Calumny

 The New York Times ran an article yesterday in which they detail how, in the last few days before the midterm elections, Republican candidates are resorting to the most rancid possible personal attacks to try to chip away at Democrats' clear lead in the polls. In some cases, they are dredging up details from the opposition candidates' personal lives that ought to be treated as off-limits. 

But in other cases, they are simply making up outrageous and lurid accusations out of whole cloth. One Republican candidate calls his opponent a "groomer," based on no evidence whatsoever. Our vice president darkly implies that a Democratic candidate could only have stood up for the rights of trans children in the past because he has some creepy sexual fixation on the subject. 

Double Injustice

 The New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump administration is apparently planning to deport more than a hundred Afghan nationals to Pakistan—with the full knowledge and deliberate intent, as part of the agreement, that Pakistan will then subsequent force them back across the border to their home country. 

The planned group of deportees reportedly includes people who would be obvious targets for persecution or assassination if they are sent back to Afghanistan, including relatives of people who risked their lives to aid the U.S. war effort against the Taliban. 

Half-Truth

 I wish I could say that, since Donald Trump is totally wrong, that means that Democrats are always right, and that everything they do to prevail against him in this week's midterm elections is therefore justified—but unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. 

Obviously, the big story about election interference right now is the fact that Trump has turned the U.S. Department of Justice into an instrument of his personal authority, and is using it to sow doubt about the integrity of the vote for transparently corrupt and partisan purposes. 

The Conceptualists

 A group of rich kids and their hangers-on, none of whom seems to need to work for a living, get together for a weekend of sex, drugs, and ultra-violence in a country manor. One of them may be not quite what they seem. Such is the by no means unpromising premise on which Martin Amis constructs his insanely readable second novel, Dead Babies (1975). 

The plot of the novel has been compared to a parody version of an Agatha Christie weekend murder party. But the compulsive aspect of the novel does not stem from its mystery or suspense (though there is plenty of that too). As with other Amis novels, it derives above all from the virtuoso prose.

Schopenhauer vs. The Royal Danish Society

 Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Basis of Morality is one of the funniest books ever written. Long before I got around to finishing the whole book, I had read its immortal first edition preface, in which AS takes the Royal Danish Society of Scientific Studies to task for passing over his essay in a prize contest. 

We subsequently learn that Schopenhauer's contribution was the only entrant that year in the essay contest. The Royal Society still could not bring themselves to bestow this recognition upon it. 

Chapters on Socialism

 With the recent resurgence of interest in socialism on the American left, it's worth revisiting John Stuart Mill's Chapters on Socialism as probably one of the best attempts ever to think through systematically both the merits of the socialist critique of capitalist society and the viability of its proposed alternatives. 

Better than perhaps any writer in history on the topic, Mill performs the feat of holding multiple ideas in mind at the same time—and managing to distinguish between them. He is therefore the opposite of that individual William Hazlitt once identified as the great pest of all political life: "the person with one idea." 

Grands Séducteurs

 A friend and I the other weekend sat down to watch Disney's largely overlooked and forgotten contribution to the L. Frank Baum expanded universe, Oz: The Great and Powerful, starring James Franco in the title role. 

It took about five minutes into the film before I realized this movie could only have been made before #MeToo. 

AI Over-Production

 The other day on this blog, I was warning about how AI companies don't seem particularly likely to ever attract the level of mass consumer demand they would need to pay off the extraordinary amount of debt they are taking on to build their products. 

This seemed like it could lead to either of two outcomes; both of them bad. On the one hand, the bubble could burst, once investors realize there is not enough revenue forthcoming to justify this capital expenditure; on the other: the government—captained by our current AI-friendly White House—could wade in to try to fill the gap by stimulating demand for AI services artificially. 

People's Actions

 We tend to assume, at least for heuristic purposes, that in a democracy, if people vote for a particular candidate, that means they largely approve of that person's campaign promises. Thus, according to this logic, people who voted for Trump in 2024 must in some sense have "chosen" his worst and cruelest actions in office—particularly since Trump didn't exactly hide the ball on the campaign trail as to his intentions. He had "Mass Deportation Now" signs printed up and distributed to people at the official Republican National Convention. 

But, strange as it must seem, this may not be the case. A recent series of focus groups with Trump voters across the country—discussed on the latest episode of Ezra Klein's podcast—apparently revealed that, no matter how blatant it may have seemed—to our eyes—that Trump was running in 2024 on a platform of white nationalist authoritarianism, most of the people who cast a ballot for him were not doing so because they backed such a program. 

New Haiti Documentary

 This week, PBS Frontline aired a must-watch documentary about the crisis set off by the Trump administration's decision to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti. The film opens with footage of people arriving in Cap-Haitien from U.S. deportation flights. The deportees cover their faces with clothes to obscure their identities from gangs, who will kidnap and extort them if they find out they have any ties to the U.S. 

Some of them describe spending years or decades in the United States, earning advanced degrees and contributing to the U.S. economy. One woman says she was a pharmacist with a doctorate. Now, they have been expelled to a country that has been reduced largely to rubble by ongoing gang violence, and where a multinational UN security force is now waging active armed combat to try to wrest some territory from marauding criminal networks. 

Merrie England

 As a young socialist, I generally avoided reading the acknowledged classics of socialist thought. This allowed me to persist in the pleasant and untested belief that someone had worked out a plausible comprehensive theory somewhere for how all this was supposed to work, and I just didn't know about it yet. 

And so, if anyone asked me for my institutional model of socialism, I could gesture to these dense volumes and explain that someone smarter than me must have thought of it already. I was just here as an evangelist for a system that more profound minds had already worked out. How could they not have? Don't you see how thick their books are? 

Beasts of Burden

 New York City apparently passed a resolution this week phasing out the use of horse-drawn carriages over the next two years. 

I thought of a passage in that aching pastoral novel I just read—beloved by many—J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, about the passing of horse-centric civilization from rural England. 

Two Quislings

 I know it's not really my business as an outsider to judge, but I really wish someone in Venezuelan politics would show some backbone for God's sake and finally stand up to those self-appointed hemispheric honchos Donald Trump and Little Rubio. 

The New York Times today features an article about recent political talks in Venezuela between the government and what passes for the domestic opposition (the most famous actual leader of the opposition, after all, remains de facto exiled from the country). 

The Thaw

 When future cultural historians try to write the story of our era, I have no doubt that AOC's use of the phrase "woke 1 was crazy" over the summer will stand out as a critical turning point. The moment conveniently bookended the early 2020s era of "peak woke" or "the Great Awokening" or whatever you want to call it—and while most of us knew on some gut level that this epoch had already ended long before, it helped to have someone within the progressive movement declare its death officially so we really knew it was over and not coming back.

Most people reacted to the news of its demise with something like relieved chatter. A shadow had been lifted. It was "ding dong, the witch is dead." "Woke 1," if we are calling it that now, was really a period of cultural revolution—and like any other revolution, it made great and ultimately unsustainable demands on our conscience and idealism. And so, when it was behind us, we all relaxed a bit into our "normal shapes" (to quote Dwight Macdonald—more on that below), like someone holding in their paunch in company who now finds themselves home in front of the TV again. 

Books vs. TikToks

 In the latest mailbag post on his blog, Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias starts with a brief (but convincing) refutation of a recent Jacobin article that offers a novel, leftist theory of the root-causes of the present "reading crisis."

There has ben a lot of hand-wringing over the past year about the reported decline in reading for pleasure among twenty-first century Americans. 

Cet animal est trés méchant

 A New York Times article yesterday points out that Trump's latest dust-up with Ukraine's leadership repeats a now-familiar pattern of behavior for him. First, Trump insults and berates a friendly nation. Then, when the latter tries to mildly push back, Trump seems genuinely outraged and appalled that they would dare to defend themselves, rather than grovel and kiss the boot that kicks them.

As Peter Baker's analysis puts it: "The rules of the road when it comes to President Trump’s relations with foreign leaders are clear: He may trash you. But woe unto you if you whack back."

Monsters

 Like the rest of the world, I too saw that Elizabeth Holmes documentary over the weekend. I found it a completely riveting yet ultimately unsatisfying and strange piece of work. 

The directors make the odd choice never to review in depth the factual background of Theranos and Holmes's career. For this reason, the film never bothers to re-indict her for fraud or to convince the viewership that she really did lie to investors and cheat the public. 

It Wasn't Us, Canada!

 Listening to former Canadian trade negotiator Chrystia Freeland's interview with Ezra Klein yesterday on his podcast, I received a sharp reminder of what it means to be part of a nation that is morally disgracing itself on the global stage. As a friend of mine would put it, there may be no such thing as collective guilt—but we are certainly experiencing collective shame. 

Like the majority of my fellow Americans (Klein cites polling to this effect on his show), I entirely take Canada's side in the trade war. Most Americans view Freeland's nation in friendly terms. We know they had been a good neighbor and ally and trading partner to us for decades—until Trump staged a gratuitous and unprovoked attack on their economy—for the explicitly stated (and completely deranged) purpose of trying to undermine their sovereignty and forcibly incorporate their territory into the United States. 

Crisis of Overproduction

 Fears of an "AI bubble" are back in the news this week, with investors starting to show some alarm about the level of indebtedness of the big AI companies and the mind-boggling and possibly unrealistic scale of future earnings they would need to generate ever to pay it off. 

Some analysts have started to talk about this as the risk that we may end up with a ruinous over-supply of AI infrastructure, after the current capital build-out, without ever generating enough consumer demand to actually pay for all these AI services we are developing. 

The Merchant's Function

 An opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday argues that business schools ought to be abolished. Whereas every other professional school in a university teaches students to pursue some identifiable public good—the author argues—MBA programs only teach people how to make money for themselves and the shareholders. 

As the author, a Cambridge business school professor himself, puts it: "A medical school’s core justification is health, and a law school's is justice — undisputed public goods. Business schools are organized explicitly around a private good: the pursuit of profit."