The Weekly Sift

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won’t.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it.

– Timothy Snyder “The Strongman Fantasy“

This week’s featured posts are “The Other Reason I’m Optimistic” about the 2024 election and “The ‘bloodbath’ statement“.

This week everybody was talking about bloodbaths

I was going to summarize the controversy over Trump’s prediction of “a bloodbath” if he doesn’t get elected, but the length got out of hand, so I made it a featured post.

and Florida

Ron DeSantis suffered two major defeats this month in his war on woke. The first was two weeks ago, when a federal appeals court blocked enforcement of one provision of his Stop-Woke law. The opinion, written by a Trump appointee, lays things out pretty clearly.

Here’s a short version: Among other things, the law bans employers from having mandatory meetings where they promote certain notions that state doesn’t like about discrimination, diversity, and so forth. On its face, this sounds like a violation of the employers’ freedom of speech, but the DeSantis administration claims it’s really a limitation on conduct (holding these meetings), not speech.

The judge rightly points out that mandatory meetings are only banned if certain ideas are presented, so there’s no way to know ahead of time whether a meeting is banned without knowing what people are going to say. That makes it a limitation on speech.

The second defeat was the settlement of a lawsuit against DeSantis’ Don’t Say Gay law. The worst thing about Don’t Say Gay has been the vagueness of it. Nobody knew exactly what ideas the law banned from Florida schools, so teachers and administrators who wanted to be safe just wouldn’t say anything at all about non-traditional gender roles or sexuality.

Under the agreement, the state must clarify the law’s scope to schools across the state, ensuring that, among other things, it does not prohibit references to LGBTQ+ persons, couples, families, or issues in literature or classroom discussions.

and the Trump trials

The trial that we thought was on track fell off track, and another one got rolling again.

The New York state trial for the pre-2016-election cover-up of the Stormy Daniels payments was supposed to start next Monday, but it’s delayed into at least April. At issue are some documents that just got released by the US Attorney’s office, and whether the defense has had adequate time to review them.

In the Georgia RICO trial, the judge has allowed Fani Willis’ office to go forward, after removing Willis’ ex-lover from the prosecution team. If the judge had disqualified Willis, it’s not clear when or whether the case would have proceeded. No trial date has yet been set.

but I want to call your attention to two books

One of my favorite observers of the intersection of technology and society is Cory Doctorow. He currently has two new books out, one fiction and one non-fiction.

The novel is The Lost Cause which takes place in a late-2030s California dealing with a much-advanced climate crisis, as well as the residue of our current political polarization. The country has had 12 years of Green New Deal administrations, and is now going through a backlash that includes a lot of old white guys in MAGA militias. To me, it’s ambiguous whether the “lost cause” in the title is the MAGA effort to maintain white male privilege or the Green New Deal effort to save the world itself.

Two things stand out: Climate-change futurism tends to bifurcate simplistically into we-save-the-world or we-don’t-save-the-world. I found it enlightening to spend time in a world where a lot of bad things have happened, but the struggle goes on. There’s a lot in this novel that is dystopian and a lot that is hopeful.

Second, I think Doctorow is right about where MAGA is headed with regard to climate change. Right now, the MAGA consensus is to ignore the problem. (Trump wants to be a dictator on Day 1 so that he can “drill, drill, drill“.) But in Doctorow’s future, they turned on a dime from “it’s a hoax” to “not everybody is going to make it, so we have to make sure our people do”. Climate change has become one more justification for anti-immigrant fascism.

The nonfiction book is The Internet Con: how to seize the means of computation. He emphasizes that the current tech and social media giants are not natural outcomes of the free market, but stem from changes in the laws, especially antitrust enforcement and copyright laws.

It’s not that there was one magical generation of entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, et al, but that the leading corporations at a particular moment in history were allowed to cement themselves into place and insulate themselves from competition.

For example, your email app doesn’t own your email files, but Facebook owns your Facebook posts, which you’ll lose if you close your account. As a result, you can change email clients whenever you want, but switching from Facebook to some other social media platform is much more arduous. You can send email to people who use other email apps, but you can’t see X/Twitter messages on BlueSky.

The result is what Doctorow has elsewhere called the “enshittification” of the internet. Companies can implement policies for their own advantage rather than yours, and there’s little you can do about it.

The book is full of suggestions for how to turn this around.

and you also might be interested in …

The House passed a ban/forced-sale of TikTok, which is owned by a Chinese company and heavily influenced by the Chinese government. What will happen next is unclear.

Trump abruptly switched his position on this issue: He tried to ban TikTok by executive order when he was president, but now he’s against the legislative ban. The flipflop closely followed a meeting with conservative financier Jeff Yass, who is heavily invested in TikTok.

Have I mentioned that Trump needs a lot of money?

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I really enjoy this Biden ad, especially the last few seconds.

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Russia held its version of an election, and you’ll never guess what happened: Putin was reelected to a fifth term as president with 87% of the vote. There were other names on the ballot, but only the ones Putin allowed to be there. No candidate was vocally anti-Putin or against the Ukraine War.

Supporters of Alexei Navalny (who wanted to run against Putin, but instead died in prison), staged a subtle protest by all showing up to vote at noon. The long lines at the polling places were, in effect, Navalny demonstrations.

Russian prosecutors threatened any voters who took part in the “noon against Putin” action with five years in prison. In the southern city of Kazan, police detained more than 20 voters who had joined the protest, according to the independent rights monitor OVD-Info. Arrests were also reported in Moscow and St Petersburg.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, the government finds to charge these people with.

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When we talk about climate change, we usually focus on rising air temperatures. But maybe we should be paying more attention to how fast the oceans are heating up.

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A rule change could make it much harder to go “judge shopping“.

and let’s close with something timely

Tim Blais is one of those people whose collection of talents seems unfair. He’s musical, does great videos, and also knows a lot of science. His A Capella Science YouTube channel has some amazing stuff, like a Billy Joel parody “The Arrow of Entropic Time“.