The Weak Suffer as They Must?

 Yaroslav Trofimov writes today in the Wall Street Journal about how the "weaker" countries around the globe seem to be putting up a surprisingly good defense to the aggression of great powers.

Back at the start of the second Trump term, Trofimov notes, the phrase on everyone's lips was the one from Thucydides: "The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must." We thought we were back in the era of naked conquest, imperialism, and social Darwinism. As Stephen Miller notoriously put it in an interview: "We live in a world, in the real world [...] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power."

The Literary Underground

 As someone with a law degree and professional writing/communications work experience, I occasionally get alerts on my LinkedIn page from robo-recruiters offering hourly contracts to train AI models to wield my own skill set. 

Apparently I'm not unique in this. A recent article in Wired says it's an open secret among screenwriters that the only way to pay the bills now is by picking up some extra income on the side teaching AI how to do their jobs for them. 

Hegseth the Pétainiste

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy over the weekend to deliver a D-Day speech. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he used the occasion—ostensibly commemorating the time U.S. troops liberated Europe from fascism—to pointedly amplify the talking points of European fascists. 

Specifically, he implied that non-white immigrants to the continent are "invaders." Today, he said, "different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies. Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

The Sacred Texts

 I am remembering why I like Walter Kaufmann so much. 

In his essays in Existentialism, Religion, and Death, Kaufmann applies the daring and untried exegetical method of simply believing that people may have actually meant what they said. 

Kierkegaard may really have been what we would now call a religious fundamentalist. 

White Racist Rule

 Well, it happened again. I fell for the mirage of the "Grand Bargain." 

When I first heard that even a conservative appeals court with two Trump-appointed judges had struck down an Alabama voting map for intentionally discriminating against Black voters, I thought: ah, here's a perfect opportunity for the Roberts court to do the right thing. 

Race to the Bottom

 A New York Times op-ed yesterday delved once more into the biography of Marco Rubio—pointing out his bizarre chameleon-like ability to adapt himself to rapidly changing political environments. 

The contradictions have only mounted in Mr. Rubio’s latter-day alliance with Donald Trump, the authors write, and not just on the issue of immigration. Mr. Rubio has shifted from an impassioned champion of U.S. foreign aid to one of the dismantlers of the United States Agency for International Development. He has gone from piquant adversary of the president’s first-term foreign policy to an enabler of legally disputed strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats and a cheerleader for the president’s hegemonic approach to the Western Hemisphere.

Lord of the Drones

 I have no patience whatsoever for the people who cite Obama's drone strikes as if these somehow excused or mitigated Trump's ongoing campaign of drone murder in the Caribbean and Pacific. Tu quoque is not a valid form of argument; and no precedent, however obscene, can normalize or relativize the fact that our government right now is blowing up civilian vessels in two of the world's oceans—murdering all their occupants—without even the pretense of there being armed actors on the other side. 

That said, it's probably a good exercise for me to occasionally look back and remind myself: Obama's drone strikes were also really bad—even if they were not exactly the same thing as what Trump is doing now. A poem by Heathcote Williams from that era, "Lord of the Drones: The President and the White House Fly," gave me that reminder that I needed, when I read it this week. 

200 Bodies

 As of yesterday, the Trump administration's campaign of extrajudicial murder in the Caribbean and Pacific has now claimed the lives of more than 200 people. 

The New York Times, in a haunting story yesterday, investigates one of the under-examined aspects of this ongoing atrocity: its impact on the livelihoods of coastal communities that fish in these same waters. 

The Divine Pig

 Both Nicholas Kristof and Noah Smith (the blogger) devoted their respective columns this week to the atypical subject of pigs and animal cruelty. 

This was no coincidence. The subject may be outside the usual beat of both writers, but they turned to it this week because Congress is actively debating right now—as part of the Farm Bill—a measure with the hideously apt name of the "Save Our Bacon Act."