"Send Me"?

 A recent article in the Intercept reports that the Pentagon has begun to use overt references to scripture in its online recruiting. One recent ad from the U.S. military prominently features the phrase "Send Me" over images of soldiers gearing up for battle. 

And if this sounds ambiguous to most of us, a Pentagon spokesperson went on to quote a full passage from Isaiah that uses the phrase; and the official "Department of War" accounts reportedly re-shared that post in turn. 

Leave it to the Trump administration to eliminate any shade of subtlety. 

Masters of Modern Thought

 Ross Douthat published his swan song at the New York Times yesterday—his final column for the paper before heading off into the sunset of Bari Weiss–controlled media. It was a fitting capstone to his career at the Times, in that it summed up a central motif of much of his writing there: namely: I'm not sure who's right, but I know I'm mad about it. 

For years, Douthat has been telling us that, as a conservative Catholic intellectual, he is against liberalism.

But he also knows that most of the illiberal alternatives on offer are not rationally or morally defensible. 

Data Centers

 In a podcast interview earlier this week about the current populist backlash against AI data centers, Jasmine Sun and Ezra Klein started off by trying to explain what it is like to actually live in the vicinity of one of these facilities. "What do they sound like?" Klein asked. Sun replied: "they sound like humming, buzzing, whirring."

B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-R!

What are the machines saying, a hundred of them in one long room?

They must be talking to themselves, for I see no one else for them to talk to.

Ceuta

 The arrival earlier this week of tens of thousands of migrants and asylum-seekers in Ceuta (a Spanish territory in North Africa) obviously gave the global far-right an issue they could demagogue for days. Extreme rightists on both sides of the Atlantic (including, of course, people in and close to our own U.S. government), who have been framing nonwhite immigration as an "invasion" all along, could flaunt viral images of the desperate sea of humanity and say: "see!? this is what happens as soon as you elect a leftist government! They open the borders!"

That much—alas—is expected at this point. 

Proletarian Voters?

 The "dirtbag" stream of the Left seems to be taking a victory lap after the results were finally announced in the Senate Democratic primary election in Michigan yesterday. They view Dr. Abdul El-Sayed's win as a vindication of the whole macho, aggro, "up yours" brand of politics they have been wanting to see take over the Left for a long time. 

"Chuck Schumer Eats Shit," was Ken Klippenstein's headline yesterday, responding to these events. So much for that "now is the time for everyone to come together and focus on the general election" speech that El-Sayed gave yesterday. 

Primary Season

 I sometimes feel I must be the last Democratic voter in the country who has not been obsessing over the primary election in Michigan. I have no strong feelings about who should win, and mostly just want this contest to be over so we can focus on what seems to me the bigger issue here: namely, that Donald Trump and a supine Republican majority are dismantling our democracy.

When I awoke this morning to see that the race was still deadlocked, I let out a groan: this—the lack of a resolution—was the only possible outcome I distinctly did not want. 

Successive Degrees of Unfreedom

 I'm sorry to keep going on about André Brink's A Dry White Season. But I wish that our government wouldn't keep proving my point for me that it feels more and more by the day that we are living in a political situation very much like the one he depicts in the novel. 

The book is about apartheid South Africa—and everyone knows these days that apartheid South Africa was an authoritarian state.