Principles to survive by
This is from way back on January 30, but I don’t think I’ve shared it:
[W]e’re going to have to learn a lot about stupidity over the next four years. I’ve distilled what I’ve learned so far into six main principles:
Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”
Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!
Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.
Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality. The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.
As time has gone by, I’ve developed more and more sympathy for the goals the populists are trying to achieve. America’s leadership class has spent the last few generations excluding, ignoring, rejecting and insulting a large swath of this country. It’s terrible to be assaulted in this way. It’s worse when you finally seize power and start assaulting yourself — and everyone around you. In fact, it’s stupid.
David Brooks
No more blind deference from the Courts
A Federal prosecutor argued that a an entire cased file should be sealed, “in seeming perpetuity,” rather than redacting sensitive portions. One of its arguments was that courts must be “highly deferential to the government’s determination that unsealing would impede its investigation.”
Along with some salty words to the effect that we don’t do secret courts in this country, the magistrate dropped a dandy footnote:
Blind deference to the government? That is no longer a thing. Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in weeks. Numerous career prosecutors have had to resign instead of taking actions that they believe violated their oath of office, or worse, were fired for upholding that oath … On the flip side, Department of Justice leaders have decried criminal investigations from the prior administration as ranging from witch hunts to illegal …
So which prosecutors does the court defer to? The number continues to shrink. Judges have had to reprimand government attorneys for a lack of candor to the court, and worse, probe failures to comply with court orders. … These norms being broken must have consequences. High deference is out; trust, but verify is in.
In re: Search of One Device and Two Individuals, fn. 10. H/T Eugene Volokh.
“Schadenfreude” isn’t quite the right word to describe my feelings about this, because the only sadness I feel is that lawyers in the DOJ have sunk so low that they deserved this.
Critical Trump Theory
At the beginning of his Truth rant, he refers back to the Court of International Trade and asks: “Where do these initial three Judges come from? How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ What other reason could it be?”
(Via David French) (bold added)
Trump talking about himself in the third person seems unhinged to me. Always has, always will.
And if you disagree, the only possible reason is that you hate Tipsy.
(Etiology of Critical Trump Theory)
With friends like Joni
Last Friday, at a town hall meeting in Butler County, Iowa, Senator Joni Ernst delivered a grim message to her constituents. In the midst of an exchange over Medicaid cuts in President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” someone in the crowd shouted at Ernst, “People are going to die!”
Ernst’s immediate response was bizarre. “Well, we all are going to die,” she said.
… [I]t would cost Ernst — who occupies a relatively safe seat in an increasingly red state — virtually nothing to apologize and move on. In fact, just after her flippant comment, she did emphasize that she wanted to protect vulnerable people. The full answer was more complicated than the headline-generating quip.
By the standards of 2025, Ernst’s comment would have been little more than a micro-scandal, gone by the end of the day. And if we lived even in the relatively recent past, demonstrating humility could have worked to her benefit. It can be inspiring to watch a person genuinely apologize.
But we’re in a new normal now.
That means no apologies. That means doubling down. And that can also mean tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.
David French
The way Ernst “sincerely” doubled down, by insults and then a little altar call, made me throw up in my mouth a little:
“I made an incorrect assumption,” she continued, “that everyone in the auditorium understood that, yes, we are all going to perish from this earth.”
She didn’t stop there. “I’m really, really glad that I did not have to bring up the subject of the tooth fairy as well. But for those that would like to see eternal and everlasting life, I’d encourage you to embrace my lord and savior, Jesus Christ.”
With “friends” like Joni Ernst, Jesus don’t need no enemies.
Beyond Good and Evil
Musk and the Muskovites talk about the world of politics and policy in terms of good and evil, and most of the idiotic catchphrases of the contemporary right—elites, Deep State, woke, etc.—are just dumb and/or dishonest ways of saying evil.
…
That kind of thing is the reason Musk failed at DOGE and the reason DOGE itself has failed and will fail to amount to anything other than a gormless blue-ribbon commission run by dilettantes and ignoramuses. Musk et al.—and Trump himself above all—believe that they can set things right in our wobbly republic if only they could simply punish the wicked and reward the virtuous, and, because their ignorance is compounded by arrogance, it never occurs to them that this is another way to say, “We require the power to disadvantage people who compete with us for status or resources in order to hand out favors for our friends.” Trump is a kind of naïve Nietzschean, unable to distinguish what is good from what he wants
…
The people who know what they are talking about talk about incentives. The people who don’t know what they’re talking about—or who wish to deceive you and to treat you like a fool—talk about good and evil.
On either side of the aisle, the smarter kind of politician understands that our problems are not simple. But many of them believe that you are.
Kevin D. Williamson, Beyond Good and Evil
Speaking of incentives, especially the perverse kind:
[The Affordable Care Act] gave states a financial incentive to treat able-bodied adults better than the disabled. The federal government gives states $9 for every $1 they spend on able-bodied adults, but only $1.33 for every dollar spent on children, people with disabilities, pregnant women and seniors. Drawn by the promise of so much federal money, Arkansas’s Democratic governor expanded Medicaid in 2013. The program now covers more than 230,000 able-bodied adults.
Because able-bodied adults bring so much money, Arkansas makes them a priority. We applied for in-home care in 2023, but state officials said it would take 10 years. Democrats are doing everything they can to keep my son on the wait list. They’re trying to frighten Republicans into abandoning work requirements by claiming they’re ineffective, unnecessary and cruel—none of which is true.
Nick Stehle, My Son Is Counting on Medicaid Work Requirements
I worked professionally on qualifying elderly people for Medicaid to help with the cost of nursing home care, but I had no idea that “poor people Medicaid” (versus “old people Medicaid”) had such a perverse incentive built in.
Trump is no avatar of civilization or culture
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, posted on social media that Trump’s military invasion of Los Angeles “is a fight to save civilization.” A letter from Charlie Kirk’s “Turning Point America” arrived Saturday, asking me for money to help Trump restore the culture.
I’m not in the market for Stephen Miller’s kind of civilization or Kirk’s kind of culture.
That was then, this is now
When California has asked for needed federal help—during the wildfires earlier this year for example—Trump has begrudged that help and played politics with it. Trump is now forcing help that the city and state do not need and do not want, not to restore law but to assert his personal dominance over the normal procedures to enforce the law.
David Frum
Rearranging the deck chairs
Constitutionally, it’s hard for me to avoid the logic of “unitary executive” theory, but now that Trump is that objective my heart protests, and I at least want the mildest plausible version of the theory (e.g., the President can fire and replace agency heads but public-facing workers can continue to enjoy civil service protections).
On the other hand, the ship seems to be sinking so maybe it’s silly to worry too much about the locations of deck furniture.
Riots are unpopular
Every time a protester burns a car, hurls a rock, or smashes a window, the protester ceases to be a lawful demonstrator and becomes a rioter. And contrary to a lot of left-wing romantic nonsense, rioting is not only wrong and illegal, it’s politically unpopular. Then-Massachusetts Gov. Calvin Coolidge became a national star by calling in the Massachusetts Guard in response to the 1919 Boston police strike, which had ignited riots and looting. In the 1968 election, Richard Nixon used the riots after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to win the presidency on a promise of restoring law and order.
The fringe left has a long love affair with the “propaganda of the deed,” a stupid concept holding that direct or revolutionary action persuades the masses to align with their cause. In America, it almost never works. But for some reason, too many mainstream progressives get tongue-tied when it comes to condemning their fringe unequivocally.
The political utility of domestic unrest is far more acute and consequential under Donald Trump because he subscribes to his own theory of the propaganda of the deed. Trump has long been enamored of using the military to quash domestic unrest. In a 1990 Playboy interview, he expressed admiration for the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to display “the power of strength” in crushing the Tiananmen protests. In his first term, he reportedly wanted troops to fire on protesters after the murder of George Floyd. Since the beginning of his second term, his administration has been pushing political, legal, and rhetorical claims that he should be granted wartime powers, most notably on trade and immigration.
Jonah Goldberg
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Jonah Goldberg.
Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.
David Brooks
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 