The Millipede

 Listening on a recent road trip to the audio version of Andy Kroll's A Death on W Street—a book detailing the bogus right-wing conspiracy theories that swarmed around the 2016 murder of Seth Rich and the effect they had on his family and friends—I went through a series of emotions. First: disbelief. These theories are easily refutable, as Kroll demonstrates. How was it that they were allowed to fester with so little factual grounding? It can't be! 

But then, once one has processed this emotion, another realization comes in its wake. Of course these theories became popular. There's nothing simpler in the world. Kroll in one section of the book reviews some of the reasons scholars most commonly give for the appeal of conspiracy theories, before concluding that none of them is quite satisfactory. Perhaps the real explanation is simpler and more common to all humanity than we wish to believe: the basic love of mystery. The sense of seeing secrets revealed. Who isn't drawn to that?

Bad Things

 As it has so often the past several years (when to start the clock on this—March 2020? November 2016?)—the morning news sent a bolt of white hot terror through me with the first headline. Musk's acquisition of Twitter. It's finished. The deed is finally done. 

Everything about this is demoralizing and terrifying. First of all, there's the simple fact of how disgracefully Musk behaved through the whole ordeal. He acted far below the standard of any responsible executive and will apparently face no consequences for it. We have here yet another vindication of what is becoming the dominant style in our social and political life: the mugging smirk of the little boy who misbehaved and got away with it. More evidence that the bad guys are winning. 

For All [Hu]mankind

 In mid-summer 1969, then–Nixon administration speechwriter Bill Safire wrote a speech that was never given. It might in fact be the most famous undelivered speech in history: the words that President Nixon would have read aloud, if the Apollo 11 mission had failed, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had perished in the attempt. 

One of the more chilling and macabre details of the piece—and perhaps the reason it sticks in the memory—is that it does not contemplate the astronauts' sudden and fiery death mid-orbit or upon reentry (an appalling fate, but one that would be mercifully brief). Instead, the speech was concerned with an even more ghastly contingency: one in which the men were unable to leave the moon's surface after landing, and were left stranded on that alien surface indefinitely to wait out their slow and agonizing end. 

Fortean Jurisprudence

In one particularly provocative line in his famous study, the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn declares that the academic disciplines of the natural sciences—far from being the domain of un-bigoted rational inquiry, as they are often portrayed—are in fact a "narrow and rigid education" to be compared at best to "orthodox theology." (That modifier "orthodox" is crucial to sustaining Kuhn's point: at the liberal divinity school I attended, after all, "theology" was taught in such a nebulous way that it could scarcely be described as even talking about god, let alone doing so in a way that was "narrow.")

Kuhn may be exaggerating for effect, and his point at any rate wasn't to impugn the rational validity of the sciences. Rather, it was to contrast the way in which episodes from the history of the sciences are treated in science class with the quite different picture that emerges from a more free-ranging examination of that history. When the history of science is discussed at all in science class, Kuhn relates, it is only to appear in the role of salient episodes—almost miniature morality tales—that show how a previous theory failed under test conditions and a new paradigm was established in its wake. 

That Bridge Explosion

 If there is one certainty in the war in Ukraine, it is that Vladimir Putin will always be sure to re-establish his role—should it be in doubt for even an instant—as premier villain of the piece. Any time the Ukrainian forces do something the least bit morally questionable, Putin will retaliate with terror bombing of civilian targets, thereby swiftly reestablishing the moral balance that has obtained throughout the war. 

Here I was over the weekend feeling somewhat uneasy about the conduct of the Kerch Strait Bridge attack, for instance (still not officially claimed by Ukrainian forces, but believed to be attributable to them); even more so about the flagrantly unlawful, strategically ill-advised, and morally bankrupt assassination of a civilian on Russian soil, which U.S. intelligence reportedly has attributed to Ukrainian forces; but before I could ready any prose on the subject, Putin was sending missiles into residential areas, damaging a kindergarten classroom, and destroying civilian infrastructure projects all over the country, making any alleged Ukrainian misdeeds pale in comparison. 

Selling Out

 I was listening to an episode of the Omnibus podcast today that was devoted to the subject of the anti-consumerist movement of the late twentieth century (ranging from Situationism, to No Logo, to Ad Busters, to "monkey-wrenchers," to "culture jamming," and all the rest of it); and as I listened, I became subtly aware of two distinct facts: 1) everything about this movement—its ideology, its methods, its total conviction of its own righteousness—would have seemed self-evidently correct to my younger self, especially in high school. And 2) every one of these intuitions that—as I say—would have seemed so patent to me once upon a time—is now lost to me. 

Why is consumerism bad, again? What's the problem with commodity fetishism? As a teenager, these questions would have seemed to hardly warrant asking. Indeed, they would have seemed self-annihilatingly absurd. "Those things are bad by definition!" And so the tactics of the movement intending to disrupt them—ranging from the unlawful (such as defacing billboards) to the basically innocuous (such as organizing a nationwide "Buy Nothing Day") would have seemed no less self-evidently righteous. But nowadays, even the relatively benign aspects of these movements strike me as wrongheaded, even harmful if taken too seriously. 

Florida Sublime

 For most of my life, there has been little to celebrate in the fact of coming from the Sunshine State. Arriving in Florida at the turn of millennium, after spending the first ten years of my life in Texas, I was confronted by a sudden vacuum of "state pride." It was a shocking contrast. 

The Texas school authorities had made the indoctrination of us elementary schoolers in the ideology of "Texas pride" a core—if not exclusive—goal of our primary education. Right after the pledge of allegiance to the United States, we recited the "Texas pledge." And we had to read The Boy in the Alamo—a book conveniently leaving to one side the fact that the whole conflict was fought over slavery and (alas) Texas was not on the side of freedom—multiple years in a row. 

The "Madman" Theory

 With the war in Ukraine by all accounts going against him on the battlefield, Vladimir Putin is adopting a strategy long familiar to theorists of deterrence: namely, to behave so erratically that you manage to convince your adversary that you are capable of anything. Many of Putin's recent actions can be interpreted in this light. There was the attack on a natural gas pipeline widely suspected to be the work of Russian operatives. There are the blatantly fraudulent votes he is conducting in Ukraine's eastern provinces in order to formalize his attempted annexation by conquest, in violation of international law. And there are his increasingly open threats to use nuclear weapons. 

Of course, Putin explicitly only threatened nuclear retaliation if Russia itself is attacked. But this is a red line the Western powers have themselves drawn in their own support for Ukraine, and the coalition in support of them would quickly crumble if the war turned into an aggressive incursion across Russia's borders. Putin knows this. So why is he suddenly talking about the possibility of resorting to nuclear weapons? The fear on the part of many analysts is that—after converting Ukraine's conquered territories into nominally "Russian" land, he will speciously portray any attempt to wrest them back (or even to continue the war in the parts already held by Ukrainian forces), as an "attack on Russia" legitimizing a nuclear response.