The deficit
The game of chicken between MAGA Republicans (and before them their Gingrichian forerunners) and Democrats, in which we face a default every few years, is very frightening; aI don't think the subset of gameplayers who would, in fact, like us to default on the nation's debts have any clue as to the world which we will all (including them and their children) have to live in afterwards. But all the "don't default us" rhetoric, Paul Krugman leading the pack, elides the understanding that deficits are not good, very bad, terrible. Krugman seems at times to be saying that deficits are normal, and will never lead to a disaster, no matter how they grow. Though I can barely even imagine living one's whole life with a stable deficit, say, of one million dollars, a burden which never increases, our deficits actually multiply geometrically rather than growing arithmetically. It is impossible to assimilate philosophically that the numbers can increase that way without any impact on risk or resources in the real world. Krugman appears to be saying that money is imaginary (which I already knew) but only in terms of the good consequences of that statement, and never the evil (as when you step onto ground which isn't there).
In my Research by Wandering Around for the Mad Manuscript, I wrote this week about the gold standard, which vaguely seems related to me. As phony, distorted, sophistical as the idea could be, like any human concept, it represented a yearning that money actually be backed by, anchored to, "something real" rather than be completely imaginary. I have started in my writing to analyze concepts in terms of whether they are doubly, or even triply, imaginary.
In my work, I often hit on things about which I have an instinct, but don't fully understand, and which I "Bird Dog" for more investigation. One of these is that deficits are a side effect of democracies. Different structures are susceptible to different diseases; dachsunds have spinal problems. Elected politicians make promises they can't easily keep, then run deficits to perform keeping them.
I therefore think that some day (I expected it long before now) we will fall off the deficit cliff. I still cannot (though I would like to be able to say "nothing human is alien to me") understand the mindset of the people who want to cause a default now. There are, it seems to me, two possibilities, one more sickening than the other. The first is that, since the bus is inevitably going to crash, let's just crash it now, in a controllable way, so that as many survivors as possible can get on with the journey. The sicker possibility is that some of the MAGA supporters advocating a default are aspiring that, beyond Thunderdome, they themselves will be Aunty Entity.
Greg Abbott of Texas
I have been thinking and writing these last few years about "Murder World", in which murder is normalized; in the main article this month I talk about the ex-marine who strangled a homeless man on the New York subway-- and has become a hero to the MAGA crowd, who have donated millions for his defense. Greg Abbott is a leading advocate of murder. Two recent instances include his irrelevant description of some victims of a mass shooting as "illegal immigrants", which suggested that it was all right to kill them. The second is his vow to pardon the man who drove into a Black Lives Matter demo in Austin, then shot the first protester he saw carrying a gun. In Murder World, there are two kinds of people, those with a license to murder, and the very extensive class of people they are permitted to murder, not because of anything they have done, but because of who they are.
Noam Chomsky the Epstein-Shamed
When the Jeffrey Epstein thing blew up, something completely astonishing resulted. My Mad Manuscript about freedom of speech, by then eight or nine thousand pages long, took a very serious hit to its structure, because more than half of (as I now see) the Old White Guys on whom I had based my philosophical analysis, for example Daniel Dawkins and Steven Pinker, turned out to have socialized with Epstein. While it is a very common human failing for people with otherwise good radar to be vulnerable to attention from celebrities including billionaires, and this could imaginably be relatively harmless, (I myself have fallen for this, for a while, on a couple of occasions), this seemed something much worse, representing the moral corruption and intellectual vacuity of an entire class of public intellectuals.
I keep experiencing a sort of Thought Experiment. You have accepted an invitation to travel with Epstein. After a nice dinner, you have retired for the night, when there is a knock on the hotel room door. You open it and there is a beautiful girl whom you do not completely know to be only fourteen years old (you have not examined her picture ID). You may not have had sex in some years, and anyway, there was before that moment absolutely no prospect of your having sex with anyone that young and attractive for the rest of your life. What do you do? By all appearances, she is there voluntarily (no one is there pushing her into your room, and she is smiling). And you think that if you let her come in, which she so eagerly wants to do, no one will ever know.
If you send her away, that raises the question, why are you there in the first place? Epstein whenever he met with you and your colleagues, at Harvard or MIT, was accompanied by that girl and several others like her, who gave him backrubs during your meeting. Given the pervasive wrongness of that scenario, why would you have accepted an invitation to travel with him? It seems to me you were half-corrupted in the first place.
In the main article, about chokeholds, I acknowledge that "justifiable homicides" exist-- for example, when you kill someone who is trying to take your life. I maintain however, that there is no such thing, in the world of crime, as "justifiable sex with a fourteen year old girl". Something which is exploitive and wrong and unequal in the first place, either inevitably harms the intellectual standing and authority of a would-be public intellectual, or proves that it was all a sham, that they never had any in the first place.
I offer as proof Noam Chomsky. He was outed several years after Pinker and Dawkins. And I have to admit, very sadly, I had higher expectations of Chomsky than the others--in my work on the Mad Manuscript, he had become the Iconic Outsider, a public intellectual of high integrity. Now he too is cheapened, well illustrated by his statement that, at the time after his first guilty plea but before his second arrest when Chomsky hung out with him, Epstein had "paid his debt to society". If you pull the telescope back and look at Chomsky with no context, floating in space, the "old" or "real" Noam Chomsky could never have made such a cheesy trite statement. Ever. About anybody.
Libraries
Even at this late date (eight years since I started writing about Trump's meteoric arc in 2015) I still have "Oh wow" and "That can't possibly be" moments in which I experience a sort of culture shock at the MAGA folk's actual intentions. There can be life or death moments, when we pose on cliffs for new stranger-spouses who have taken out large insurance policies. But, on a more trivial level, this can happen every day in today's very harsh, dishonest and confusing environment. A relatively trivial example (sad to say, it should be an important one) is the way public librarians are being bullied in Florida and other red states, which are passing laws allowing any parent to obtain a ban of any book, and even criminalizing library activities. An exemplary instance of the obligatory naive liberal response that I (I am embarrassed to say) experienced is: "If they keep that up, don't they know they won't have libraries?" The horrifying epiphany (what I call in the Mad Manuscript a "Basilisk Moment") is that: they don't want libraries. In my childhood I haunted the public library a short subway ride from my house, sitting there for hours on a Saturday reading science fiction magazines or attempting Proust. Until the pandemic, I would go to my local library once every week or so, and, among other activities, read two articles on unfamiliar topics in the New York Review of Books. The far right doesn't want that; its too exciting and uncertain and might lead you to dissent or a different lifestyle. Bad libraries!