Looking Out At The World From Muncie

 It doesn't look so good sometimes. It feels like my thinking is divorced from the main currents out there. Frankly, I like my thinking better. When I was getting sucked down into nihilism by my depression, I could not understand why thinking diverged from what everyone told me about reality. I thought I was crazy. Not so sure about not being crazy, but it is my life, and I am happier living with what I think is right. I just stay amused about it all.

Proof that Indianapolis is multi-cultural and how much that recognition is in danger: Indy’s Global Village Museum facing funding troubles.

The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids (The New Republic) leaves me wondering why certain ideas do not die. Are our egos so frail? Is our empathy illusory?

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

 The Media (Sheila Kennedy)

Then Krugman gets to what he calls the shaping of the information space, the promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy with “zombie” ideas that experience should have debunked. (Tax cuts for the rich have never stimulated economic growth. Climate science is not a hoax.) The takeover of the legacy media is one way of promoting those “zombie ideas” 

The Ellison family has already acquired CBS and installed Bari Weiss to corrupt it. Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner will effectively destroy CNN as we now know it. (Krugman says “It will almost turn into Fox News. Now, that won’t be a profitable venture. There’s already a Fox News, and so creating another one is not going to actually produce a lot of profits, if any, but that’s not the objective. This is buying influence.”) Look what happened to Twitter when Musk took it over.

Krugman says this takeover of the general information environment by a handful of billionaires will continue, and the only “fix” is to bring the concentration of wealth at the top down

 A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie (Thornfield Hall) why Musk failed to stop The Odyssey: he has no art in his bones.

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