- Timothy Snyder on Elon Musk, responsibility, and displacement;
- Adam Lee how on how, despite abortion bans, rates of abortion have gone up;
- Short items on racism, dual citizenship, dismantling climate research, promoting violence, and snitching and scapegoating.
Stepping out a bit to a larger issue of human psychology.
Timothy Snyder on Substack, 16 Dec 2025: Enemy Aliens and (Freudian) Displacement, subtitled “One way to think about billionaires and borders”
[H]ow should we interpret the utterances of tech billionaires (and their allies and clients) regarding the threat of migrants to Western civilization? What they say is often wrong, and what they say always matters. Where does it come from?
The easiest thing to do is to start with what was just said. But why do people say the things that they do? The simplest assumption is that this reflects some aspect of reality. But so often it does not, as in the case of Elon Musk. One level deeper: we could imagine that Musk (to take the most important example) believes that what he is saying is true.
But there is a missing logical step here: why might Elon Musk think that the false things that he says are true?
(This of course is a general question, that can be asked of people about a wide range of subjects. Why do people believe their religions are true? (Do they really believe theirs is true and all the others false?) Why do the anti-science crackpots believe their alternative ‘theories’ are true?)
Historians deal with such questions all the time, Snyder points out. He mentions that a lot of what Musk says is verifiably false!
Perhaps Musk is displacing something, or projecting something. After all, he is a migrant to the United States who worked illegally, and he has quite possibly done more damage to the country than any single other individual. Naturally, that is not the kind of reality that we as human beings like to face directly, so we displace the emotion and project the blame: it is not me the migrant who has done damage, but it is they the other migrants.
Personally, I think that that is not the most likely explanation. I believe that the displacement and the projection begins somewhere else, somewhere deeper.
What could this something deeper be?
Consider this: there are in fact alien entities that threaten the essence of our civilization. They are undermining education. They do consume our time. They do ruin our relationships. They do separate wives from husbands, children from parents. They polarize our politics. They enter into our very minds, reformatting them, cutting us off from what we once believed, what we once might have remembered. They prepare us for a generic life that is hardly life, separated from the history of what made each culture special and each individual different. They are truly inhuman!
Those entities, of course, are the algorithms of social media.
And Musk has done as much as anyone to spread them. And so he’s deflecting feelings of his own responsibility onto others. Blame anyone else. Blame the immigrants. Concluding:
It is comfortable, though ultimately unsatisfactory, to remain at the level of the words people say, and cling to the notion that they are either true or intended to be true. But staying at that level, I fear, can draw us away from some of the crucial realities of our everyday politics. We have to know what people say; but we also have to take each utterance in context and think creatively about where it all comes from. This interpretation is, of course, unfalsifiable. You can judge for yourself whether this account of displacement and projection helps to make the big subject easier to understand.
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This isn’t about abortion per se, it’s about how conservatives think all you have to do to prevent something is to ban it. Life is so much more complex than they realize. And the old saw: an ounce of prevention…
OnlySky, Adam Lee, 17 Dec 2025: Say it again: Abortion bans don’t stop abortion, subtitled “They only cause women and infants to die.”
Beginning with the fact that wealthy women, including wives of Republican politicians, will always find a way to get an abortion. (The Republican politicians arrange it.) Anyway, there’s data.
The Society of Family Planning, a reproductive-rights nonprofit, compiles a report called #WeCount that tracks the number of abortions in the United States. The report goes back to 2022, and the most recent data covers the first half of 2025.
Its data shows that the abortion rate hasn’t gone down at all since the end of Roe. It’s gone up.
With qualifications about how these numbers are certainly undercounts, for reasons.
Women who lived in states that ban abortion were significantly more likely to die during pregnancy, while giving birth, or soon after the birth of their child, compared to those who lived in states where abortion care was legal and accessible, our analysis shows. A mother’s risk of dying was nearly twice as high in the banned states.
And:
As I’ve said before, abortion bans are more accurately described as women’s healthcare bans. They frighten doctors away from helping suffering and dying women, because they can’t be sure what they will or won’t be prosecuted for. That’s not an accident; it’s by design. The lawmakers who draft these laws see these deaths as an acceptable price for imposing their patriarchal worldview.
Well I’m not so sure about “patriarchal worldview”; that strikes me as a simplification. I think it goes deeper: to the tribal drive to reproduce as often as possible, to grow the tribe, and prevent or prohibit any activity that would distract from that. See OT. If modern prohibitions against abortion results in more deaths of women, well, that’s collateral damage.
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Briefly noted items.
- Slate, Dahlia Lithwick, 17 Dec 2025: Why Are Democrats So Afraid to Even Mention the Source of Trump’s Political Power?
- That is: racism.
- Slate, Pablo Andreu, 27 Dec 2025: The Attack on Dual Citizenship Is an Attack on Me, subtitled “New legislation would force dual citizens to choose. Here’s what it’s really about.”
- Title on homepage: “Republicans Have Found a New Kind of U.S. Citizen They Can’t Accept”. Which goes to the core of their xenophobic thinking.
- *I* held dual citizenship, until I was 18. British, since I was born in England; and American, since my parents were Americans. Good thing Trump wasn’t around in my teens.
- USA Today, 16 Dec 2025: Trump moves to dismantle major US climate research center in Colorado (Via JMG)
- Heads in the sand.
- Erm, which side is promoting violence?
- JMG, 16 Dec 2025: Rioter/GOP Senate Candidate Jake Lang Claims He’ll “Storm” Colorado Prison To “Break Out Tina Peters”
- LGBTQNation, Dr. Warren J. Blumenfeld, 13 Dec 2025: Trump has put snitching & scapegoating back in fashion
- Republicans’ primitive morality.
