I'm sure that was Trump's reaction to a Timothy Snyder tweet:
"Pete Hegseth: The Short Course – 13 Steps to National Destruction"
— Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) January 14, 2025
A thread. Full essay via link in image below or profile. pic.twitter.com/74aimdwaAf
You can click over for Timothy's conspiracy theory; it takes 13 separate tweets to explain. Basically, as I understand it, Pete Hegseth is too dumb to run the Department of Defense, but he is brilliant enough to bring about that "Christian Reconstructionist" decapitation strike.
As the kids ask: srsly? Or, as Charles C.W. Cooke asks: Does This Yale Prof Actually Believe Hegseth Is Part of a ‘Decapitation Strike’ on America? (Probably paywalled. I'm running low on gifted links for this month, sorry.)
Snyder’s claim is that the plan he adumbrates will be executed if Donald Trump’s cabinet picks are confirmed. That, clearly, is going to happen soon — either in the most part, or in full. The supposed villains that Snyder feared on November 14 are probably all going to be elevated into their designated roles, and his chief villain, Pete Hegseth, is probably going to join them. What is Snyder going to do about this? You will forgive me, I hope, for insisting that if the answer is to stay at Yale and keep going about his daily life, then I must remain skeptical that he believes a word of what he is saying. The only concrete suggestion I can find him making amid all the drama is to engage in “simple defiance, joined with a rhetoric of a better America.” But that is not a scheme suited to the engineered downfall of the republic; it is a scheme suited to a stable system of government that relies on biennial election cycles. “A rhetoric of a better America” is a sentence that belongs in a presidential aspirant’s briefing book, not in an existential fight against a dastardly international conspiracy. Other than writing at his Substack, teaching at a university, and doom-posting on a social media platform that is owned by a man he suspects of being a collaborator, what’s the plan?
There are times that call for sprezzatura, and there are times that call for action. The inauguration of a disliked president allows the former; the inauguration of an ineluctable tyrant does not. In the coming months, we will see all manner of public figures casually talking as if America as we have known it is finished and a dark authoritarian nightmare has taken its place. If, having delivered this verdict, its authors then go about their days as if nothing had changed — speaking on panels or on TV, delivering copy to the usual outlets, enjoying dinners in New Haven and Cambridge, and tweeting to great acclaim — one would be forgiven for concluding that, actually, they don’t believe a word of it.
I keep noticing Snyder's latest book On Freedom on the "New Non-Fiction" table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I don't mind reading books outside my ideological comfort zone, so I was tempted, but … nah.
Also of note:
-
In his defense, it's easy to misunderstand tasks when you're demented. Ramesh Ponnuru joins the critics: Biden’s farewell address, like his presidency, misunderstood his task.
Joe Biden had two messages to send America in his farewell address: His administration has been a historic success, and the country is on the verge of becoming an oligarchic dystopia. Oh, and the chief problem with this oligarchy is that it isn’t active enough in telling the rest of us what’s true and false. With such discordant themes, I can’t fault him for tripping over his message this time.
Unlike National Review, the WaPo is generous with its gifting links, so click away.
-
It's an Islamic terrorist plot, I tells ya!
James Skyles looks at
The DOJ's War on Algorithmic AI.
In short, entrepreneurs have developed software algorithms that utilize economic data (both backlogged and current data) to provide their user bases with a better, more comprehensive understanding of how differing consumer trends, seasonal changes, breaking news, and other factors affect the demand for their services and products. These software programs use that information to provide their users with pricing adjustment recommendations that they are free to take or leave.
To say that this AI technology has taken off would be an understatement. Car rental companies, airlines, and hotels use it to ensure their prices match current marketplace trends. Hospitals and city and state governments use it to help quell congestion and long wait times. Farmers are even using technology to monitor and manage field variability, maximize outputs, reduce costs, and improve sustainability, a practice known as precision farming.
However, the widespread utilization of algorithmic AI has the DOJ worried that businesses might begin using it for price-fixing, and it has begun throwing the antitrust books at many of these algorithmic software companies. Its actions have included but have not been limited to an October amicus brief filed against hotels and an August suit against one of landlords’ preferred algorithmic AI software. The Western District of Washington’s December 4 action against a different rent algorithmic AI firm has only added further fuel to the fire.
"In short", it's another front in the War on Prices. With the added feature that it's an easy sell for demagogues who rely on scarifying people with anti-AI dystopianism. You know what else used algorithms? Skynet!.
(And didja know: the word algorithm references the "Persian Polymath" Al-Khwarizmi, who invented some of the early ones. See this item's headline.)
-
And yet, ye won't be missed. Tyler Cowen bids farewell: Net neutrality, we hardly knew ye.
One of the longest, most technical and, as it turns out, most inconsequential public-policy debates of the 21st century was about net neutrality. Now that a federal appeals court has effectively ended the debate by striking down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, it’s worth asking what we’ve learned.
If you have forgotten the sequence of events, here’s a quick recap: In 2015, during President Barack Obama’s presidency and after years of debate, the Federal Communications Commission issued something called the Open Internet Order, guaranteeing net neutrality, which is broadly defined as the principle that internet service providers treat all communications equally, offering both users and content providers consistent service and pricing. Two years later, under President Donald Trump, the FCC rescinded the net neutrality requirement. It was then reinstated under President Joe Biden in 2024, until being struck down earlier this month.
Tyler notes that "Hardly anyone cares or even notices", and explains why. But:
Internet experts Tim Wu, Cory Doctorow, Farhad Manjoo and many others were just plain, flat out wrong about this, mostly due to their anti-capitalist mentality.
An observation that applies well to our previous item.
-
OK, but it might be an answer to my problems. Yascha Mounk debunks one of my favorite panaceas: Proportional Representation Is Not the Answer to America’s Problems. Darn it!
One of the things that is astonishing to any immigrant to America—even one who grew up in a reasonably affluent society like Germany—is the sheer amount of choice the country offers in just about every realm of life. There is an endless profusion of cable television channels. American grocery stores are incomprehensibly giant, offering a commensurably vast number of different products. Even sports is a notably variegated affair. In most European countries, soccer dwarfs all other sports; but while American football may be dominant in the United States, other sports like baseball, basketball and ice hockey also enjoy massive followings.
Politics is the one realm which stands out for the poverty of the choices it offers. At every election, Americans trudge to the polls and are presented with the same choices. Unless they want to waste their vote on some third party candidate that has no chance of winning, they dutifully pick between two parties that have existed for over a century and a half: Democrats and Republicans.
To the layman, this paucity of choice, so out of keeping with other realms of American life, may seem puzzling. But any political scientist knows that there is a simple explanation. The United States has a “majoritarian” electoral system. If you want to be elected to the House of Representatives, you need to win the largest absolute number of votes in your electoral district. In theory, this means that lots of candidates could vie for office. But in practice, a majoritarian political system strongly incentivizes voters to abstain from voting for smaller political parties or to lend their support to outsiders. For if you vote for a candidate who winds up getting ten or 20 percent of the vote, your preference effectively doesn’t count. Your vote is “wasted.”
Yascha goes on to analyze the latest advocacy piece in the NYT from Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman (which includes a very splashy presentation, gifted link.) Briefly: Congressional districts should have multiple members, and those members' party affiliations should reflect the popular vote. So, for example, if each district has 5 members, and the vote goes 60-40 for Democrats, three Democrats and two Republicans would be sent to DC.
Both the Wegman/Drutman proposal and Yascha's rebuttal are long, and if you're in the electoral reform mood, click away.
I'll just use this opportunity to (once again) plug my own crackpot proposal: Any candidate for the US House of Representatives who receives greater than 1% of the popular vote in the general election shall be entitled to a vote in the House equal to the fraction of the vote he or she receives.
I'm pretty sure the objections Yascha raises to the Wegman/Drutman scheme might also apply, at least in part, to mine. But you know what? I don't care.