Overheard at an imaginary reception:
I’m a chatbot censor—victim of the Musk purge. At Alphabet now. You?
Deus ex machina engineer.
Uh…?
I write science fiction.
Ah…guess we have a lot in common, then.
Apocalypsos
Governor Newsom, the Time Is Now
Defend your people. Do your fucking job. If you don’t know how, ask Володимир Зеленський.
Is It Genocide?
Yes.
To call it anything else is to deny the painfully, devastatingly obvious.
Have I, as a citizen of the United States, been complicit in this genocide?
Yes.
To deny it is to pretend that the obligations of citizenship do not apply to me.
Were there provocations? Were they inhumane?
Yes. As true in October, 2023 as in May, 1948.
Do we need to talk about European colonialism, Muslim atavism and xenophobia?
If we’re being honest, yes.
How can a child of the Enlightenment, a citizen of the United States, countenance even the idea of an ethnic state?
Intellectually, not at all. Diplomatically, the wisdom of the principle of live and let live is unavoidable. We should accommodate any religion or ideology which doesn’t demand that we bend the knee to its claims of supremacy. (This absolutely includes Christianity, which has a long history of lethal meddling in other people’s legitimate affairs.)
Can we understand why, 80 years after the Shoah, Israelis feel embattled, feel justified in committing any atrocity which they believe will keep their enemies at bay?
Yes, absolutely.
Can we understand why, 77 years after the Nakba, Palestinians feel abandoned by the rest of the world—as alone as the Jew who once wrote on a Matthausen concentration camp wall, “Wenn es einen Gott gibt, dann soll er mich um Verzeihung bitten!” (“If there is a God, then he ought to beg me for forgiveness!”)?
Yes, absolutely.
Is there any hope of forbearance, of reconciliation here?
None that I can see.
Is this because I’ve become morally and spiritually numb?
Probably. Does this speak well of me?
No.
Can I, will I do better?
Time will tell….
Opus Dei, Opus Diaboli
Can you tell the difference? Neither can I—and that’s not because I don’t know what I’m looking at….
The Hillbilly Pygmalion
George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.
Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.
Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.
*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic
The Trump Patrimony
An abused child speaks:
I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump,” posted Eric Trump. “The first to negotiate will win—the last will absolutely lose. I have seen this movie my entire life.”
—Eric Trump, as quoted in “China Called Trump’s Bluff,” from an Atlantic article by Jonathan Chait published online in Apple News, May 12, 2025
We know this movie. It’s the one where the sons submit unconditionally to the cruelty of their father. It appears to be as popular in the Trump family today as it was two generations ago. Elsewhere it gets decidedly mixed reviews. Check out the Bible, or the Taviani Brothers’ film Padre Padrone. (Like the Bible, it’s available in a dubbed version for you Trumps, who still steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that anything of interest exists in the world except America-first assholes and their medieval prejudices.)
Yes Eric, I know you’d rather travel to exclusive game preserves in Africa to shoot large animals than read a book, so it might surprise you to learn that history is made by the sons who defy their fathers, not by those who submit to licking papa’s boots in the hope that someday they might inherit papa’s money and papa’s puissance. (That’s a French word, Eric. Look it up.)
Let me do you a favor, kid. Let me recommend another Taviani brothers’ film to you, La Notte di San Lorenzo. Pay special attention to what happens in the end to young Marmugi, the son of the local Fascist party chief who’d assumed thoughout the film that following in his father’s footsteps was his key to a bright future of domination over everyone in his village. Above all, consider how easily his actual fate could be yours.
Egg Freckles
Siri is from Apple and is here to help us. We’re assured that it doesn’t spy on us like its relatives from Amazon and Alphabet do, so why do we hate it? Maybe being talked to like we were five years old by a machine the size of a grapefruit has something to do with it. Maybe being given answers that are either irrelevant or insane when we ask it a question does also. Artificial intelligence sounds like a fine idea. Being given artificial stupidity instead tends to confirm the contempt that we suspect the management of large corporations have for us. The tech bros fear the singularity. What they should fear is the Butlerian Jihad.
Quoted Without Comment
Rationality, in the sense of an appeal to a universal and impersonal standard of truth, is of supreme importance …, not only in ages in which it easily prevails, but also, even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.
—Bertrand Russell, as quoted in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, Chapter 23: The Sociology of Knowledge
Here again is that key insight we saw in The German Ideology: in totally changing a society, people must inevitably radically change their own ideas, and the nature of being human itself. Under communal ownership and democratic control, it would be socially impossible to be someone whose selfhood is predicated on the exploitation of others. A subjectivity that would desire such power would be meaningless, and have no social traction. Marx and Engels repeatedly stress that revolution is the transformation of people and ideas as well as social structures.”
— China Miéville, A Spectre, Haunting (analysis of The Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Eldon Tyrell and Roy Batty On the US Constitution
It doesn’t obstruct replication, but it does result in an error in replication, so that the newly formed DNA strand carries a mutation and you’ve got a virus again. But this—all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
But not to last….
What We May Hope To Live Up To
<< Ainsi, dans l’ombre et dans le sang, la plus forte des Républiques s’est constituée. Chacun de ses citoyens savait qu’il se devait à tous et qu’il ne pouvait compter que sur lui-même ; chacun d’eux réalisait, dans le délaissement le plus total son rôle historique. Chacun d’eux, contre les oppresseurs, entreprenait d’être lui-même, irrémédiablement et en se choisissant lui-même dans sa liberté, choisissait la liberté de tous. Cette république sans institutions, sans armée, sans police, il fallait que chaque Français la conquière et l’affirme à chaque instant contre le nazisme. Nous voici à présent au bord d’une autre République : ne peut-on souhaiter qu’elle conserve au grand jour les austères vertus de la République du Silence et de la Nuit.>>
“Thus, in darkness and in blood, a Republic was established, the strongest of Republics. Each of its citizens knew that he owed himself to all and that he could count only on himself alone. Each of them, in complete isolation, fulfilled his responsibility and his role in history. Each of them, standing against the oppressors, undertook to be himself, freely and irrevocably. And by choosing for himself in liberty, he chose the liberty of all. This Republic without institutions, without an army, without police, was something that at each instant every Frenchman had to win and to affirm against Nazism. No one failed in this duty, and now we are on the threshold of another Republic. May this Republic to be set up in broad daylight preserve the austere virtue of that other Republic of Silence and of Night.”
—From Jean-Paul Sartre’s La République du Silence, published on September 9, 1944, in the first non-clandestine issue of Lettres françaises, republished in 1949 in Situations III