It seems I am often prefacing links (as I am here) with a mention of how often I disagree with the author on many particulars. Don't take my link to Krugman as an endorsement of Krugman as anything but an observer of this recent deal:
It's about the free trade agreement just negotiated between the EU and India. I'd have to go back and look over what Krugman says to see if his view is compatible with what Tooze is saying, but I think that the deal itself is very much in line with Tooze's (and Carney's) assertions.
The world is losing faith in the Peace of Westphalia. It will be interesting to see what sort of new order emerges out of that collapse -- assuming that we survive the environmental collapse that is likely to be brought on by all of this lack of a functioning order.
My campus is one of the campuses that had a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down with a massive law enforcement action. (I was not there. I had students and colleagues on either side whose perspectives and reasons for their involvement I can sympathize with. It was a complex situation. No one actually involved on either side wanted anyone else on campus to be physically threatened or harmed.)
I'm not going to get into a big post over this because bc has enough to respond to on other lines. I merely note that the public-at-large's understanding and descriptions of what was going on on campuses bear little resemblance to what it was actually like. The media accounts read like mock epics without any of the irony.
The actual drama and foment was tiny right up to the point where the helicopters and riot police showed up in overwhelming numbers and stormed in like they were dealing with a violent mob.
bc - That Prairieland Detention Center case is definitely worth some examination. Bondi's people claim that 19 people so far are part of a "North Texas Antifa Cell," and are making much of the five guilty pleas.
Here are two articles about the action and the people who have been charged - from The Guardian and from The New Republic:
...of the two, I find TNR's article to be better supported and more nuanced, but the Guardian has more personal details about some of the people involved that seem like they are worth consideration.
Just based on what I have read about the case, I'd say that two or three of the people involved were dangerous idiot who might have aspired to being an antifa cell. Another small number were friends who were trying to help an idiot friend who did stupid things in support of them, but who weren't part of any plot at the start, and the majority were protesters who got caught in bad circumstances and exercised poor judgment in not backing out when the idiots started talking big in the encrypted group chat.
Throw the dudes with guns in jail. Treat the vandals like vandals.
As for the rest, I'd need to see a lot more evidence of actual coordination and planning and association before I believed anything that law enforcement said about the majority of the people who showed up.
Thank the gods none of them had a sandwich, or who knows what charges might have been filed?
My thoughts are with you, cleek. Such a hard thing to go through with a loved one. Been through a few rounds of this myself (brother, cousins, my college love, ...). It always feels like having stumbled into emotional quicksand.
hairshirthedonist and I are clearly receiving the same instructions from the Red Brigade for our comments. Slow down, bro. I'll never get that toaster oven if you keep beating me to the quota.
One thing that the right consistently misconstrues/misrepresents about the left is the nature of the relationship between antifa, socialist activists, and the protesters as a whole.
Antifa, as much as they exist as organized groups, are small cells that don't coordinate with anyone else. They don't want contact. They are afraid that any contact and coordination will lead to fed infiltration. They are a miniscule presence within these protests, and they show up uninvited.
The only real relationship between the socialist activists and the majority of the protesters comes through the socialist groups offering tactical training for the protesters - all the whistles and communication things - as an open source information practice. They aren't leading things in the sense of providing ideology and direction, they are sharing their practical experience about how, safely and effectively, to stand up to militarized federal agents who are violating the constitution.
The vast majority of the people engaging in the training are not activists or socialists, and have no interest in the ideology of the people who put together the training. All they want to know is how to prevent their neighbors from being snatched and sent to a government oubliette or dumped in a foreign country with no due process. Oh, and how to deal with the indiscriminate use of teargas and CS against them and their neighbors, and how to render aid to people being shot with less lethal rounds and beaten with batons - often in direct violation of the training and use of force guidelines.
Finally, consider this: Obama removed a whole lot of people during his presidency and went after traffickers and criminals with low-intensity, targeted operations even in sanctuary cities. No one was showing up to disrupt that because under Obama the agents were operating within normal enforcement protocols. Socialist activists were around and protesting during his time in office too (I know a surprising number through my work with my union and heard about a lot of this directly from them).
Those Minnesotans are not a bunch of radical socialists attempting to overthrow federal order, they are scared and angry midwesterners who are pissed off because the President has sent in masked, militarized enforcers to grab their neighbors without probable cause or due process. They just want things to go back to the way they were, and for ICE and CBP to go back to low-intensity work against actual threats to public safety.
bc - My point is that by defunding ICE, you do give Trump what I think (I’m doing a bit of mind reading here) you fear: that he will militarize the response.
He's already done that when he mobilized the National Guard and deployed them in LA. We've seen that line crossed before. The people protesting aren't acting on pollyanna instincts. We've seen what the response could look like.
We've also seen what they will do if funds are withheld. But the fact that withholding funding won't stop this administration doesn't mean that there is no point in doing it. The Democrats in congress have to choose if they would rather be seen as having stood up to this wave of federal violence against their communities, or if they want to be seen as resignedly accepting that this administration and their enablers in congress and the courts will not be deterred.
Sanctuary cities/counties/states are actively resisting the enforcement of federal law. Those that think the obstruction isn’t part of and the cause of much of the violence (and intentionally so) are naive IMO.
The idea that if they are defied it will provoke a more violent response, and that the response is then the defiers' fault is what you see in the family members growing up with an abuser in authority. The abuser only wants to help the family. If everyone just did what he asked then no one would get hurt. Why do you keep provoking him?
The only ways to break that cycle are to leave the abuser or to stand up, knowing that the violence will happen, but also knowing that when it does it's no one's fault but the abuser's.
The narrative has to be broken before the cycle can be broken.
Take the resistance far enough and what you end up with may not what you bargained for. Or maybe some are bargaining for that response in search of the revolution.
What revolutionaries and battered family members bargain for is a chance for some change in an unlivable situation - hostage to the threat of violence. They choose to resist knowing what is likely coming.
I've been teaching classes about war and civil unrest long enough to not have any illusions about what could happen.
I'm not sure that I'd say that Philoctetes, Hercules, or Odysseus were great and noble of character. All three were men of great ability, sure, but of very mixed character. In this they seem to support Aristotle's claim in the Poetics:
There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,—that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.
I think many of the supporting people in the first Clementine Caligula administration fit this description, and were brought low by it. Of the current batch, Rubio is probably the closest thing.
Whatever the case, it'll probably require a deus ex machina to achieve public catharsis in our current state. We are still deeply polluted, politically, by the miasma we have allowed, and the sources of our pollution have not yet suffered enough to assuage the wrath of the political gods.
...at least speaking from the classic Greek perspective.
...so I guess this adds a second formula to the one that Snarki outlines. Sometimes it is the "zoom out until the particulars blur" tactic. This time it's the "tight focus to leave others off camera" tactic.
Either way, it saves face for the people who continue to facilitate this push to authoritarian illiberalism.
GftNC - However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I'd say that he's lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:
Of these four, the unraveling of Trump’s mind is the primary one, leading to all the others. Narcissists sometimes get worse with age, as their remaining inhibitions fall away. The effect is bound to be profound when the narcissist happens to be president of the United States.
When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks' heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man's head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.
But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.
But I do know that events are being propelled by one man’s damaged psyche. History does not record many cases in which a power-mad leader careening toward tyranny suddenly regained his senses and became more moderate.
See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It's all one madman dragging everyone else with him.
wj's response to Brooks's ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization - it's the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.
In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.
Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.
We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.
Anyway, thought I'd mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.
Fletcher - (Give it five minutes or so, and you’ll hear US Republicans zeroing in on a single word in that entire speech — communist — and firing up their outrage engines accordingly.)
I'm sure you are correct. It saves their listeners the burden of checking out the speech for themselves and trying to make sense of it.
What strikes me about that part of the speech, though, is that it says the exact opposite of what they will try to spin it as saying. Carney is mentioning Havel's greengrocer as a way of saying that he's no longer signaling compliance. He's not calling for quiet, Czech-like endurance, he wants more active resistance.
We all get that because we can read (or listen). The RW pundits' purpose, though, is twofold: to keep their listeners from seeking it out for themselves, and to spread their misrepresentation widely enough and repeat it enough times that they can game the AI bots into giving their disinformation more prominence and make it seem reasonable and valid.
Michael Cain - I think Carney is talking about Canada's energy reserves in order to set them up as an alternative. He's basically outlining the game theory of multilateral and iterative trade as an antidote to the US strategy of All Prisoners Dilemma All The Time. I think it's a plea for the middle people to look to each other and isolate the bullies.
wj - as far as future histories go, John Shirley's Eclipse Trilogy is by far the most on-the-nose thing I have seen as an alternative perspective from which to see our current moment, which is why it continues to scare the crap out of me. I think Paolo Bacigalupi also does an excellent job of future history, and is equally depressing.
What we really need is more gritty anti-dystopian futures, and more optimistic visions in which the world manages to choose Door #2 and it somehow works and creates a better world. Those are the works that nurture hope while we take down the signs in the window that pretend that the old stories are still working.
Biden's cabinet was qualified and within normal parameters, and he at least was competent in his lucid moments. Trump's are all Project 2025 dictator wannabes and Coup Cuck Clansmen, and he himself has always been awful.
wj - I think that, as a nation, we are in the process of moving past it. I say “as a nation” because, while I think that more and more of us have moved past it, clearly there are still a huge number who have not.
As a nation I think we have been here before, which is to say that as a nation we are currently in the midst of the sort of self-sorting that leads to us actually being two nations mixed up in one sack. We have two very different nationalisms facing off and in open conflict with each other.
The question is whether this leads to a forced reunification (as in the Civil War) or into some form of collapse, or just a prolonged dysfunction and are supplanted on the world stage.
I am not optimistic that we can put the toothpaste back into the tube this time.
WRT the Toni Morrison reference in the title, her "rememory," and my research about trauma has made me aware of how "remember" can be thought of (figuratively, not as a literal etymology) as "re-membering." When we remember trauma we should be thinking about how to restore wholeness to a psyche that has lost a part of itself. It's the psyche's equivalent of an amputation. The old narrative that gave one's life continuity has been severed and a part of oneself that once seemed intrinsic has become an object outside of one's control.
This sort of figurative thinking plays into my focus on restorative justice. People and societies need to be made whole, or be remade or given back a sense of wholeness.
wj - Answering that requires answering the motivation question: Why do they come? The simple answer: economics and safety. Not macroeconomic generalities, but the microeconomics of individuals. Combined with, and overlapping with, the legal environment. There are other motivations, such as moving to be near family members, or even climate. But those are tiny in comparison.
I can understand the desire to simplify the way we talk about immigration in order to reframe the asylum seekers in an empathetic way - to put ourselves in their shoes. That's an essential strategy in this age of tech driven propaganda and outrage.
I do worry, however, that this simplification might obscure the degree to which economics and safety are entangled with climate.
When a Salvadoran farmer can't afford to buy seeds because his crops keep getting ruined, climate is economics. When groups of farmers like him become desperate and have to go to the city where they have no place to live and no aid, they find themselves at the mercy of the gangs in the cities, both economics and safety. To avoid the violence of working for the gangs, they have to find somewhere else to go, which means paying the gangs to take them someplace safer.
But all of that starts with the climate making their rural agricultural lives unlivable. Climate change is a threat and vulnerability multiplier. It's hugely destabilizing. Decarbonization and humanitarian aid work together to reduce threat, and ignoring the ways that they are entangled undercuts our ability to reduce the economic hardship and the political instability that drives mass migration.
They cover the reasoning for Ethiopia in a paragraph towards the end.
Given the source of the map, I'd venture that its inclusion is less a matter of rigorous argumentation and more a means of provoking a conversation. That's not unusual in a prologue - it's the academic equivalent of a clickbait headline.
There's a transcript at the NYT, which is what I used.
I'm always amazed at the people I know who post seven YT vids and two podcasts a day from some left-wing political influencer - many close to the same age as my students. Most of those are haphazardly arranged and not very cohesive, and more noise than signal.
I want information, and I want it to be accessible, not padded out for good engagement numbers and juiced for the outrage algorithm.
At least with a transcript I can skim and find the things that are worthwhile, and then use that to anchor my further reading.
On “Adam Tooze”
It seems I am often prefacing links (as I am here) with a mention of how often I disagree with the author on many particulars. Don't take my link to Krugman as an endorsement of Krugman as anything but an observer of this recent deal:
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-world-files-for-economic-divorce
It's about the free trade agreement just negotiated between the EU and India. I'd have to go back and look over what Krugman says to see if his view is compatible with what Tooze is saying, but I think that the deal itself is very much in line with Tooze's (and Carney's) assertions.
The world is losing faith in the Peace of Westphalia. It will be interesting to see what sort of new order emerges out of that collapse -- assuming that we survive the environmental collapse that is likely to be brought on by all of this lack of a functioning order.
On “Moral insanity”
My campus is one of the campuses that had a pro-Palestinian encampment that was taken down with a massive law enforcement action. (I was not there. I had students and colleagues on either side whose perspectives and reasons for their involvement I can sympathize with. It was a complex situation. No one actually involved on either side wanted anyone else on campus to be physically threatened or harmed.)
I'm not going to get into a big post over this because bc has enough to respond to on other lines. I merely note that the public-at-large's understanding and descriptions of what was going on on campuses bear little resemblance to what it was actually like. The media accounts read like mock epics without any of the irony.
The actual drama and foment was tiny right up to the point where the helicopters and riot police showed up in overwhelming numbers and stormed in like they were dealing with a violent mob.
"
bc - That Prairieland Detention Center case is definitely worth some examination. Bondi's people claim that 19 people so far are part of a "North Texas Antifa Cell," and are making much of the five guilty pleas.
Here are two articles about the action and the people who have been charged - from The Guardian and from The New Republic:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/texas-antifa-ice-detention-center
https://newrepublic.com/article/204190/texas-antifa-protest-case-doj-free-speech-test
...of the two, I find TNR's article to be better supported and more nuanced, but the Guardian has more personal details about some of the people involved that seem like they are worth consideration.
Just based on what I have read about the case, I'd say that two or three of the people involved were dangerous idiot who might have aspired to being an antifa cell. Another small number were friends who were trying to help an idiot friend who did stupid things in support of them, but who weren't part of any plot at the start, and the majority were protesters who got caught in bad circumstances and exercised poor judgment in not backing out when the idiots started talking big in the encrypted group chat.
Throw the dudes with guns in jail. Treat the vandals like vandals.
As for the rest, I'd need to see a lot more evidence of actual coordination and planning and association before I believed anything that law enforcement said about the majority of the people who showed up.
Thank the gods none of them had a sandwich, or who knows what charges might have been filed?
On “Feeling Philoctetes”
Unrelated to anything else here, but that title makes me think of Soundgarden's "Outshined" every time I read it:
Well, I got up feeling so down
I got off being sold out
I've kept the movie rolling
But the story's getting old now
Oh yeah
Well I just looked in the mirror
And things aren't looking so good
I'm looking California
And feeling Minnesota
Oh yeah
That "feeling Minnesota" hits a little differently these days, but still matches the mood and sentiment pretty damn well.
On “But tell me what you really mean”
My thoughts are with you, cleek. Such a hard thing to go through with a loved one. Been through a few rounds of this myself (brother, cousins, my college love, ...). It always feels like having stumbled into emotional quicksand.
On “Moral insanity”
hairshirthedonist and I are clearly receiving the same instructions from the Red Brigade for our comments. Slow down, bro. I'll never get that toaster oven if you keep beating me to the quota.
"
One thing that the right consistently misconstrues/misrepresents about the left is the nature of the relationship between antifa, socialist activists, and the protesters as a whole.
Antifa, as much as they exist as organized groups, are small cells that don't coordinate with anyone else. They don't want contact. They are afraid that any contact and coordination will lead to fed infiltration. They are a miniscule presence within these protests, and they show up uninvited.
The only real relationship between the socialist activists and the majority of the protesters comes through the socialist groups offering tactical training for the protesters - all the whistles and communication things - as an open source information practice. They aren't leading things in the sense of providing ideology and direction, they are sharing their practical experience about how, safely and effectively, to stand up to militarized federal agents who are violating the constitution.
The vast majority of the people engaging in the training are not activists or socialists, and have no interest in the ideology of the people who put together the training. All they want to know is how to prevent their neighbors from being snatched and sent to a government oubliette or dumped in a foreign country with no due process. Oh, and how to deal with the indiscriminate use of teargas and CS against them and their neighbors, and how to render aid to people being shot with less lethal rounds and beaten with batons - often in direct violation of the training and use of force guidelines.
Finally, consider this: Obama removed a whole lot of people during his presidency and went after traffickers and criminals with low-intensity, targeted operations even in sanctuary cities. No one was showing up to disrupt that because under Obama the agents were operating within normal enforcement protocols. Socialist activists were around and protesting during his time in office too (I know a surprising number through my work with my union and heard about a lot of this directly from them).
Those Minnesotans are not a bunch of radical socialists attempting to overthrow federal order, they are scared and angry midwesterners who are pissed off because the President has sent in masked, militarized enforcers to grab their neighbors without probable cause or due process. They just want things to go back to the way they were, and for ICE and CBP to go back to low-intensity work against actual threats to public safety.
"
bc - My point is that by defunding ICE, you do give Trump what I think (I’m doing a bit of mind reading here) you fear: that he will militarize the response.
He's already done that when he mobilized the National Guard and deployed them in LA. We've seen that line crossed before. The people protesting aren't acting on pollyanna instincts. We've seen what the response could look like.
We've also seen what they will do if funds are withheld. But the fact that withholding funding won't stop this administration doesn't mean that there is no point in doing it. The Democrats in congress have to choose if they would rather be seen as having stood up to this wave of federal violence against their communities, or if they want to be seen as resignedly accepting that this administration and their enablers in congress and the courts will not be deterred.
Sanctuary cities/counties/states are actively resisting the enforcement of federal law. Those that think the obstruction isn’t part of and the cause of much of the violence (and intentionally so) are naive IMO.
The idea that if they are defied it will provoke a more violent response, and that the response is then the defiers' fault is what you see in the family members growing up with an abuser in authority. The abuser only wants to help the family. If everyone just did what he asked then no one would get hurt. Why do you keep provoking him?
The only ways to break that cycle are to leave the abuser or to stand up, knowing that the violence will happen, but also knowing that when it does it's no one's fault but the abuser's.
The narrative has to be broken before the cycle can be broken.
Take the resistance far enough and what you end up with may not what you bargained for. Or maybe some are bargaining for that response in search of the revolution.
What revolutionaries and battered family members bargain for is a chance for some change in an unlivable situation - hostage to the threat of violence. They choose to resist knowing what is likely coming.
I've been teaching classes about war and civil unrest long enough to not have any illusions about what could happen.
On “Feeling Philoctetes”
I'm not sure that I'd say that Philoctetes, Hercules, or Odysseus were great and noble of character. All three were men of great ability, sure, but of very mixed character. In this they seem to support Aristotle's claim in the Poetics:
There remains, then, the character between these two extremes,—that of a man who is not eminently good and just,-yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error or frailty. He must be one who is highly renowned and prosperous,—a personage like Oedipus, Thyestes, or other illustrious men of such families.
I think many of the supporting people in the first Clementine Caligula administration fit this description, and were brought low by it. Of the current batch, Rubio is probably the closest thing.
Whatever the case, it'll probably require a deus ex machina to achieve public catharsis in our current state. We are still deeply polluted, politically, by the miasma we have allowed, and the sources of our pollution have not yet suffered enough to assuage the wrath of the political gods.
...at least speaking from the classic Greek perspective.
On “Moral insanity”
...so I guess this adds a second formula to the one that Snarki outlines. Sometimes it is the "zoom out until the particulars blur" tactic. This time it's the "tight focus to leave others off camera" tactic.
Either way, it saves face for the people who continue to facilitate this push to authoritarian illiberalism.
"
GftNC - However, on the subject that you and Snarki raise of his having an “unerring ability to land on a GOP friendly position”, it seems to me that the whole piece is a really scathing denunciation of Trump’s character, conduct, motivations etc etc. And given, as we all see, that the GOP as a whole has cravenly and pathetically bent the knee to him, enabled him, acceded to his power grab from Congress and been totally mealy-mouthed about his attacks on the constitution, I think it’s odd to say that he is supporting the GOP.
I'd say that he's lending cover to the GOP as a whole when he writes:
When you look at the things currently being done in the US, the majority of them are in line with what the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation have been working to get done for a lot longer than Trump has been on the scene. This administration is not acting on the whims of a mad king, they are taking advantage of the noise and foment that Clementine Caligula provokes to advance their own agenda. Brooks' heaping of all this on He Who Slumbers head is some fine scapegoating. At the end of the day it allows him to put all the sins of the GOP on one man's head and usher him into the desert, sins forgiven after having momentarily succumbed to a fever.
But really, the institutions are okay, and the people still believe in democracy in their hearts.
See? No one else in frame. No lackeys. No institutional agendas. No long assault on the judiciary to facilitate this takeover. No discussions of illiberal democracy and wishing for a Red Caesar. It's all one madman dragging everyone else with him.
"
wj's response to Brooks's ritual performance of balance calls to mind one of the books I read early in my Ph.D. studies when I was building my Media Studies chops: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, by Alexander Galloway. The central idea there being that what makes the modern networked world continue to function is not deregulation, nor is it centralization - it's the informal and changeable rules that negotiate the conflicts between those two poles, which Galloway identifies as protocol.
In the US, that protocol was largely a function of what we call The Deep State. Congress makes laws. Private citizens make products. The Market exists as a fluctuating hologram of the shifting dynamics between those two. The Deep State oversees the negotiations between those two in order to steer the overall system and keep it functioning within acceptable parameters for both sides. (His digital analogy for this is the system of protocols that allowed TCP/IP to work with the DNS system to facilitate information exchange.
Galloway was, like most of the Media Studies people writing in the moment between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, a bit of a utopian technolibertarian. He did point out that the authoritarian nature of DNS
allows whole realms of the Web to be blacked out with the flip of a switch, but the belief was that those things would self-correct as protocol adjusted to keep the system moving.
We are living in the moment when protocol has been destroyed in order to prevent the system from moving to preserve the privilege of the powerful. Without the federal bureaucracy, and with the legislative branch neutered, we have only the executive and the judicial, operating top-down with no negotiation.
Anyway, thought I'd mention the book in case any of the (more) tech savvy (than me) here wanted to find it and take a look.
On “Carney’s speech”
Pro Bono - The whole of the UK, even Farage, is furious with Trump over his remarks about the rest of NATO
Rightly so. He's a moral contagion. He is the hollow man. He is a headpiece stuffed with straw.
He is the reason no one should ever again trust the US. Collectively we are petty, ungrateful, and untrustworthy.
On “Rememory”
I don't know that they can tell the truth. I don't think they have it in them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/22/white-house-ice-protest-arrest-altered-image
On “Moral insanity”
The next few lines too, which I love for how they render the mess of us.
...
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself.
And a part of you,
For my part is the chorus, and the chorus
Is more or less a borderline between
The you and the me and the it of it.
On “Carney’s speech”
Fletcher - (Give it five minutes or so, and you’ll hear US Republicans zeroing in on a single word in that entire speech — communist — and firing up their outrage engines accordingly.)
I'm sure you are correct. It saves their listeners the burden of checking out the speech for themselves and trying to make sense of it.
What strikes me about that part of the speech, though, is that it says the exact opposite of what they will try to spin it as saying. Carney is mentioning Havel's greengrocer as a way of saying that he's no longer signaling compliance. He's not calling for quiet, Czech-like endurance, he wants more active resistance.
We all get that because we can read (or listen). The RW pundits' purpose, though, is twofold: to keep their listeners from seeking it out for themselves, and to spread their misrepresentation widely enough and repeat it enough times that they can game the AI bots into giving their disinformation more prominence and make it seem reasonable and valid.
Michael Cain - I think Carney is talking about Canada's energy reserves in order to set them up as an alternative. He's basically outlining the game theory of multilateral and iterative trade as an antidote to the US strategy of All Prisoners Dilemma All The Time. I think it's a plea for the middle people to look to each other and isolate the bullies.
wj - as far as future histories go, John Shirley's Eclipse Trilogy is by far the most on-the-nose thing I have seen as an alternative perspective from which to see our current moment, which is why it continues to scare the crap out of me. I think Paolo Bacigalupi also does an excellent job of future history, and is equally depressing.
What we really need is more gritty anti-dystopian futures, and more optimistic visions in which the world manages to choose Door #2 and it somehow works and creates a better world. Those are the works that nurture hope while we take down the signs in the window that pretend that the old stories are still working.
On “Rememory”
Biden's cabinet was qualified and within normal parameters, and he at least was competent in his lucid moments. Trump's are all Project 2025 dictator wannabes and Coup Cuck Clansmen, and he himself has always been awful.
"
wj - I think that, as a nation, we are in the process of moving past it. I say “as a nation” because, while I think that more and more of us have moved past it, clearly there are still a huge number who have not.
As a nation I think we have been here before, which is to say that as a nation we are currently in the midst of the sort of self-sorting that leads to us actually being two nations mixed up in one sack. We have two very different nationalisms facing off and in open conflict with each other.
The question is whether this leads to a forced reunification (as in the Civil War) or into some form of collapse, or just a prolonged dysfunction and are supplanted on the world stage.
I am not optimistic that we can put the toothpaste back into the tube this time.
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WRT the Toni Morrison reference in the title, her "rememory," and my research about trauma has made me aware of how "remember" can be thought of (figuratively, not as a literal etymology) as "re-membering." When we remember trauma we should be thinking about how to restore wholeness to a psyche that has lost a part of itself. It's the psyche's equivalent of an amputation. The old narrative that gave one's life continuity has been severed and a part of oneself that once seemed intrinsic has become an object outside of one's control.
This sort of figurative thinking plays into my focus on restorative justice. People and societies need to be made whole, or be remade or given back a sense of wholeness.
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wj - Answering that requires answering the motivation question: Why do they come? The simple answer: economics and safety. Not macroeconomic generalities, but the microeconomics of individuals. Combined with, and overlapping with, the legal environment. There are other motivations, such as moving to be near family members, or even climate. But those are tiny in comparison.
I can understand the desire to simplify the way we talk about immigration in order to reframe the asylum seekers in an empathetic way - to put ourselves in their shoes. That's an essential strategy in this age of tech driven propaganda and outrage.
I do worry, however, that this simplification might obscure the degree to which economics and safety are entangled with climate.
When a Salvadoran farmer can't afford to buy seeds because his crops keep getting ruined, climate is economics. When groups of farmers like him become desperate and have to go to the city where they have no place to live and no aid, they find themselves at the mercy of the gangs in the cities, both economics and safety. To avoid the violence of working for the gangs, they have to find somewhere else to go, which means paying the gangs to take them someplace safer.
But all of that starts with the climate making their rural agricultural lives unlivable. Climate change is a threat and vulnerability multiplier. It's hugely destabilizing. Decarbonization and humanitarian aid work together to reduce threat, and ignoring the ways that they are entangled undercuts our ability to reduce the economic hardship and the political instability that drives mass migration.
On “An interesting map”
I went looking for the references. The actual source for the map is here:
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/24/5835320/map-in-the-whole-world-only-these-five-countries-escaped-european
They cover the reasoning for Ethiopia in a paragraph towards the end.
Given the source of the map, I'd venture that its inclusion is less a matter of rigorous argumentation and more a means of provoking a conversation. That's not unusual in a prologue - it's the academic equivalent of a clickbait headline.
On “Talarico”
If you don't have access to the NYTimes, you can find a transcript here:
https://podscripts.co/podcasts/the-ezra-klein-show/can-james-talarico-reclaim-christianity-for-the-left
...scroll down.
On “An interesting map”
Note to Sino-Platonic Papers: wj would like to be one of your outside readers for peer review. He has methodology questions. Hit him up.
On “Talarico”
There's a transcript at the NYT, which is what I used.
I'm always amazed at the people I know who post seven YT vids and two podcasts a day from some left-wing political influencer - many close to the same age as my students. Most of those are haphazardly arranged and not very cohesive, and more noise than signal.
I want information, and I want it to be accessible, not padded out for good engagement numbers and juiced for the outrage algorithm.
At least with a transcript I can skim and find the things that are worthwhile, and then use that to anchor my further reading.
On “An open thread”
More news about the sort of people that ICE is happy to have working for it:
https://www.texasobserver.org/ice-prosecutor-racist-account-back-at-immigration-court/
Maybe this is what Bannon meant when he advised King Lear Jet to flood the zone with shit.
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