I’ll take Kurtis Blow, thank you very much.
Nas and Lauryn Hill will do.
Hell, I’ll take Tony Bennett.
…
As some of you may have guessed, I’m alluding to this. (To be completely fair to Jeffrey Goldberg and The Atlantic magazine, if I got a quote like that out of an interview with an Oval Office occupant, I’d run with it on the magazine cover, too).
I will not devote another word to that story in the body of today’s Abbreviated Pundit Roundup.
Moving right along...
Paul Krugman writes on his Substack that the continued erosion of the U.S. economy is a critical development.
Just to be clear, I am very much not in the camp that urges Democrats to focus on kitchen-table issues and ignore the Trump regime’s other outrages. Polls tell us that Americans aren’t as ignorant and self-centered as some political consultants would have their clients believe. Many ordinary people are outraged at the news of renditions of legal residents to gulags in El Salvador. The public overwhelmingly opposes Trumpist defunding of medical research and attacks on universities, as well as the DOGEing of Social Security.
Democrats shouldn’t give Trump a pass on any of his destructive actions. They should, instead, tell voters that stripping people of their civil rights, annihilating education and science, destroying U.S. trade and poisoning our international relationships has one unifying goal: to destroy civil society in the name of MAGA.
That said, I believe that the administration’s metastasizing economic catasrophe is a critical development.
Thomas Edsall of The New York Times wonders how dangerous Trump will be if what is left of this country’s institutions continue backing him into a corner.
Public opinion has turned against him, the economy is faltering, the Supreme Court has ordered him to stand down, his tariffs have backfired and such conservative mainstays as National Review and The Wall Street Journal are questioning his judgment.
How does a stymied autocrat deal with defeat? As the opposition gains strength, frustrating the nation’s commander in chief, how will Trump respond?
It is unthinkable to imagine him graciously acknowledging defeat, changing direction and moving on. [...]
As Trump’s armor begins to crack, you have to wonder: Who is more dangerous — a triumphant Trump or a wounded Trump?
Evgeny Morozov writes a sprawling hot mess but highly informative essay about the prophets and oracles of Silicon Valley for El País in English.
Consider the heresies of investors such as Balaji Srinivasan and Peter Thiel, with his idea of the “network state,” conjures blockchain fiefdoms with à la carte citizenship and pay-per-view police forces, while the latter pines for oceanic platforms where the wealthy might float beyond government reach
Elsewhere, Sam Altman drafts planetary blueprints for AI (non-)regulation, while crypto acolytes (Marc Andreessen, David Sacks), aspiring celestial colonizers (Musk, Bezos), and nuclear revivalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Altman) offer their own grandiose, exciting solutions to problems of seemingly unknown origin. [...]
Today, it’s increasingly clear that it’s the tech oligarchs — not their algorithmically-steered platforms — who present the greater danger. Their arsenal combines three deadly implements: plutocratic gravity (fortunes so vast they distort reality’s basic physics), oracular authority (their technological visions treated as inevitable prophecy), and platform sovereignty (ownership of the digital intersections where society’s conversation unfolds). Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), Andreessen’s strategic investments into Substack, Peter Thiel’s courting of Rumble, the conservative YouTube: they’ve colonized both the medium and the message, the system and the lifeworld.
Sam Jones, Ashifa Kassim, and Jon Henley of the Guardian report that electricity has been restored in most of Spain and Portugal after a massive blackout that affected both countries.
Electricity had been restored to nearly 90% of mainland Spain by early on Tuesday, the grid operator REE said. Power was restored overnight to around 6.2m households in Portugal out of 6.5m, according to the national electricity grid operator. Lights also came on again in Madrid and in Portugal’s capital, Lisbon.
Barely a corner of the peninsula, which has a joint population of almost 60 million people, escaped the blackout. But no firm cause for the shutdown has yet emerged.
Portuguese prime minister, Luis Montenegro, said the source of the outage was “probably in Spain”. Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said that all the potential causes were being analysed and warned the public not to speculate because of the risk of “misinformation”.
Earlier, the blackout was blamed by Portugal’s grid operator REN on extreme temperature variations, and left the two countries without trains, metros, traffic lights, ATMs, phone connections and internet access.
Media critic Bernhard Poerksen continues his quarterly audit of content at Der Spiegel, this time focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the magazine’s coverage of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD).
...I, too, have been infected. I am now suffering from a serious case of praise-phobia. Which has led me to spend the last several months doing little else then scouring all of DER SPIEGEL’s more extensive articles about the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on the search for mistakes. And yes, I did find a few points worthy of criticism, which I will examine at length below – but which, in truth, have more to do with the media industry’s lack of dialogue and empathy as a whole. [...]
Again, DER SPIEGEL delivers comprehensively substantiated, multifaceted, concrete warnings from the deeply reactionary, intellectually entrenched AfD world. It is a world in which sweaty, hardworking men still chop their own wood and where there is, happily, no climate crisis. It is a world in which the Nazi era is "but a spot of bird shit” (Alexander Gauland) on German history and in which the party once campaigned for its own deportation and remigration program with gummy-candy airplanes for the kids and with candidates dressed up as pilots ready to carry out the deportations themselves. All of this is intelligently and comprehensively covered.
But in the background of this extremely successful informational work lurk dilemmas that are unfortunately not spelled out with the necessary clarity. And now, all those who have a weakness for negativity can let out a sigh of relief. This – after quite a fair amount of praise – is where my criticism begins. Because in DER SPIEGEL’s AfD coverage, there is a clearly perceptible awareness of the dilemmas that exist, but there are no tried and tested formats for debating those dilemmas – formats that could introduce, could provide a platform, for a more interactive, dialogue-based approach for those for whom all this coverage is produced. The readers. And that is a shortcoming. Because communication that is aware of existing dilemmas, as communication psychologist Friedemann Schulz von Thun has demonstrated, signals a different, pro-pluralism approachability. In times of instantaneous hostility, it opens up an awareness of new perspectives. Because suddenly, readers are confronted with competing viewpoints in addition to the costs and risks of their own position. Such thinking, guided by context and aware of contradictions, is by its very nature dialogical, as one struggles to find one’s own situationally appropriate point of view in full view of everyone without the prospect of landing on a perfect solution for eternity.
Finally today, Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi Jawed Naqvi channels a bit of Noam Chomsky in reminding the world of the enormous environmental stakes for the region as India and Pakistan try to avoid yet another armed conflict over Kashmir.
The nuclear dimension of the threat is all too well known, but the reference to environmental catastrophe is less widely grasped. It, nevertheless, holds great relevance for South Asia, where rivers are facing the combined adverse consequences of urbanisation, big dams arresting the flow, and snow in the lofty mountain ranges losing cover with global warming. India and Pakistan are both facing the growing twin challenge of flood and drought. A water-sharing dispute would pose a mortal crisis for one or both.
Also, Kashmir, claimed by three and not just two countries, has increasingly been the venue for devastating floods, the season for which is not far away. The tragedy of Pahalgam is heartrending, but it cannot be redressed with war drums, weaponising water-sharing or spreading hate.
I knew that China and Kashmir shared a border but I didn’t know that China lays claim to some parts of Kashmir.
And the Iran information in that report is very interesting.
Try to have the best possible day everyone!
