Baffled European

Blog

  • They really mean it

    Lovely warm spring day today. I put a cat tree out next to my front door. Both of my cats have found it and immediately recognised its strategic advantage. They started fighting over possession of it at any rate.

    This being a laboured link to indicate that my cats display more intelligence than the US government at the moment.

    Thousands of government workers have been sacked by DOGE over the last two months, with the destruction still in full swing. I thought this was all inspired by a love for small government. In fact, it looks as though they want to maintain government capabilities by using AI. This is astonishing. It appears they actually believe their own hype about AI.

    Have they ever used AI for anything? Like a google search? It’s useless. It produces walls of readable text, but it can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth or lies. It gives every appearance of doing the same job as a human, much faster, but the results are worse.

    In one sense, this explains why the rulers of the USA are a bunch of amoral liars. They actually believe the things their computers tell them and they don’t have the critical faculties to evaluate the results. On the other hand, they think they can use this unreliable and immature technology to run the country.

    Maybe it will work.

  • You’re unwelcome!

    The USAians don’t want people visiting their country. There have been a number of cases recently of Europeans and Canadians being “disappeared” by the US border police. Taken by ICE agents and locked in a cell for a couple of weeks without access to lawyers or the outside world. A French scientist was refused entry to the country because he had been critical of the baby in charge. At least one USAian has also been caught up in the fun.

    Presumably this is the new regime sending a message that they’ve been a soft touch for too long and they aren’t going to be nobody’s pussy no more, no sir.

    At any rate, this new policy is already having an effect. People are being scared away. Scientists are cancelling their attendance at conferences, for example. That’s the immediate response. It’s likely that some future conferences won’t even be held in the USA because of the paranoia and xenophobia.

    So they’ve succeeded in their aims of isolating the USA further. What happens next? Does the USA remain a world leading place for business, science and culture? Does the rest of the world accept this maltreatment and continue to look up to the USA as a role model?

    I suspect the USAians think that there will be no negative consequences to their actions at all. I’m sceptical. We’ll have to wait and see if this new approach is a success.

  • A question of honour

    A sliver of sanity in the US as a judge rules that you can’t simply declare thousands of people to be “dishonourable” and exclude them from the army. The trans soldiers are thus to be reinstated, after months of being illegally discriminated against. But their cards are marked and the government won’t stop there.

    The most galling thing of this episode (so far) is that President Bonespurs himself, who was too scared to join the army, is the one who decides who is “honourable” or not. This order violates the very constitution he swore an oath of honour to protect.

    But what is honour anyway, and why is it so important? Everybody knows what it is, but defining it is more difficult.

    In the Middle Ages, people relied on oaths of fealty to maintain the structure of society. From peasants to the King, everybody promised to serve their Lord and Master. Anybody who broke this oath was dishonourable. They were outcast, shunned by all who knew them.

    Losing your honour was a terrible punishment. Gentlemen would fight duels to the death over “honour”. This was still commonplace at the time the US constitution was written.

    We don’t bother with “honour” much nowadays. We have NDAs and other legal instruments to precisely define people’s behaviour, rather than relying on a vague and outdated concept. Losing your honour today is pretty meaningless and explains why it is no impediment to becoming president.

  • How to avoid a revolution

    If I were a dictator, there are a couple of things I would do.

    For a start, I would keep the army happy. What soldiers don’t want to see is thousands of their comrades in arms kicked out for no good reason. Not to mention the way that old heroes are being erased from the record for racist and sexist reasons, because those soldiers don’t fit into the perfect image that their masters demand.

    That’s not to mention abolishing assistance for veterans. A lot of old soldiers have trouble adjusting to civilian life and it’s good that the government at least tries to help them, even if it doesn’t always work.

    Even the dumbest grunt must surely notice how badly the government is treating their comrades and how they themselves will not get any support in the future. That’s not what they were promised when they joined up.

    Then there’s the social security cheques. I would make sure these were paid on time and in the full amount. People depend on this money for survival and there will be a big problem if hundreds of thousands suddenly cannot afford to eat. Especially if they are armed.

    That’s what I would do at any rate. The US government is not doing either of these things. My conclusion? Obviously they’re not trying to set up a dictatorship. Thank goodness for that.

  • Performative politics

    The USA has a new war on drugs. This time it is not crack cocaine, but the opiate fentanyl. This has been a growing problem in recent years and everybody promised to sort it out as part of their election campaigns.

    So far, the president has cancelled scanning machines to check for smuggled drugs, and pardoned a notorious drug dealer who profited from sales of the drug in its early days. He has hit Canada and Mexico with tariffs – this was the original of many reasons for the tariffs – and is threatening military action against his neighbours if they don’t sort out the US fetanyl problem.

    This seems to fit into a pattern of typical policy making for Maga. First, get rid of any policy that is grounded in reality or might be effective in any way. Second, invent an insane policy that cannot possibly work, but insist it is the only way, or that it will get results fast.

    The point of all of this is not to actually do anything, but to give the appearance of doing something. This policy will never solve the fetanyl problem, because it does nothing to address either the problem or its causes. However, they can say they are doing something to their supporters. When everything gets worse, they can blame Canada, Mexico, Kulaks, leftists, whoever, in order to distract from the fact that they aren’t doing anything.

    I have a feeling this is going to be normal governance.

  • They know better

    A great success of Maga has been the normalisation of transphobia. They’ve been preparing this for a long time.

    Their message was simple. Transes are deviants, perverts, mentally ill, weirdos and you don’t want them anywhere near your children mark my words you’ll regret it if you do. Easy to understand, as this was essentially exactly the same set of slurs aimed at the gays since forever, even though they all turned out to be completely wrong.

    Now they are in power so they can start their persecution. Like everything else they do, this involves ignoring or denying what others say, while using the full power of the state to enforce their own baseless prejudice.

    The most prominent case is the sacking of all serving trans soldiers in the military. This has gone to court and the government doesn’t know its own policy, has provided false and misleading evidence in support, and has attempted to undermine the legal procedure.

    No surprises there. The policy is based on an irrational hatred of trans people, nothing more. All this is part of a grind to dehumanise transes, to push them out of mainstream society, to “other” them.

    Rather than deal with reality, they want to live in a world where transes don’t exist. So they are implementing policies that yet again explicitly deny reality. Do they really think that denying the existence of something means it actually doesn’t exist?

  • The Democrats capitulate

    Star Wars fans are difficult to please. While the original films from the 70s and 80s are universally loved, the fans hate everything since then to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe there is a limit to how many times you can tell the story of space wizards and space nazis chasing a MacGuffin.

    Even on its release, the prequel trilogy at the turn of this century had a generally negative response. It tells the story of the rise of Darth Vader and the fall of the Galactic Republic. While its depiction of space politics has been widely derided as boring and ham-fisted, some of its aspects are interesting in retrospect.

    The old republic is portrayed as tired. It still appears to have the glory of the past, but it is riven with factional fighting and disputes. The old institutes appear to uphold the old traditions, but even they are a shadow of what they once were. Procedure takes the place of action even in crises; complacency and arrogance prevent them from noticing the reality of their decline.

    Palpatine, one of the space nazis, exploits these weaknesses and divisions, enabling him to declare a Galactic Empire. A lightsabre fight between Palpatine and Yoda destroys the Senate, symbolically indicating the end of the republic and democracy.

    They should have used chainsaws.

  • +3° cannot be avoided

    We’ve been having a dry spell. It hasn’t rained for weeks. Drought is a problem here in Brandenburg and it’s getting worse. Due to climate change.

    Of all the vandalism caused by the new US administration, probably the most predictable was climate science.

    The history in USA policy goes back to when daddy Bush decided to rename climate change “global warming” because it sounded positive. Something that we would want, rather than a bad thing. That set the tone for the next thirty years of obstruction, where climate change deniers sought to prevent any action taken to reduce CO₂ emissions.

    Now the pretence is over. They are not going to do anything about climate change. In fact, there are even moves in some states to make renewable energy illegal.

    Why are they doing this? To own the libs, obviously, but there must be a bit more than that. Do they think reality is whatever they say it is? That there is no objective reality? Maybe they genuinely think climate science is all a giant hoax?

    Whatever the case, the USAians have decisively rejected reality and embraced a fantasy instead. This cannot end well. Reality always wins in the end.

    Beyond the USA, it’s worth pointing out that if the governments of the world had shown as much enthusiasm for this issue as they have for tooling up for a great big fight, it would be solved by now.

  • Corruption powers

    Apparently you can have a private dinner with the President of the USA for a “donation” of $5 million, although it is not clear where this money goes. He has also suspended a law that forbids USAians from bribing foreign governments. This sets the tone for his government.

    It’s weirdly consistent the way all anti-fraud and anti-corruption agencies across the USA are being closed down. It runs across government and through each department.

    I reckon it’s certain that most of the members of the criminal cartel have had run-ins with all these agencies in the past. Now the mob is in charge, they are out for revenge. On this level, I understand why they are doing it.

    At the same time, in the real world, they are reducing government services across the board, even though the demand for those services has not changed. So how do you get access to these rare services? You pay a bribe. The official has no problems in accepting this, assuming they don’t demand it up front, because there are no comebacks.

    Somehow I see this as an accelerated corruption drive. The USA is a fairly honest and corruption-free society. These measures seem designed to corrupt everything as quickly as possible.

    Even if congress were to remove this maniac tomorrow, it would take years to unpick the mess he has caused. The more this corruption sets in and becomes endemic, the longer it will take.

  • Make America Healthy Again

    Outbreak of measles in Texas. The result of a long campaign by anti-vaxxers.

    RFK Jr is responsible for the outbreak. In the sense that it is his job at the moment, as well as him being one of the most prominent anti-vaxxers of the last 25 years.

    I see RFK giving an interview in a fast food restaurant. He’s saying how good the food is for you. Endless anti-vax drivel. He sounds more like an activist trying to get their points in rather than a government minister.

    He seems to be settling scores as well. He’s sacked a load of researchers from the CDC (disease control) and set the rest over to researching the non-existent autism-MMR link. They all know it’s a waste of time, but that’s their job now. He will want results though.

    This is in addition to all the other closures in his department. Some look like revenge from the covid time, others are just wanton vandalism. Is this “small government”? At some point, things will actually genuinely stop working.

    What is worst about all of this is the rejection of reality. It’s like he takes every single piece of medical advice and rejects it. Deliberately and knowingly. Why? This looks like a common feature in the government as well.

    And the title of this blog? That is literally his slogan.