I view rationality as a tool that we primates have developed to try to apprehend the world as it really is. There are lots of aspects of primate psychology that pull us away from rationality, and there are other primates who, for the same reasons, would take advantage of our chimpanzee nature for their own benefit, or to satisfy needs that even they don't understand. But reality is still out there, and kidding ourselves like King Canute isn't going to make our lives better.

My friend Roger has written an essay that describes the fall in measures of trust in New Zealand society, and rightly identifies these indicators as pointing to important declines in the way that society is working.  He goes on to urge us to replace interactions based on zero-sum grievance with mutual identification of what's not working and the will to fix it.

In the US, people often ask me about the differences between NZ and US society, and I've always identified trust as fundamental: in institutions, in the government, in personal interactions with each other, as the biggest difference I've seen.  And for years, in this blog, I've lamented the losing of trust as underlying many of the woes we see besetting us: the acceptance of falsehood as truth, the abandonment of institutions as too flawed to be usable, even though they were built for good reason and have served well over decades or centuries, the prevailing attitudes that all politicians are the same, they're all corrupt, all media is biased and promotes their own agendas, all big business is against us, the justice system is only for those with money, the cops want to hurt us, you're on your own in this world.  All these trust systems ideally create an environment within which everyone, regardless of luck or initial circumstance, can flourish.  If they're broken, they need fixing, not demolishing.

I often attributed the strong levels of trust between people in NZ to the small size of the population and the way the education system worked.  It's easier to gain consensus on the fundamentals when everyone is born and raised in the same systems, from the hospitals they're born in through the college they graduate from.  As many noted when I lived there, this perhaps leads to a tendency to conformity.  The US was long viewed by me as a society within which non-conformity is not only tolerated but celebrated.

Until the first Trump administration I thought that the society I was living in had a huge variety of ideas about the right way to live, but they were all grounded in tolerance of others and some fundamental common ideas about human rights, the rule of law, institutions that were designed to further those premises.  We had a shared understanding of where we wanted to get to, and lots of different conflicting ideas about how to get there.  The biggest shock to me in that election was discovering how many people didn't share either those fundamentals or the underlying facts on the ground that told us how the world was.

This encapsulates the loose thoughts I've been trying to elaborate in the blog about ways forward for the federal government.  Doesn't, however, provide a path from where we are to where we want to be.

The NYT on the detained tourists I've been writing about: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/13/world/europe/german-tourists-detained-deported.html.  Better late than never.  The German woman is now back in Germany, but the Welsh tourist is still in detention, AFAIK.  I called the UK Embassy in San Francisco, but they are unable to give out information on British nationals due to privacy constraints.  I called the ICE number for verification of detention, but the voicemail system I was directed to was full and not accepting more messages.

As I noted earlier: if you don't have a US passport, you should not travel to the US at present.  Detention is cruel and unpleasant, and for an indeterminate length of time.  This warning should be posted as a travel advisory on other countries' government web sites.

I really appreciate M. Gessen's work.  I find her particularly clarifying, and thinking about that this morning I think the reason is that, unlike most of the other columnists I read or listen to, she has had experience of what's happening and time to think it through, and as a result she can see a little further into the future than most.  Rather than a "can you believe they did this yesterday" or "this thing they did today will have all sorts of consequences we can't even begin to anticipate" kind of approach, she can credibly say "look at the bigger picture, this is the process that's unfolding, this is what to look for next, this is where we're going."

I bought one of their books during Trump I, "Surviving Autocracy", and it introduced me to the term "the autocratic attempt" and Trump as failing at the time to progress beyond the attempt.  It seems only fair in the US that we gave the guy a second chance …

This post is prompted by their latest NYT column that simply lays out what the current situation is for trans people in the US and around the world and how it's changed with this administration.  Much of the column patiently explains the consequences for different specific individuals, both in the US and abroad, highlighting specific consequences that have happened that I hadn't thought about.

The last portion of the column is the kicker; Gessen refuses to follow the easy rhetorical device of trying to convince the reader that next they'll come for us, a device which would transform  the column into an appeal for self-interest, but just effectively says "this is what's happening, this is why it's happening, you are morally obligated to care about it".

gotta go out for a walk.  Meanwhile: I've been trying to figure out how to characterize Trump.  I've been somewhat persuaded by Ezra Klein's characterization as a sort of mafia don, running on tribute and loyalty, but he just doesn't seem that clever.  I used to think of him more as an ignorant buffoon who, once he got to be President, had accomplished what he wanted.  I'm tending back to that thinking after reading Surowiecki's review of Michael Wolff's latest.  It sounds right-er.

https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/the-strategic-poverty-of-shutdown

In particular, this quote:

• What's particularly frustrating is that this isn't a matter of partisan politics—it's about whether we maintain a constitutional system at all. There are principled conservatives who recognize the danger of an executive unbound by law. There are institutional actors across the political spectrum who understand what's at stake. A genuinely strategic opposition would have built bridges to these allies rather than retreating into partisan frameworks that limit rather than expand the possibilities for effective resistance.

resonates with me: as I've expressed earlier, we need _our_ guys in Congress to talk to their colleagues and get them to understand that giving up their constitutional authority has created a power vacuum that's being occupied by a mafia don.  They might agree with some of the ends, but they must disagree with the means.  Demonizing Republicans (both those that mistakenly voted for Trump and are horrified at the result, and those in Congress who are being cowed by their leadership) is not the way forward.

Thinking about Dave Winer led me back to this post about the London COVID memorial wall.  Turns out this was a grass-roots action.  I was back in London over Christmas, picked up a book by a group called Led By Donkeys (!) and turned to a random page, and the chapter was describing the process they went through to make that wall.  They spent a bunch of time figuring out what and where (opposite Parliament, so they couldn't ignore it), and then how to do it stealthily in such a way that it wouldn't be shut down by the authorities over the weeks that it'd take to complete.

They donned official looking hi-viz vests and made signs in official-looking fonts saying things like "National COVID Memorial Wall" that they glued on the wall prior to starting, and men-at-work hoardings that they put all over that section of the walkway.  The cops didn't pay them any mind until they were already well into it, and the media had started to cover it.  Eventually, leading from behind, politicians used it as a backdrop for press conferences.

Dave Winer asks that bloggers respond to his post on The Writers' Web.  In re-reading it, the tenet that resonates most with me is "Open, for real".  One of the reasons I've been blogging so long is for the reasons he describes there: using small components loosely joined that can be replaced as appropriate, and formats that are long-lived because they're simple, to maintain something that I use for most of my adult life.

'Course, I'm a software guy, so I was forced to come to that realization over time in my professional life.  It took me a few years to understand the tradeoff between the simplicity of an all-in-one tool and the flexibility of a set of small interconnected tools, and get off the Microsoft bandwagon where the tradeoff for making everything relatively simple was to lock me into a non-standard development process that was driven ever faster by the thousands of developers they had in-house.  I remember realizing that I was having to charge people to replace perfectly functional software after a few years with rewrites because the underlying MS-based toolset had been discontinued and I couldn't just replace or extend any small part.  The solution was to move to the open-source environment: Linux, gcc, simple text tools like wiki, blog, markdown, HTML, ANSI SQL, PNG.  Self-hosting collaborative tools, so they couldn't be altered or removed.  Paths to migrate any data from one simple format to another, should it be required.

For the same reason, I host a blog server on a generic hosting service and post my thoughts there.  I have no interest in being widely read, nor do I want to find all this text removed or edited because whatever service I had mistakenly chosen to use as a publisher decided not to let it remain.  I think most of the non-technical people I know choose to use the all-in-one product because of the low bar to entry, and I applaud Dave for trying to replicate that with his Tech for Poets series, but it's still harder to use collections of tools together than one big tool, built by a big company that has to see a return.

Incidentally, I see WordLand as a great addition to this collection of small tools.  I've used WordPress because I can self-host it, it requires a minimal amount of maintenance and it used to have a low overhead for posting new stuff.  But at some point the ambitions grew, and it evolved from the straightforward journalling system it had been into a Content Management System and simply pushing content onto my blog became onerous.  So I didn't post as much.  Now, with WordLand, it's simple again, and as a result I'm posting many more items.

I keep a blog mostly to note down thoughts and links to which I'd like to return and which I occasionally want to share.  Not every writing system is for publication.  Not every system is for serving advertising, nor for engaging in tit-for-tat argument.  Sometimes you want to just dash off a thought, sometimes you want to write an essay.  It's a web, not a monoculture.

AFAIK, this woman is still in custody in a jail in Tacoma.   I haven't had any luck trying to contact the author of the article I saw, and through them the woman's parents.  I found a likely mail address for the prison, but the official people finder that the federal government provides to find people in their facilities doesn't show her anywhere.

I've sent mail to Ms Burke directly in care of the facility to offer help: visit, contact her parents, find a lawyer, bring her something she needs.  I think she urgently needs legal representation, so I filed an application with the local branch of the ACLU on her behalf as well, but haven't heard from them.

Her parents must be pulling their hair out.