I don’t think I’ve ever seen a week where so many bright, shiny objects obscured the really important things that were happening.
We had the GOP’s Trumpapalooza midterm convention on Wednesday and Thursday, which was as near a non-event as it could possibly have been. Few people attended, few people watched, and the big headline afterward — $5000 for everybody if Republicans keep both houses of Congress! — is obviously never going to happen, as even the most ardent Trump cultist probably knows.
Then a couple AI researchers went public with their worry that AI might kill us all. There are real issues with AI, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a government where people understood that? There could be an international conference that included China and the EU. Some kind of standards could be written, and we could avoid needing the Butlerian Jihad they had in the Dune universe. But how likely is that with the know-nothing expertise-despising regime we live under now?
I don’t know how to start the kind of thoughtful, nuanced public discussion we need. But going around panicked about AI killing us all is probably not the right approach.
So what should you have been paying attention to this week? Well, for one thing, Iran’s Houthi allies took control of the strait at the south end of the Red Sea, potentially cutting off the Saudis’ main way of avoiding Iran’s stranglehold on the Strait of Hormuz. I’m not sure what happens next, but it sure looks like Iran has outflanked us in the current war.
And then two things should have drawn your attention to the threat of Trump stealing the midterms. First, the dispute over Missouri’s congressional maps demonstrated MAGA’s dangerous willingness to play chicken with the courts. The courts won this time. But it’s easy to imagine the line not holding next time. And then conservative Judge Michael Luttig, appointed by Bush the First to an appellate judgeship that he retired from in 2006, described how a constitutional crisis might unfold in January, if the current House leadership simply refused to seat the newly-elected Democrats.
And finally, there’s what we can learn from last week’s biggest news: the victory of the neo-Nazi AfD party in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany. Germany is both similar to and different from the US, making it an interesting case study in how not to control the extreme Right. Worryingly, what we can learn from the Germans undermines both the progressive and centrist Democrats’ strategies.
The featured post will be about what we can learn from the Germans. It should appear around 10 EDT. The weekly summary will handle the rest, and I hope to get it out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 