Anticipatory Obedience

 Yesterday, Amazon appeared briefly to consider being transparent with the American people, and attaching a line item to each bill going forward that would show the added costs from Trump's tariffs. The White House then predictably lashed out at them, as soon as this news broke. 

What was weird, though, is that the administration's response didn't even offer a pretext as to why their objection was in the public interest. They seemingly forgot that they are supposed to at least pretend to care about the American people, rather than their own naked political self-interest. But this time, they left that part out. 

The Sure Hand of God

 Let me first state for the record that I do not support committing property crimes under any circumstances. But with that said, you can consider me not exactly moved to tears by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's recent loss of $3,000 in cash from a purse that she had left under a lunch table. 

However much I oppose stealing under any circumstances, I won't be getting out the violin for her. Anyone who sports a gold Rolex while touring a foreign gulag, in which they have deliberately confined innocent people without charge or trial—all on the taxpayer's dime—is already tempting fate. 

Rat and Apostate, Revisited

 Ezra Klein's interview with Ross Douthat this week shows us the rather depressing spectacle of someone confronting the fact that they have compromised themselves—by joining forces with something morally hideous—and resorting to all manner of feeble ad hominem arguments and fallacies of irrelevance in order to avoid acknowledging that fact. 

Reading through the transcript, it is clear that Douthat is open to criticizing Donald Trump personally. But what he cannot bring himself to do is to admit that his buddy J.D. Vance, specifically, has utterly and basely sold himself. Each time Klein specifically tries to bring up Vance and to get Douthat to comment publicly on the obvious and rank hypocrisy of Vance's positions—Douthat demurs. 

An Experiment with Time

 J.W. Dunne's 1927 pseudo-scientific classic, An Experiment with Time, is plainly the work of a crank. But thank God for the cranks, I say. Without them showing up periodically, we would all remain trapped in our straightforward and all-too-readily explicable common sense model of reality, and no one would ever say anything interesting. 

And Dunne is certainly saying something interesting. He leads us toward an intrinsically preposterous outcome, but he does so by stages that seem so reasonable and cautious that one gladly takes his hand and walks with him on the journey, purely for the intellectual pleasure of it. Those who don't want the destination of the journey spoiled should stop reading here and go look up Dunne's book instead. 

The Wolves and the Shepherds

 Yesterday, the Trump administration unveiled their (ahem) "peace plan" for ending the war in Ukraine. As long feared, it essentially amounts to a one-sided capitulation to Putin's core demands. Under the Trump/Vance proposal, Ukraine would never become a member of NATO; they would also permanently abandon and cede large parts of their Eastern territory—essentially, any part of the country currently occupied by Russian forces (including the Donbas and Crimea). 

In exchange for making these concessions, Ukraine would get basically... nothing at all. Some friends of Ukraine have tried to find a sliver of hope in the fact the agreement does not expressly limit the size of Ukraine's future military, or bar other Western countries from supporting Ukraine if they choose to do so. But it says nothing positively—at least according to initial reporting—about what concrete security guarantees Ukraine would receive so as to prevent Putin from invading again. 

The Tenderest Point of Government

 Every week in the Trump hellscape has its own distinct theme—in which he destroys some new pillar of the global community that previously kept humanity from each other's throats. And obviously this current week is only a few days old at this point; but already it seems that perhaps this week's theme is going to be: the week Trump destroyed the dollar. 

Recent days have already brought disturbing signs that we are witnessing a wholesale capital flight from the United States. Foreign investors are dumping US stocks, bonds, and dollar reserves all at once—a pattern that suggests not only a short-term pessimism about the effects of Trump's tariffs, but something like a complete reordering of the global economy. 

Meaningful Coincidences?

 Everyone comes across those moments in life in which there seems to be an eerie correspondence between one's inner world and external reality—"synchronicities," in Carl Jung's terminology; which he further defines as "meaningful coincidences." (Hull trans. throughout.) But the benefit of keeping a blog for more than ten years is that you start to accumulate a written record of a few of the more memorable ones. 

Take a post I published on January 15, 2022. I was reflecting in the piece on Max Frisch's short novel, Man in the Holocene, with its images of human extinction and the notion of a dead cosmos. I wrote about an episode that some scientists believe occurred early on in human evolutionary history, when our entire species may have faced a bottleneck that nearly caused our extinction, due to a volcanic cataclysm. 

Notes on the Tusculan Disputations

 Cicero's Tusculan Disputations are best known these days for being the origin of the story of the "Sword of Damocles." But they may also be the site of the first ever use of the "slippery slope" argument. The Wikipedia page for this well-known fallacy attributes the earliest use of the argument to a different work of Cicero's—a treatise on friendship. But the Tusculan Disputations, apparently composed some years earlier, use the image of a "slippery slope" even more directly than the example Wikipedia cites. 

In the fourth disputation—on the topic of "mental perturbations"—Cicero at one point makes the questionable argument that it is impossible to tolerate a little bit of vice, without thereby allowing in vice of any proportion. Obviously, there's no reason why this logically follows. It's a classic form of the slippery slope fallacy. And Cicero even uses the metaphor of "slippery ground" to justify it: 

Banality of Evil

 A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog depicting Marco Rubio as a quasi-tragic figure. I was intrigued by his fall from grace—the question of how a seemingly reasonable and idealistic person could have sold himself so basely to a right-wing would-be dictator who has nothing but contempt for our constitutional tradition. 

Now, however, I realize this take was giving Rubio too much credit. He's not tragic. He's boring. He and the other members of this administration belong to the banal roster of history's other criminals, tyrants, butchers, and murderers—and there could be no duller sight. They are not worth a second glance. 

Is This That World?

 Trump spent part of his day yesterday issuing a new executive order about regulating shower-heads. Yes, as in, the normal shower-heads that we use every day to wash ourselves. Trump declared that Biden's policies had made shower-heads too weak, and that intervention was needed in order to restore "strength" to shower-heads. "Make America's showers great again," as the executive order reportedly put it. 

Reading about such actions, one can see why so many Americans just can't bring themselves to see this man as an actual threat to democracy. He is so utterly bombastic and unserious that people for the most part manage to laugh him off. The public's view of Trump becomes that he is something of an Archie Bunker—a comic figure who says outrageous, silly things that shouldn't be taken too much to heart. 

Treated Like a Liar

 When Trump first started revoking grant money to major universities—as part of his sweeping attack on the American mind, ranging from the arts and sciences to higher education and public health services—I confess the selfish part of me was relieved at first to see that my own alma mater was not immediately in his crosshairs. They weren't even on the full list of 60 schools the administration plans to eventually target. 

But as the administration started to go down the list of prominent schools, eventually reaching even Northwestern—my feeling of relief began to graduate into something more like FOMO. It felt insulting not to be included. I'm reminded of Brecht's poem about an exiled author who sees a list of proscribed works to be destroyed in a book-burning rally, and is incensed not to see his oeuvre included. 

The Abyss

 And just like that, Trump backed off from most of his reciprocal tariffs. Once again, he held a gun to the head of the world economy—the material basis that supports all human life on this planet—and then got bored with the act and put the weapon away. Except that, yet again, the suspension is only "temporary." And the elevated base rate for tariffs will remain. And the uncertainty and instability generated by his actions will continue indefinitely. 

I guess it passes for "good news" these days that we are now going to destroy the global economy only a little bit at a time, rather than all at once. The stock market—desperate as always for any "comfort serves in a whirlwind" (Hopkins)—is certainly willing to treat it as such. I'm personally relieved we aren't immediately going to plunge ourselves into a gratuitous global depression. But one is also dismayed by the sheer madness of it. The absurdity. What on Earth did he think he was doing? 

The War Prayer

 In a recent blog I zeroed in on one aspect of that leaked Signal chat story that I thought had received insufficient attention at the time—namely, the impact on the people of Yemen of the strike that was discussed over the thread. After senior members of the administration stupidly added a journalist to their group chat, much of the outside scrutiny focused instead on the security implications of this blunder. 

But I found myself no less disturbed by the actual content of the leaked messages themselves. The participants in the thread, after all, cheer on the bombings they are carrying out in Yemen with "fist bumps," jingoistic bravado, and flame emojis. When one of them reports that a "building collapsed" from a U.S. strike, J.D. Vance replies to this grim news with one word: "Excellent." 

Mental Fight

 On a weekend trip to New England the last few days, my sister asked if I felt compelled to attend the massive anti-Trump protests around the country that occurred on April 5. I think we both agreed we'd rather do something fun with the kids (we ended up going to the zoo instead); but my sister thought I might feel guilty if we missed the protests entirely. 

I really didn't, though—which surprised me. During Trump's first term, I would have kicked myself if I didn't attend a local rally. I would have felt that I had failed in my duty as a citizen. But now, for some reason—even though Trump's second term is head-and-shoulders worse and more destructive than his first—I don't feel so obliged to march in the streets. 

We're Weaving, We're Weaving!

 There's a lot one could say about Trump's decision to unilaterally torpedo the global economy this week with across-the-board tariffs. But what's particularly sticking in my craw this morning is just the rank unfairness of this policy to countries who spent decades redesigning their domestic economies, under pressure from Washington—only now to see more bullying from the U.S. government in the opposite direction. 

After all, maybe the U.S. was wrong to pursue neoliberal globalization so aggressively in the first place. Maybe it was a mistake. But the now irrevocable fact is that it happened; we did it. We imposed this system of trade on the rest of the world. Countries throughout the developing world were pressured to give up the protective tariffs that shielded their domestic farmers from competition and to throw their markets open to cheap, heavily-subsidized U.S. crops.