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.
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.
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.