Recent Reading

Music Database

Artist Search:

Browse

Website Search

Google:

Friday, June 27, 2025

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. My previous one appeared 23 days ago, on June 4.

I've been busy working on the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll: Mid-Year 2025, which may seem a bit like "fiddling while Rome burns," but quite frankly, we'd all be much better off catching up with this year's still-remarkable parade of new jazz releases, including another bounty of dusted-off oldies, than we are helplessly watching Fox and CNN regale us with what little they can grasp of the world, and how little they -- let alone the actors and ideologues they report on -- understand of it. Jazz is, after all, music for people who take pleasure in thinking about what gives them pleasure, and often who are willing to expose themselves to the frontiers of human creativity. Politics is something nearly opposite: it hurts to even think about it, in large part because it's hard to recognize as human people who are so full of greed, petty hate, and lust for power, the class of people who promote themselves as others' expense, you know, the "newsmakers."

Note that the long comment on Ezra Klein and the long intro on Israel were written a couple weeks ago -- the latter after the bombing of Iran started, but I haven't tried to update it. Most of the tweets were collected as the popped up. (I could probably build whole posts out of them, but they'd be even more scattered than this forum is.) The music stuff has also been sitting around (but I should update the mid-year lists -- or more likely, I may keep adding to that section). Most of the rest of the comments are of recent vintage, even if the articles are a bit old. No doubt I'm missing some major stories. One I'm aware of is the New York mayoral primary, as a lot of my sources are thrilled by how well Mamdani has fared and/or afraid of what establishment Democrats may try to do to sabotage him. I'm going to go ahead and post whatever I have by bedtime, then return tomorrow to my jazz poll and whatever else I have need of working on.

Israel: I'm loathe to group articles, but there's too much here not to, especially given the rate at which it is piling up. I've been thinking about revolution lately. It's taken me a while because first I had to disabuse myself of the idea that revolutions are good things. That idea was deeply cemented in my brain because first I was taught that the American Revolution was a good thing, overthrowing monarchy and aristocracy to establish an independent self-governing democracy. Then the US Civil War was a second good revolution, as it ended slavery. Such events, as well as less violent upheavals like the New Deal and the movements of the 1960s made for progress towards equal rights and justice for all. Moreover, one could point to revolutions elsewhere that made for similar progress, although they often seemed somewhat messier than the American models. That progress seemed like an implacable tectonic force, driving both revolution and reform. And when you put more pressure on an object than it can resist, it either bends or breaks. So I came to see revolutions not as heroic acts of good intentions overcoming repression but as proof that the old order is hard and can only give way by shattering. France and Russia are the key examples: both absolute monarchies that could not reform, so had to be overturned. China, Vietnam, and Cuba were variations on that same theme. So was Iran, which was harder to see as any kind of shift toward the progressive left.

Meanwhile, leftists became more aware of the downsides of revolution, and wherever feasible more interested in reforms, reducing militancy to ritualized non-violent protest. On the other hand, while right-wingers also protest, they are more likely to escalate to violence, probably because right-wing regimes so readily resort to violence to maintain control. The result is that revolutions are more likely to come from the right these days than from the left. Which can be awkward for people who were brought up to see revolutions as progressive.

I'm bringing this up under Israel because Israel's far-right coalition government, going back to its formation before the Gaza uprising of Oct. 7, 2023, makes much more sense when viewed as a revolutionary force. The single defining feature of all revolutionary forces is independent of their ideologies, which are all over the map, but has to do with with simple discovery that people previously denied power now find themselves free to test their limits -- which leads them to act to excess, as long as their is no significant resistance.

This may seem surprising given that Netanyahu has been in power off-and-on since the late 1990s. While his sympathies have always been with the far-right fringe of Zionism, and he's consistently pushed the envelope of what's possible in Israel and the world, he has always before exhibited a degree of caution. But since Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who were long identified not just as outsiders but as criminals, joined his coalition, they have effectively driven Israel's agenda: the genocide in Gaza, expropriation and terrorism in the West Bank, military adventurism in Lebanon and Syria, and not starting a war with Iran. Only a truly revolutionary government can go so far off the rails so fast and so carelessly.

Once you dispense with the assumption that revolutions have to be progressive, you'll find plenty of other examples, both left and right, some (like the French) oscillating between two poles, some generated from below (like the French or Russian), some from guerrilla wars (like Cuba and Afghanistan), some were simply gifted (like the Red Army's installation of Kim Il Sung, whose decision to invade the South was not directed by Moscow, nor effectively throttled), or more relevant here Hindenburg's appointment of Hitler as chancellor (the main difference between Hindenburg and Netanyahu is that the former died soon and was forgotten, whereas Netanyahu continues as the figurehead for a regime spinning out of control.

One might note that Israel has always been a revolutionary state (more or less). Ben-Gurion was more artful than Netanyahu, but he always wanted much more than he could get, and took every advantage to extend the limits of his power. Had he believed his own rhetoric in 1947 when he was campaigning for the UN partition plan, he would have legitimated his victory in 1950, but instead he still refused to negotiate borders, biding his time while building up the demographic, economic, and military strength to launch future wars (as happened in 1956, 1967, 1982, up to this very day. When his successor, Moshe Sharett, threatened peace, he seized power again and put Israel back on its war path. He was shrewd enough to caution against occupation in 1967, but as soon as war seemed to triumph, he got swept up in the excitement. Nothing stimulates the fanatic fervor of a revolutionary like seeing what you took to be limits melt away. Just look at Hitler after Munich, or Netanyahu after his American allies encouraged his long-dreamt-of program of extermination.

We should be clear that until 2023, Israel's "final solution" was just a dream -- not that it was never acted on (e.g., Deir Yassin), but most dreams, no matter how vile, are harmlessly forgotten. We can date it way back, easily through Ben-Gurion and Jabotinsky, perhaps to the foundings of Zionism with Herzl. And we know well that settler colonialism, even when one imagines and/or professes benign intentions, is conducive to genocide -- perhaps not inexorably, but we have enough of a sample to draw that conclusion. What allowed Israeli dreams to be turned into action was the realization that the restraints which had inhibited Israeli leaders in the past had lost all force, and could be ignored with no consequences.

• Richard Silverstein [06-06] Shin Bet's Palestinian Proxies Are Gaza Gangsters: I've read a ton of books on Israel/Palestine, but two I never got to but always wished I had are Hillel Cohen's books on Israel's manipulation of Palestinian collaborators: Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (2008), and Good Arabs: The Israeli Security Agencies and the Israeli Arabs, 1948-1967. I imagine the series could continue up to the present day, and will whenever the relevant archives are opened. Given this history, that Israel should be organizing and even arming Palestinian gangs is hardly a surprise, but underscores more forcefully than ever the moral bankruptcy of the occupation. Another lesson that one should draw from this is the realization that if Israel wanted Palestinians to have a stable and docile government, they could easily find people to lead it, and deliver enough respect and dignity to keep those leaders democratically elected. That they don't so isn't due to the intransigent militance of the Palestinian masses, but to their conviction that they can win by grinding the Palestinians into dust.

• Zack Beauchamp [06-13] The Israel-Iran war hinges on three big things: "It's impossible to know how this war will end. But here's how to make sense of it." Section heads: "What is Israel's objective?"; "Can Iran fight back?"; "How does Iran think about the bomb after this?" All of these points are fairly superficial: the first draws way too much on what Israel says, much of which is obviously misleading; the others ignore what Iran says, and especially the question of whether Iran wants to fight back, or even to fight in the first place. Like many critics, this piece attempts to approximate objectivity by hedging while remaining trapped in a profoundly distorted cloud of propaganda. (The word I first thought of was noosphere, but I settled for a plainer term, which puts more emphasis on its distinctly political construction. Beauchamp is not an apologist for Israel, but he is also not fully independent of a society that accepts the legitimacy of hasbara.) Beauchamp followed this piece with more:

  • Zack Beauchamp [06-22]: Three ways Trump's attack on Iran could spin out of control: "How does this war end?" Which, of course, misses the obvious point, which is that Israel doesn't want this (or any) war to end. They'd be happy to keep periodically "mowing the grass," as they did for well over a decade in Gaza, and if that ever blows back on them, they'd be happy to demolish the entire country (especially given that the prevailing winds for nuclear fallout are blowing away from Israel). The only practical limit on Israel's warmaking is financial: as long as the US is willing to foot the bills, and the American political system is effectively a wholly owned subsidiary of pro-Israeli donors, they're happy to fight on, oblivious to the consequences.

  • Zack Beauchamp [06-18] Trump doesn't have a foreign policy: "What he has instead is the promise of chaos." Instincts not reason, a blind faith that chaos will always break in your favor. He surrounds himself with people who tell him he's on a mission from God. And so far he's gotten away with pretty much everything, so doubt and worry are for losers.

  • Eric Levitz [06-23] 3 ways Americans could pay for Trump's war with Iran: "The conflict could take a toll in both blood and money." Section heads: "How Trump's war on Iran could impact the economy"; "Trump's attack has put American soldiers in harm's way"; "Trump may have made an Iranian nuclear weapon more likely." These are all pretty likely, and much more is remotely possible. Israeli/US aggression against Iran is a species of the Madman Theory, which can only work if the other side remains sane. (Indeed, that's true for all deterrence theories.) One problem here is that the more successful you are at decapitating responsible enemy leadership, the more likely you are to promote someone who's lost his marbles.

• Chris Hedges [06-10] Genocide by Starvation. Also led me to:

  • Chris Hedges [02-19] One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This: Interview with Omar El Akkad, who wrote a book with that title.

• Tony Karon [06-18] Tony Judt was right about Israel, wrong about the West. Bob Marley did warn us: "As long as we rely on the existing constellations of nation states, decolonization will remain a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained."

  So, all stakeholders need to understand that they're not dealing with the America they knew 30 or 20 or even 10 years ago. The crumbling edifice has entirely collapsed, and is unlikely to return. There will be no Pax Americana, because Washington no longer sees any incentive to taking that level of responsibility for anything. As the President sounds off like a cartoon gangster from an ancient Hollywood movie threatening to murder Iran's leader and to devastate its capital. The only sure bet here is that even if it did manage to topple Iran's regime, the U.S. of today has no interest in sticking around to manage the chaos that would follow. As Trump made clear in a recent speech in Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is done with "nation-building." (And as it has proven in Iraq and Afghanistan, its unmatched ability to destroy things is paralleled by epic failure to build anything of use to it on the ruins.

  The end of the article is also worth quoting here:

  Gramsci might have called it a morbid interregnum in which the old is dying but the new is unable to be born. But as the late, great Mike Davis wrote in what turned out to be his farewell missive, "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies . . . Unlike the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today's maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands."

  Which means humanity only has a future to the extent that it can take power from those destructive hands, and collectively chart a different course independent of the tumor-stricken ruling classes called out by Davis.

  By the way, my favorite line in the Davis piece comes early: "In a world where a thousand gilded oligarchs, billionaire sheikhs, and Silicon deities rule the human future, we should not be surprised to discover that greed breeds reptilian minds."

• Ahmed Ahmed/Ibtisam Mahdi [06-20] 'The Hunger Games': Inside Israel's aid death traps for starving Gazans: "Near-daily massacres as food distribution sites have killed over 400 Palestinians in the past month alone."

• Orly Noy [06-20] Why everything Israelis think they know about Iran is wrong: "For historian Lion Sternfeld, Israel's regime change fantasies ignore realities inside Iran and risk repeating historic mistakes."

• Jamal Kanj [06-25] Ceasefire Not Peace: How Netanyahu and AIPAC Outsourced Israel's War to Trump? This article explains a lot about Israel's policy of sowing chaos throughout the Middle East, dating it to the 1982 Yinon Plan. That's one I was unfamiliar with, but it makes a lot of sense, and is consistent with a lot of otherwise bizarre behavior, like the practice of seemingly random bombings of Syria (and Lebanon and Iraq and now Iran) just meant to inflict terror. In 1979, after the Carter-brokered peace agreement with Egypt, Israel could have negotiated similar deals with Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and come up with some kind of decent implementation of their promise of "autonomy" for the remaining Palestinians, but instead they lashed out at Lebanon and doubled down on repression and settlement in the occupied territories. I don't know whether the Yinon Plan was a blueprint or just a reflection of the mindset which Begin had brought to power, but which was latent in previous decades of Labor Zionism.

• Vijay Prashad [06-25] Why the US Strikes on Iran Will Increase Nuclear Weapons Proliferation. This is pretty obvious, yet rarely seems to be factored into the war plans of the US and Israel, which invariably underestimate future risks. But there is little evidence that the US cares about nonproliferation anymore.

• Rahman Bouzari [06-26] Against Israel's New Middle East Vision. Israel "issued an evacuation order for Tehran"?

• Jeff Halper [06-24] Global Palestine: Israel, the Palestinians, the Middle East and the World After the American Attack on Iran.

• Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies [06-25] How the US & Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran. Grossi is Director General of the watchdog group that is supposed to monitor nuclear power and weapons programs around the world. This has a lot of detail on its operations and how the information they collect can be abused.

• Richard Silverstein [06-23] Regime Change in Iran Will Not End Well.

• Asa Winstanley [06-10] Illegal police raid on my home won't stop me covering Gaza: "The police broke the law when they ransacked my house. When will they stop harassing pro-Palestine journalists?" Winstanley is British, author of the book, Weaponising Anti-Semitism: H ow the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn (2023).

• Branko Marcetic [06-18] Tulsi said Iran not building nukes. One senator after another ignored her: "seems like an odd thing to do unless you really want to go to war."

Tom Collina [06-08] Killing the Iran nuclear deal was one of Trump's biggest failures. It's not unusual for bad decisions to take years to mature into full-blown catastrophes. Not that he didn't produce enough immediate disasters, but the tragic costs of Trump's first term continue to emerge. Trump's surrender to Israel in scuttling the JCPOA, along with his let's-just-normalize-business-and-fuck-the-Palestinians Abraham Accords, as well as his signal that the US would always back Israel no questions asked, have lead directly to the current war and genocide. He bungled Ukraine and Afghanistan as bad, and probably North Korea too (although thus far Kim Jong Un has had the good sense not to embarrass him there). Back when Trump was first elected, I stressed that his presidency would result in four severe years of opportunity costs. The assumption there was that most of what he did wrong could later be reversed. That's proven difficult, and not just for lack of trying -- Biden not only didn't reverse Trump on Israel and Ukraine but made matters worse, and that's probably true, if less evident, for Afghanistan and North Korea as well. His second term is likely to be even more irreversible.

Jamal Abdi [06-29] How Biden Is to Blame for Israel and the US's 12-Day War Against Iran: "Biden's failure to reenter Obama's nuclear deal helped create the risk for a potentially catastrophic US war against Iran."

Jason Ditz [06-12] Israeli Minister Calls for Israeli Control Over Syria and Lebanon: So says Avichai Eliyahu, Heritage Minister and grandson of a former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, whose solution for Gaza is "they need to starve."

Jonah Shepp [06-21] 'Regime Change' Won't Liberate Iran: Not that anyone in Israel or the US cares a whit about liberating Iran. Nudging it from one orbit of misery to another, preferably lower one, is all they really care about.

Mitchell Plitnick [06-27]: What comes next following the US-Israeli war on Iran? Follows up on his previous article:

• Mitchell Plitnick [06-13]: How Israel and the US manufactured a fake crisis with Iran that could lead to all-out war. I think he's right that nothing that happened has turned out very satisfactorily for any party. However, his reason for Israel starting the war needs a bit of elaboration: "The purpose of 'Iran nuclear issue' sham is and has always been to create a regime-change bloc in Washington and Brussells to force the Islanic Republic from power." "Regime change" in Iran isn't a realistic goal, but it holds out the false promise of an end to the war other than complete failure, which helps keep the Washington and Bussells blocs bound to, and subservient to, Israel.

Jeremy R Hammond [06-26] Lessons Unlearned from Israel's Bombing of Iraq's Osirak Reactor: "The claim that Israel's bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 halted or set back Saddam Hussein's efforts to acquire a nuclear weapons capability is a popular myth."

Elfadil Ibrahim [06-24] Israeli-fueled fantasy to bring back Shah has absolutely no juice. That the author even considers the hypothetical gives this idea far more credit than it deserves.

Sanya Mansoor [06-27] Israeli soldiers killed at least 410 people at food aid sites in Gaza this month: "Israeli soldiers and officers have said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed civilians waiting for food in Gaza."

Yanis Varoufakis [05-06] In the EU nothing succeeds like gross failure: The astonishing case of Ursula von der Leyen. She is president of the European Union, elected for a second term, and recipient of some big deal prize, although she's mostly been in the news lately for her cheerleading of Israel's Gaza genocide.

• Francesca De Benedetti [06-26] Ursula von der Leyen Is Waging War on Workers.

Eric Alterman [05-08] The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump: "Trump is offering American Jews a kind of devil's bargain: throw in with us against the antisemitic universities and campus rabble-rousers, but pay no attention as we dismantle the traditions and institutions that Jews value." This article has a lot of useful information, especially the first section which shows pretty clearly how Trump is still an anti-semite, and how his particular brand of anti-semitism is especially ominous for American Jews.

Gabrielle Gurley [05-20] Republicans Break the Weather: "The private sector can't match the value proposition of the National Weather Service, but companies work to entice Americans to pay up anyway. What happens if they can't?"

Phil Freeman [05-22] Why Do You Hate Jazz? Who, me? This is Freeman's monthly column, with his monthly batch of 10 jazz album reviews (5 I've heard, only one A- so far: Horace Tapscott), but his intro is a review of a book by Andrew Berish, Hating Jazz: A History of Its Disparagement, Mockery, and Other Forms of Abuse (2025, University of Chicago Press). Turns out that neither Berish nor Freeman hate jazz, and of course there are things one can learn from their chronicle of people who do. But I'm not exactly psyched to find out. It's a bit like trying to survey "unhappy families": there are so many, so different, and ultimately so pointless. I should, however, check out the other five albums Freeman likes.

Barry S Edwards [05-29] Why Did Americans Elect a Felon Instead of a Prosecutor: I would have started with the observation that a great many Americans actually admire criminals. As someone whose childhood was rooted in the years when the Hays Office Code was still in effect, I tend to date this to the emergence of TV shows like It Takes a Thief (1968-70) and movies like The Dirty Dozen (1967), which showed how bad people could be employed to "do good" as defined by American political powers, but said powers' culpability for criminal malfeasance goes back deeper, becoming even more obvious during the Vietnam War. But Edwards starts with mass incarceration. While that could be cited as evidence that Americans are sticklers for rules, it also exposes how arbitrary and capricious the police state is, which erodes confidence in what they call justice. In that system, it is easy to see prosecutors as cruel political opportunists, and "criminals" as their victims -- even when they're as guilty as Trump.

Also at Washington Monthly:

• Barry C Lynn [06-01] Resurrecting the Rebel Alliance: "To end the age of Trump, Democrats must relearn the language and levers of power."

• Philip Longman [06-01] The Secret to Reindustrializing America Is Not Tax Cuts and Tariffs. It's Regulated Competition. "From airlines to energy, shipbuilding to railroads, America became a capitalist superpower in the 20th century based on careful market rules. It can do so again."

• Bill Scher [05-30] What Elon Musk Learned (and Donald Trump Didn't) About Governing: "It turns out public policy is harder than it looks."

Jared Abbott/Dustin Guastella [05-30] What Caused the Democrats' No-Show Problem in 2024? "New data sheds light on the policy preferences of nonvoting Democrats in the last election." They add "it may disappoint some progressives," but it looks to me like data we can work with. Unlike the cartoon progressives characterized here, I don't have any real complaints that Harris didn't run on sufficiently progressive policy stances. The big problem she (and many other Democrats) had was that voters didn't believe they would or could deliver on their promises. And a big part of that was because they cozied up to the rich and put such focus on raising money that voters often felt they were an afterthought, or maybe not even that.

Sarah Viren [06-06] A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia? "Maura Finkelstein is one of many scholars discovering that the traditional protections of academic freedom are no longer holding."

Ezra Klein [06-08] The Problems Democrats Don't Like to See: The co-author of Abundance defends his book and its political program, mostly from critics on the left, who see it as warmed-over, trickle-down growth fetishism that pro-business centrist ("new") Democrats have been have been peddling as the only viable alternative to whatever it is that Republicans have been peddling since Reagan or Goldwater. Unfortunately, both of these ideologies are often critiqued, or just labeled, as "neoliberalism": indeed, they have much in common, most notably the view that private sector capitalism is the only true driving force in the economy, even as it requires increasing favors from the public, including tolerance of high degrees of inequality, corruption, and deceit; the main difference is in ethics, where Democrats tend to be liberal (which is more often hands-off than helping), and Republicans tend to be laissez-faire (which is to say none, or more specifically that any pursuit of money is to be honored), not that they aren't quite eager to impose constraints on others (sometimes as "morality," often just as power). I wish we could straighten this terminological muddle out, as the net effect is to make the "neoliberal" term unusable, and the themes indescribable. This extends to "neoconservative," which has no practical distinction from "neoliberal": they are simply Janus masks, where the former is used to look mean, and the latter to look kind.

Klein's article originally had a different title: The Abundance Agenda Has Its Own Theory of Power. By the way, that link is from a reddit thread. I've never paid any attention to reddit, but the link has a number of interesting and insightful comments, including this one:

I think Ezra is largely right that the populist left needs to: a) work off of an actual coherent vision of the world and b) understand the risks of simplifying policy to simplify politics

To which someone else adds:

It's unironically even simpler than this and makes it wild that the progressives have been unable to figure out Abundance. The entire book and thesis can be boiled down to "the party of big government needs to make government actually work."

That's it. That's the whole thing. The rest of it is presenting theories for different areas that need more or less regulation, for enabling policy to take shape, etc. But that's literally the entire bag. . . .

It's not about a platform for winning elections, it's about materially making peoples' lives better so that they trust you when you say you want to do things.

One thing I've repeatedly tried to stress is that there are major asymmetries between the two big political parties. One is that while both parties have to compete to win votes -- for better or worse, most effectively by impugning the other party -- only the Democrats actually have to deliver on their promises by governing effectively. Republicans have cynically peddled the line that government is the problem, so all they are promising is to hobble it (for which they have many easy tools, including tax cuts, deregulation, corruption, and incompetence). Needless to say, when Republican administrations succeed in their sabotage, Americans are likely to vote them out, but by then they've dug enough holes that Democrats can never quite build their way out, let along deliver tangible benefits, leaving Republicans set up for the next round of political demagoguery.

So I think we should welcome whatever help Klein & Thompson have to offer toward making Democratic government more competent and fruitful. However, before one can implement policy, one has to win elections, so it's no surprise that Democrats of all stripes will focus immediately on the book's political utility. That's why Klein is perplexed: that the Democrats he was most critical of -- "blue-state governors like Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul and top Obama and Biden administration officials" who actually had power they could work with but have little to show for their efforts -- have embraced the "Abundance agenda," while "some of my friends on the populist left" have raised objections. He then goes on to develop his "theory of power," contrasting his own "more classically liberal" credo against "the populist theory of power," under which "bad policy can be -- and often is -- justified as good politics." This part of his argument is somewhat less than coherent -- even if I gave up my reluctance to accept his redefinition of "populism" -- and unlikely to be useful anyway.[*]

In his conclusion, Klein says:

So I don't see any contradiction between "Abundance" and the goals of the left. I don't think achieving the goals of the modern left is even possible without the overhaul of the state that "Abundance" envisions.

I haven't read his book[**], so I can't point to specifics one way or the other, but I also don't see the contradiction: there certainly are goods and services that we could use more of, and that's even more true elsewhere in the world. And it would be good to produce them more efficiently, at lower cost, and/or higher quality, which is to say that we should work on better systems and policies. But while I don't doubt that there is room for growth on the supply side, the larger problem for most people is distribution: making sure that everyone's needs are met, which isn't happening under our current system of price-rationed scarcity. A more explicit identification with the left, including more emphasis on distribution, and acknowledgment of other important issues like precarity, debt, and peace, would have improved his points about building things and trust.

It also would have made his agenda harder to co-opt by Democratic politicians who are basically bought and paid for by rich donors, who seem to be little troubled by rare it is that most of their voters ever benefit from the crumbs left over from their corruption. As Robinson points out, "They insist that their agenda is not incompatible with social democracy and wealth redistribution. But it's clearly a different set of priorities." It's a set of priorities that cause no alarm to the donor class, and may even whet their appetite, and that's why their agenda has the appeal it has, and is drawing the criticism it deserves.[***]

[*] In Kansas, where Thomas Frank and I were born, populism was a decidedly left-wing movement, mostly rooted in debt-saddled free farmers (like my great-grandfather, not that I know anything about his politics). Frank defends this view in The People, No! A Brief History of Anti-Populism (2020). Also see his especially biting critique of the business/financial wing of the Democratic Party, Listen, Liberal! Or What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? (2016). It's easy to condemn liberals as elitist when they recoil so fervently against common folk, even if in theory they believe everyone should share in their blessings. As for theories of power, there are some that make sense. The largely forgotten Rooseveltian countervailing powers is one, with faint echoes in recent antitrust and pro-union work. Anarchists have a more negative theory of power -- negative both in the sense that power is intrinsically bad, and that in almost always generating resentment and blowback it is dysfunctional. As a child, I was exposed to the saying, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and I've found that to be true.

[**] I wouldn't rule out reading the book in the future, especially if I find myself in need of boning up on certain technical issues like housing and infrastructure development. I read Klein's Why We're Polarized (2020), and found it to be worthwhile, especially for citing and digesting a lot of technical political science literature. I certainly wouldn't read him to expose him as an idiot and/or crook, as Nathan J Robinson suggests in his review below. I also wouldn't read Matthew Yglesias's One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (2020) for that reason, although I'd probably find even more evidence there.

[***] Aside from political agenda and policy mechanics -- various critiques on specific policies, especially their lack of concern for "intellectual property" rents, which is a major cost concern, a source of artificial scarcity -- there is a third strain of criticism, having to do with growth itself. There is good reason to acknowledge that sooner or later growth will have to slow and stabilize, or we will eventually fall victim to crashes. This was my initial reaction to "Abundance," and one I'd like to return to at some point, but while such crashes may hypothetically not be distant in the future, they could be much better managed if only people were more able to deal with immediately pressing political problems.

• Nathan J Robinson [06-13] Abandon "Abundance": "The latest Democratic fad sidelines equality and justice in favor of a focus on cutting red tape. This is not the path forward." After having complained about the masochism of having to read the book -- even after he's repeatedly made sport of dissecting much more obvious right-wing dimwits -- at least he admits this much: "Some of what's in Abundance is both true and important." The question this raises is whether, from a practical political standpoint, it does more good to cite Abundance in support of the "true and important" bits, or to discredit Klein & Thompson for the parts they get wrong, or that they use disingenuously. Robinson focuses on the latter, but that's what you'd expect from a critic (or just a rigorous thinker). For instance, he points out their use of motte-and-bailey arguments, which allow common sense to be turned into exaggerated claims, which when challenged can retreat into common sense. (I mean, who doesn't hate red tape?) Supporters can then pick and choose among such claims. For example, "Klein might personally believe in wealth redistribution and unions, but he's offered a great program for billionaires who don't want us to talk about the predations of the health insurance industry or big corporations crushing union drives. Let's talk about zoning reform instead!" He also points out how the authors ingratiate themselves with Democratic royalists by misrepresenting critics on the left: especially, "they spend more pages criticizing Ralph Nader and the degrowth movement (both politically marginal) than they do explaining how corporate power stands in the way of, for example, a universal healthcare system."

• Nathan J Robinson [2024-12-03] Matt Yglesias Is Confidently Wrong About Everything: "The Biden administration's favorite centrist pundit produces smug psuedo-analysis that cannot be considered serious thought. He ought to be permanently disregarded." Yglesias and Klein are bound together as co-founders of Vox, from which they both bounded for more lucrative pastures. Yglesias in particular has repeatedly been a pioneer in new ways to exploit the internet. I read a lot by him for a long time, finally losing interest when he left Vox for Bloomberg and Substack and made his bid for the Thomas Friedman market with his One Billion Americans -- which fits in here as a prototype for Abundance. Because this piece came out back in December (when I was avoiding any and all news sources), Robinson doesn't dwell on that connections, while dwelling on numerous other faux pas. (It's impossible for me to mention either Yglesias or Klein in my household without being reminded of their support for the Iraq War.) I also just discovered that Robinson wrote a review of One Billion People back on [2020-11-13]: Why Nationalism Is a Brain Disease.

Ben Rhodes [06-08] Corruption Has Flooded America. The Dams Are Breaking. I don't doubt that crypto represents yet another higher stage of corruption than ever before, but the dams broke long ago, most obviously in the "greed is good" 1980s, not that they ever held much water in the first place. "President Trump has more than doubled his personal wealth since starting his 2024 election campaign." But most of that is phony paper wealth, slathered onto his corpulence like flattery.

Henry Grabar [06-10] It's Robotaxi Summer. Buckle Up. "Waymo and Tesla offer competing -- and potentially bleak -- futures for self-driving cars in society."

Doug Henwood [06-13] We Have Always Lived in the Casino: "John Maynard Keynes warned that when real investment becomes the by-product of speculation, the result is often disaster. But it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins." I flagged this because it seems like an interesting article, but I can't read it because it's behind their paywall. Speaking of which, some more articles I clicked on but cannot read:

• Adam Serwer [05-27] The New Dark Age: "The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself." Starts talking about "the warlords who sacked Rome," suggesting that they were less culpable than Trump for the benighted period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Maybe, or maybe not. But having read Jane Jacobs' Dark Ages Ahead (2005), I'm inclined to view Trump and his minions less as instigators of a Dark Age than as an example.

• Adam Serwer [06-08] Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing: "Whatever they may be fighting about, they are both committed to showering tax cuts on Americans who already have more than they need."

Jeffrey St Clair

[06-13] Roaming Charges: From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Venice Beach: "It's becoming clearer and clearer every day that the South finally won the Civil War and the Insurrectionists won J6." Also: "The drones are coming home to roost." Also quotes Greg Grandin: "Only fools believed Trump is somehow antiwar. He's not a break with neocons but their evolution."

• [06-27] Roaming Charges: After Midnight: "Trump mega-bombed a mountain in Iran and called it peace." St Clair doubts the effectiveness of the bombing. I don't have any particular stake in that argument. Anything that was damaged in the bombing, including the people who were killed or maimed, can be replaced easily enough. The physics and technology of nuclear weapons have been understood since the 1940s. At the end of WWII, the US rounded up all of Germany's atomic physicists and holed them up on a farm on rural England. They had spent years fiddling and fumbling in their efforts to build even a simple reactor, but what confused them was their uncertainty that it might work. Within two days of hearing about Hiroshima, they figured out a functional design. They couldn't build one. That took the Russians four more years, not because they had to figure out how it worked, but because the materials were hard to come by, and the processes complex. It took France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea even longer, but they all did it, and the timelines have more to do with motivation than with skill. A number of other nations, most obviously Germany and Japan, have demonstrated they have all the skills they need. It is, after all, easier to get a bomb to blow up than it is to keep a power plant from melting down. Iran, too, has amply demonstrated that they have the necessary skills, and for that matter the materiel. Netanyahu was probably right way back in the 1990s that Iran could produce atomic bombs from their program within 3-5 years, or 6-12 months, or whatever time frame he was projecting to panic his people and allies. That Iran never met his timelines is primarily because they didn't see the point of actually having nuclear weapons. Perhaps they were thinking that if Israel and America could see that they could, that would be enough of a deterrent to keep them from being attacked. Perhaps that thinking even worked until now. The big problem with the "madman theory" is that it assumes the other side will always be the sane one, without bothering to examine one's own sanity in contemplating such a contest. Iran's quite rational notion of deterrence failed because Netanyahu and Trump have not only called Iran's bluff, they've upped the ante, giving Iran the one necessity it was lacking: motivation. The gamble is that Iran will still realize that nuclear weapons are useless, a fool's game. They only seem to have value as a deterrent, but that no longer works against Netanyahu and Trump, who act like they're daring Iran in hopes of burying the entire country under mushroom clouds. After all, what's the point of nuclear superiority if you can't use it to extort your enemies and force them to submit to your will?

  Also linked here:

  • Lucian K Truscott IV [06-24] Fake man starts fake war makes fake peace.

  Further down, St Clair spots a tweet by Stephen Miller:

  The commentary about NYC Democrats nominating an anarchist-socialist for Mayor omits one point: how unchecked migration fundamentally remade the NYC electorate. Democrats change politics by changing voters. That's how you turn a city that defined US dominance into what it is now.

  That's a fairly accurate description of New York City, but from the 1880s through 1910s, when borders really were open (albeit only for whites). The result was a long series of Irish-, Italian-, and Jewish-American mayors. And he's right that their descendents, mostly with Democratic mayors, led New York City to a dominant position in American finance and culture. They've also made it the richest and least affordable city in America, but even with all that wealth few New Yorkers see Republican nihilism as an attractive proposition.

Peter Shamshiri [06-16] The Politics of Eternal Distraction: "To some Democrats, everything Trump does is designed to distract you." It's taken Democrats an awful long time to realize that much of what Trump does is sheer distraction, so when they point that out, along comes someone to attack you for overstating your insight: after all, some of what Trump does is so plainly damaging that he needs this other crap to distract you from what he's really doing. I can't sort this out right now, but I'd caution against thinking that the "distractions" are the harmless parts: they often reveal what Trump is thinking, even where he doesn't have the capacity to deliver. That he even says he wants to do something profoundly stupid should make you suspicious of everything else, even if superficially plausible. But also you have to guard against getting carried away responding to every feint he throws your way. The word "distraction" can help in that regard, if immediately followed by redirecting back to something important.

Charlotte Klein [06-19] Are You a $300,000 Writer? "Inside The Atlantic's extremely expensive hiring spree." A certain amount of professional jealousy is inevitable with articles like this, and is indeed much of the interest. I mean, they could hire me for much less than any of these writers I've mostly never heard of, and I could write some genuinely interesting content -- mostly innovative engineering solutions to tricky political problems -- that won't read like everyone else's warmed-over punditry. On the other hand, I probably wouldn't want to write what they're so eager to pay for. I don't know who's footing the bills behind their current menu, but they're up to no good.

Scott Lemieux [06-19] Getting the war criminals back together: Quotes Elisabeth Bumiller seeking the sage advise of a washed up US General:

One person who sees little similarity between the run up to Iraq and now is David H. Petraeus, the general who commanded American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and led the 101st Airborne Division in the initial invasion in Baghdad. "This is clearly the potential run up to military action, but it's not the invasion of a country," he said on Wednesday.

Mr. Trump, he said, should deliver an ultimatum to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and order him to agree to the complete dismantlement of his nuclear program or face "the complete destruction of your country and your regime and your people." If the supreme leader rejects the ultimatum, Mr. Petraeus said, "that improves our legitimacy and then reluctantly we blow them to smithereens."

Nobody's even talking about fixing Iran here. There's no warning that "if you break it, you own it." They just want to fuck it up, leave it bruised and bleeding in a ditch somewhere, washing their hands of the whole affair . . . unless they have to come back and do it again, which they probably will. Sheer nihilists, because that's the power they think they have.

Ryan Cooper [06-20] Climate Change Will Bankrupt the Country: "Climate-fueled disasters cost America almost a trillion dollars over the last year, far more than economists predicted." By "economists" he's referring to work by William Nordhaus, which he was critical of at the time and even more so now. The price tag will only continue to rise, and with it private insurance becomes increasingly untenable. While this will be bad for everyone, the ones with the most to lose are property owners and lenders, who will experience ever greater precarity, and no doubt will finally be driven to attempt to socialize their risks. This will be a huge political factor in coming years. The phrase "too big to fail" will haunt us. And while one may debate the merits of bailing out individual companies, the whole country poses a somewhat different problem: who's big enough to bail us all out?

Josh Dawsey/Rebecca Ballhaus [06-20] Stephen Miller's Fingerprints Are on Everything in Trump's Second Term: "The deputy chief of staff has played an outsize role in immigration -- and amassed more power than almost anyone else at the White House." Also on Miller:

• Pablo Manríquez [06-24] Stephen Miller's Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir Raises Conflict Concerns.

Naomi Bethune [06-24] ICE Impersonators Proliferate Amid the Agency's Undercover Tactics: "Pretending to be an ICE agent to commit crimes is disturbingly easy."

David Klion [06-24] State of Exception: National Security Governance, Then and Now.

No More Mister Nice Blog: This might as well become a regular feature. I've skipped over a few pieces, mostly about the NYC mayor race, which are also of interest:

• [06-10]: Gosh, if only there were a way to test the premise that the LA protests are an "80-20 issue" favoring Republicans: "Hand-wringing Trump critics think America won't vote for a candidate who's linked to controversial protests, and they cling to this belief even though America just elected the guy who did January 6." He also offers some sound advice:

  Why can't Trump critics be advocates for their own side? Why must they echo right-wing critiques of the protest movement? Given the way most Americans consume news these days, I'm guessing that it might not register on many voters that the protestors are waving Mexican flags (and that they should see this as a moral outrage) until they start hearing about the flags from both sides. (Compare this to the war on "woke" language: I'm sure most voters have now heard the word "Latinx" far more often from centrist Democratic language police than they have from actual "woke" Democrats.)

  I'll say it again: If your critique of Democrats/liberals/progressives echoes right-wing critiques, shut up. You're just an extra megaphone for the right, which doesn't need any help getting its messages out. . . . So please stop the tone policing, and stick up for your side.

  My bold.

• [06-11]: Trump came into office wishing a mf'er would: "Two commentators I respect . . . believe that Donald Trump is militarizing Los Angeles out of weakness. I don't think that's true."

• [06-13]: Everyone knows that only Republicans are normal!: "They're engaging in totalitarian repression, obviously, but they claim they're freeing people." Exmaples of Republican "normalcy" follow.

  Republicans struggle with the idea that anyone could possibly want to live in a place where people are of very different ethnic backgrounds, speak different languages, and have different religious beliefs (or non-beliefs), just as they struggle with the idea that anyone could be unalterably gay or bi or pan or trans just because they aren't. They struggle with the idea that anyone would want to live in a city where you can do most of your errands in a fifteen-minute radius, because they're used to long drives whenever you have to run errands. Increasingly, they're selling the message that everyone wants a marriage consisting of a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home "tradwife" who gives birth to large numbers of children, after marrying young (and preferably as a virgin), and they can't believe anyone really wants a life that's different from that.

  It is true that Republicans have chosen to represent an imagined majority: a large bloc of people who can be characterized as "true Americans" and flattered as "patriots." They can be treated as a socially and economically cohesive bloc, with some sleight of hand added to line them up behind the true economic powers. This has always been true: it was built into the design of the Republican Party in the 1850s, when white, protestant free soil farmers and small-time business and labor actually formed something close to a majority of voters. That's baked into the initials GOP, which writers (including me) find irresistible because we tire of overly repeating words, especially "Republican." (It's effectively a proprietary pronoun. One of the many asymmetries of our warped politics is that Democrats don't have an equivalent pronoun or alias.) Republicans are skating on thin ice here: their "majority" is thinning out, haphazardly reinforced as various ethnic groups become honorary whites, and various sects are accepted as close enough to protestants (the new term is "Judeo-Christian," with "Abrahamic" in the wings, held back by the political opportunism of anti-Islam bigotry.) But the larger risk Republicans run is that they don't represent their voters at all well. They lie to them, they steal from them, they double-cross them whenever they see an opportunity to make a quick buck. On the other hand, Democrats are developing their own nascent myth of a majority built on diversity, equity, tolerance, mutual respect and aid, and solidarity.

[06-14]: Trump's muddled, on-and-off militarism won't split the GOP at all.

[06-18]: Jeb Bush was right about Trump and "chaos". Cites a piece by Jamelle Bouie ([06-18: Maybe Trump and Miller Don't Understand Americans as Well as They Think They Do), regarding Trump's polling slump.

[06-21]: Your right-wing neighbors still don't believe the Minnesota shoter was a conservative ideologue: I haven't yet cited any articles on the June 14 assassination of Democratic politicians in Minnesota, but the basic facts are available on Wikipedia (2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators), not for lack of interest or alarm but mostly a matter of timing. That right-wingers have worked overtime to twist the stories into unrecognizable shapes is unsurprising: if anything, it's standard operating procedure, and the examples are as telling as their penchant for gun-toting vigilantism. One of the most fundamental differences between right and left is that only the former believes that violence works, and will resort to it readily (and will lie about it afterwards, because that's even more part of their nature). Two earlier pieces on the shootings:

• [06-15]: Your right-wing neighbors think the Minnesota shooting were liberal-on-liberal violence.

• [06-17]: Republicans hate Democrats, and media liberals consider that an acceptable prejudice.

[06-22]: To your right-wing neighbors, this will be Trump's war only if it works. Cites a Joshua Keating article ([06-21]: This time, it's Trump's war) I had initially skipped over.

[06-23]: Will Democrats be too high-minded to respond to young people's war fears? I don't know what he means by "high-minded." What Democrats need to do is convey the view that any time Americans pull the trigger that represents a failure of American foreign policy, regardless of whether you hit the target or not. Of course, from 2021-25, Biden was the one demonstrating incompetence by not preventing war situations from developing and/or spreading. But why show Trump the slightest leniency when the voters cut them no slack?

[06-26]: In New York, I'm enjoying this billionaire freakout.

[06-28] The Supreme Court's Republicans know our side will never use the power they've potentially given us: The Supreme Court "ruled that lower-court judges can't protect even fundamental constitutional rights using nationwide injunctions."

The Supreme Court's Republicans aren't worried that the shoe might be on the other foot someday because they know the shoe will never be on the other foot. This is why they're willing to give Donald Trump nearly unlimited power: they know that any Republican would use the power in ways they like and no Democrat would ever use it in ways they dislike. They're giving powerful weapons to Trump and future party-mates because they know the enemy -- Democrats -- will never use those weapons.

Tweets:

• Alan MacLeod [06-05]: The most American leading ever: Kids could end up in foster care over lunch debt, Pennsylvania school district warns parents

• Adam Serwer [06-08]: Don't let Trump and Musk's feud obscure their fundamental agreement: Both men and the party they own are committed to taking as much as possible from Americans who need help in order to give to those who have more than they could ever want. [link to his Atlantic article: Musk and Trump Still Agree on One Thing]

  For years, commentators have talked about how Trump reshaped the Republican Party in the populist mold. Indeed, Trumpism has seen Republicans abandon many of their publicly held commitments. The GOP says it champions fiscal discipline while growing the debt at every opportunity. It talks about individual merit while endorsing discrimination against groups based on gender, race, national origin, and sexual orientation. It blathers about free speech while using state power to engage in the most sweeping national-censorship campaign since the Red Scare. Republicans warn us about the "weaponization" of the legal system while seeking to prosecute critics for political crimes and deporting apparently innocent people to Gulags without a shred of due process. The GOP venerates Christianity while engaging in the kind of performative cruelty early Christians associated with paganism. It preaches family values while destroying families it refuses to recognize as such.

  Yet the one bridge that connects Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush to Donald Trump is slashing public services while showering tax cuts on the rich. This is the Republican Party's most sacred, fundamental value, the one it almost never betrays. Whatever else Trump and Musk may fight about, they are faithful to that.

• Nathan J Robinson [06-09] goddamnit so many @curaffairs readers have requested a review of "Abundance" that now I'm having to write it. why do our readers want me to suffer[?]

  I commented: Why, compared to idiots you love writing about (like Peterson & Rufo), is Klein a sufferance? Maybe it takes more work to accept and build on what he offers than to trash it as not enough or some kind of sellout, but the idea that Dems need to build/deliver isn't wrong.

  When I clicked on post, I got a pop-up saying: "Want more people to see your comment? Subscribe." The days when social media companies were happy just to profit off our free content are obviously over. Now in their pay-to-play racket they view everyone as an advertiser, which will tend to reduce every comment to the credibility level of advertisements (i.e., none: advertising has been proudly post-truth for over a century, and indeed was born that way).

• Richard D Wolff [06-09] US liberals also enabled Trump. They let the right enlist them against the left after 1945. As the GOP right-turned authoritarian, a unified liberal-left opposition would have been real and powerful, unlike today's liberal-vs-left split opposition.

• Isi Breen [06-09]

  Has anyone written an article about how Abundance is a swan song for Obama's presidency? That it's less about doing anything new and more about getting back to the last time it seemed like the party had its shit together?

  Problem here is how can anyone still think that the Democrats had their shit together under Obama? He promised "change" and shrunk it down to virtually nothing. He lost Congress after two years, and never won it back, giving him an excuse to do even less than he was inclined to do. Even the articulateness he was famed for before he ran deserted him. (Or was it some kind of race to the bottom with the dumbing down of the American people?) I have dozens of examples, but one specific to "abundance agenda" is that Obama refused to pursue any stimulus projects that weren't "shovel-ready." (Reed Hundt, in A Crisis Wasted, has examples of things proposed but rejected because Obama and his locked-in advisors like Summers and Emmanuel wouldn't consider anything that smacked of long-term planning.)

• Kate Wehwalt [06-13]:

  It's crazy how in 40 years the internet made everyone stupid and ruined the entire world

  Nah. It just made you more aware of how stupid people already were.

• Kim, Bestie of Bunzy [06-19]

  Watching this man try to get rid of imaginary raccoons he thought were invading reminds me of what white people are currently trying to do [to] America to get rid [of] immigrants they think are invading

  This comes with a 0:43 video, where the captions read: "My dad had raccoons in his tree house. Nobody has been up there in years. He tried to get rid of them with a combination of . . . smoke bombs and firecrackers. Anxiously watching for fleeing raccoons . . . [the tree house catches fire and is destroyed]. No raccoons were seen or found." Much more of interest in Kim's feed. I didn't expect (i.e., couldn't have imagined) this one:

  Israeli Interior Minister Ben-Gvir accuses Mossad chief Barnea of starting a war: - Why did you provoke Iran! Barnea: - I didn't know Iran had such rocket capabilities!

  The head of Mossad "did not know"

  I've been imagining that Ben-Gvir was the architect of the war, and conjuring up rationales for him doing so. Netanyahu has been complaining about Iran's rockets ever since Israel pivoted against Iran after the 1990 Gulf War neutralized Iraq as Israel's chief bête noire (more like a boogeyman meant to frighten the US and make it subservient to Israel -- a card they've played many times, and which you still see working as US politicians clamor for war against Iran). What this suggests is not that they were unaware of Netanyahu's propaganda, but that neither Ben-Gvir nor Barnea believed Israel's own propaganda, which they both used for their own purposes. Long-range rocket attacks were a significant part of the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, with Iraq using Soviet Scuds and Iran building their own (after exhausting their US-built rockets). Extending their range to reach Israel would have been easy, and didn't cross an obvious red line, like nuclear bombs would have. Still, to be a nuclear threat, as Netanyahu has long insisted Iran is, you both need warheads and some way to deliver them: Iranian rockets have always been an obvious part of the equation. (Same for North Korea, which has even larger rockets.) Israel has routinely blamed Iran for every rocket from Gaza, Lebanon, and/or Yemen, so claiming now that you didn't know Iran had "such rocket capabilities" is an admission that you thought the rockets from Gaza, etc., weren't serious threats. They were just propaganda foils.

• Pessimistic Intellect, Optimistic Will: Includes graphic of a press release by Hakeen Jeffries ("Democratic Leader"). Second and third paragraphs are solid points, although I wouldn't say that the kind of diplomacy the US needs to engage in at the moment is "aggressive": how about "serious"? or "constructive"? or just something that suggests you're not insane? However, before he could allow himself any of that, first Jeffries had to recite his pledge of allegiance:

  Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power. Israel has a right to defend itself against escalating Iranian aggression and our commitment to Israel's security remains ironclad.

  Not only is none of this true, and as articulated is little short of psychotic. Still, the real problem with always putting this pledge first isn't that it suggests you cannot think clearly. It's warning other people that you cannot or will not do anything about Israel's behavior because you're not even in charge of you own thoughts let alone actions.

• Matthew Yglesias [06-22]:

  Every president of my lifetime except Joe Biden actually started wars, but somehow he ended up getting lambasted from the right and the left for providing military supplies to allies as if that made him the greatest warhawk in American history.

  No one I'm aware of has tried to sort out a ranking of "greatest warhawks in American history," but even if one did, not being the "greatest" wouldn't be much of a compliment. Biden needed not just to not start new wars, but to end them. He not only didn't do the necessary diplomacy to end the wars in Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, what diplomacy he did do, combined with his unflinching supply of arms and money to support the war efforts, made it possible for the wars to extend and spread. (Ukraine is slightly different, in that sending arms there can be justified by the need to counter Russian aggression, but also in that there are clear opportunities for diplomatic resolution. Support for Israel, given their long history of aggression and domination, is impossible to justify.) And while you might credit Biden with ending the Afghanistan war, once again he failed to show any diplomatic skill or interest. His popularity sunk not because he ended the war, but due to the ineptness of his withdrawal. The only thing you can say for him is that he was painted into an untenable corner by predecessors, but it's hard to see where he even tried to right their wrongs.

• Ian Boudreau [06-26] Responding to a tweet noting that "mamdani's win has made the ny times, the washington post, fox news, trump, third way, and the democratic establishment very mad" citing a Washington Post Editorial Board article: "Zohran Mamdani's victory is bad for New York and the Democratic Party: New York cannot take its greatness for granted. Mismanagement can ruin it."

  Wow, mismanagement of New York City - what a genuinely terrifying prospect! Siri who is the current mayor of New York City?

  I don't have the bandwidth to deal with what looks to Wichita like a remote mayoral primary, but is obviously big news for the media centers and for the electorally-oriented left. It's quite possible that left candidates are much better at articulating problems and proposing solutions than they are at administering and implementing, but couldn't that just as easily be due to the obstacles entrenched powers can throw into the way, including their cozy relationship with the establishment press? One thing for sure is that whatever management skills conservatives think they have aren't helped by the evils of their ideology.

  Jamelle Bouie adds: "i think i would take the hysteria over mamdani's ability to govern more seriously if half these people hasn't endorsed eric adams."

  Ryan Cooper quotes Paul Krugman: "centrist Democrats often urge leftier types to rally behind their nominees in general elections. I agree. Anyone claiming that there's no difference between the parties is a fool. But this deal has to be reciprocal."

• Don Winslow [06-28]:

  16 million Americans are about to lose their health insurance because 77 million Americans voted for this shit.

  

Mid-Year Music Lists: I usually collect these under Music Week, but it's probably easier here.

• Rolling Stone [06-05] [AOTY] The Best Albums of 2025 So Far: "What a year it's been for great music -- as opposed to, say, everything else."

• AV Club [06-26] [AOTY] AV Club's Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• Billboard [06-24] [AOTY] Billboard's 50 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Consequence [06-02] [AOTY] The 30 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Exclaim [06-02] [AOTY] Exclaim!'s 25 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• The Fader [06-06] Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• The Guardian [06-10] The best albums of 2025 so far.

• NME [06-26] [AOTY] The best albums of 2025 . . . so far!

• Paste [06-06] AOTY] The 40 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• PopMatters [06-26] [AOTY] The 70 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• RIOTRIOT [06-12] Sick of What I Want: The 30 Best Albums of 2025 So Far (#30-11) and (#10-1). Also of note: The End of the World Should Not Come Between Us: The 50 Best Songs of 2025 So Far.

• Slant [06-23] The Best Albums of 2025 . . . So Far.

• Spin [06-02] [AOTY] Best Albums of 2025 (So Far).

• Stereogum [06-02] [AOTY] The 50 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

• Treble [06-10] [AOTY] The 40 Best Albums of 2025 So Far.

Current count: 146 links, 12549 words (14967 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.