I admit that I follow a Facebook group called America’s Cultural Decline Into Idiocy. It consists of group members posting examples (by others) of what they take as idiocy, for example someone who did not understand the movie:
Subtitled “The Assault From Within on Modern Democracy”
(Oxford, August 2021, xvii + 245pp, including 25pp notes and index)
Here’s the last of several books about current issues that I read in December and January. I read this one because I liked the author’s previous book, THE DEATH OF EXPERTISE (reviewed here). And this one has an unexpected counter-intuitive thesis: that the discontent in the modern world is derived from how successful we’ve been in creating it.
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As with previous reviews, my complete notes are below, following this summary set of bullets. Continue reading
Trump has no plan. He has bluster, and a magic toy he’s discovered that he thinks can solve everything: tariffs. But he can’t make up his mind. On again, off again. Even his supporters are becoming discontent.
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AP News, 5 Mar 2025: ‘Read this e-mail immediately’: CDC tells about 180 fired employees to come back to work
Subtitled: “Psychological Warfare and the American Mind”
(Norton, June 2024, xxv + 246pp, including 42pp of acknowledgements, notes, and notes.)
Here’s a book that offers a different spin on the ideas of misinformation, fake news, and narratives, than earlier books I’ve read on these subjects. The author is a journalist and science fiction novelist, with now three books each of nonfiction and fiction.
Broadly, as the subtitle says, this is about the idea of psychological warfare, of deliberately spinning the truth or telling alternative narratives for political purposes. Its techniques go way back before social media. From the perspective the modern ideas of fake news, psychological warfare isn’t about conspiracy theories; it’s about misinformation spread deliberately to sway people’s ideas and opinions. One surprising player in this history is one Paul Linebarger, who wrote science fiction under the name Cordwainer Smith mostly in the 1950s and 60s. It’s long been known that Smith worked for the US government and spent his early life in China, but I’ve never seen the extent of his work in psychological warfare spelled out as Newitz does in this book.
I did not watch the speech last night (Trump to Congress, in the spot on the calendar where the State of the Union speech would usually be), nor have I even read the commentaries and fact-checks closely. But I will list some of the headlines, which are not surprising, and excerpt a quotation or two.
Trump doesn’t seem to have reasons for doing anything except for childish petulance.
Paul Krugman, 4 Mar 2025: Trump Hates Canada for its Decency, subtitled “The president lacks basic decency, and loathes people who do”
Subtitled “Why We Never Think Alone”
(Riverhead Books, March 2017, 296pp including 30pp acknowledgements, notes, and index.)
This is a book that I’ve thought of as a companion to the O’Connor/Weatherall book I just reviewed ever since they’ve been sitting together on my TBR shelves for the 6 or 7 years since they were published. Their themes seemed adjacent, their dustjackets are similar, and each has two coauthors, none of whom I’d heard of before.
Busy weekend, so I’m behind and have three days of political links to catch up on. I’ll triage.
Beginning with: The Trump/Vance/Zelensky meeting was a setup.
Slate, Jim Newell: Volodymyr Zelensky, subtitled “A setup.”
Subtitled “How False Beliefs Spread”(Yale University Press, 2019, 266pp, including 80pp of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index)
This is an interesting enough book that wasn’t quite what I was expecting. It seems right up my alley: why do so many people believe things that are not true? Sure social media is involved (with their conspiracy theorists and chaos agents), and we understand that most people know only what they hear from social media or glean from casually interacting with their friends and neighbors. Further, no matter how ambitious or well-intentioned one is, no one can acquire first-hand knowledge about everything, so to some extent we rely on experts, or at least on the conclusions of those who have studied matters more deeply than we are able to. Even further, as I’ve discussed, most people live their mundane lives without any great concern about whether what they believe about matters outside their immediate concern are true or not; they don’t care, and it doesn’t actually matter toward living a good life.
How much worse can it get? It’s still getting worse. Today the president and vice-president bullied a former US ally, in the White House, in favor of siding with the Russian dictator Putin.
NY Times, 28 Feb 2025: Trump Administration Live Updates: Trump and Vance Berate Zelensky, Exposing Break Between Wartime Allies
