Month: February 2025

“There are other reasons the “far-right on the march” story might appeal. It’s easier to spot and tell than the one about Die Linke because the results are obvious rather than something you have to drill down into crosstabs to spot. It’s an easier sell to the powers that be, too, because bad news stories are always an easier sell, and also because everybody else is writing them so no one is going to yell at you for missing the real story. The sense of a Europe hovering above the abyss is exciting, too, and a not insignificant proportion of the people who go into journalism are history nerds who always kind of wanted to cover a world on fire”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/the-heart-of-the-problem

“In many ways, Military MAGA resembles the parallel development of far-right politics after the Vietnam War. Again, this politics was rooted in the trauma of defeat, and again it came to revolve around the idea that an effete liberal class was holding the country back and needed to be forcibly uprooted. It played a large role in the rise of the white power movement in the 1990s, as you can read in the great book Bring the War Home by Kathleen Belew. This post-Vietnam movement didn’t really ever fade away, instead bleeding and merging into Military MAGA in the years after 9/11”

https://amerex.substack.com/p/how-911-created-military-maga

“So the Stafford Beer-approved crisis strategy is – find a list of actions which could potentially stabilise the situation in a useful time frame, then pick the one which causes the least organisational damage. Bearing in mind at both stages that the option you pick will determine the way you have to behave, and that this will have consequences for you, and for the organisation. If this process doesn’t identify any viable course of action, then move to a “war footing”, and consider tradeoffs which had previously been rejected, in the knowledge that you are going to have to spend time repairing fences afterwards; if there’s still no answer, you have to resign”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/resign-and-do-not-fail-to-do-so

There may even be trade-offs between certain types of intelligence: Simon Baron-Cohen and other researchers, for instance, have postulated that there’s an inverse correlation between systematizing and empathizing: people tend either to be interested in abstract ideas or interested in other people, but not so often both.

https://www.natesilver.net/p/elon-musk-and-spiky-intelligence

“If Trump was out to Bolster The Republican Party, he would only be slashing budgets in blue states and protecting red ones. Instead he is lashing out at everything, ignoring every rule. The humiliating ritual of forcing Republican allies to come and beg him to restore cuts he has already made is the point. This process reflects the success of the system that Trump wants: All control of all things in his own hands. Rules and laws—even the ones that Republicans traditionally like!—are impediments to his own control of all decisions. Therefore rules and laws must be smashed, discarded at a whim, openly violated, ignored. Do not search for some archaic form of ideological conservatism at work here. The goal of all this is not “remaking the government in a conservative image”—it is “if you want anything, you have to ask me for it”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/gangster-party

“Seriously, when he decided: “I’m going to help elect Donald Trump President if he agrees to then let me loose on all the governmental department systems, because I really really want to __”; what goes into that blank? Was he motivated by a desire to prove that a drastically smaller government is possible? Or to demonstrate some other super-genius theory of government? Was it because he’d always wanted political as well as financial power? Did he want to punish all the wokeness and taste librul tears? Was he after competitive advantage, or outright fraud, for his companies?

I don’t know. I’m not s[u]re anybody does, which seems like a flaw when you’re basically letting a guy run amok with the federal government”

https://goodpoliticsbadpolitics.substack.com/p/what-is-musk-up-to

“What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them on how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are due to those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences among the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent — that is, they decide some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important”

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/democrats-need-their-own-dei-purge

“OMB Director Russ Vought said: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-personalist-presidency

“And if you’ve noticed your electric bill recently, it’s getting worse. And this worsening dynamic isn’t a result of higher cost levels, but financial engineering of men like McKenzie. How do we know? Well, as it turns out, there is a useful natural experiment. Only 70% of electric utilities are investor-owned, the other 30% are publicly owned, either by cities or cooperatives or some other public ownership model. And we can compare rates across ownership structures. As utility expert Mark Ellis noted in an important new paper on which this BIG piece is based, in the past three years, investor-owned utility rates went up 49% more than inflation, whereas publicly owned ones have gone up 44% less than inflation”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/power-moves-how-electric-utility