Three immediate thoughts re Roger’s article https://quillette.com/2025/06/10/classical-liberalism-without-strong-gods-open-society-popper/:

1. I remembered reading “Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Appiah, 2006) years ago. A unifying moral liberal secular idea of how societies might function.  I remember recommending it to many friends. Quite bracing, I should re-read.

1. There are moral lessons to be drawn from established religion.  The importance of an institutional mechanism for forgiveness in society.  Egalitarianism.  Charity.  Many of society’s best ideas are distilled into religious tenets in admittedly simplistic but comprehensible forms. Don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

1. https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Moral_Particulars_in_Literature.php Happened to read this in the same feed session, some coincidence, huh?

The media have spent a week of frenzied reporting on the high-school-level breakup of Trump and Musk.  It’s reality-tv level nonsense, and the Donald knows how to make that work for him.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the two of them orchestrated the whole thing as part of the ongoing don’t-look-behind-the-curtain autocratic capture. It was always going to be the case that the transactional president would dispense with any one of his sidekicks when they were no longer useful to him.

There is a Musk story.  Weeks of sustained grass-roots protest at Tesla dealerships has led to plummeting sales and sinking share values as the brand has become toxic.  Tesla owners are shamed for associating with the brand, and turn away. Feeling the pressure from shareholders and board members, the CEO withdraws from activities that are damaging his brand and returns to the work of managing the businesses.  A success for bottom-up non-violent citizen protest.

I haven’t seen any punditry drawing these connections, however.

Wow.  Pbs NewsHour, of all people, chose to interview, as an economic expert, a reality TV show personality. What qualifies him as an expert? The fact that he sits on a show, "shark tank", and tells people that he will or will not invest money in their idea. I thought we'd had enough of reality show fakes when the con man who was just playing a CEO on TV got elected president… Bad form, PBS

I’m listening to Ezra Klein talking with his compatriots about where we are on the autocratic timeline, and what we should be looking for, and is this competitive autocracy or failing tyranny or Orban or Duterte or what (actually, doesn’t the monomaniacal nature of tyranny mean that every one is different, tuned to the differences in the Dear Leaders?), and does the robustness of the resistance mean that he’s lost, and …

Coincidentally, I just read a good article in the Times about the hurricane in North Carolina, and how different individuals, their families and the emergency response system fared.  Never happened there before, that creek has never gotten this high but this house is fine, it’s never flooded, sure hurricanes happen on the coast but they don’t do that here, they need that level of preparedness out there but not here, then BOOM landslides, mass destruction, death.

Amazing resonance.

https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/piercylowroad.html

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say _We
_and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

In the meantime, the world’s richest man has been involved in the deaths of the worild’s poorest children.

Frm NYT may 8, "The $200 Billion Gamble: Bill Gates’s Plan to Wind Down His Foundation", in a discussion of Elon Musk's involvement in shutting down PEPFAR, which is predicted to result on an increase in the deaths in the millions worldwide. 

A succinct and devastating summary.

https://leighopkins.com/2018/07/18/198-methods-of-nonviolent-action/

I participated in a nationwide demonstration that included 5.2M people, by the most optimistic count I've heard.  There's a few photos in the media here and there, but nothing that matches the scale of the protest.  Oh well.

OTOH, the media are carrying on every hour on every channel about the stock market.  I get it, I have a 401(K) that I'm going to need to draw on in the next year or so, so I care about the market.  But I'm in the minority.  Most Americans don't have stocks and bonds, so it the market is going south, so what?  Most Americans don't care that unemployment rates are low or inflation rates are matched by income increases; that's just a bunch of numbers, they don't tell me anything about me.  Most Americans don't care about overseas aid, they think we spend too much on that anyway.  Most Americans wish there weren't wars going on overseas, but there are always wars going on overseas and so long as we're not the ones fighting that's fine.

What do I think people care about?  The price of groceries.  The price and availability of healthcare, which might mean I don't get to go to a doctor or a dentist and hope I don't get hit by a car.  The price of childcare.  The lack of a house I can afford, and the increases in the rent.  The increase in homelessness that I can see on the streets of the place I live.  The insecurity of my job.

I've seen studies that say things change when 3.5% of the population gets out on the streets. We're halfway there, it'll probably take more in an authoritarian state, we'll keep going and getting bigger.  Trump'll keep being incompetent as catastrophe after catastrophe happens, just as catastrophes do with any administration.  And at some point the media will focus on what people actually care about.

Doing it the right way: Rutgers proposes that universities in its conference band together for academic freedom against the federal government.  https://senate.rutgers.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Resolution-to-Establish-a-Mutual-Defense-Compact-for-the-Universities-of-the-Big-Ten-Academic-Alliance-in-Defense-of-Academic-Freedom-Institutional-Integrity-and-the-Research.pdf

Anyone else remember this book? Seems like a good description of where we are.