There's no question, he's the leader of our party. So now he's got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. ... If Donald Trump says "Jump three feet high and scratch your head", we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it.
- Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)
This week's featured posts are "Harris lost the war of ambient information" and "Caligula's Horse and other controversial appointments".
This week everybody was talking about Trump's appointments
The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?
and more election retrospectives
As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump's victory -- while still clear and undisputed -- was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.
Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris' defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I've been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn't, and didn't do the things they claim she did.
The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren't true. If you can't explain that, I don't think you've gotten to the root of the problem.
The other featured post focuses on a New Yorker article that is at least a step in the right direction.
and Palestine
I'm not sure how I didn't notice this until now -- I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday -- but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.
The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.
The report doesn't present Israel's actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.
and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)
Tuesday, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the "Department of Government Efficiency". This could mean a lot or practically nothing. It's hard to tell at this point.
Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a "department" that doesn't exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They're both rich, maybe they'll fund it themselves.)
It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court's partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.
But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE's recommendations. But they're bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won't. We'll see.
In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they'll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they'll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.
Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he'll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.
One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I'm already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I'm sure there will be many more.
Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent "winner".
I'm sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don't understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. ("They fell. What did you think would happen?")
More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.
and BlueSky
X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He's made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a "Perfect Disinformation Machine".)
The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world's top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I'm making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse -- a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" -- restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.
The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you're just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk's Sauron.
At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of "instances", in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.
But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X -- Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows ... -- are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.
I've been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don't post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.
I've generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can't tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I'm told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven't had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they'll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky's direction.
I confess I don't really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:
Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.
I'm not sure how the "public benefit" part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it's hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.
and you also might be interested in ...
I had to check this several times before believing that it wasn't a joke: The new owner of Alex Jones' fallen media empire is the satirical newsite The Onion.
Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.
The Onion plans to shutter Jones' InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.
The Onion published a very Onionish statement from the CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron.
All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.
Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.
Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.
The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a "steep bargain" of "less than one trillion dollars".
Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump's victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we'll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.
Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:
- Wealthy and well-connected. They'll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump's anti-woman policies.
- Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They're single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump's personal issues.
- Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
- Ignorant. "I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he 'brought abortion back to the states.' She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban."
Rudy Giuliani's illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.
State laws that single out trans kids for discrimination are inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. Some have been thrown out, but Indiana just upheld one.
and let's close with something deep
We often talk about people "going underground" to escape attention, but in ancient Cappadocia they literally did.
The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth's surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.
The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.
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