Stairway to…?
And if that reminds you of Led Zeppellin, then join the club.
Quote of the Day
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself.”
- Groucho Marx
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart | Laudate Dominum, KV 339 | Patricia Janečková – Soprano
It doesn’t get any better than that.
Long Read of the Day
Posterior Analytics
The US mid-term elections are next Tuesday and there’s a lot of wishful thinking about them delivering an electoral hiding to Trump, MAGA and the Republicans. And maybe they will. But even if they do, Trump will still have two years in office, and anybody who thinks will be chastened hasn’t been paying attention.
Arthur Goldhammer, however, has, and in this piece paints a picture that isn’t pretty.
There is good reason to fear the form that narcissistic decompensation might take when the discombobulated ego in question belongs to the commander-in-chief of a nuclear-armed power. The Financial Times reported that yet another malignant narcissist head of state, Vladimir Putin, was sorely tempted to use nuclear weapons when his lawless, remorseless, superiority-driven, hence narcissistic attack on Ukraine was, to his surprise and consternation, rebuffed rather than welcomed by its victims.
The world may be about to witness a similar aggressive and disproportionate decompensation if Trump is dealt a decisive setback in the impending midterm elections. It has been widely reported that the US and Israel are planning to renew their attacks on Iran, despite the quite unexpected and disappointing result of their initial assault…
Do read on. He comes back to the Putin example at the end.
Books, etc.
Interesting new book which is a sardonic echo of JFK’s book Profiles in Courage. It’s about the people who have sucked up to Trump. Among the prime suspects are Jeff Bezos. Mitch McConnell, George W. Bush and Chief Justice John Roberts. I’ve just bought it and look forward to browsing through the moral mire.
My commonplace booklet
From Willard McCarty (whom God Preserve) who edits the Digital Humanities newsletter that graces my inbox most mornings:
It is a notable reaction to new technologies that they give rise to technological imaginaries, visions of a future to which the visionaries assign their edenic/apocalyptic dreams. My favourite is the pronouncement of one General John J. Carty, Chief Engineer of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (1907–), about the telephone:
“Some day we will build up a world telephone system making necessary to all peoples the use of a common language, or common understanding of languages, which will join all the people of the earth into one brotherhood. . . . When by the aid of science and philosophy and religion, man has prepared himself to receive the message, we can all believe there will be heard, throughout the earth, a great voice coming out of the ether, which will proclaim, ‘Peace on earth, good will towards men.’
It’s interesting that new technologies have often triggered utopian dreams. Tim Wu’s wonderful book, The Master Switch: the Rise and Fall of Information Empires is a chronicle of how four industries — the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and TV — all encouraged utopian dreams about their human and societal possibilities, and all wound up being captured by corporations. At the end of the book, he wondered if this would happen to the Internet. We now know the answer. Which is why when I’m asked to describe myself I say that I’m a ‘recovering Utopian’.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
From PRRI’s 2026 American Values survey…
With the exception of white evangelical Protestants (42%), around two-thirds or more of all major religious groups believe that empathy is a foundational moral value for a healthy society, including about eight in ten religiously unaffiliated Americans (83%), members of other non-Christian religions (80%), and Jewish Americans (77%). By contrast, a majority of white evangelical Protestants (54%) believe empathy can become dangerous when it leads people away from building a society guided by God’s truth.
h/t to Jason Kottke
Interestingly, Elon Musk, the ketamine-fuelled billionaire, thinks that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit… they’re [i.e. migrants] exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.”
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