- The range of politics reflects the range of human nature;
- Posts without much comments about military tribunals, hacking the economy, Jeanine Pirro’s black and white worldview, how the Qatar jet deal is Biden’s fault, Paul Krugman on sadistic zombies, and how China will dominate.
Most of the news on a day to day basis consists of illustrations of how politics works, and how politics reflects the conflicts between different kinds of thinking. Political conflicts are seldom rational disputes about the effects of this or that policy; they’re conflicts between fundamentally different views of the world, and how it should work. These views in turn reflect the range of human nature, which at one end is anchored into the tribal, hierarchical, intuitive way of life that humans existed in for hundreds of thousands of years, and on the other is anchored by the (relatively) cosmopolitan, egalitarian, rational approach to life that has enabled humanity’s expansion across the globe, and which is increasingly necessary for the world’s peoples to get along, not to mention being honest about our apprehension of the real world, apart from superstitions and religion.
Actually, a fair portion of the news on a day to day basis is about catastrophes and crime, incidents that in the big picture are irrelevant, but which people love to hear about. This, I’ve come to conclude, is another reflection of base human nature, which is primed to detect threats and to respond to tribal violence. Even in the modern world, they are itches that humans need to have scratched, if only vicariously. Thus the prevalence of violence and crime in movies and TV; thus the existence of organized sports, as sublimated warfare, as the persistence of a zero-sum game mindset. In sports, one team wins, the other loses. In human history, that can’t have been true, or we’d all still be living in caves.
Progress, the expansion of options, is by definition the triumph of non-zero sum games throughout human history.
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With these high thoughts in mind, I will only link a few of today’s interesting articles, without pondering through them too much.
JMG, 19 May 2025 (from The Daily Beast): Trump Posts Call For Obama To Face “Military Tribunal”
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Salon, Heather Digby Parton, 19 May 2025: Trump is trying to COVID hack the economy, subtitled “The White House prepares to falsify data and cook the books in order to sell their schemes to the American people”
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Washington Post, Erik Wemple, 19 May 2025: Jeanine Pirro’s 10 most astounding quotes, subtitled “By the unique standards of Trump’s merit system, the former Fox News commentator has paid her dues.”
I.e., about her black and white worldview.
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New Republic, Edith Olmsted, 19 May 2025: Trump’s Qatar Private Jet Is Now Somehow Biden’s Fault, subtitled “Donald Trump’s treasury secretary managed to rope Joe Biden into a wild new theory.”
It’s always the other guy’s fault.
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Paul Krugman, 19 May 2025: Attack of the Sadistic Zombies, subtitled “The GOP budget is incredibly cruel — and that’s the point”
Krugman published a book, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future, back in 2020, and he’s used the term “zombies” to refer to Republican policies that evidence have shown don’t work. Like trickle-down economics.
This post is just the latest example.
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And this is becoming increasingly clear. Do most Americans notice? Or care?
NY Times, Kyle Chan, 19 May 2025: In the Future, China Will Be Dominant. The U.S. Will Be Irrelevant. [gift link]
