A Frictionless World Is A Solipsitic World

MIT did a study last year on the use of AI. Unsurprisingly, they found that students who used AI a lot demonstrated very little growth as students, including the use of EEG imaging to determine brain activity. Students who used Google saw some growth, and students who used neither saw the most. Even more striking, the AI using students were helpless when asked to write without AI.

David Brooks expands on this, writing about how people who enjoy mental struggle will really benefit from AI, because they enjoy the process of thinking. For this group, AI becomes another tool, whereas for people who really hate strenuous thinking, AI will degrade their thinking more. Even his middle group, who he calls the Reluctant Optimizers, will eventually be dumbed down by AI. The example of this can be seen with previous technologies. Does anyone really remember phone numbers anymore? Can you find yourself somewhere without GPS? 

This, I believe, feeds into my argument from a few days ago. For the past 30 years, tech companies have worked assiduously to remove "friction" from technology use. If you can think back to the early days of personal computing, a handful of people used computers for things like coding or spreadsheets. Most of us used it for word processing. Then the internet comes along, and your computer is now a mailbox and crude search engine. Here come Google and they come to dominate searches. As computing power speeds up, streaming video emerges, beginning with the microfilms of Vine. 

We've now reached a saturation point where any friction feels like a tragedy. I spent the last few weeks with a Smart TV that was several years old. This effectively makes it a dumb TV, and we spent minutes - WHOLE MINUTES - rebooting, reloading and otherwise dealing with a glitchy streaming system. It was frustrating. What it was NOT was driving to a video store to see what they had in stock. We watched what we wanted, when we wanted (minus a few minutes where we had to de-glitch the TV).

I would argue that this psychological space is proving to be somewhat incompatible with liberal democracy. 

The very structures of the Constitution are designed to be frustrating to power. Among the many outrages that Trump has visited upon the country is his wholesale contempt for the basic structure of the Constitution and the need to treat the other branches as co-equal partners in governing. The President absolutely should not govern by decree; that is deeply contemptuous of the American governing system. It was designed to be frustrating specifically to frustrate imperial aspirants. 

Trump's fundamental pitch to his non-cultists is that he can "run America like a business" (despite his manifest incompetence at running his own businesses). The import of Project 2025 was the force change on a system that created endless friction in the path of change.

What I see happening, though, with young "activists" is that they seem completely incapable of understanding that you simply don't get "what you want" from our system of government. You can - occasionally - get what you need, but the idea that your personal preferences will translate into policy is not just the naivete of youth, it is the defining gestalt of the internet age.

While many people have warned of AI's impact on the job market and the environment, I share Brooks'  and Krugman's concerns about what AI will do to our minds and by extension our culture.

This weekend, Scott Weiner was heckled at a trans event for not being sufficiently deferential to the desires of the Palestinian "lobby". Weiner has been a staunch ally of the LGBTQ communities, yet he was physically confronted and screamed at by people that more than one online commentator described as "mentally deranged." 

Maybe.

Or maybe we've become culturally deranged in our solipsism. We see the world as a toddler does, as lacking purpose and agency beyond the insatiable appetites of a toddler. I want what I want NOW. I will not build a coalition; I will not settle for half measures; I will not bend to time or compromise.

I want my utopia delivered to my door by Tuesday noon. 

Slip Sliding Away

 I realize everything I am about to write reeks of privilege, and that makes it some form of cringe or maybe colonialism? I lose track. Anyways. 

My great-uncle served at Otis AFB on Cape Cod during WWII. He must have fallen in love with the area, as he subsequently bought a house on Nantucket in 1960 for about $10,000. I went there about every other summer as a child. After graduating high school, I worked there for a summer, cleaning streets for the DPW.  

In 1994, I discovered that the woman who would become my wife also had a family home there. I don't know if we would have dated if we didn't share a ferry ride home one Thanksgiving. We were married on the island, and our boys were baptized in the same church. 

Moving to New England meant that the island became central to our summers. We were absolutely blessed to be able to share our summers and our boys’ summers with our families. 

After my parents died, my sister and I tried to keep the house by renting it. The house was in the heart of the town and dated back to around 1800. The upkeep, carrying costs and sporadic repairs and improvements meant we couldn’t use it during the summer months. 

Last summer we sold it. 

When we did, I promised my wife we would be able to keep her family’s house, but the island kept changing. The place I went to as a kid was weird and crusty. It still retained aspects of an old New England fishing town. It was very hard to get to with only 2 ½ hour ferries or twin engine planes able to cross the water. 

Then they expanded the airport and launched high speed ferries. The airport is the second busiest in Massachusetts during the summer. Jets began to land from NYC. 

It all changed. Local shops that served year round residents became boutiques. Traffic became snarled. Quiet out of the way beaches became choked with lax bros and influencers. 

My wife’s sister insisted on selling their home. It closes later this summer. 

We will likely come back to Nantucket. As guests, not summer residents. We’ve sold my father’s farm. My body does not work the way it used to. So much of my life feels like the past slipping away.

Yesterday would’ve been my father’s birthday. We went to a place he loved to eat, in what might be my last night on the island. Probably not. But maybe. Afterwards, we walked down to the docks to see the mega-yachts, passed a swanky restaurant rented out for a private party. Apparently, I wore my melancholy on my face.

I look more and more like my father every day, and I can feel myself losing him, too, every day.

Precarity

 Paul Campos writes about a Times story on how $130,000 for a family of four really isn't enough money to live comfortably. The Times story looks at several areas where the above average family is struggling to make ends meet. When it comes to groceries, the toughest area to make ends meet is...meat. Beef prices are indeed really high right now, having risen 33% over the past two years.

What's striking is how much of this is policy based. The screwworm infestation is a result of Trump and Musk's gutting of various programs. There's a drought - thanks global warming. There's Trump's tariffs. The piece doesn't mention it, but deportations are likely to hurt meatpackers. 

Housing remains a real chokepoint for spending, and Trump is pitching a hissy fit over Congress' inability to pass his voter suppression act - the SAVE act - so he's not going to sign the recent bipartisan bill to help bring housing costs down (or at least help arrest their growth). It might become law without his signature, which is a really perfect example of Trumpism: deny the importance of legislation in governance. He killed the immigration reform bill from 2024. He passed his one piece of legislation and now wants to govern without consulting Congress.

This is the issue that bedeviled Biden, and his administration actually tried to address it. Trump called affordability a "made up Dumocrat word" so it's going to be hard to pivot for Republicans. Then there is the visual indictment of him trying to create some sort of Roman spectacle in DC. 

Having fucking idiots in charge of economic policy is really hard.

What's interesting, and neither Campos nor the Times addressed this, is that we've had this dynamic before in the 1970s. The difference is that we had far less wealth inequality in the '70s. So we not only have rising prices, but we have an elite that is just completely out of touch with the experience of even upper middle class Americans. If Elon Musk is making decisions about policy, you have a badly distorted policy environment.

If we begin to save American democracy this fall, we will be in a situation where Democrats will have to clean this mess up. Again. The problem is that one key pillar of solving this mess will be addressing the exploding national debt and the solvency of Social Security. There are limits to the ability of raising taxes on the rich that will be hard to resolve.

Anyway, Republicans suck, in case you were wondering. 

Civic Education

 In his mailbag, Yglesias talks about "stealth democracy."

Stealth democracy is a theory that people have this idea that all that is required to solve a problem is for people of goodwill to sit down and hash out their disagreements like colleagues do. They see "corruption" as any action by a government that does not really benefit them. Sure, they can see things like Trump's desecration of the White House and DC in general as being "corrupt" for THAT reason, when the real reason is that he is accruing money to himself and his family and acting outside the cover of law. 

This misconception about "corruption" is really interesting. 

The elections in NYC are the flavor of the minute, and the factionalism expressed there is not an advantage for the Democratic Party in November. Adults - or at least people who really understand our politics and history - understand that you need a Big Tent to win elections, and what resonates in the congressional district around Columbia University does not resonate 25 miles to the north. Still, elements of the Left - and I do not really include Mamdani here - think that if a Democrat representing suburban Yonkers has a difference of opinion on, say, Israel, that isn't a difference of opinion. It's "corruption." They are corrupted by AIPAC.

(I need to take a moment and express my exasperation with the primacy of the Israeli-Palestine issue in Leftist politics at the moment. I fully support the idea that Israel has and continues to commit war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank; I do not think it is genocide, but I understand the arguments that it is. I fully support conditioning American military aid to Israel on the ousting of Netanyahu from power and Israel re-committing to a two-state solution. What I do NOT agree with, is that this is the most important issue facing this country. It is not in the top-10. Ultimately, much of the Israel-Palestine discourse feels performative, and that's just exhausting and not a path to winning control of Congress this fall. <end rant>"

Back to the issue at hand. So much of our politics - from MAGA to the DSA - seems fixated on a version of politics that is simply false. Yes, there is corruption, and Trump is so far and away our most corrupt president, that second place isn't even in the same league. You'd have to run through about 20 Trump scandals before landing on a previous scandal of similar depth. Most of those did not involve the direct participation of the president himself. Only Watergate rises to that level, maybe Iran-Contra. 

So, Trump is legit corrupt. When members of Congress disagree with each other, THAT IS NOT CORRUPTION. 

We've reached this perilous moment, because our parties are more ideological than perhaps they have ever been, and Trump adds breathless stupidity to the mix. The left of the Republican Party does not overlap with the right of the Democratic Party in any meaningful way. When they actually DO accomplish something, like Chris Murphy and James Lankford coming together to fix the immigration system, it gets blown up by Trump. The same thing could be happening with the bipartisan housing bill, but I think that has the votes to override Trump's veto. 

You've had this sort of venomous partisan discord since the '90s, but at least some of it was performative. That's the old "Senate Club" idea, where they yell at each other on CNN and then go have dinner together. Trump, because he has no saving graces or subtlety of thought, has turned that into a politics of grievance that has truly broken Congress and perhaps American democracy. Election denialism is really an offshoot of this. Democrats cannot legitimately win an election is not a position Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay would have entertained.

All of this is to say, we have to find a way out of this moment. 

People do not seem to understand the basics of how democratic governance and politics actually work. Hey, sometimes you lose an election! That's not corruption! Sometimes a good bill dies for bad reasons. That's not corruption! Sometimes there really aren't easy solutions to problems! That's not corruption! 

I've argued that we live in a consumer culture where we really don't have to compromise. You never have to go to Blockbuster only to find out the movie you wanted is checked out and then you have to compromise on whether to watch the rom-com or the action-buddy movie. You just click and stream. 

We've made much of our society frictionless and that simply isn't how politics works. Our whole system is based on friction! That's the point of the separation of powers. 

Instead, both the median voter AND the voters at the extremes simply decry the whole thing as "corrupt" because they can't get what they want all the time. 

That allows a demagogic troll to eviscerate our national institutions, just in time for the 250th anniversary of republican self-government. 

UPDATE: Slightly different take on the same issue of "corruption" from Martin Longman.

UPDATE II: Yet another take on the rise of "dirtbagism."

Anti-System Politics

 Richardson has a throw away line in the middle of her recap, where she suggests that the unexpected victories of DSA candidates in NYC has Republicans worried. Conventional wisdom, as typified by Yglesias, suggests moderating the Democratic party's stances in order to win enough races to save democracy in America. The extremist rhetoric of people like Chevalier muddy that message, and there are real concerns that Michigan and Maine's Senate races could be thrown away by unsuitable candidates.

As David Nir and Jeff Singer point out, there is a broad anti-incumbent mood out there. Some of this on the Democratic side is being upset with an older generation of politicians. I don't think this is entirely about "fight", but rather lingering issues with Biden's age and even Trump's. It's about Democratic House members who have died in office in a razor close House, depriving Jeffries of votes. Sure, there's some of Biden's old "we can work together" ethos being repudiated, but really they are just old, and don't seem equal to the moment. 

Also, whether Trump, Milei, Magyar or any other number of politicians, we are looking at a broadly anti-incumbent climate. While I am deeply disturbed by Graham Platner's idiocy and impulse control issues, he DOES represent that anti-politics politician. Maybe that's enough to carry him to victory over one of the strongest electoral overperformers in the Senate. OTOH, Roy Cooper seems to be coasting to a Senate victory in North Carolina, and Sherrod Brown seems to be leading in Ohio. 

In the end, the 2026 elections will be a referendum on a very unpopular president. I don't think that things are going to improve for Trump, especially since he can't seem to extricate himself from his Iran catastrophe. Nominal prices remain high, inflation isn't likely to abate, he's corrupt as hell and people see that. 

It may very well be that Trump's massive unpopularity carries the day, but the stake are high, and I think we can all worry. I certainly thought that 2024 would go differently, so I can't take anything for granted.

DSA On The March

 A slate of candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their primaries in NYC last night. As per usual, these results will be flogged to death by everyone who is too invested in internecine conflicts and Republicans looking to scare the rubes.

First, Mamdani is a remarkable political talent. Effusively charismatic and with a keen insight into how to be a visible symbol of effective governance. The scare-mongering that Republicans have tried to inject into coverage of his tenure hasn't worked, because the guy just seems jolly.

That isn't true of each of the candidates he endorsed, especially Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is almost a caricature of leftist politics. She has a history of saying inflammatory things on social media, including "Fuck Kamala Harris" which was a standard position for those on the farther reaches of the Israel-Palestine issue. 

If there was a theme from these elections, it was a dissatisfaction with the Old Guard of NY politics and a rejection of anything even remotely pro-Israel. Chevalier beat incumbent Adriano Espaillat, the Chair of the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Chevalier won the wealthier areas of the district around Columbia University, whereas Espaillat won the the Bronx. This is the paradox of DSA support: Much of it comes from upper middle class college educated liberals, not the working class voters it purports to serve.

Presumably, these candidates will win their indigo blue districts. The question is whether Republicans will be able to tie someone like Blake Gendebien, a dairy farmer trying to flip the conservative NY 21, with the statements of the leftist candidates from the City. If we have learned one thing, it is that Fox News viewers will believe any rancid bullshit placed on their plates. These are people who still believe Democrats are the ones hiding the Epstein Files.

Midterms are referenda on incumbent parties. People are pissed and supporting someone like Chevalier is a good way to express that anger. It may not be the best way to flip marginal seats, but Republicans already believe that Democrats want to require gender reassignment surgery in elementary school, so what will be the movement at the margins?

More interesting, I suppose, is what impact these DSA candidates will have if they win and Democrats win the House, but by a reasonably narrow margin (I think they win a 20-25 seat majority, but gerrymandering could impact that). Will they behave like AOC, another impressive political talent, or like Rashida Tlaib, who doesn't seem to understand that you have to work within the party, even if you sometimes disagree with it. 

Republicans have been calling Democrats communists since the New Deal. At some point that attack falls apart from overuse. However, Democrats do keep nominating people like Platner and Chevalier who seem to be engineered for opposition attack ads. Hopefully a Blue Wave carries everyone along, because, well, we HAVE to have a Democratic Congress by January. 

Peace Likely Won't Help Trump

 The surrender to Iran has largely been understood as Trump desperately needing to turn things around before the midterms. He needs the oil to flow again and bring prices down. As Krugman explains, though, that's unlikely to happen for a lot of reasons. Among them are the fact that even if the war was really over - and the ceasefire keeps collapsing because Trump keeps threatening Iran - it would take weeks and months to restore the flow of oil, urea and other goods through the Strait. We would also have to replenish reserve stockpiles that we have been drawing down to reduce the impact of the loss of the Gulf oil on world markets. Finally, there are baked in inflationary effects from this war that we really haven't seen yet, but almost certainly will.

So, Trump seems to be flailing around. You have weathervanes like Tucker Carlson blowing away from Trump. Leaving aside whatever pathologies are surrounding Trump psychologically and neurologically, he is facing collapsing poll numbers and rumblings among his base that portend even more ominous signs. The MOU is simply another sign of this flailing. His desperation for a favorable peace deal is more palpable than the load in his Depends, and Iran knows it.

There are a host of things going wrong, all of which create a gestalt of incompetence and corruption. While I think a lot of what Yglesias writes about politics is suspect, he's right about persuadable voters. This is really just another way to describe the Ariana Grande Voter Theory, and we have to acknowledge that partisanship has left American democracy at the whims of people who do not understand American democracy. 

This should redound to Democrats' favor in November, because things aren't great now and are going to stay bad. Trump can't help but make some of these things worse - the Reflecting Pool is a good example of how he simply cannot admit a mistake - and so the question for the midterms is pretty simple.

Democrats will turn out. They are motivated. Even if many of them have qualms about the party, they are going to show up. They will hold their noses and vote for people like Graham Platner. The questions are about what will happen to Republican turnout? And where will the feckless middle land? If a lot of Republicans just sit out the midterms, that's important. If angry Ariana Grande voters show up to vote for Democrats, that's important. 

We need both Houses to really correct things. I don't think surrendering to Iran is going to help Trump prevent that.

UPDATE: We are in the midst of a market correction. That seems an especially likely outcome over time. The stock market seems disconnected from the world at large. 

When we have market crashes, typically we get some foreshadowing in the spring and the real collapse in the fall. Is this foreshadowing or just a small correction?

Can America Lead Again?

 This thread is an interesting one, where Bret Devereaux makes the case that future democratic leaders around the world will, in fact, be eager to make friends with a post-Trumpist United States. I think it's broadly true on the merits. The US remains an impressive country. The gleeful reactions of international visitors to the World Cup is a helpful reminder that Americans - if not their government - retain a lot of goodwill, because Americans are generally nice and welcoming and generous. 

I think that the malignant forces that launched Trump into a position of power are not unique to the United States. Britain is losing another Prime Minister to what is fundamentally the dysfunction created to British government by Brexit. 

Brexit preceded Trump and was a herald of the anti-globalization, anti-international movement that benefits backwards powers like Russia. Fears of immigrants and the loss of status of "native" whites is a common thread running through British and American politics since 2016. This anti-integrationist populism was roundly defeated in Hungary recently, but only after two decades of non-democratic corruption and cruelty. 

We need to get past this faster than that.

As Trump's ridiculous tariffs and his defeat in Iran have shown, even the a superpower can be defeated if it's left isolated. Trump isolates America further and further every day. His beef with Georgia Meloni is great example of his crass belligerence undermining what SHOULD have been a productive relationship with another right wing populist. The idiot just can't help himself as he tries to protect his whiny assed fragile ego.

Meanwhile, Vance is being humiliated at peace talks, because Trump continues to undercut him and give him jobs that would be difficult in the best of circumstances, not counting for the fact that ANY agreement with the US while Trump is president is effectively useless. 

America will shamble along, a concussed giant stumbling across the world stage, until Trump finally dies or leaves power.  When that happens, I do believe that the world will be wary of the post-Trump US, but not hostile. 

We need each other. That's what Trump and Brexiteers don't understand.

Trump's War On Competence

 Krugman makes the case for how Trump and Hegseth's racism and misogyny have undermined military competence and readiness. The case against Trump is that he sees the military as a form of brute strength that he can use as an extension of his personal whims. It's not just the success of the Venezuela raid, but the need to surround himself with men in uniform. (Happy Pride Month, Donald.)

With Hegseth, you get a bully's understanding of military strength: How many pushups can you even do, bruh? As Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated during the Ukraine War, drones are the future of warfare, but Hegseth being dismissive of that threat is largely how we stumbled into a humiliating defeat against Iran (and how Russia is sliding into defeat against Ukraine).

Meanwhile, the Washington Post remembered that it used to be an excellent newspaper and did a deeply researched story on outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard's membership in a cult. (The Post does still suck, as it puts its' stories behind a paywall; a smart paper would give that article away.) Gabbard was always rumored to be pro-Putin and pro-Assad puppet, but I wonder how much of that was because of the cult she was in. It's a weird Hindu cult, where the leader does not appear to be Hindi. Yet there are strains of Hindutva in the virulent anti-Islamic bigotry. India has also had an unusually close relationship with Russia over the decades, though Russia's behavior in Ukraine has strained that.

Gabbard and Hegseth got their jobs because Trump liked the way they looked and spoke on TV. Gabbard is photogenic, and I guess Hegseth is, too. (Your mileage may vary.) Gabbard was a "Democrat" who spoke ill of Democrats, and Hegseth was a blustering bully from Fox. They had very little qualifications for the actual jobs that they hold and now we have lost a war to Iran and we have no idea the damage Gabbard has done to American intelligence operations and capacity.

Elect a stupid clown, get a stupid circus.

Happy Father's Day

 As you age, you realize that your children - if you are so blessed - are the best thing to ever happen to you. It's a lot of "work" but damn is it worth it. 

Everything He Touches...

 Some MAGA commentators online have decried the media focusing on the gross incompetence demonstrated by the Reflecting Pool shitshow. "Why do you care about this, when Trump just signed a triumphant peace agreement that re-opens the Straits of Hormuz!?" (As of the moment I'm writing this, the Straits are closed again.) 

The reason the Reflecting Pool - like the destruction of the East Wing of the White House - is such a good story is because it so compellingly visualizes the greed and corruption of the Trump Administration. With the Reflecting Pool, it's also the appalling incompetence. My favorite commentary is by some sun-leathered pool guy who comes out and stands by the pool and says exactly what went wrong. The average pool guy knows what's up, but Trump doesn't, and his every utterance has become Gospel to MAGA.

Anyway, I bring this up, because we can see that everything Trump touches turns to shit.

Case in point, Netanyahu made a wager a few years back to align himself with the Republican Party generally and Trump specifically.  It's a natural alliance, because they are both racist and corrupt. Game recognizes game. What Netanyahu failed to understand is that everything Trump touches turns, as I said, to shit. He also burns the reputation of everyone who comes in his orbit. He's basically sending JD Vance out to be the face of this Iran "peace deal" in case it fails. 

Trump's popularity in Israel was really high. It was basically the only country in the world that really liked this guy. His conduct in this war, especially the "peace deal" has soured Israelis on him.

The good news is that perhaps this is the final nail in Netanyahu's political coffin. He has to hold elections soon, and despite overseeing the catastrophic failure of 10/7, he could point to persuading the American president to wage war on Iran. 

Only now, Iran has won the war, because the president is a feckless idiot who hires people like Pete Hegseth to manage a war, when he can't manage a one car parade.

If the result of the Iran War is the death of much of Iran's leadership, the defeat of Netanyahu and Likud in the coming elections and the defeat of Republicans in the midterms, that would be objectively funny.

Regime change begins at home. 

It Doesn't Have To Be Like This

 As Trump slides further into senescence and mental incompetency, his once feared ability to hang a demeaning nickname on opponents feels tired and listless. Jon OssJackOff? WTF? His speech is narrowing into a handful of elementary school level diction and playground insults. The trailer park aesthetics that he has brought to the South Lawn and the Reflecting Pool are just a visual manifestation of the garish, childish nature of the mewling man-baby in the People's House.

Meanwhile, yesterday gave us another vision, a reminder of public rhetoric that soared rather than demeaned, that tried to draw us together rather than tear us apart. 

Zohran Mamdani is a legitimate political talent, and his speech at the Knicks celebration was not only expertly crafted, but delivered with an optimistic brio that was incredibly infectious. Meanwhile, the dedication of the Obama Presidential Library reminded us of what it was like to hope and come together. That many attendees wore tan suits to remind us of how petty and mean-spirited the criticisms were of Obama - criticisms rooted the refusal to believe a Black man could be president, including Trump's birther movement - and how far we've fallen in terms of the standards to which we hold the Chief Magistrate of the land.

Mamdani is sadly unable to pursue the White House, but there are others who can try and point us to a better, more wholesome future than the degraded troll squatting in the Oval Office. Biden was a good "prime minister" working his thin majorities to pass important legislation, but he was simply not the man to rally people to a great cause. 

We can find that person again and be that country again.

Speaking Of Idiocy

 You really have to read David Roth on the Reflecting Pool fiasco. 

A taste:

Specifically, the water is more or less the color of a sour apple Jolly Rancher now. It looks like they're brewing Yodas in there. It is so uncannily green and visibly slimy that it feels inevitable that video will soon surface of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. splashing around in it with jeans on. It looks like the aftermath of Boston Tea Party-style political action involving matcha. 

And:

Disfiguring public spaces on a whim fits within Trump's program of relentless, reckless literalism. Claiming, as an administration spokesperson did earlier today, that the algae bloom has been "successfully destroyed" when the reflecting pool still looks like someone recently boiled spinach in it, reflects, among other things, how thoroughly he has already moved on. As far as Trump is concerned, the problem was solved when he decided upon a solution; it immediately and irrevocably became everyone else's problem the moment he stopped thinking about it. Other people will be charged with doing the dirty work of cleaning up his mess for some time to come, and life will go on in the stink and shadow of this ruinous and tossed-off fix until then. Not much of a metaphor there, either.

Secretary Of Losing A War

 So, indeed, we lost the war to Iran. If the Memorandum of Understanding is the terms of the peace deal, then we undeniably lost this war. It was a war of choice on terms of our choosing, where we established a broad set of terms for the end of the war and fundamentally achieved none of them. The global economy has taken a hit and Iran has emerged in a stronger geopolitical position than when it began,

China has also emerged much stronger. What we have learned from Covid and Trump's War is the primary importance of trade routes. Trump may hate trade, but the reality is we rely on it. Iran proved (or rather re-proved) how important the Strait of Hormuz is, but China enjoys a similar chokehold not only on the goods it produces, but they can easily choke of trade by attacking Taiwan. America's erratic, feckless and moronic leadership under Trump has made China look wise and the stabilizing force that the US once was. 

Will the Chinese learn the lessons of 2022-26, though? It's pretty clear Pete Hegseth has not.

If the past four years have taught sentient people anything, it is that the nature of war in 21st century has changed. It is no longer recognizable to the warriors that invaded and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001-3. The US military overthrew the Taliban with a combination of Special Forces, airpower and local militias. A much heavier force overthrew Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks. 

What happened next was not necessarily "new." Both countries degenerated into insurrections and civil war, conflicts that would not have seemed dissimilar to the French in Algeria or the US in Vietnam. In the end, Iraq became something that was not quite a victory but not quite a defeat, whereas Afghanistan can reasonably and clearly seen as a failure. (Some of this was that the terms of victory we established in Afghanistan were obviously not met. If the terms of victory there had been the destruction of Al Qaeda, then we won that war.)

The "old" war of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism required intelligent leadership combined with brute force of arms. To a certain degree, what Pete Hegseth was trying to create was the brute force of arms. He wanted every soldier, sailor and airman to be Rambo. His juvenile obsession with pushups and waistlines was part of this hopelessly buffoonish vision of what military strength looked like.

What he missed - because he's an idiot - is that the nature of war is now completely changed and continues to change at a lightning pace. 

War has always been fundamentally a competition between political and economic systems. If your economy is weaker and smaller, you are unlikely to win a conventional war. The advent of insurgencies was a response to this fact. The idea was to bleed out the superior power to the point where the war became unsustainable. The US in Vietnam, the Soviets in Afghanistan. 

Now, drones allow the weaker power to exert force beyond an insurgency. They can even exert force beyond their own borders. 

Drones don't care how many pushups the Secretary of Defense can do.

During the waning years of the Civil War, European military observers must have looked at the miles of trenchwork around Richmond and seen the future. In the intervening years, the machine gun made trenches the new form of warfare and World War I extracted a brutal price for those generals unable to see the new reality. Countries then sank resources in the interwar years into the emerging technologies of tanks, airplanes and mobility warfare. 

We are at a similar tipping point where technology has changed the nature of combat and the profoundly unserious men that surround Trump are congenitally unable to understand this or adapt to it. 

What's more, the shallow, gasping narcissism of Trumpism means that they cannot do the first, more important step: admit they lost and understand WHY they lost. The success of the US military from 1989-2001 was built on understanding the lessons of Vietnam as being the lessons one learns from defeat. Rumsfeld and Cheney forgot those lessons and we lost any chance in Afghanistan when we pivoted to Iraq. Subsequent military decisions have been made from the understanding that we lost the political nature of those conflicts. 

Trump and Hegseth ignored those lessons and ignored the lessons from Ukraine, and we lost another war. Despite the hundreds and hundreds of billions we spend on defense, we lost to a second rate power, because we have leaders who are morons, dangerously unable to learn from failure because they can't even admit when they failed. (Want to know how ignorant they are? Trump signed his surrender at Versailles. Macron knows history, if Trump does not.)

Welcome to the Post-American World Order.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall suggests something interesting. That much of this deal will likely not come to pass, as both sides need to get out of this. Trump never releases the money, Iran never agrees to nuclear inspections...not exactly a victory for Iran, but not a loss either.

Musky Odor

 Amazon was not profitable for many years. Today it makes most of its money off cloud storage, not sending you a three-pack of tighty-whiteys in 24 hours. The point being that you never know when the next huge company will emerge. 

Krugman looks at the IPO for SpaceX. (First of all, NVIDIA is now the company with the largest market cap. More than Alphabet (Google), Apple and Microsoft.) SpaceX jumped ahead of Amazon, making Musk the world's first trillionaire. All of these companies are - more or less - IT companies. Apple, I guess, actually makes physical products, as does NVIDIA. There's a tangible "thing" there. SpaceX seems to be in the same space, in that they have a lot of shitty IT stuff (Twitter, Grok) but they do have a good satellite system.

What's crazy about these IT companies is that most of them were not profitable for years. Eventually, they found a way, like Google did, of monetizing their product. Amazon moved into cloud storage, because being the world's largest retailer wasn't profitable enough. If you look at the most profitable companies in the world, the usual suspects are there, but so are Saudi Aramco, Berkshire Hathaway and a bunch of banks.

The valuation of SpaceX is entirely a valuation of Elon Musk. Microsoft - whom no one loves, and that includes freaks like me who actually use an MS system - has $125B in profits off $318B in revenue. SpaceX has $4B in LOSSES off $19B in revenue. How are there market caps the same?

Ultimately, it's a bet on Musk. He's this crazed, ketamine fueled weirdo whose manifest strangeness is presumed to represent genius. Yes, Tesla makes an amazing battery and Starlink is very impressive. But Grok?  The Boring Company? His purchase (and destruction) of Twitter? You can hand-wave away these flops as the price of genius, or you could look at Musk and see a nine year old boy rattling off dreams ("I'm gonna go to MARS!") and mistake that for vision, because was right about lithium batteries. He's so fucking strange that he must be a genius, right? So let's buy into SpaceX, because...space is profitable?

Silicon Valley is all about hype, and sometimes that hype pays off. Sometimes it very much doesn't. Musk, sadly, has largely accumulated so much speculative money that even if his endeavors crash and burn, he will likely blithely sail along on his riches. 

The plutocratic freakshow this diminished age deserves.