Birch Smith

Moments like this really make me question my sanity as a moral philosopher: there are genuinely hard problems in morality, but this is about as easy as it gets.

If we can't get people to figure out "don't have this kind of relationship with someone 34 years your junior, duh" what's the point?

Gobsmacking irony for Donald Trump, a man who won the presidency with no political experience and who is frequently proven to be incompetent, to advocate voting for a Democrat on the grounds that they are competent and experienced.

In some sense, the current GOP may have started as a "Trump problem" (I'm skeptical, and tend to view him as early symptom rather than cause, but it's at least a plausible story), but it is clearly no longer primarily a "Trump problem." And that's very bad!

For long-term recovery, voters *must* recognize that fact. Even if voters reject Trump but return power to GOP in future elections, while it is still pervaded by illiberal authoritarianism, the authoritarians will likely have enough chances to make authoritarianism stick. I'm not optimistic.

First, as dispositionally authoritarian as Trump is, he isn't *ideological* in the way that all of the plausible successors are. Second, to whatever extent Trump's approval is going down, I see little evidence that the relevant voters recognize the fact that the GOP is an authoritarian party.

"Trump is actually the best remaining Republican" (technically false, but true in the sense that the collection of back-benchers who are better than him are not going to be the ones leading the post-Trump party)is a dispiriting thesis, but important in two senses.

Trump’s Leaked Plan to Deploy the Texas National Guard Against Illinois Will Tear Apart the Union If it goes forward, it will plunge the country into an unprecedented constitutional crisis

We are officially in a constitutional crisis since Texas National Guard has arrived in Illinois: www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-lea...

Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to join The UnPopulist as a contributing editor, and I was glad to take it because I knew I was joining a team that understands the danger this moment presents and is committed to opposing it. I couldn't be happier to be a part of this work. Subscribe!

Talked about this as a potential outcome for tomorrow's episode of Discourse Machine.

We didn't even get to release the episode before it happened

I'm sure someone else has made this observation before me, but this seems to be the sort of "president commits murder under the guise of official duties" situation that we were told was an implausible hypothesis unworthy of consideration during the SCOTUS immunity decision?

As ever, deciding to give everyone a Pocket Cursed Object: Brain Liquefier is having extremely predictable bad consequences.

/4 SCOTUS has lost the presumption of regularity -- the mandate of the legal heavens -- through its shadow docket actions, which by invoking SCOTUS' equitable discretionary powers have obliterated the pretext that SCOTUS is merely calling balls and strikes, merely calling lines where they see them.

I am not kidding when I say the simplest (and basically accurate) way to think about the contemporary epistemic environment is as a global 50% debuff to human cognitive function, video-game style.

America First foreign policy: where God forbid you give a tiny pittance of money to a friendly nation fighting a war against one of your chief strategic foes, but where you *can* light that money on fire changing letterhead.

Here I am, back in the states and already hard at work in the podcast mines

We Are Well on the Road to an Immigration Police State A roundup of The UnPopulist’s work in the first six months of Trump’s second term

Trump’s constant canard is that his mass deportation plans are targeted at dangerous criminals, not ordinary, hardworking people. This was never true—or even *possible* given the scale of his deportation ambitions.

@birchsmith.bsky.social

Birch Smith (@birchsmith.bsky.social) on Trump's fundamentally anti-American legacy.

"concerns about the Turbo Brain Liquefying Gizmo 9000 are absolutely just a moral panic," says person currently in an advanced stage of having her brains liquefied by overexposure to the Turbo Brain Liquefying Gizmo 9000.

Thanks for the rec!

The court pseudo-thinkers of the Right (Yarvin, etc) are largely convinced that the collapse of the current liberal-democratic system is inevitable, and so they plan for how to take over in the aftermath. If our side doesn't have people taking that possibility seriously, we'll be flat-footed.

It's possible that JVL (and me) are wrong about our prophecies of doom. My point here is just that I think it's easy for people to think that ignoring doomerism is cost-free or at least unproblematically beneficial. Ignoring doomerism *if we're actually doomed* can waste a lot of time, etc.

Harm-mitigation and, most importantly, rebuilding strategies demand different things from us. And it's at least possible that strategies and mindsets that would be helpful in the 'prevent system collapse' model could be counterproductive in the 'gotta rebuild' model, and vice versa.

But on the other hand—and this is the part that I think often gets underrated—the kind of stuff you think and do when you believe you can still save the system is often fundamentally different from the stuff you think and do when you recognize that's no longer possible.

Here's something I've wrestled with in my academic work and public philosophy efforts for a while now: at what point do you announce that you think it's too late? On one hand you do risk dispiriting people, especially if you're wrong and you *could have* stopped system failure....

Our political media is simply not equipped to handle a situation where the voters were unambiguously wrong in a way which morally implicates the electorate.

More Everything Forever: Utilitarianism Gone Wrong Discourse Machine · Episode

@birchsmith.bsky.social and I read More Everything Forever by Adam Becker for this episode. One of the best books I've read this year, and a brilliant explainer on why some parts of Silicon Valley are obsessed with Mars and AGI.

Part 2 in a week!

open.spotify.com/episode/1z7g...

(attempts to detox from politics while on vacation are clearly having mixed results)

Yeah there's so much stuff going on that I frequently forget this also happened.

But when I remember it, I think it's one of the more undervalued signs of just how bad things are.

Philosophy:

(This is great for my mental health)