Enough for now. Started early but with little enthusiasm, more links and fewer comments, as the Trump articles piled up. While it was gratifying to see Trump lose in court, he came out of the week looking more indomitable than ever.
One article to single out below is the long one by Nathan J Robinson and Noam Chomsky. Sure, it's old news, but it's the root of so much that is happening today (not least in Ukraine). Chomsky has been collecting this book for decades now, but Robinson helps a lot, advancing it beyond the usual dry contempt.
Trump: On Tuesday, a jury found Trump guilty of sexual assault and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, and fined Trump $5 million. On Wednesday evening, CNN allowed Trump to flip the story, by hosting a "town hall" limited to his rabid followers, where among numerous other blatant lies, he doubled down, defaming Carroll again. Seems like a dubious legal strategy, but masterful politically.
Zack Beauchamp: [05-11] The debate over CNN platforming Trump is missing the point: CNN sponsored and broadcast Trump's "town hall" on Wednesday, showcasing "an endless parade of lies and moral obscenities." Beauchamp also wrote: [05-13] A second Trump administration would be much worse.
Noah Berlatsky: [05-12] CNN's Trump town hall was a fascist ritual: "Trump calls his supporters to their worse selves." Asks "how can 74 million Trump supporters be fascists?" Of course, it's not true that 74 million Americans are fascist day-in, day out. They're just not unwilling to vote for one. But some fairly substantial number are also happy to go out and cheer one on. One more thing you should keep in mind is the division between leaders and followers: the former have a characteristic ideology and initiate action; the latter follow and often submit, mostly to the vicarious thrill of mass membership, but sometimes to commit violence. The Adorno/Horkheimer research into authoritarian personality was an attempt to identify potential followers of fascism based on past followers, given how widespread the common traits are. Fascist leaders vary considerably, both in agenda and in competency. On a simplistic 0-to-10 scale, where Hitler is a 10 (there being little point in trying to imagine an even-more-fascist leader) and Mussolini is about an 8, Trump is probably in the 5-6 range (today, up from 3-4 in 2016). That is high enough to worry about, especially given that his followers haven't thinned out much while becoming much more intense.
Philip Bump: [05-12] Trump supporters are neither underrecognized nor half the country: Things CNN claimed in defense of granting Trump a prime slice of TV time to air his falsehoods. Charts follow, including ones that show that CNN has featured Trump much more than anyone else, even much more than Fox News did.
Margaret Carlson: [05-12] After that awful CNN Trump town hall, liberals gloat at their peril: "The circus showed he's learned more since 2020 than the mainstream media has."
Matthew Cooper: [05-10] If I were Trump's lawyers after losing the assault and defamation case, I'd be very concerned: Interview with Jennifer Taub, who notes: "What I haven't said yet, is what an incredible coward [Trump] is. He He had so little faith in his own ability to keep his mouth shut that he couldn't even show up in court . . . This man is the most cowardly, pathetic person."
Ken Dilanian: [05-11] Trump's comments on Mar-a-Lago documents 'like red meat to a prosecutor'.
Jamison Foser: [05-11] Anderson Cooper, company man: "CNN's response to critics of its Trump rally makes one thing clear: The cable channel hates its viewers." One thing here rarely reported elsewhere is that, per Matthew Bartlett, "the crowd was explicitly told they could applaud but not boo." That may have been unnecessary, given how carefully the in-studio audience was stacked to cater to Trump (which was, of course, a condition of getting Trump on board). The rest of the article goes deep into Cooper's non-apology and CNN's calculations. The subtitle, of course, reminds me of the old saw, that Republicans fear their base, where Democrats loathe theirs.
Constance Grady: [05-09] Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse. Will it change anything? "E. Jean Carroll won a fraught victory in her civil case against the former president."
Glenn Kessler: [05-11] Trump fills his CNN town hall with a fire hose of old and new false claims.
Ed Kilgore: [05-10] Trump's CNN Town Hall Was a MAGA Rally: Notes that "CNN did Trump a huge favor" in staging this, with the "town" restricted to Republicans and Independents, offering softball questions and whoops and cheers.
Hugo Lowell: [05-12] Trump's team revels in town hall victory as CNN staff rages at 'spectacle of lies'.
Ramesh Ponnuru: {05-10] 11 questions I wish Trump had been asked at the CNN town hall: Mostly good questions, most turning on Trump's failure to lift a finger to do things he promised in his 2016 campaign. Could be more, and could cut deeper, of course. Still unlikely that he would have answered any of them.
Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [05-11] They helped Trump plan a coup. He wants them back for a second term: Pictures of Michael Flynn and Jeffrey Clark. First-term Trump had few qualms about appointing whoever he was told to appoint, but he's learned a thing or two since then, mostly the need to enforce strict loyalty.
Li Zhou: [05-11] The danger of Trump's ugly attacks on E. Jean Carroll: "They reaffirm his mistreatment of women and complete disregard for the legal system."
Republicans:
Kate Aronoff: [05-11] Republicans are truly losing their minds over ESG.
Maria Cramer: [05-14] On the Right, support and donations pour in for Daniel Perry. Prominent among those applauding the murderer of Jordan Neely is Ron DeSantis, who railed against "Soros-funded DAs" and pleaded, "Let's show this Marine . . . America's got his back." For more on Neely, Perry, and the NY Times, see St Clair, below.
Matt Ford: [05-11] George Santos can't even do corruption right: "The charges leveled against the New York lawmaker highlight how little thought he put into his grift." More Santos:
Paul Kane: [05-13] Defending white nationalists, Tommy Tuberville fears a military that is 'going wrong': The R-AL senator has blocked "nearly 200 military promotions" over his concern that the Pentagon is becoming "woke."
Sky Palma: [05-12] Holocaust text books rejected in Florida's crack down on 'woke indoctrination'.
Nia Prater: [05-10] George Santos, fashion criminal.
Terrence McCoy/Marina Dias/Isaac Stanley-Becker: [05-11] George Santos confesses to theft in Brazil to avoid prosecution.
Prem Thakker: [05-12] Ron DeSantis bans credit card companies from helping track gun criminals: Republicans understand that the second amendment isn't about good guys with guns stopping bad guys with guns. It's about making sure that all the bad guys have guns.
Li Zhou: [05-11] The blatant discrimination of Ron DeSantis's anti-China housing law.
The economy and its politics (including the debt ceiling): I'm seeing a lot of articles recently about how Biden is going to blink and give into McCarthy's extortion demands.
Kevin T Dugan: [05-10] 5 Things to Know About the Best Inflation Report in a Long Time.
Garrett Epps: [05-08] I've argued for years that the President must pay the national debt even if Congress won't raise the debt ceiling.
James K Galbraith: [05-11] The debt ceiling drama is all stagecraft: "Remember: The US Treasury is obligated to make payments. The rest is optics."
Ed Kilgore: [05-09] What if Republicans actually want a debt disaster?
Eric Levitz: [05-13] New study finds a high minimum wage creates jobs: The right-wing theory that raising the minimum wage will make jobs prohibitively expensive has been tested in cities and states that have raised the floor -- in the case of New York, by 72% (adjusted for inflation) between 2013 and 2021 -- and the opposite has been proved. Perhaps reality does have a left bias.
Dylan Matthews:
[05-02] Why Joe Biden won't negotiate on the debt ceiling: "The budget and debt ceiling are separate issues. Biden will budge on one of them."
[05-12] The trillion-dollar coin scheme, explained by the guy who invented it.
Ian Millhiser: [05-11] Is the debt ceiling constitutional? "What will the courts do if House Republicans push the United States into default?"
Courts:
Adam Freelander: [05-11] Why Texas judges have so much power right now: "Judge shopping."
Ryann Liebenthal: [05-09] The right's war on student debtors may cost us all: "Is the Supreme Court willing to unleash legal chaos to defeat Biden's loan cancellation program?"
Jane Mayer: [05-09] How troubling are the payments and gifts to Ginni and Clarence Thomas?
Ian Millhiser: [05-11] The Supreme Court rediscovers humility -- in a case about pigs.
Julia Rock/Andrew Perez: [05-09] Clarence Thomas reversed position after gifts and family payments. Rock previously wrote, with David Sirota: [04-12] Thomas pushed to kill disclosure laws while getting secret billionaire gifts. Sirota and Perez wrote: [05-09] Here's the real goal of Supreme Court corruption: The right has been plagued with conservatives turning into liberals once they secured life-long appointments to courts. Perhaps the simplest way to keep that from happening is to keep them (or wives, etc.) on the payroll.
Immigration:
Ellen Ioanes: [05-14] Title 42 is over. Immigration policy is still broken..
Ed Kilgore: [05-14] Immigration is still fueling Trump's political future: No doubt. It's also an issue that Democrats are having a very hard time coming up with a coherent policy on. Republicans are divided between moguls who want cheap labor and bigots who want zero immigration (except, perhaps, when Trump needs his next trophy wife, or someone like Rupert Murdoch wants to buy a television station). They, at least, can compromise on a program that lets the rich enter discreetly, that lets workers in through back channels to keep them powerless, and that displays maximum cruelty to everyone else. Democrats have it much harder: they are torn between loud advocates of even more immigration, even louder pleas for accepting refugees from every godforsaken corner of the world (many fleeing US-backed regimes, and many more from US-condemned ones), while most rank-and-file Democrats don't care much one way or another, but are willing to go along with the pro-immigrant forces because the anti-immigrants are so often racist and xenophobic. I suspect most Democrats would be happy with a reasoned compromise*, but Republicans like having a broken system they can campaign against without ever having to fix, so there's no one to compromise with. And in a world governed by sound bites, the demagogue always come off as strong and clear while the sophisticate looks muddled and middling.
Nicole Narea: [05-11] The seismic consequences of ending Title 42.
Tori Otten: [05-11] House Republicans pass immigration bill that would completely destroy asylum process.
*For a compromise, how about this? Clean up the undocumented backlog by allowing citizenship or subsidized return. Impose quotas to cut back on new immigration rates, at least for a few years. Figure out a way to distribute refugees elsewhere, subsidizing alternate destinations. (Everybody deserves to live somewhere safe and healthy, but that doesn't have to be the US.) And stop producing so many refugees (war, economic, climate) -- this may require more foreign aid (and not the military kind). And do real enforcement against illegal immigrants, including thorough checks on employment. But also get due process working.
Environment:
Robert Hunziker: [05-12] The ocean heat bomb ignites: "For the first time that scientists recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so." And that's before El Niņo kicks in, later this year.
Benji Jones: [05-11] A giant patch of seaweed is growing to record sizes in the Atlantic. Sorry, Florida.
Rebecca Leber: [05-11] The EPA's long-delayed new rules for power plant pollution, explained. Leber followed up with: [05-13] 4 winners and 1 loser in the EPA's historic move to limit power plant pollution: The loser is "Biden's 2035 clean grid goal," largely due to carve outs that exempt most gas-fired power plants. Coal plants could survive beyond 2040 by adopting carbon capture technology, but that has yet to prove practical and economical.
Ian Livingston: [05-12] Here's where record heat may envelop the West this weekend: The map highlights western Canada, but includes record highs in the 90s for Seattle and Portland.
Artificial intelligence and other computations: Vox has a whole section on The rise of artificial intelligence, explained, and a few other articles have popped up. I've barely poked around in all this material, partly because I have my own ideas about what AI can and/or should do -- I had a fairly serious interest in the subject back in the 1980s, but haven't kept up with it -- and partly because I'm dubious about how it might affect me. (Although, as someone with serious writers block, this title caught my eye: If you're not using ChatGPT for your writing, you're probably making a mistake.
Tom Engelhardt: [05-11] Whose planet are we on?: "What happens when LTAI (less than artificial intelligence) gives way to AI?" Argues that "this can't end well," mostly based on the proven shortcomings of LTAI, by which he means human intelligence (a better term, better even than one I considered proposing: organic intelligence; both have the advantage of leaving quantitative comparison to the side).
Taylor Lorenz: [05-13] An influencer's AI clone will be your girlfriend for $1 a minute: CarynAI, which sucks callers in for hours, but has led to "terrifying threats against her," as "they think that it's the end of humanity." That's about what it sounds like.
Alex Pareene: [05-12] The computers are coming for the wrong jobs: A number of good points here, like how AI writing programs are "the perfect employee of the sorts of content mills that exist to aggregate and rewrite tech or entertainment news," which will mostly be read by robots "to get good placement in search engine results . . . so that other robots can sell ads against it."
Kelsey Piper: [05-10] Don't let AI fears of the future overshadow present-day causes: "We shouldn'g forget present-day problems like global health and poverty."
Alissa Wilkinson: [05-02] The looming threat of AI to Hollywood, and why it should matter to you.
Robert Wright: [05-04] The hidden source of AI's emerging power: Interview with Geoffrey Hinton. Wright previously wrote: [03-15] OK, it's time to freak out about AI.
Ukraine War:
Connor Echols: [05-12] Diplomacy Watch: China's top diplomat earns mixed reception in Europe.
Anatol Lieven/Jake Werner: [05-12] Yes, the US can work with China for peace in Ukraine.
Eve Ottenberg: [05-12] Beltway mediocrities bumble toward Armageddon.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [05-11] Trump tells CNN town hall: 'I want everyone to stop dying' in Ukraine. He actually has some points here, including the point about how calling Putin a war criminal only makes it harder to get to a deal. His brags that Putin wouldn't have invaded if Trump was president, and that if he were president, he'd end the war within 24 hours, seem pretty ridiculous. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself: would Putin have been more likely to invade knowing that he had a indifferent US president who wouldn't fight back, or because he feared he was being pushed into a corner by Biden's much more militant backing of an increasingly hardline Zelinsky? I find the latter much more plausible, but the conventional wisdom would argue that strengthening support for Ukraine should have deterred a Putin attack. Sure didn't work out that way.
Robert Wright: [05-12] The ultimate Blob blind spot: A recent Foreign Affairs has a batch of five pieces by foreign policy experts in the global south, casting into relief how Americans fail to see how others sees them. That leads to a lecture on the lack of "cognitive empathy" as a key defect among Blob thinkers. That's true enough, but I think there's a simpler and easier solution, which is to check your hubris and to admit that most things beyond your borders are beyond your control.
World:
Graham E Fuller: [05-13] Turkey's elections: What's at stake? Their presidential election is on Sunday.
Jen Kirby: [05-13] Turkey's extremely big-deal election, explained: One obvious downside should Erdoğan lose will be learning how to pronounce the name of his successor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Nicole Narea: [05-09] What Imran Khan's arrest means for Pakistan. For an update, see Ellen Ioanes: [05-13] Pakistan's political turmoil over Imran Khan's arrest, explained. Some of the turmoil subsided after Pakistan's Supreme Court ruled that the arrest of Khan was "invalid and unlawful," but the divisions remain.
Trita Parsi: [05-08] Five years after Trump's JCPOA exit, Iran closer to bomb than ever: There is still no reason to think that Iran wants nuclear weapons, but denied the incentives offered under JCPOA, they were left nothing to do but returned to refining enriched uranium, and evidently have enough of it to assemble several Hiroshima-style weapons. Furthermore, US hostility has driven them to closer relationships with Russia and China -- not so much an alliance as a group sharing an interest in escaping US sanctions. All of this leads Fred Kaplan to ask: [05-08] Why are we still living with one of Trump's dumbest decisions?
Seyed Hossein Mousavian: [05-12] Biden's 'no Iran deal, no crisis' policy is unsustainable.
Richard Silverstein: [05-09] Gaza: House of slaughter.
Philip Weiss: [05-06] Palestinians overwhelmingly support armed struggle to end occupation: That's not how I read the numbers, but that's clearly the drift. And just as clearly, that's the way right-wing Israelis want it. Provoking Palestinians to violence gives them an excuse to kill more, to destroy more homes and infrastructure, to inflict more pain and misery. That's what they live for. Slaughter proves Zionism is both necessary and sufficient.
Andrew Cockburn: [05-07] Getting the defense budget right: A (real) grand total, over $1.4 trillion: Significantly more than the already obscenely high $842 billion Department of Defense appropriation.
Ben Ehrenreich: [05-10] How climate change has shaped life on earth for millenia: Review of Peter Frankopan: The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story, which attempts to reframe all of human (and for that matter geologic) history in terms of climate change -- that being something we've lately noticed matters.
David A Farenthold/Tiff Fehr: [05-14] How to raise $89 million in small donations, and make it disappear: "A group of conservative operatives using sophisticated robocalls raised millions of dollars from donors using pro-police and pro-veteran messages. But instead of using the money to promote issues and candidates, an analysis by The New York Times shows, nearly all the money went to pay the firms making the calls and the operatives themselves, highlighting a flaw in the regulation of political nonprofits." Not to mention a flaw in the enforcement of consumer fraud laws.
Ed Kilgore: [05-08] Democrats shouldn't freak out over one really bad poll.
Walter Shapiro: [05-10] Democrats, don't panic! Seriously, don't.
Erin Kissane: Blue skies over Mastodon: General piece on Twitter-alternatives, which in turn lead to Mike Masnick: Six Months In: Thoughts on the Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options. Just FYI. Neither piece has convinced me to sign up for either, although it's fairly clear that my Twitter following is in decline (followers 591, but views on latest Music Week notice down to 227).
Eric Levitz: [05-11] Do the 'Woke' betray the left's true principles? A review of Susan Neiman's book, Left Is Not Woke. I'm all for emphasizing the primacy of the left-right axis, but I don't see much practical value in opposing that to woke. On the other hand, Levitz's take on "toxic forms of identity politics" are well taken. I recall from my own political evolution how I started out with a deep antipathy to rationalism, but changed my mind when I discovered that reason could lead to the right answers I had intuited, but put them on a much firmer basis.
David Owen: [04-24] The great electrician shortage: "Going green will depend on blue-collar workers. Can we train enough of them before time runs out?" Plumbers, too. I've spent months trying to get a plumber to fix a floor drain, which no one seems to want to touch. I'm tempted to rent a jackhammer and deal with it myself, but then again, I'm also a bit scared to.
Andrew Prokop: [05-12] The potential indictment of Hunter Biden, explained. If you care, some parameters. Worst case is that he's a fuck up who got sloppy on his taxes. Trump would say that makes him smart. The gun form is supposedly the clearest violation, but how often is that seriously investigated?
Nathan J Robinson:
[05-11] Donald Trump could well be the president again: "The polling is alarming. Biden is weak, Trump is ruthless, and 2024 could look a lot more like 2016 than 2020."
-/Noam Chomsky: [05-12] The worst crime of the 21st century: "The United States destruction of Iraq remains the worst international crime of our time. Its perpetrators remain free and its horrors are buried." Long essay, a painful reminder not just of what was done in and to Iraq but of the extraordinary hubris in its planning. Adapted from a forthcoming book, The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers the World.
Aja Romano: [05-12] Why the Vallow-Daybell murders are among the bleakest in true crime memory: I normally skip right over mundane crime stories, but the author is right, that this one is profoundly unsettling, not just for what a couple of very crazy people did but for the broader cultural roots of where their thoughts came from. By the way, Rexburg, Idaho, rings a bell: it was once described as the most Republican town in America.
Dylan Scott: [05-10] 3 things you should know about the end of the Covid public health emergency: "A hidden experiment in universal health care is about to end."
Jeffrey St Clair: [05-12] Roaming Charges: Neely Don't Surf: Starts off with the murder of Jordan Neely in a NYC subway car by Daniel Penny, who "loved surfing." He then links to a Clash song: "Charlie Don't Surf".
A society that systematically victimizes people tends to reflexively blame its victims for their own misfortune: poverty, hunger, chronic illness, homelessness, mental distress and, as we're witnessing once again with the case of Jordan Neely, even their own deaths.
Traditionally, this role has fallen to the New York Times and when it came to the murder on the F train they sprang into action. . . .
Penny is described as easy going, a people person, an unstressed former Marine who loved surfing. Yes, he too was jobless, but unlike Neely, he had aspirations. He wanted to become a bartender in Manhattan and a good citizen in the city he loved.
When the Times turns to Neely, we are treated to sketches in urban pathology -- the portrait a troubled black youth, who has been in decline since high school. His life is reduced to his rap sheet, his arrests, his confinements to the psych ward. . . . Neely is depicted as ranting, homeless, troubled, erratic, violent, mentally ill and ready to die. It's almost as if we're meant to believe that Neely's murder was a case of "suicide by vigilante." He was, the story implies, almost asking for someone to kill him.
After protests, NYC prosecutors finally announced that they will charge Penny "with Manslaughter in the Second Degree, which is classified as a Class C Non-Violent Felony, where first-time offenders often receive a non-incarceratory sentence, usually of probation."
Matt Taibbi, et al: [05-10] Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The top 50 organizations to know: Taibbi wrote the introduction, which ginned up the title, while others wrote the profiles that follow. The organizations include a broad mix of non-profits with a few companies and government sections thrown in. They give you a good idea of who's monitoring the internet to identify misinformation. They may do a lot of complaining, but few have any actual ability to censor, which makes this one of the more tenuous X-industrial complex coinages.