericized to the point where you have no control over it, even if
you do mostly understand it. Same with politics, business, law, even
medicine. These, and much more, are dedicated not just to shaking you
down but to keeping you powerless. After all, powerlessness begets
indifference and incuriosity, which is the secret formula for stupid.
If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it's
interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a
"frictionless" user experience, to ensure that, provided we slide from
app to app or screen to screen, we will meet no resistance. The
frictionless user experience is why we unthinkingly offload ever more
information and work to our digital devices; it's why internet rabbit
holes are so easy to fall down and so hard to climb out of; it's why
generative AI has already integrated itself so completely into most
people's lives.
We know, from our collective experience, that once you become
accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real
world feels harder to deal with. . . .
Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words
such as "stupid," but there are worrying signs that all this digital
convenience is costing us dearly. . . . In the ever-expanding,
frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive,
dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and
deepfakes, how will we maintain the scepticism and intellectual
independence we'll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no
longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech
assistance, how much of us will be left to resist?
Media:
Chris Lehmann [01-30]:
The smug and vacuous David Brooks is perfect for The Atlantic:
"The former New York Times columnist is a one-man cottage industry of
lazy cultural stereotyping." I haven't read him in so many years I may
not have noticed the move, and the new paywall is just one more reason
to not care.
Miscellaneous Pieces
The following articles are more/less in order published, although
some authors have collected pieces, and some entries have related
articles underneath.
David Klion [2025-04-17]:
The war on the liberal class: As the author tweeted: "Seems like a
fine time to re-up this piece I wrote a year ago, about how the Trump
Administration and its Silicon Valley oligarch allies are murdering
liberalism as a class along with the cultural and intellectual
institutions that sustain it." Back in the late-1960s, I grew up
to be very critical of the era's liberal nostrums, but lately my
views have softened and sentimentalized, now that we risk losing
even their last few saving graces. I can now admit that, like the
Stalinists of the 1930s they so loathed, they started with fairly
decent intentions, before they allowed themselves to be adled and
corrupted by power. Astra Taylor had a similar idea when she wrote
Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.
Klion locates liberalism in a "new class" (borrowing from Djilas,
although one could also refer to Reich's "symbolic manipulators"),
which gives the "war on liberalism" targets which can be attacked
without having to grapple with concepts: universities, nonprofits,
bureaucracies, publications — organizations that can be
starved of funds and denied audiences. Klion provides numerous
examples, including the promotion of right-wing alternatives,
which help suck the oxygen out of the atmosphere sustaining
independent thought. What isn't clear is why these fabulously
wealthy individuals want to live in a world where most people
are denied even the basic idea of freedom.
The crisis facing liberalism begins with the crisis of basic
literacy. It was the expansion of literacy after World War II that
made the ascent of the New Class possible in the first place, and it's
only slightly hyperbolic to say that liberals today confront a society
in which no one under 30 reads serious books or newspapers. A
much-discussed article in the Atlantic last fall flagged that even
undergraduates at the most elite universities struggle to read whole
books that their counterparts a decade ago were able to handle. Their
attention spans have been eroded since childhood by social media
addiction, and now the social media they consume is no longer
text-based.
In the 2000s and 2010s, the dominant social media platforms were
Facebook and Twitter, both of which, whatever their faults (including
Facebook's central role in bankrupting traditional news media),
primarily circulated the written word. Both of these platforms are
currently controlled by Silicon Valley billionaires in hock to Trump,
and both have become increasingly degraded, poorly functioning, and
saturated with scammers and hatemongers. Even more salient, both are
losing market share to the Chinese social media platform TikTok, which
prioritizes short-form videos that obviate any need for more than
nominal literacy, much less for the critical-thinking skills that
liberals have always regarded as essential to a healthy democratic
polity. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is
increasingly copying TikTok's approach.
Meanwhile, tech firms in both China and the U.S. aggressively
compete to develop AI, which functions in part by plagiarizing,
synthesizing, and undercutting the reliability of original written
work while promising to render human-generated writing redundant and
unmarketable. The combination of video-based platforms, AI, and
algorithmically "enshittified" text-based social networks that
suppress links to actual writing has rendered the internet
fundamentally hostile to anyone who crafts words for a living. This is
a threat not just to the basic finances of professional writers but
also to their ability to socially reproduce a receptive public for
what they're selling.
The same tech oligarchs who bankrolled Trump's victory have been
using their unprecedented fortunes to fund alternative institutions to
compete with, and ultimately sideline, the established ones. As Eoin
Higgins documents in his recent book Owned: How Tech Billionaires on
the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, venture
capital-backed platforms like Substack have been instrumental in
creating lucrative new career opportunities for veterans of mainstream
media, especially those who parrot the reactionary views of their
funders. While these platforms are available to writers of any
political persuasion, it is reactionaries who disproportionately get
the most lucrative deals: Independent blogging doesn't tend to reward
robust newsroom cultures and traditional editorial standards as much
as invective and audience capture.
A very simple explanation for why politics is broken: "Entertainment
got too good." That's a bit too simple, but covers the right, which as
long as Republicans still receive a competitive share of votes suffices
to break the whole system. But it's only entertainment on the right.
The center-left has its own fissures and chasms, but the only time we
get entertainment is on the late-night comic shows, which serve as a
palliative against the everyday horrors of the Trump mob. I took a
break from Kimmel-Colbert-Myers after the election, and have only
recently returned. It is comforting to know that not just these
hosts but also their crowds are staunchly on our side. As for the
right, I'm simply immune to their "entertainment": I can't recognize
it as true, as honest, even as just sincerely misguided. It's based
on an instinct for self-flattery, cult-worship, dominance, and cruelty
I never acquired (not that I didn't notice its appeal to quite a few
folks around me). But the entertainment didn't win over anyone who
wasn't prepared in the first place. And the preparation was simple
cynicism: first show that no one can be trusted, admitting everyone
is crooked, even your own guys; but their guys are even worse, often
working not just to feather their own pockets but as supplicants to
even more diabolical conspiracies. To fight such people, you need
your own fighters, willing to get dirty and bloody.
By the way, this opens with a series of charts showing the split
of white presidential vote by income quintiles going back to 1948,
each normalized to the national margin. Republicans won the upper
two quintiles every year up through 2012, but lost it three times
with Trump (small Democratic edge on 2nd quintile in 1956, 1960,
1968, 2000, and maybe 2012, but in each of those cases the top
quintile broke strongly R). On the other hand, Democrats won the
bottom two quintiles in all of the pre-Trump races except 1960
and 1968 — where the far-from-patrician Nixon was aided by
some unusual splits. As for 2016-24, Levitz says:
This development surely reflects Trump's personal imprint on
American life. Yet it was also made possible by long-term,
structural shifts in our politics.
Aside from the somewhat muddled Eisenhower and Nixon elections,
the pattern of Democrats winning the poorer quintiles and Republicans
the richer ones has been pretty consistent. The clearest examples
were from 1976-88, with 1984 the strongest correlation, but 2008 is
nearly as strong. The pattern still held for 2012, but the divide
was reduced, partly because right-wing media fanned white racial
backlash, but also because the Obama recovery worked much better
for the rich than for the poor. Not coincidentally, Obama seemed
to identify (or at least socialize) much more with the rich than
with the poor. I wouldn't call this a "structural shift," but it
did offer Trump an opening that someone like Jeb Bush or Marco
Rubio would have had trouble navigating. But Trump also had the
advantage of running against Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris,
who spent all of their energies cultivating the rich and famous.
Even so, Trump was a dumb choice, but Democrats had squandered
whatever credibility they once had to point such things out.
When I think of "structural shifts," I think of things that are
beyond individual conscious control: technology, capitalism, mass
culture, aspirations for freedom and self-determination. Even so,
many of them are consequences of political decisions, as when the
Democrats decided not to restore let alone expand support for labor
unions after Taft-Hartley weakened them, or their decisions to cut
taxes on the rich and loosen up regulations constraining finance,
or their wrong-headed and mendacious war in Vietnam.
Those structural shifts have blighted the lives of many whites,
stranding them in stagnant areas, with limited skills and vanishing
opportunities. That many such people would turn against a Democratic
Party that seemed to care little and offer less isn't surprising.
Unfortunately, in Trump they've found a "savior" who will only make
their lot worse, at most giving them hollow flattery, some kind of
emotional release at seeing their supposed enemies attacked and/or
ridiculed.
Jonquilyn Hill [01-26]:
Are we getting stupider? "Technology is rotting our brains —
but there are ways to stop it." Interview with neurologist Andrew
Budson, "who specializes in and researches memory disorders." Title
is broad enough we probably all already have answers, which will be
seen to have little bearing on the very narrow subject broached here.
Budson focuses on mental decline among individuals, and his main take
is "use it or lose it." His main insight is that brains are meant for
social networking, not compiling facts or computing results, so he
sees isolation and loneliness as major contributing factors. He also
notes that watching more than one hour of TV per day "rots your brain,"
but that's because it's a solitary activity — content seems to
be irrelevant, but I'd guess that most people who see this headline
will be expecting yet another critique of mind-devastating content.
As I read along, I found myself thinking about assisted-care living,
and how to better structure those organizations for sustained mental
health. I think it's safe to say that's not a high criterion for our
current mix of providers and customers, where economics rules, making
quality of life an option few can afford. But that's a subject for a
future essay.
It's commonly understood that people learn voraciously when they
are young, a rate that slows down over time (although accumulated
knowledge and insight may still produce qualitative breakthroughs),
then usually declines in advanced age, sometimes catastrophically.
Plot this out on a line and you'll find that most people most of the
time are in decline. A different question is to compare generations
using common sample points: how to 30-year-olds today compare to
30-year-olds in 2000 or 1980 or 1960 or 1940? I don't know, maybe
because I'm skeptical of metrics (like IQ[*]). But my impression
is that the totality of knowledge has only increased, and continues
to do so, which makes it impossible for individuals to keep up. We
depend on an ever-increasing division of labor to manage all this
knowledge, but our inability to keep up with the whole falls ever
farther behind, making us feel stupider, or at least less in charge.
So it's possible to be smarter than ever before, yet less and less
competent to check the intelligence of others. That would be less
of a problem if we could trust the experts not just to know their
stuff but to do the right thing with their knowledge. Unfortunately,
the last 40-50 years has witnessed a boom in fraud and greed with
little or no moral or political checks. When those people screw up,
as happens pretty often these days, it's often unclear whether it
was because they were crooked, or stupid.
[*] The data for IQ suggests that it increased steadily from 1900
to 2000, correlating with broad gains in education and science, but
has since declined, which is often blamed on automation, although I
could see the same correlation with inequality (time-shifted a bit).
Jeffrey St Clair:
[01-30]:
Roaming Charges: Bored of Peace: Eventually gets to Trump's insane
counter-UN racket, but first half deals with ICE, Minnesota, and other
instances of Trump fascism. [02-09]:
Roaming Charges: If you're not a scumbag, you're a nobody: "One
of the world's richest jerks is gutting the once-storied newspaper
he bought as a vanity project, used to promote his own narcissistic
and predatory brand, ran editorial interference for Trump, eventually
grew bored with the shredded like yesterday's news." .
Books:
Other media:
Anis Shivani [2017-05-29]:
Four years later, Breaking Bad remains the boldest indictment
of modern American capitalism in TV history: "The show's visual
style is the greatest-ever rebuke to the gory hold neoliberalism has
over our minds and bodies." Stumbled across this piece, not out of
any particular curiosity about the 2008-13 Vince Gilligan series
(five seasons, which I hated at first, broke with early on, but my
wife persevered, and I wound up watching he end of; we also watched
Better Call Saul, and have started Pluribus and will
probably return to it, but with little enthusiasm, at least from
me). While my disgust is undiminished, I'm likely to use its title
as the second chapter of my "weird" political book: a brief sketch
of how America "broke bad" from WWII to Trump. I don't much care
whether the show works as critique or example, but I thought I
should flag this for future reference. It also turns out that
Shivani, who has also written novels and poetry, wrote a 2017
book called
Why Did Trump Win? Chronicling the Stages of Neoliberal Reactionism
During America's Most Turbulent Election Cycle, which I hadn't
noticed, but looks sharp enough to order.
Some notable deaths: Mostly from the New York Times listings.
Last time I did such a trawl was on
January 24, so we'll look that far back (although some names have
appeared since):
Current count:
#^c
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