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Exceptionalism

With the AI on the fritz again, dear leader’s tenuous grip on a very limited supply of marbles, and the corporate media unable unwilling to call any of this what it is, the importance of checking the scores is our go-to.

Not those scores.

Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.

I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think.

Let’s start with Germany because everyone thinks they know this story. Franz von Papen, the conservative politician who convinced President Hindenburg to make Hitler Chancellor, said “We’ve hired him” in January 1933. He thought he was so clever. Within 18 months, the Nazis were machine-gunning von Papen’s allies in their homes during the Night of Long Knives. Von Papen himself barely escaped to Austria with his life. Every single conservative who thought they could “control” or “moderate” Hitler was either dead, in exile, or groveling for survival by 1934.

Italy was even dumber, if that’s possible. October 1922, Mussolini announces he’s marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts. Except here’s the thing: they were poorly armed, disorganized, and the Italian military could have crushed them in about three hours. The King had his generals ready. He had martial law papers drawn up. The military was waiting for the order. Instead, he invited Mussolini to form a government. Just handed him power. Twenty-three years later, partisans hung Mussolini’s corpse upside down at a gas station while crowds beat it with sticks. The king died in exile. Hundreds of thousands of Italians died for that moment of cowardice.

Spain might be the worst because everyone saw it coming. Three years of escalating fascist violence. Actual assassination attempts. Then in 1936, Franco and his generals launch a straight-up military coup. The Spanish Republic begged for help. France said “not our problem.” Britain said “both sides are bad.” America declared neutrality. The result? Franco ruled for 39 years. He died peacefully in his bed in 1975. They’re still finding mass graves in Spain. Still. In 2025.

Want something more recent? Look at Hungary. Orbán won democratically in 2010. By 2011 he’d rewritten the constitution. By 2012 he controlled the media. By 2013 he’d gutted the judiciary. It’s 2025 and he’s still in power. The EU has been “very concerned” for fourteen fucking years. They’ve written strongly worded letters. They’ve held meetings. Hungary is now a one-party state in the middle of Europe and everyone just… accepts it.

Okay, but surely someone, somewhere, stopped them?

The dreaded ‘someone.’ Not be outdone by Herr von Hindenburg

Want to know how many times people successfully “controlled” the fascists they allied with? Zero.

Are we feeling special?

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Seeing it as it happens

Figure out what you think, first. Where you stand, what you can support. Yes, you may be challenged in an argument (or be the challenger) so this includes being able to defend what you think. If you can be convinced to change or alter what you think by a superior moral rationale or appeal to reason, this is the path to knowing. Pardon the prologue.

The tendency not to see, much less believe, what is happening in the US at any particularly moment but especially this one is itself more widespread than many want to admit.

Climate change, née global warming, offers some analogue. The shift in the name presents a clue, that the reality had to be softened, broadened, recast in a more natural-seeming context to gather more support or even acknowledgement. This was and is childish. The ‘skeptics’ who tentatively step on board thought-temple and nod will only demand more incontrovertible evidence later, when the latter has piled up beyond any denial. And that’s assuming they were acting in good faith in the first place. My desire for more ice cream before I cleaned my room was genuine. When I was six. Sometimes. Depending on how many times my parents and I worked out these deals.

The point beyond any denial above is critical,  because that is when the negotiations begin. With individuals, with themselves. We don’t want to entertain the possibility that some things are happening, that we have some responsibility for their happening, that they are the results of our actions, actions that have benefitted us greatly, that question the wisdom and grace of those actions and perhaps even their divine sanction. No, it can’t be that. Must be treachery of any other sort. Certainly not ours.

So, there’s a great deal of possible agency, and it can be winsome temptation.

The successful contortions that have both pushed climate solutions so near the point of no return AND super-charged the development of the same solutions – wind and solar power displacing fossil fuels – have been the result of enormous time lags that allowed technology to catch up as well as the proliferation of lies and frauds on an industrial scale. Decades. We had at least a very solid handle on global warming in 1988.

Alas, the analogue has it limits. The transition to fascist authoritarianism offers no such kind of lazy time frame. You can argue, but you need to. It is in motion, speeding up as the summer burns out. And no, simply getting depressed about it is not one of your options. Just clean your fcking room.

 

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Things not to be believed, nor hidden

What do unimaginable riches permit?

History books will not be kind. We won’t believe we did this, we’ll try to hide it but we won’t be able to and we shouldn’t:

“DESTROY” stickers were affixed this week to hundreds of cases of U.S.-branded food aid — 15,000 pounds’ worth — that have languished for months in a Georgia warehouse and then expired before they could be sent overseas to famine-stricken areas like Sudan.

And Mana Nutrition’s warehouse holds plenty more of the peanut paste, a crucial element in treating malnutrition. A $50 million supply has been stacked for months in the nonprofit’s facility in Pooler, a short drive from Savannah, caught in the chaos as the Trump administration upended foreign aid and never shipped.

The food could still help 60 million people, Mana estimates.

“This is a giant glut,” chief operating officer David Todd Harmon said. “All contracted. All bought and paid for. It’s just not been picked up.”

A State Department memo in late May signaled that more than 60,000 metric tons of commodities were sitting in warehouses in the United States and around the world and that an “urgent” plan would begin to shift some of it. The logjam followed the Trump administration’s breakneck dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, slashing more than 80 percent of its programming and laying off all but a tiny fraction of its staffers. The agency’s doors officially closed July 1.

It feels a bit naive not to think some people will be pleased by this. Soi-disant ‘good christians’ everywhere will attempt to rationalize it with excuses that fold perfectly into the circular logic of the worldview that needlessly condemns millions to misery.

There is no reason for this beyond charlatans and cheap vengeance. Your vote has consequences.

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Vitruvian man, MMXXV, seeks camaraderie, romance

I can get a couple of issues behind on the NYRB, but this a good recent-ish one for your Friday reading:

Because the practice of architecture requires such a store of knowledge, Vitruvius maintains that it is much more than a craft that depends on purely manual skill: it is a lofty liberal art, a pursuit that engages all the human faculties of imagination and reason no less than grammar, rhetoric, or poetry. His career included inspecting catapults for Julius Caesar and building a basilica at Colonia Julia Fanestris (modern-day Fano, on the Adriatic coast) with some radical innovations, such as gigantic two-story interior columns, that belie his popular reputation as a hidebound conservative. A man of strong, sometimes unpredictable opinions who thanks his parents in the preface to Book VI for having given him a first-rate Roman education, Vitruvius was bilingual in Greek and Latin and well read in Greek and Latin poetry, Cicero’s prose, Greek architectural pamphlets, and recent developments in natural philosophy and technology.

His proposed course of study for young architects continues Cicero’s recent efforts to create a system of Roman learning comparable to that of the Greek-speaking world (a world that notably included Alexandria as well as the eastern Mediterranean), and it participates fully in the contemporary effort, fostered by the emperor Augustus, to transform Rome into a capital of distinctively Latin culture. His ambitiously comprehensive treatise is almost certainly the first of its kind for the ancient Greco-Roman world, recasting architecture not only as a liberal art but also as a natural means to extend the reach of Rome’s expanding empire. Clear and precise, his remarks on education show how the Romans of the early Augustan era tried to define their place in a rapidly changing world—both native Romans and Romans newly absorbed into the Res Publica Romana, for Roman education followed swiftly on the legions to prepare young people in conquered territories for participation in the imperial state.

It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese.

Do not study marketing, kids.

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Wind and sun, things of that nature

A Russian nesting doll of spite and stupid.

This is straight up insane, which checks a box within-a-box within-a-box for the lobotomized party. So they’ll probably do it.

The tax provision, tucked inside the 940-page bill that the Senate made public just after midnight on Friday, stunned observers.

“This is how you kill an industry,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, a nonpartisan group of business leaders and investors. “And at a time when electricity prices and demand are soaring.”

The bill would rapidly phase out existing federal tax subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027. Doing so, many companies say, could derail hundreds of projects under development and could jeopardize billions of dollars in manufacturing facilities that had been planned around the country with the subsidies in mind.

Those tax credits were at the heart of the Inflation Reduction Act, which Democrats passed in 2022 in an attempt to nudge the country away from fossil fuels, the burning of which is driving climate change. President Trump, who has mocked climate science, has instead promoted fossil fuels and demanded that Republicans in Congress unwind the law.

But the latest version of the Senate bill would go much further. It would impose a steep penalty on all new wind and solar farms that come online after 2027 — even if they didn’t receive federal subsidies — unless they follow complicated and potentially unworkable requirements to disentangle their supply chains from China. Since China dominates global supply chains, that measure could affect a large number of companies.

That’s from NYT on Sunday, and there are literally no benefits from doing this.

Not unrelated to the way ‘policymakers’ are making pawns of Chinese college students studying and doing research in the US. Always running behind will always do the wrong things. Ahead is right there. In front of you.

 

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When will you know

Google anything and you’ll see what they’re up to, with the “AI” results pushed up top. Scare quotes for reasons but really, the Google is doing a weird thing to the internet by this strategy – and they know they’re doing it.

But when will people realize it? When will they know?

Because the appearance of “AI” in expected places has already become… expected and rather commonplace. And this is what they at the Google understand well, that humans get used to stuff. However, now, you must look past these top results to find actual websites, with real information from people trying to provide it. People trying to find you – or have you find them. That’s one reason they have a site. I know, it sounds trite.

But those sites are being buried beneath these “AI” results. How concerned should you be? Should you care?

So, context: Open AI has unleashed all these free products training models like ChatGPT and several iterations you can pay for, in order to train us to use and become dependent on their products. But they need to make money. Lots of money and fast.

So we can know that, should we so choose. It’s expensive to run these things – both in financial and environmental costs, and the information they provide becomes degraded rather quickly – a thing humans still readily recognize [they call that foreshadowing in the biz].

These tech companies realize all of this, plus the fact that the media does all of their PR for free. And yet they are still burning through cash, mostly, it seems, on the vibes that people aren’t noticing the sixth finger or the clunky syntax, will grudgingly embrace accept most of it with a kind of dull fascination.

Are you overwhelmed? Is it all so little that it seems too much? What if there was a way to sharpen your fascination instead?

 

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Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

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The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.

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Chimurenga – who no know go know

Along with promoting some recent work, a new project is making clips from my Unscripted interviews available on social media. One of those we’ll get to eventually is with journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabe, founder and editor of Chimurenga, an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection by Africans about Africa.

And this is one of the rare, correct uses of ‘innovative’ as an adjective. in newspaper form, the issues have a little of everything – poetry, photography, plays, terrific writing of all kinds and of course, news. However,  and I only started to understand this much later and not especially because of the times we are a’living in, Chimurenga’s journalism often presents news stories long after actual events. That is, rather than so-called breaking news – which honestly leaves us mostly flummoxed and discombobulated by its sheer volume (not to speak of those who work the sheer volume for their purposes, ahem) – Chimurenga presents news much later. Maybe more information has come available, maybe people still don’t understand a thing that happened… does this sound familiar?

It really changes the idea of news into information for action and understanding.

A sample of the excellent writing, in an article by saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings:

In a lecture he gave on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun used a phrase which resonated with me – “encoded language”. I believe there is an alternative vernacular present in both hip-hop and jazz which relates the two musics intrinsically, and which exists outside the orthodox analysis. This idea that music has layers of encoded information, passed down through generations, without explicit acknowledgement even from the participants, fascinates me. It speaks to the question of why certain elements of African musical stylings are propagated by the diaspora. Are there more stories within musical elements which survived the middle passage than we choose to admit? Are we in a position to grasp the meanings of these tales? Maybe the formulation of new myths is a valid way of approaching these questions, if only for the creative stimulus imagined answers can inspire.

Let us then try to explore the worlds of both jazz and hip-hop as vessels for an informational network outside the parameters of pre-packaged discourse. What happens when you take away the notion of harmonic movement in jazz as being central to its intrinsic meaning or the message the improvising soloist has to offer? What happens when you take the focus away from lyricism in hip-hop?

Yes, we could learn a thing or three – and wow do we need to. There’s so much more to all of this – and take that however you want. Chimurenga is supported by donations, if you are able. My interview with Edjabe is here.

Image: an issue of Chimurenga I keep in my office.

 

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What does thought-terminating cliche mean?

We think we like being turned on, but it’s apparently much, much easier to turnoff. How familiar is this? An essay from the Guardian, resurfaced by like minds:

Thought-terminating cliches exist, of course, in every language. In China, some government officials are known to exploit the phrase “Mei banfa”, meaning “No solution”, or “There’s nothing to be done” to justify inaction. The saying “Shouganai”, a linguistic shrug of resignation similar to “It is what it is”, is similarly weaponised in Japan. The Polish idiom “Co wolno wojewodzie, to nie tobie, smrodzie” roughly means “People in positions of power can get away with anything” (hence, don’t bother putting up a fight). According to Walter Scheirer, author of A History of Fake Things on the Internet, thought-terminating cliches commonly carry a defeatist flavour. It’s hard work, involving psychological friction, to figure out the best way to think about complex subjects such as climate policy or geopolitics. Any licence to give up the struggle is going to be appealing.

Tobia Spampatti, a decision scientist at the University of Geneva, argues that such phrases become especially problematic when wielded by politicians with decision-making power. In 2023, Australian conservatives used the rhyming slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” to discourage citizens from supporting a constitutional amendment that would have afforded Indigenous people representation in parliament. Spampatti, who studies the relationship between information processing and beliefs about climate change, says disinformation tends to spike around major events, like elections and climate deals. That’s when thought-terminating cliches do their wiliest work. Examples used to squash environmental efforts range from “Climate change is a hoax” and “Scientists have a political agenda” to “Climate change is natural” (or the related “The climate has always changed”), “Humans will adapt” and “It’s too late to do anything now”.

Unfortunately, mere awareness of such tricks is not always enough to help us resist their influence. For this, we can blame the “illusory truth effect” – a cognitive bias defined by the unconscious yet pervasive tendency to trust a statement simply because we have heard it multiple times. Memory scientist Lisa Fazio has found that we are so primed to confuse a statement’s familiarity with veracity that the bias persists even when listeners are warned to look out for it, even when they are explicitly told the source was untrustworthy. “Some of these cliches catch on not necessarily because we believe them to be true but because they feel comfortable and are easy to understand,” she says.

Do continue reading (also operative as a general admonition). We are all decision scientists now.

Image: Boat Racer, from the Occupations for Women series for Old Judge and Dogs Head Cigarettes, Metropolitan Museum of Art