Linked List: April 6, 2025

Sunday, 6 April 2025

My sincere thanks to The Ole Independence Hall Hooligans for sponsoring this past week at DF to promote democracy. That’s it. A real sponsorship, real money, raised by a group of readers who simply wanted the ad space on DF to promote, as they described it, “the enduring and aspirational project that is democracy.”

In their sponsored RSS entry to start the week, they quoted the preamble to the US Constitution. I’ll go a decade earlier, and quote from the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. [...]

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. [...]

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

Sounds like someone in the news today (and yesterday, and alas, surely again tomorrow). There is no greater threat to democracy itself than a delusional mad king, whether he wears a crown or a ridiculous ugly red cap. Take action and make your voice heard now — democracy in action is democracy’s only defense.

The Spectacle of Incompetence ★

David Remnick, in a fine short piece for The New Yorker on Signalgate:

This is an Administration that does not have to slip on a Signal banana peel to reveal its deepest-held prejudices and its painful incapacities. You get the sense that we would learn little if we were privy to a twenty-four-hour-a-day live stream of its every private utterance. Part of what was so appalling about Trump and Vance’s recent meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky was not just their penchant for channelling the world view and negotiating points of Vladimir Putin but their comfort in expressing them, barking them, at the Ukrainian President in front of reporters in the Oval Office.

Stupidity and ignorance as a governing style. That’s it. They are exactly who they claim they are, and in private speak how they do in public. There is no secret plan.

These idiots do not believe polluting the atmosphere with carbon emissions has caused calamitous damage to our climate, despite the fact that experts, decades ago, almost universally predicted it would. Few issues in science had as much expert consensus.

These idiots think vaccines — one of the great breakthroughs in the history of science and medicine — are a bigger health risk than the diseases they immunize against. Now there are unvaccinated American kids dying from measles, a disease that was effectively wiped out in the modern world by the time I was born.

These idiots think the universe is only 6,000 years old.

Now they’re bringing the same sort of idiocy, unbound by critical thinking, history, or anything recognized as economic expertise, to trade policy.