Trump

Hanlon’s Razor isn’t quite right

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 27 JDN 2461311

Hanlon’s Razor tells us:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

This is almost right. In fact, it is close enough to right to be useful at solving the problem it was meant to solve. However, I have a different maxim that I believe improves upon it:

Never attribute to coordinated conspiracy that which is adequately explained by uncoordinated malice and/or stupidity.

This is also related to another maxim I have read, Grey’s Law:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The problem that Hanlon’s Razor exists to solve, I believe, is the fact that many people are innately conspiracy-minded: Whenever something bad happens, they like to attribute it to the mysterious workings of some coordinated cabal of evildoers.

But this is in fact a very improbable explanation; our prior probability on it should be quite low. Not zero, as coordinated conspiracies do happen on occasion; but low, as they don’t happen very often—and the larger and longer the conspiracy required to explain the outcome, the lower we should the probability. (Three evil people coordinating for a few weeks happens all the time. Three thousand evil people coordinating for ten years is almost impossible.)

Yet malice is not actually all that improbable. About 1% of men are full-blown psychopaths and 10% have psychopathic tendencies, and about 8% of men are rapists. Since psychopaths seem to be overrepresented in positions of power, the prior probability that a given CEO or head of state is a psychopath is more like 5%. So when a corporation or a government does something horrific, yes, stupidity is very likely to be involved—but so is malice.

If we follow Hanlon’s Razor too closely, we begin to look for reasons why horrible things are not the true intentions of the people who do them, when sometimes the cruelty is the point. We come to imagine that our enemies are simply foolish and benighted, and if we simply told them the truth they would be enlightened.

This is in fact how I used to think. The last decade proved me wrong.

It seems deeply ironic; when I was a teenager, I thought the world’s conflicts were fundamentally complicated and required nuanced understanding of multiple perspectives in order to resolve. But everything that Donald Trump and the Republicans who have enabled him have done over the last ten years has shown me that this is simply not always true. My naivete of youth was in being too charitable.

Sometimes the other side is just evil. Sometimes they really are motivated by nothing but craven selfishness, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. Sometimes our leaders really are willing to support a corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, malevolent, racist, misogynist, fascist, pedophile rapist. (Are they corrupt? Has he threatened them? Are they doing this because they still somehow think he’ll be good for the economy? Do they simply hate the same people he hates? Does it even matter anymore? Someone who supports a fascist because he was bribed or thinks it will be good for the economy is still supporting a fascist.)

While I cannot say all his millions of supporters are evil, their failure at this point seems to go beyond any ordinary stupidity. It requires either that they do not know how terrible he is—which would require such profound willfull ignorance or gullibility that it is almost unfathomable to me—or that they do not care—which would make them so totally callous or misguided that in fact I should probably simply call them evil after all. Fortunately they only comprise about 40% of Americans, roughly the proportion who think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—and yes, the two beliefs are very strongly correlated. So maybe they really, truly are that ignorant and gullible. They have been convinced of absurdities and so will happily excuse atrocities. Perhaps there is still some way to reach them, but I do not know what it is, and I do not think we have time to find out.

Sometimes our enemies cannot be reasoned with, and must simply be defeated—hopefully at the ballot box, but if it comes to it, sometimes even on the battlefield. (To be clear: I am not suggesting a violent overthrow of Donald Trump. I want Democrats to win both houses of Congress and remove him from office. But if they try to remove him and he refuses to be removed, or if he refuses to cede power to whoever wins in 2028, then yes, it would then be time to solve this conflict with guns.)


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Somehow, the sanewashing continues

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Jul 26 JDN 2461248

Since the very beginning, journalists have been sanewashing Trump and his cronies: Whenever he or one of them says something absolutely absurd, they always try to find some more sensible way of rephrasing it as a vaguely-similar concept that might actually be a potentially reasonable government policy.

To use one of many examples I could have pulled from, when Donald Trump gave an incoherent rant about immigrants invading our country to barbecue our cats and dogs, many news outlets reported it as things like “Trump escalates rhetoric on immigrants.” Is that what he did? Is it?

I even understand the impulse: In most circumstances, trying to be charitable and steelman your opponents’ ideas is healthy, productive, and good.

But sometimes, when someone just says something completely crazy, you need to quote them verbatim. You need people to know that what they said was, in fact, completely crazy. As journalists, you do the world a disservice otherwise.

Indeed, I think this was one of the reasons Trump was able to be so successful; low-information voters often only heard the sanewashed version of his ideas, and so he sounded like a fairly typical Republican: tough on crime, tough on immigration, serious about boosting the economy.

And while some news outlets are—slowly, all too slowly—getting better about this, spending more time quoting Trump directly and showing videos of him actually speaking and how demented he appears when doing so, there are still some mainstream outlets that are trying to sanewash him and his cronies.

I give you, Exhibit A: The Economist.

“Pete Hegseth’s testosterone-screening plan is unusual, not crazy”, they write.

Is that so? Is it?

They point out that soldiers are at elevated risk of hypogonadism, likely due to the extremely high physical and psychological stress of warfare. This much is absolutely true. But is it even relevant? Is that what Hegseth’s testosterone plan is actually about?

Clearly not. WIRED has their heads on straight: “Pete Hegseth’s Plan for ‘High T’ Troops Is a Junk-Science Fever Dream”.

Pete Hegseth did not consult a group of military endocrinologists or read the latest scientific research on stress-related hypogonadism when devising his latest policy. Nor, indeed, would he have come up with this policy had he done so: Military doctors already know how to screen for endocrine disorders, it is not difficult or expensive to do so, and they generally do so whenever a soldier exhibits symptoms that are consistent with such a disorder. Most soldiers obviously don’t need such screenings, and those that do, would need to be tested at multiple different times of day to track their hormone cycle (male hormone cycles are higher in both frequency and amplitude than female hormone cycles, so it’s honestly pretty weird that we think of women as “hormonal”), not simply get a one-time test every six months to see if the number is high enough. And even if a soldier does suffer from hypogonadism, any good endocrinologist will tell you that you don’t just jump straight to testosterone replacement therapy before trying anything else.

Thus, mass testing everyone in the military for testosterone and immediately offering hormone replacement therapy is neither necessary nor sufficient for actually treating the genuine physiological risks of warfare.

What it is necessary and sufficient for is something much, much stupider.

Testosterone is manly. Manly is good. Warriors must be more manly. More manly warriors win wars.

That, my friends, is the level of reasoning that went on inside Pete Hegseth’s pathetic, immature brain.

This is not a carefully considered medical policy developed under consultation with experts. This is a man physically has the body of an adult but never mentally matured beyond the age of 13 and still thinks that the ideal soldier looks like a GI Joe doll. (Excuse me, “action figure”.) He’s probably insecure about his own testosterone level (as that does tend to drop as you get older), likely is on (unnecessary) testosterone replacement therapy himself, and thinks that everyone should do this, because it’s just obvious to him that more testosterone equals more manly equals better.

Imagine a Neanderthal who had been given some vague inkling as to what testosterone is, enough to know that men have lots of it and women don’t. That is the kind of person we are dealing with here.

So, I say to you, The Economist, and every other news outlet:

STOP IT. STOP IT NOW.

You should have stopped 10 years ago, but better late than never. Stop it now.

When they do and say crazy things for crazy reasons, say that. Tell people. That is your job. Yes, we all wish that low-information voters were more responsible about gathering knowledge before voting (and thus stopped being low-information voters). But they aren’t going to do that any time soon, and it’s even understandable that they don’t (life is busy!). So please, make it easy for them: When the guy on one side of the aisle is a raving maniac, tell them that. Don’t expect them to figure it out for themselves.

(Really, I just wish that ignorant people would stop voting. If you can’t cast an informed vote, don’t cast a vote at all! You aren’t helping!)

Wonderful news from Hungary

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Apr 19 JDN 246150

Hungary’s recent election results were just about as good as they could possibly have been. Victor Orban was not only defeated, but crushed; Magyar’s party didn’t just win, they won a supermajority. They now have the power to implement sweeping reforms that could prevent authoritarians like Orban from ever taking power in Hungary again.

Already Magyar has suspended Hungarian state media broadcasts and released $90 billion in EU aid for Ukraine that Hungary had been holding up. These are immediate, concrete results from just his first few days in office.

I have two goals for this post:

First, I just want to celebrate.

This is a huge victory for democracy, not just in Hungary, but across Europe and indeed around the world. It brings hope in a time when we needed it most. It proves to the world that authoritarians can be toppled, and democracy can be restored—sometimes even without bloodshed.

There is a light at the end of this tunnel. We must keep pressing forward.

Second, I want to use it as a model.

I think the biggest thing that this event teaches us is that democracy and nonviolence can succeed. This is something we should already have recognized from the empirical evidence, but rarely do we see such a clear, unambiguous example of a triumphant victory by nonviolent, democratic means alone.

Hungarians protested, and lobbied, and voted, and they did so in a united voice against Orban’s tyranny. But there was very little violence—and most of what there was, was instigated by the government against peaceful protesters. (Remember, nonviolence doesn’t mean nobody gets hurt.)

And once he took power, Magyar already began the process of reform. It will no doubt be a long and difficult process, and may take years to complete. Orban and his party are defeated, but not destroyed, and they will continue to mount resistance. But Magyar did not wait. He did not try to reconcile or compromise. He immediately set out to make things better.

This is what the Democrats must do when they win the midterm elections this year. They must not be timid and careful, not taking any bold moves to avoid upsetting “moderates”. (Anyone who still thinks Trump belongs anywhere near public office at this point is not and never was a moderate. At best, they might be a low-information voter who literally doesn’t know what’s going on.) They must act swiftly and decisively to repair the damage Trump has done and fix our system so that no similar maniac can do such damage again in the future. This is exactly what Biden failed to do when he took office in 2020. (Yes, I know that Congress and the Supreme Court fought him on a lot of things. But there was definitely still more that he could have done and didn’t, and people are suffering now because of it.)

Ideally, in fact, they would impeach and remove Trump before 2028. (And if it’s not too much trouble, try him at the Hague for all the children he starved?) But if they don’t manage to do that, at the very least, they must ensure that they continue to have such a strong campaign for Congress and the President in 2028 that they take both of those branches of government—and then, they need to pack the Supreme Court in order to secure the third. This damage will not be undone until Republicans are completely removed from the seats of national power, and stay removed for at least a decade.

Of course, in order for that to happen, the Democrats are going to need to win a lot of elections. And that isn’t just on them—it’s also on us. They need to run better candidates, we need to vote for those candidates, and we need to hold those candidates accountable for taking the bold measures necessary to repair America after this disaster. They need to stop taking their own electoral victories for granted: Yes, Clinton and Biden absolutely deserved to win all three elections. But they only actually won one of them, and that is what matters. The Democratic Party should be looking long and hard at what went wrong in 2016 and 2024, and learning from those mistakes.

I’m not even saying the Democrats are perfect; they are not. (Neither is Magyar.) But we need a powerful party to defeat the Republicans and restore American democracy, and only the Democrats are currently in a position to fulfill that role. After the Republicans are totally destroyed and only a distant, unsettling memory like the Nazis, then you can start voting for the Greens or the Libertarians.

And since “Magyar” basically just means “Hungarian”, maybe we should run a Presidential candidate named something like John T. American, just in case.

This is fascism.

PNRJ current events, ethics, politics, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 1 JDN 2461073

The Party told you to ignore the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

– George Orwell, 1984

As I write this, we haven’t even finished January of 2026, and already there have been not one, but two blatant, public executions of innocent people by federal agents that occurred in broad daylight and on video.

I already thought the video of Renee Good’s shooting was pretty clear, but the videos of Alex Pretti’s just leave no room for doubt at all. He was disarmed and restrained when they shot him; this was an execution.

I have heard liberals mocked by leftists as “people who are okay with the government killing people as long as the right paperwork is filed”. This is sort of true, actually—if by “paperwork” you mean due process of law. You know, the foundation of liberal democracy? That little thing?

Yes, I am actually okay with (some) military actions, police shootings in self-defense, and even executions of convicted murderers (though I should note that actually many liberals aren’t okay with the latter). I think that a world where nobody kills anybody is a pipe dream, and the best we can reasonably hope for is one where there are few killings, most of them are justified, and the ones that aren’t are punished. (And if your problem is specifically with the government killing people… who do you think should have that authority, if not democratically-elected representatives?) I understand that the government needs to kill people sometimes, but I expect those killings to be limited to justifiable wars, imminent threats to life and limb, or the result of a proper conviction by a fair jury trial.

But this was not due process of law. There was no judge, no jury, no trial—there wasn’t even a warrant or an arrest. Nor was it an in-the-moment response to an imminent threat—even a perceived one. The videos are crystal-clear: Alex Pretti was no threat to the border patrol agents who shot him to death.

This is fascism.

It’s not like fascism. It’s not toward fascism. This isn’t how it starts. Masked men executing innocent people in broad daylight is fascism. It’s here. It’s happening.

This does not necessarily mean that our entire country has fallen to fascism; there is still hope that we can stop this from happening again, and also hope that this will not escalate into a full-blown civil war. But shooting an innocent unarmed man without a judge or a jury is an inherently, irredeemably fascist act. If the men responsible are not tried for murder, it will be a grave injustice—and it could very well escalate into much larger-scale violence.

I wish I could say this sort of thing is totally unprecedented; but no, it’s not. The United States government has done a lot of horrible things over the years, from slavery to the Trail of Tears to the Japanese internment. I think that our country has been in a profound state of tension from the very beginning, between the high-minded ideals of “all men are created equal” and the deep-seated tribalism that comes naturally to nearly all human beings. I don’t think America is uniquely evil; in fact, I think we are especially good—it’s just that even a good country often does horrible things.

And there is something different about this. It’s not the first time our government has killed anyone, or even killed anyone for an obviously unjustified reason. But I think it might be the first time the government has publicly and blatantly lied about the circumstances in a way that can be directly refuted by video evidence. They aren’t painting it as a “mistake” or saying it was “a few bad apples”; they are actually trying to claim justification where obviously none exists. They are asking you to believe what they say over what you can see with your own two eyes.

This is what authoritarian states do. They try to undermine your belief in objective reality. They try to gaslight you into believing what they say instead of what you can see. And even in an extremely prosperous, well-educated country, they have been shockingly effective at it.

This is what we warned against when Trump was running for election.

Maybe it’s not productive to say “We told you so”, but, uh, we told you so.

He’s done so many terrible things, and has been enabled so many times by Republicans in Congress and the right-wing justices of the Supreme Court. As a result, it’s hard to draw any bright lines in the sand. But if you really want to draw one, this might be a good one to draw.

Honestly, the best time to turn against Trump was ten years ago; but people are finally turning against him, and better late than never.

Hope for the new year

PNRJ current events, personal, politics , , , , , ,

Jan 4 JDN 2461045

We have just entered 2026. I remember that around this time last year I felt a deep, visceral despair: Trump had just been elected and was about to be inaugurated, and I could only dread what the next year would bring. For the next several weeks I posted sections of my book The Logic of Kindness (at this point, it is probably never actually going to be published?), partly because I felt—and still feel—that these ideas do deserve to be out in the world, but also partly because I had no creative energy to write anything else.

Well, the first year of Trump’s second term was just about as bad as we thought it would be. He has torn apart global institutions that took decades to forge; he has caused thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths; he has alienated our closest allies—seriously, CANADA!?—and cozied up to corrupt, authoritarian dictators around the world, because that is exactly what he aspires to be.

It’s true, he hasn’t collapsed the economy (yet). Inflation has been about as bad as it was before, despite the ludicrous tariffs. (He promised to bring prices down, but we all knew he wouldn’t. I honestly expected them to go up more than this.) He also hasn’t started any wars, though he looks damn close to it in Venezuela. And as he continues to make a mockery of our whole government, the checks and balances that are supposed to be reining him have languished unused, because the Republicans control all three branches.

Trump is still in office, and poised to be for three more years.

Yet, at last, there is some glimmer of hope on the horizon.

Other Republicans are starting to turn against him, in part because of his obvious and undeniable connections to Jeffrey Epstein and his ring of serial rapists. (Let’s be clear about that, by the way: They’re not just pedophiles. “Pedophile” merely means you are sexually attracted to children. Some pedophiles seek treatment. These men were rapists who sexually assaulted actual teenagers. And at this point it strains credulity to imagine that Donald Trump himself wasn’t an active participant on multiple occasions—no amount of incompetent redactions will change that.)

Trump’s net approval is now negative on almost every major issue, especially on inflation. It is now a statistical certainty that more Americans disapprove of him than approve of him.

Both of these things should have happened more than a year ago, if not a decade ago; but hey, better late than never.

Democrats—even very left-wing democrats, like Mamdani—have done very well in elections lately, and seem poised to continue doing well in the 2026 midterm election. If we can actually secure a majority in both houses of Congress, we might finally be able to start undoing some of the damage Trump has done—or at least stop him from doing even more.

I’m sure there will be plenty of bad things that continue to happen this year, and that many of them will be Donald Trump’s fault. But I no longer feel the deep despair I felt last year; it seems like things might finally be turning around for America—and thus for the world.

What is the cost of all this?

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Nov 23 JDN 2461003

After the Democrats swept the recent election and now the Epstein files are being released—and absolutely do seem to have information that is damning about Trump—it really seems like Trump’s popularity has permanently collapsed. His approval rating stands at 42%, which is about 42% too high, but at least comfortably well below a majority.

It now begins to feel like we have hope, not only of removing him, but also of changing how American politics in general operates so that someone like him ever gets power again. (The latter, of course, is a much taller order.)

But at the risk of undermining this moment of hope, I’d like to take stock of some of the damage that Trump and his ilk have already done.

In particular, the cuts to US foreign aid are an absolute humanitarian disaster.

These didn’t get so much attention, because there has been so much else going on; and—unfortunately—foreign aid actually isn’t that popular among American voters, despite being a small proportion of the budget and by far the most cost-effective beneficial thing that our government does.

In fact, I think USAID would be cost-effective on a purely national security basis: it’s hard to motivate people to attack a country that saves the lives of their children. Indeed, I suppose this is the kernel of truth to the leftists who say that US foreign aid is just a “tool of empire” (or even “a front for the CIA”); yes, indeed, helping the needy does in fact advance American interests and promote US national security.

Over the last 25 years, USAID has saved over 90 million lives. That is more than a fourth of the population of the United States. And it has done this for the cost of less than 1% of the US federal budget.

But under Trump’s authority and Elon Musk’s direction, US foreign aid was cut massively over the last couple of years, and the consequences are horrific. Research on the subject suggests that as many as 700,000 children will die each year as long as these cuts persist.


Even if that number is overestimated by a factor of 2, that would still be millions of children over the next few years. And it could just as well be underestimated.

If we don’t fix this fast, millions of children will die. Thousands already have.

What’s more, fixing this isn’t just a matter of bringing the funding back. Obviously that’s necessary, but it won’t be sufficient. The sudden cuts have severely damaged international trust in US foreign aid, and many of the agencies that our aid was supporting will either collapse or need to seek funding elsewhere—quite likely from China. Relationships with governments and NGOs that were built over decade have been strained or even destroyed, and will need to be rebuilt.

This is what happens when you elect monsters to positions of power.

And even after we remove them, much of the damage will be difficult or even impossible to repair. Certainly we can never bring back the children who have already needlessly died because of this.

Why are so many famous people so awful?

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Oct 12 JDN 2460961

J.K. Rowling is a transphobic bigot. H.P. Lovecraft was an overt racist. Orson Scott Card is homophobic, and so was Frank Herbert. Robert Heinlein was a misogynist. Isaac Asimov was a serial groper and sexual harasser. Neil Gaiman has been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults.

That’s just among sci-fi and fantasy authors whose work I admire. I could easily go on with lots of other famous people and lots of other serious allegations. (I suppose Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski seem like particularly apt examples.)

Some of these are worse than others; since they don’t seem to be guilty of any actual crimes, we might even cut some slack to Lovecraft, Herbert and Heinlein for being products of their times. (It seems very hard to make that defense for Asimov and Gaiman, with Rowling and Card somewhere in between because they aren’t criminals, but ‘their time’ is now.)

There are of course exceptions: Among sci-fi authors, for instance, Ursula Le Guin, Becky Chambers, Alistair Reynolds and Andy Weir all seem to be ethically unimpeachable. (As far as I know? To be honest, I still feel blind-sided by Neil Gaiman.)

But there really does seem to be pattern here:

Famous people are often bad people.

I guess I’m not quite sure what the baseline rate of being racist, sexist, or homophobic is (and frankly maybe it’s pretty high); but the baseline rate of committing multiple sexual assaults is definitely lower than the rate at which famous men get credibly accused of such.

Lord Acton famously remarked similarly:

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority.

I think this account is wrong, however. Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela were certainly powerful—and certainly flawed—but they do not seem corrupt to me. I don’t think that Gandhi beat his wife because he led the Indian National Congress, and Mandela supported terrorists precisely during the period when he had the least power and the fewest options. (It’s almost tautologically true that Lincoln couldn’t have suspended habeas corpusif he weren’t extremely powerful—but that doesn’t mean that it was the power that shaped his character.)

I don’t think the problem is that power corrupts. I think the problem is that the corrupt seek power, and are very good at obtaining it.

In fact, I think the reason that so many famous people are such awful people is that our society rewards being awful. People will flock to you if you are overconfident and good at self-promoting, and as long as they like your work, they don’t seem to mind who you hurt along the way; this makes a perfect recipe for rewarding narcissists and psychopaths with fame, fortune, and power.

If you doubt that this is the case:

How else do you explain Donald Trump?

The man has absolutely no redeeming qualities. He is incompetent, willfully ignorant, deeply incurious, arrogant, manipulative, and a pathological liar. He’s also a racist, misogynist, and admitted sexual assaulter. He has been doing everything in his power to prevent the release of the Epstein Files, which strongly suggests he has in fact sexually assaulted teenagers. He’s also a fascist, and now that he has consolidated power, he is rapidly pushing the United States toward becoming a fascist state—complete with masked men with guns who break into your home and carry you away without warrants or trials.

Yet tens of millions of Americans voted for him to become President of the United States—twice.

Basically, it seems to be that Trump said he was great, and they believed him. Simply projecting confidence—however utterly unearned that confidence might be—was good enough.

When it comes to the authors I started this post with, one might ask whether their writing talents were what brought them fame, independently or in spite of their moral flaws. To some extent that is probably true. But we also don’t really know how good they are, compared to all the other writers whose work never got published or never got read. Especially during times—all too recently—when writers who were women, queer, or people of color simply couldn’t get their work published, who knows what genius we might have missed out on? Dune the first book is a masterpiece, but by the time we get to Heretics of Dune the books have definitely lost their luster; maybe there were some other authors with better books that could have been published, but never were because Herbert had the clout and the privilege and those authors didn’t.

I do think genuine merit has some correlation with success. But I think the correlation is much weaker than is commonly supposed. A lot of very obviously terrible and/or incompetent people are extremely successful in life. Many of them were born with advantages—certainly true of Elon Musk and Donald Trump—but not all of them.

Indeed, there are so many awful successful people that I am led to conclude that moral behavior has almost nothing to do with success. I don’t think people actively go out of their way to support authors, musicians, actors, business owners or politicians who are morally terrible; but it’s difficult for me to reject the hypothesis that they literally don’t care. Indeed, when evidence emerges that someone powerful is terrible, usually their supporters will desperately search for reasons why the allegations can’t be true, rather than seriously considering no longer supporting them.

I don’t know what to do about this.

I don’t know how to get people to believe allegations more, or care about them more; and that honestly seems easier than changing the fundamental structure of our society in a way that narcissists and psychopaths are no longer rewarded with power. The basic ways that we decide who gets jobs, who gets published, and who gets elected seem to be deeply, fundamentally broken; they are selecting all the wrong people, and our whole civilization is suffering the consequences.


We are so far from a just world that I honestly can’t see how to get there from here, or even how to move substantially closer.

But I think we still have to try.

Reflections on the Charlie Kirk assassination

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Sep 28 JDN 2460947

No doubt you are well aware that Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10. His memorial service was held on September 21, and filled a stadium in Arizona.

There have been a lot of wildly different takes on this event. It’s enough to make you start questioning your own sanity. So while what I have to say may not be that different from what Krugman (or for that matter Jacobin) had to say, I still thought I would try to contribute to the small part of the conversation that’s setting the record straight.

First of all, let me say that this is clearly a political assassination, and as a matter of principle, that kind of thing should not be condoned in a democracy.

The whole point of a democratic system is that we don’t win by killing or silencing our opponents, we win by persuading or out-voting them. As long as someone is not engaging in speech acts that directly command or incite violence (like, say, inciting people to attack the Capitol), they should be allowed to speak in peace; even abhorrent views should be not be met with violence.

Free speech isn’t just about government censorship (though that is also a major problem right now); it’s a moral principle that underlies the foundation of liberal democracy. We don’t resolve conflicts with violence unless absolutely necessary.

So I want to be absolutely clear about this: Killing Charlie Kirk was not acceptable, and the assassin should be tried in a court of law and, if duly convicted, imprisoned for a very long time.

Second of all, we still don’t know the assassin’s motive, so stop speculating until we do.

At first it looked like the killer was left-wing. Then it looked like maybe he was right-wing. Now it looks like maybe he’s left-wing again. Maybe his views aren’t easily categorized that way; maybe he’s an anarcho-capitalist, or an anarcho-communist, or a Scientologist. I won’t say it doesn’t matter; it clearly does matter. But we simply do not know yet.

There is an incredibly common and incredibly harmful thing that people do after any major crime: They start spreading rumors and speculating about things that we actually know next to nothing about. Stop it. Don’t contribute to that.


The whole reason we have a court system is to actually figure out the real truth, which takes a lot of time and effort. The courts are one American institution that’s actually still functioning pretty well in this horrific cyberpunk/Trumpistan era; let them do their job.

It could be months or years before we really fully understand what happened here. Accept that. You don’t need to know the answer right now, and it’s far more dangerous to think you know the answer when you actually don’t.

But finally, I need to point out that Charlie Kirk was an absolutely abhorrent, despicable husk of a human being and no one should be honoring him.

First of all, he himself advocated for political violence against his opponents. I won’t say anyone deserves what happened to him—but if anyone did, it would be him, because he specifically rallied his followers to do exactly this sort of thing to other people.

He was also bigoted in almost every conceivable way: Racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and of course transphobic. He maintained a McCarthy-esque list of college professors that he encouraged people to harass for being too left-wing. He was a covert White supremacist, and only a little bit covert. He was not covert at all about his blatant sexism and misogyny that seems like it came from the 1950s instead of the 2020s.

He encouraged his—predominantly White, male, straight, cisgender, middle-class—audience to hate every marginalized group you can think of: women, people of color, LGBT people, poor people, homeless people, people with disabilities. Not content to merely be an abhorrent psychopath himself, he actively campaigned against the concept of empathy.

Charlie Kirk deserves no honors. The world is better off without him. He made his entire career out of ruining the lives of innocent people and actively making the world a worse place.

It was wrong to kill Charlie Kirk. But if you’re sad he’s gone, what is wrong with you!?

For my mother, on her 79th birthday

PNRJ core principles, current events, personal, politics , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 21 JDN 2460940

When this post goes live, it will be mother’s 79th birthday. I think birthdays are not a very happy time for her anymore.

I suppose nobody really likes getting older; children are excited to grow up, but once you hit about 25 or 26 (the age at which you can rent a car at the normal rate and the age at which you have to get your own health insurance, respectively) and it becomes “getting older” instead of “growing up”, the excitement rapidly wears off. Even by 30, I don’t think most people are very enthusiastic about their birthdays. Indeed, for some people, I think it might be downhill past 21—you wanted to become an adult, but you had no interest in aging beyond that point.

But I think it gets worse as you get older. As you get into your seventies and eighties, you begin to wonder which birthday will finally be your last; actually I think my mother has been wondering about this even earlier than that, because her brothers died in their fifties, her sister died in her sixties, and my father died at 63. At this point she has outlived a lot of people she loved. I think there is a survivor’s guilt that sets in: “Why do I get to keep going, when they didn’t?”

These are also very hard times in general; Trump and the people who enable him have done tremendous damage to our government, our society, and the world at large in a shockingly short amount of time. It feels like all the safeguards we were supposed to have suddenly collapsed and we gave free rein to a madman.

But while there are many loved ones we have lost, there are many we still have; and nor need our set of loved ones be fixed, only to dwindle with each new funeral. We can meet new people, and they can become part of our lives. New children can be born into our family, and they can make our family grow. It is my sincere hope that my mother still has grandchildren yet to meet; in my case they would probably need to be adopted, as the usual biological route is pretty much out of the question, and surrogacy seems beyond our budget for the foreseeable future. But we would still love them, and she could still love them, and it is worth sticking around in this world in order to be a part of their lives.

I also believe that this is not the end for American liberal democracy. This is a terrible time, no doubt. Much that we thought would never happen already has, and more still will. It must be so unsettling, so uncanny, for someone who grew up in the triumphant years after America helped defeat fascism in Europe, to grow older and then see homegrown American fascism rise ascendant here. Even those of us who knew history all too well still seem doomed to repeat it.

At this point it is clear that victory over corruption, racism, and authoritarianism will not be easy, will not be swift, may never be permanent—and is not even guaranteed. But it is still possible. There is still enough hope left that we can and must keep fighting for an America worth saving. I do not know when we will win; I do not even know for certain that we will, in fact, win. But I believe we will.

I believe that while it seems powerful—and does everything it can to both promote that image and abuse what power it does have—fascism is a fundamentally weak system, a fundamentally fragile system, which simply cannot sustain itself once a handful of critical leaders are dead, deposed, or discredited. Liberal democracy is kinder, gentler—and also slower, at times even clumsier—than authoritarianism, and so it may seem weak to those whose view of strength is that of the savanna ape or the playground bully; but this is an illusion. Liberal democracy is fundamentally strong, fundamentally resilient. There is power in kindness, inclusion, and cooperation that the greedy and cruel cannot see. Fascism in Germany arrived and disappeared within a generation; democracy in America has stood for nearly 250 years.

We don’t know how much more time we have, Mom; none of us do. I have heard it said that you should live your life as though you will live both a short life and a long one; but honestly, you should probably live your life as though you will live a randomly-decided amount of time that is statistically predicted by actuarial tables—because you will. Yes, the older you get, the less time you have left (almost tautologically); but especially in this age of rapid technological change, none of us really know whether we’ll die tomorrow or live another hundred years.

I think right now, you feel like there isn’t much left to look forward to. But I promise you there is. Maybe it’s hard to see right now; indeed, maybe you—or I, or anyone—won’t even ever get to see it. But a brighter future is possible, and it’s worth it to keep going, especially if there’s any way that we might be able to make that brighter future happen sooner.

The AI bubble is going to crash hard

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, futurism, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 7 JDN 2460926

Based on the fact that it only sort of works and yet corps immediately put it in everything, I had long suspected that the current wave of AI was a bubble. But after reading Ed Zitron’s epic takedowns of the entire industry, I am not only convinced it’s a bubble; I’m convinced it is probably the worst bubble we’ve had in a very long time. This isn’t the dot-com crash; it’s worse.

The similarity to the dot-com crash is clear, however: This a huge amount of hype over a new technology that genuinely could be a game-changer (the Internet certainly was!), but won’t be in the time horizon on which the most optimistic investors have assumed it will be. The gap between “it sort of works” and “it radically changes our economy” is… pretty large, actually. It’s not something you close in a few years.


The headline figure here is that based on current projections, US corporations will have spent $560 billion on capital expenditure, for anticipated revenue of only $35 billion.

They won’t pay it off for 16 years!? That kind of payoff rate would make sense for large-scale physical infrastructure, like a hydroelectric dam. It absolutely does not make sense in an industry that is dependent upon cutting-edge technology that wears out fast and becomes obsolete even faster. They must think that revenue is going to increase to something much higher, very soon.

The corps seem to be banking on the most optimistic view of AI: That it will soon—very soon—bring about a radical increase in productivity that brings GDP surging to new heights, or even a true Singularity where AI fundamentally changes the nature of human existence.

Given the kind of errors I’ve seen LLMs make when I tried to use them to find research papers or help me with tedious coding, this is definitely not what’s going to happen. Claude gives an impressive interview, and (with significant guidance and error-correction) it also managed pretty well at making some simple text-based games; but it often recommended papers to me that didn’t exist, and through further experimentation, I discovered that it could not write me a functional C++ GUI if its existence depended on it. Somewhere on the Internet I heard someone describe LLMs as answering not the question you asked directly, but the question, “What would a good answer to this question look like?” and that seems very accurate. It always gives an answer that looks valid—but not necessarily one that is valid.

AI will find some usefulness in certain industries, I’m sure; and maybe the next paradigm (or the one after that) will really, truly, effect a radical change on our society. (Right now the best thing to use LLMs for seems to be cheating at school—and it also seems to be the most common use. Not exactly the great breakthrough we were hoping for.) But LLMs are just not reliable enough to actually use for anything important, and sooner or later, most of the people using them are going to figure that out.

Of course, by the Efficient Roulette Hypothesis, it’s extremely difficult to predict exactly when a bubble will burst, and it could well be that NVIDIA stock will continue to grow at astronomical rates for several years yet—or it could be that the bubble bursts tomorrow and NVIDIA stock collapses, if not to worthless, then to far below its current price.

Krugman has an idea of what might be the point that bursts the bubble: Energy costs. There is a clear mismatch between the anticipated energy needs of these ever-growing data centers and the actual energy production we’ve been installing—especially now that Trump and his ilk have gutted subsidies for solar and wind power. That’s definitely something to watch out for.

But the really scary thing is that the AI bubble actually seems to be the only thing holding the US economy above water right now. It’s the reason why Trump’s terrible policies haven’t been as disastrous as economists predicted they would; our economy is being sustained by this enormous amount of capital investment.

US GDP is about $30 trillion right now, but $500 billion of that is just AI investment. That’s over 1.6%, and last quarter our annualized GDP growth rate was 3.3%—so roughly half of our GDP growth was just due to building more data centers that probably won’t even be profitable.

Between that, the tariffs, the loss of immigrants, and rising energy costs, a crashing AI bubble could bring down the whole stock market with it.

So I guess what I’m saying is: Don’t believe the AI hype, and you might want to sell some stocks.