China rises. We suffer Trump.

 

So now we are in a moment when Donald Trump is making a big show of deference to China's President Xi. Xi is Trump's kind of guy, a personalist dictator, someone who replaced a collective leadership which bound itself to real limits despite claiming ultimate power over its country. The first among equals became top dog.

 

Trump is a weak imitator of his hero. American society remains resistant. In the photo, note Trump's full time sycophant Natalie Harp, her job to fluff his sick ego, trailing the big boys.  Sad.

 

Several weeks ago, New Yorker reporter Evan Osmos passed along a sober assessment of contemporary China. It's not alarmist; rather it's thoughtful.  Xi's China sees itself on top of the world, not without reason.

While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said. 

The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”

... Rush Doshi, a professor at Georgetown and a China specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, sees in Trump’s pursuit of territorial control a recurring historical error. In the eighteenth century, while Russia fixated on conquering Eurasia, Britain developed the steam engine; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while Europeans fought over Africa, Americans mastered the assembly line. Today, while the U.S. tries to govern Venezuela and hobble Iran and Cuba, “China is focussed on winning the technologies of the future,” Doshi said. 

If the U.S. were to lose the competition over the next wave of industries—including A.I., biotech, and robotics—as it lost the ones over solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.” ... To China, Doshi said, “autocracies are considered perfectly legitimate, and technology is used to strengthen them. China increasingly says to autocrats, Would you like to stay in power? I can help you with that.”

Yet Osnos reports that there are observers who don't see Trump's bow to China as indicating permanent global subservience. Rather we are spectators to a contest of somewhat precarious oligarchies -- this is unstable.

... Mark Leonard, the director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me that the international system the U.S. constructed after the Second World War—and ran, often to its benefit—is “definitely dead and beyond redemption.” He said that Trump’s dismantling of the country’s alliances signaled the end of the “willingness of the American public to play the role America has played for most of the last eight decades.”

But America’s diminished stature does not necessarily clear a path for China. Few people these days are enthusiastic about the prospect of a world dominated by either superpower. ...

... The likely successor to the American order, then, is not a Chinese order so much as what Leonard calls a period of “un-order”: a jungle in which every country hedges, arms, subsidizes, hoards, and searches for choke points to exploit. In the words of Suisheng Zhao, a China scholar at the University of Denver, it is the makings of a “twenty-first-century Hobbesian struggle of all against all.”

During the Cold War, as futurists on both sides of the Iron Curtain plotted to control the direction of history, another group coalesced around a more modest idea. Mankind 2000, as it called itself, was made up of European survivors of fascism who were wary of both Communist determinism and American hubris. They warned that man could be “absorbed by his machine” and declared, “The future belongs to all of us, not only to small oligarchic groups.”

Spend enough time in Beijing and Washington these days and the rivalry looks less like a clash of competing systems than like a race between small oligarchic groups—tight circles of men with immense power over everyone else’s future....

Scary, but not simple or inevitable. Oligarchs and aspiring monarchs always think they've solved the problem of pesky peoples who think they ought to get a say in how their lives are lived. Perhaps China's future is not so clear. New York Times correspondent Keith Bradsher, writing from Beijing,  sees a more complicated reality in the country he has watched develop for 30 years.

For China and its top leader, Xi Jinping, the biggest prize from a summit in Washington, notably free from confrontation, may be simple: time.

Time to cope with a housing market crash that has wiped away the savings of tens of millions of Chinese families. Time to deal with local governments running short of money as land-use revenue collapses. Time to make China even less vulnerable to economic pressure from the United States and other industrialized countries.

And perhaps most consequentially, time to prepare for the once-in-five-years Communist Party national congress next autumn, which will choose a new slate of top leaders to work under Mr. Xi.

“By trying to stabilize relations with the U.S., China can better concentrate on its own priorities,” said Wu Xinbo, a leading American studies scholar at Fudan University in Shanghai. ...

It ain't easy governing one of the most populated, fastest growing economies and societies the world has ever seen. China is big and on the rise, but its destination, and ours while in our relative decline, has not yet been written.

Timothy Snyder on virtue ....

I found this interesting and challenging. The eminent historian of Ukraine and eastern Europe is sitting in bunker near the frontline against Russia's invasion, thinking about meanings and moral virtue.

Moral Language (Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10) by Timothy Snyder

Kharkiv Meditations, 3/10

Read on Substack

Here's my abbreviated transcription: 

... it's alright to use moral terms in general. ... I'm trying to break through a certain taboo we have about acceptable ways of expressing ourselves on media .. on the ways it is acceptable to talk about politics or even society.  ... we find ourselves talking about interests and calculations as though those were real. ... But what about things like cowardice and courage?  ... Without terms like cowardice and courage, you can't talk about politics ... especially when you get down to a small family of oligarchs where human vices and virtues start to count for more than they would if politics were apportioned [characterized?] more neatly by ... the rule of law. ... It becomes necessary to use these kinds of terms to describe ...

I don't think you can talk about the leaders of the present administration without talking about greed. ... Greed is more real, more real than interests or calculations. ... And if we deprive ourselves of that language ... if we don't have a word for putting our commitments around a vice like greed, then we can't address it. ... we can't solve it. ... if the people who are greedy or avaricious ... if they parade it, they don't hide it, if they display it ostentatiously, what are we do?  

Because if we lack the word to describe what they are doing, they are changing reality. ... They are making things normal. And we are helping them because they are embodying ever more perfectly a vice. And we are embodying ever more perfectly the inability to describe that vice.  ... Together we are creating a politics [in which], let's say greed, becomes normal.

... terms like cowardice or courage are as much of our objective reality as terms like interests or calculations. And if we are afraid to use them, we're not actually describing any reality better, we're describing it worse. ... we may also be contributing to some of the vices we should be describing.  

 A few observations on Snyder's lesson for us -- perhaps I should call it his sermon. 

•  If they trouble themselves to look at the behavior of our rulers, most Americans seem to understand that we are seeing extraordinary violations a moral code so fundamental that it is hardly conscious. "Trump is a crook. He doesn't care who he hurts. They lie. They are careless of human life. They are cruel." This moral instinct either isn't there at all or, among a considerable majority, is simple and obvious. This moral repulsion accounts for the fact that right now polls show intense disapprovers of the Trump administration vastly outnumber intense approvers. The repulsion fuels intensity.

•  Among most people, approval or disapproval of politicians does include personal assessments about "interests or calculations." The huge example is folks' recollection that prices were lower under Trump I. But this assessment exists within a context in which hardly anyone believes that politicians are working for them, not for themselves. When you think the politicians are just transactional scum anyway, it's easy and adequate simply to weigh what they might do for you. But if you think pols should provide anything more than a cheap date, the moral repulsion kicks in these days.

• Snyder seems to me to be talking to, and about people, who cannot use moral language about the Trump regime for fear of showing themselves to be unsophisticated -- not savvy. In the media, and perhaps in academia, defaulting to "interests or calculations" when moral repulsion would be truer and more accurate looks to me like habitual timidity. Elite institutions too often reward pusillanimity, reward shaving the rough edges off uncomfortable truths. The Trump regime is showing that the often gray haired zealots of "No Kings" and the like may be the real sophisticates in our current moment.

Of parks and builders

Once upon a time, Americans with foresight empowered an imaginative creator, Frederick Law Olmsted, to build urban parks in many of our burgeoning cities. I grew up near to one of Olmsted's projects, Delaware Park in Buffalo. Parents worried that our pack of postwar WWII children would get in trouble in "the park"-- but we ventured there by ourselves despite their disapproval. 

Heather Cox Richardson's "250 to 250" project tells the story of the great park builder in this video.

San Francisco's Golden Gate Park were I play nowadays was NOT an Olmsted creation. He thought the edge of the Pacific Ocean dunes was too harsh an environment for his sort of nature park. I'm okay with it and hope to get back to it very soon when my busted leg and hip heal.

Women of tech: disillusioned, disoriented, and disenchanted

Well I sure didn't see this one coming. WIRED magazine -- the indispensable technology and science publication -- has devoted an issue to women. Women as tech workers, as AI moguls, as engineers, as inventors, as the unseen substratum of Silicon Valley. And it's doozy!

The editor, Katie Drummond, pulls no punches. Too many of the men (boys?) of the technocracy routinely abuse their female coworkers.

... Off the top of my head, and across a 17-year career: There was the boss who, upon learning that I wanted kids, said that I seemed “too cold” to be a parent. I held my tears long enough to make it to the bathroom. 

A few years later, I remember being visibly pregnant in another employer’s office, as he joked that a woman as intense as me would probably keep her baby locked in a closet. 

One boss tried to pay me exponentially less than my male predecessor, because, he said, I was younger and less authoritative. A highly regarded media company enrolled me in its internal program for promising female leaders, which was being run by two male executives. 

I stood last year among a crowd of my peers at a packed event, listening to a prominent think-tank leader (male) credit WIRED’s previous editor in chief (also male) with the magazine’s successes during my tenure. 

Let’s not forget the cofounder of this very publication, who suggested via email following the 2024 election that I might “seppuku” myself because he disagreed with an editor’s letter I’d written. 

And in 2023, The New York Times published a story about my appointment as WIRED’s global editorial director—then had to issue a correction for inaccurately stating that I was the first woman to run the magazine. In fact, Katrina Heron ran WIRED from 1997 to 2001. 

She is certain it is time for women in tech to speak up:

It’s gotten easier to be an ambitious woman, but if my own personal experience is any indication, not by nearly enough. ... In a bid to command the respect at work that a man would, I’ve often felt the need to behave more like a stereotypical one: meaner, louder, less empathetic. I hate that. And I’ve got it relatively easy: If a white, straight woman working in media and technology deals with this much bullshit, imagine the experience of a woman who happens to be a person of color, or gay, or transgender.

... Deciding in 2026 to commit an entire issue to all things women might seem regressive, or too obvious, or even unnecessary in an era where many people—and plenty in tech—are happy to wave off the notion that gender is still “a thing” to contend with.

I disagree. A convicted sex predator, after all, is in the White House; the tech industry executives in his ear are virtually all men. Women do wield power in Silicon Valley, but far too many still serve at the pleasure of a man above them. When Mark Zuckerberg bemoans the loss of “masculine energy” in his workforce, and Pete Hegseth says that the military is too “effeminate,” and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts impact Black female civil servants above all other groups—it can seem like they want to erase women altogether. 

And it’s infuriating. The world deserves better heroes, women deserve better colleagues, and my daughter—who sleeps in a bed, not a locked closet—deserves to be less furious than I am when she’s 40. ...

This women's issue of WIRED includes two investigative features. 

Lauren Goode describes her Search for Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful Women. Her essay is thoughtful and a little bemused. There are women who reach the heights of apparent power, but what's it all for?

... I realized that the real question is not who is most powerful, but why this question is still, in 2026, so difficult to answer. What’s missing from their lives or résumés? Why is there no woman Elon? Why don’t we have our own all-powerful heroine or supervillainess? 

... Women now possess all kinds of capital, which is in itself remarkable. But they are choosing not to fully enter the matrix. And really, why would they? What awaits them on the other side? 

Sandra Upson provide a survey and a lot of telling responses from 643 women working in various roles in tech. Not all feel alienated by Silicon Valley's futuristic fantasies and bro culture. But too many are. 

... Of course, plenty of women in WIRED’s survey reported feeling satisfied with their careers, and not everyone’s been, shall we say, manhandled. But so many have. 

More than a third of the women surveyed said they’d experienced gender-based harassment or bias at work. 

One after another, women reported being sexually harassed by male supervisors, getting paid less than their male peers, getting passed over for promotions, getting talked over in meetings. They were denied opportunities because men can “handle the pressure better.” 

Another popular trope is the man who only seems to hear a good idea when another man says it. You don’t need to listen to a three-hour podcast to find the manosphere; it’s right there in the conference room. 

Few respondents are as blunt as this woman:

“I hate the right-wing CEOs marching us along to a dystopian fascist hellscape because they get a boner over escaping to Mars.” ENGINEER, AGE 45–54

Sure looks like that to many of us mere observers of the guys who aim to determine our futures ...

On moving on from what Trump has broken ...

by way of Jess Piper

Maybe I'm tempting fate by even thinking about this -- and most likely the state of the nation will get even worse before it gets better -- but I nonetheless thought these observations about what we the people might want from new rulers when the Trump regime falls would be worth passing along.

Journalist Brian Beutler opines: 

“Looking Forward” Is An Accountability Catastrophe

... Left to their own devices, people will forget. When Republicans fail, they put a lot of effort into hastening the process of forgetting, into turning everyone’s attention to whatever’s going wrong right now. The perverse thing is that Democrats also seek to hasten the process of forgetting.

Their model of politics tells them holding the center is everything (it’s definitely important) and that this is accomplished, at all times, by meeting or at least speaking to the immediate needs of whoever happens to inhabit the center. If you’re “looking backwards” you aren’t focused on the future, and thus aren’t attending to the needs of regular people. Or at least they won’t perceive you to be focused on their needs. So Democrats “look forward.”

It’s why Barack Obama squelched investigation and prosecution of the Bush torture regime. It’s why he made preemptive concessions for bipartisan cooperation, and accepted that the buck stopped with him from day one, rather than remind people every day that his opposition in Congress comprised the very same people who wrecked the country. It’s why Joe Biden tried so hard to write Donald Trump out of the story of his presidency. This is catastrophic for political accountability. In a very obvious way, it helps Republicans rehabilitate themselves. ...

Yup. Those of us who've been around since Reagan (remember Iran-Contra?) and certainly since George W.'s wars, know the pattern.

Beutler goes on:

I cling to the blind hope that they’ve learned this lesson. That as Trump leads us into a dark era, and Democrats grok that their next turn in power will entail repairing a great deal of wreckage, they will realize they can’t repeat the same mistake. They may have to surrender Trump’s war in Iran for him, but they’d absolutely have to define it that way—and ideally do so while holding officers and civilian leaders who broke the law or committed war crimes accountable. Trump should get what he wants insofar as his name should be emblazoned on everything he broke in the world. And Republicans should get what they deserve, haunted by their complicity with Trump for the rest of their lives.

This is a slightly simplified version of the story. But one of the reasons FDR’s presidency was viewed as a success at the time, and why it had such long coattails for the Democratic Party, is that he didn’t behave the way today’s Democrats behave. He benefited from the fact that the depression began long before he took office, and Hoover bore clear responsibility for it. But FDR rejected Hoover’s efforts to get him to endorse a joint, bipartisan relief package before his term began. This made the lines of responsibility clear. Republicans were responsible for the Great Depression, Democrats were responsible for ending it. 

Joe Biden could have had something like that: Trump, responsible for COVID, and the economic collapse it precipitated, Biden, for restoring normalcy. But he couldn’t tell that story because he was determined not to say “the former guy’s” name.

... We can’t expect the public to remain grateful or bitter forever. But Americans are not amnesiacs. Ask typical swing voters for their impressions of Jimmy Carter, and while their responses wouldn’t be unanimous, they’d be much more heavily negative than positive—and they wouldn’t be able to say why. But I know why! It’s because that’s what Republicans wanted people to think, and so they said so, constantly, for decades.

Fortunately there are prominent Democrats and friends who are already revving up for accountability. Rep. Jamie Raskin has been through impeaching Trump once and he's not giving up, even if that mechanism does not provide a simple legal fix. We can count on AOC and Rep. Robert Garcia. In general, we're seeing a generational turnover among Dems in the House. About time. The older timers did their service, but taking back the country from MAGA, the tech bros, and the crooks needs younger, tougher Dem pols.

According to Beutler, whatever US government comes out of the GOP ruins could be both effective and smart.

... With a free hand to govern, Democrats should do things that are good, legal, and in the public interest—and that they have the competency to execute. DOGE showed that “just do[ing] things” can be a disaster, but speed was not the culprit per se. It was that the project was inherently malign, and corrupt—a bad idea that would’ve ended poorly no matter what, where the purpose of the speed was to break things before the law could catch up. 

Democrats could tear down the ballroom with that kind of speed and it would be fine; but it would be a bad idea to try to insure 40 million people overnight by declaring a national emergency, then daring the Supreme Court to overturn it, particularly given the option of passing a Medicare for All bill over the course of a few weeks.

So, clear the decks, be prepared to move fast, but don’t insist on speed when deliberation is important, and don’t refuse to choose battles out of stubbornness.

Political ingenuity has not been the Democrats forte for many years. If country is to make it out of the current disaster, Dems are going to have to be brave and supple. When we see a hint of this, let's get behind them and push ...

Friday cat blogging

Here I sit, convalescing from my violent encounter with an asphalt road, and Mio keeps up sentry duty. This human better not try disappearing for two weeks again!

He's not the only watcher. It sure is nice to be out of rehab and continuing recovery at home!

Elon Musk has a problem

One of Musk's many sons (he's a determined, heedless procreator) turned out to be not a boy but a transgirl -- and he can't seem to face the facts. So his idea of trying to help MAGA win Senate and Congressional races this year is to charge Dem candidates with being pro-trans. 

Most of those Dems are only notional, unenthusiastic, supporters of gender equity; it's just noise to them. So when Musk beats them up, few tell the bully to F-off and most weave and dodge. (Amy Acton who is running to be Ohio's governor seems an actual trans-phobe; most of the rest of them are just politicians who are too ready to adjust to whatever they think constituents might like.)

Thing is, as Erin in the Morning reports, this is not really a winning pitch that Musk is buying with his millions. 

This week’s ad spend is largely driven by [Musk's] America PAC, which has dropped $100 million on anti-transgender ads targeting Democrats. “The PAC’s emphasis on trans issues is striking because that’s been a much less prominent theme in GOP Senate ads so far this election cycle, per AdImpact, which tracks political advertising,” Axios’s Mike Zapler reports. “On its face, the strategy is at odds with what voters say they want candidates to talk about. Concerns about the economy dominate; trans and LGBT issues barely register.”

Zapler’s point is correct. Anti-trans ads may scare Democratic candidates, but among the general public, polls consistently show that voters rank transgender issues among the lowest-priority issues they care about and vote on, with less than 1% of respondents naming “wokeness/transgender issues” as a top issue. Regardless of the public’s specific views on topics such as transgender people’s access to bathrooms or gender-affirming care for transgender youth, voters decide their ballots far more on issues such as housing affordability, gas prices, and jobs. 

Democrats who decide to capitulate on transgender issues in response to these ads, as some have, risk alienating their progressive base while gaining nothing from Republicans, who will simply move on to hitting them on another trans-related issue.

Nevertheless, anti-transgender advertisements will saturate the airwaves for the next two months as the election draws near. For transgender people, that means constant exposure to hateful messaging, running alongside the evening news and football and appearing on the internet without warning. These ads do incredible damage to unsuspecting viewers. They paint transgender people as predatory and disgusting to a national audience in a cheap attempt to win votes, and every viewing raises the temperature of the hate and abuse directed at a community that is already a target. 

Meanwhile, Democrats face a decision point of their own: capitulate and lend these ads credibility, or defend the transgender constituents being used as bait. So far, in some of the states Musk is targeting, they have chosen the former, and the ads have not stopped.

Musk is a sick puppy -- a damaged man with lots of money acting out his underlying fear that spewing his semen might not guarantee his immortality. You too will die in God's time, Elon; get over yourself. Life is better over here in the real world.

Nightmare or daydream for this moment?

Somehow I don't think this is how humanity's encounter with the smart machines we are building will turn out, but Politico's Matt Wuerker offers a nice fantasy.

 

Guess they found their preferred alignment.

LGBT+ Pride, Mongolian style

 

Our newly met friends in Ulaanbaatar sent along this short video from their recent Pride festival. There's a freshness and pure joy to their struggle -- too often delight has been leached out of our community here. But they know -- gay is good; they are good. Enjoy.

An insight into the pungent politics of endangering humanity

We live involuntarily in the same world with the ostentatiously vocal tech bros; it's not hard to think they often come off as more like shallow teenage boys than humanly useful geniuses. But amid the real world noise about Artificial Intelligence, it's worth teasing out exactly what some of them are doing in our ordinary politics.

The always annoying but frequently insightful Matt Yglesias reports on some grubby real world machinations in the AI business. Many workers and some tech barons are warning there should be more regulation -- but as always, the devil is in the details.

... [the company] OpenAI’s official position in its communications to its employees is that OpenAI is not behind the anti-regulation super PAC Leading the Future.

But nobody working professionally in American politics believes this.

Leading the Future is funded in large part by OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman and his wife. It was conceptualized, by all accounts, by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer... Unfortunately, his expertise in helping tech companies win regulatory fights in blue states — an endeavor I normally support — is in this particular case gravely endangering humanity.

Leading the Future has dumped huge amounts of money into primaries to try to defeat candidates who advocate for A.I. safety regulation. More than that, though, it’s trying to chill the whole topic. It exists not so much to spend money in the midterms as to convey to Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer something like “nice anti-Trump thermostatic backlash you’ve got there … would be a shame if hundreds of millions of dollars came off the sidelines to be used against all your frontliners because party leaders embraced A.I. safety.”

So, again, if you work at OpenAI and believe that collective action is needed to address this problem, you have to understand that your company’s executives are massive stumbling blocks. 

Putting out fake statements distancing the company from Leading the Future is worse than doing nothing. You and your colleagues need to work together to demand that the company cease and desist from this effort to chill federal regulation. If the company won’t do it, you need to walk.

By contrast, while I would never in a million years say that [the AI company]Anthropic’s conduct as a company is beyond reproach or above suspicion — that’s the whole reason we need actual regulation here and not just to root for the “good guys” to win the race — their political conduct is consistent with the view that collective action is desirable.

Yglesias makes some prescriptions for reining in the many dangers that may be arising from the AI our tech barons are racing to build. I don't know if he is really onto something. But I do know that understanding the entanglement of the tech moguls with very conventional US political incentives has to be a big part of curbing the worst potentials of AI.