What I loved, however, about JLo and Gaga and, later, Katy Perry giving us full-blown celebrity grand malarkey in a quite tense political setting is that it was, at least to me, a joyful infusion of bedlam in a space where, for so long, all the bedlam has been so joyless. I don’t feel like it’s an indicator of an old world returning—that can’t be the objective—but I took it as a reminder that some of the better, weirder, let’s get louder things of the old world might carry over into the new world that I hope we’re making.
While some right-wing Republicans have howled that Biden’s firing of burrowing Trump loyalists betrays his promise of “unity,” in fact the new administration’s quick restoration of a qualified, nonpartisan bureaucracy is an attempt to stabilize our democracy.
Democracy depends on a nonpartisan group of functionaries who are loyal not to a single strongman but to the state itself. Loyalty to the country, rather than to a single leader, means those bureaucrats follow the law and have an interest in protecting the government. It is the weight of that loyalty that managed to stop Trump from becoming a dictator—he was thwarted by what he called the “Deep State,” people who were loyal not to him but to America and our laws. That loyalty was bipartisan. For all that Trump railed that anyone who stood up to him was a Democrat, in fact many—Special Counsel Robert Mueller and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, for example—are Republicans.
Because beauracracy isn't necessarily a bad word. It can also be a stable a new regulating force.
Indeed, at some future point, we might look back at the 2020s the way we look back at the 1980s to see two eras reacting politically to respective previous eras, setting the tone for a generation each. The 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush, were a reaction to Black freedom and power. The 2020s, under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris might be, in the end, a reaction to radical right-wing collectivism. For now, we can only hope that’s the case.
These crises of democracy did not occur randomly. Rather, they developed in the presence of one or more of four specific threats: political polarization, conflict over who belongs in the political community, high and growing economic inequality, and excessive executive power. When those conditions are absent, democracy tends to flourish. When one or more of them are present, democracy is prone to decay.
Today, for the first time in its history, the United States faces all four threats at the same time. It is this unprecedented confluence—more than the rise to power of any particular leader—that lies behind the contemporary crisis of American democracy. The threats have grown deeply entrenched, and they will likely persist and wreak havoc for some time to come.
...snip...
The situation is dire. To protect the republic, Americans must make strengthening democracy their top political priority, using it to guide the leaders they select, the agendas they support, and the activities they pursue.
I am four years late to read On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder. I was prompted by his recent interview, focusing on the Events At Our Nation's Capitol, on MSNBC.
And it is a very quick, readable, and sobering book. It pairs well with my (relatively) recent reading of Hitler's American Model and the report published by the Transition Integrity Project. Where “pairing well” means they reflected on each other in ways that helped me get at my own thinking,
And it's tempting to think with Biden's election the moment for tyranny in the U.S. has passed. This is not true. We may have a small pause where we can put in place more resilience — which ultimately is a practice — to help us respond to future outbreaks.
What does this mean in practice? I don't pretend to know but this little book and it's to do list approach did make me begin a list of my own:
Provide more on ramps for civil society. This isn't just the tradition of donations or volunteerism. Nor the kind of professional capacity building I do daily. It is about prioritizing more ability to help a wide variety of actors and to create meaningful collaborations between the traditional NGO world and other groups.
Think about the ethics of civil society. I don't know that this has been written about much. And so often we seem more concerned with the behavior that preserves our status. Anticipatory obedience. Very different from accountability to the concepts of free association and democracy.
Be increasingly generous with our platform and build for that. I have a very direct influence over that at work. And as a user of platforms. The trick will be to create as a value. As an image that we aspire towards.
In the book, Snyder derides — it feels to me that he derides — the internet. But really I think it is what we have optimized the internet for — monetization and consumerism — that is the issue. How we can we start to optimize for resiliency and collaboration? What's required for that? That to me is very connected to the items above because civil society helps provide the space for civic discourse.
The book also left me with a list of Eastern Europeans to read.
I just finished the audiobook of Range by David Epstein.
I listen to audiobooks at 1.5 speed and while I'm walking or cooking dinner. It makes talking notes, looking up references hard. Mostly, that doesn't matter. With this book it does because I want to dive in deeper.
The general idea that a broad array of knowledge feels like, well, of course. Both for and individual and a team — where the benefits of a diverse team have been well documented. This book provides more detail on this benefits and goes well beyond a sort of “and this is why you should take your general education classes seriously” type of advice. It also provides support for how we might make up teams and establish commu ovation channels around projects. How we might hire. And how we might bring people together to look for solutions.
As someone who works with communities to make change, I'm particularly interested in how to build things like analog and lateral thinking in to the mix. How to make games out of the concept of withered technology. But I need to know more first. Which means a copy of the physical book is on its way to me.
This post contains affiliate links; though not the ones you might expect.
The weak response of the Capitol Police to the insurrectionists yesterday highlighted the difference in police responses to Black Lives Matter protesters last summer, when officers under the control of the Executive Branch used tear gas and flash bangs to clear peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so Trump could walk across it for a photo op, and to the right-wing rioters who invaded the Capitol. Although they were different law enforcement branches, and although then-Attorney General William Barr, who ordered the summer’s attack, is now gone, no one could miss that Black protesters could never in a million years have broken in the windows of the Capitol, invade, and wander around taking selfies before leaving without arrest.
To enable an algorithm to differentiate a thermal image of a koala from, say, an idle pickup truck, the model needs a quality dataset of images. Unfortunately, this niche slice of photography had not produced a large pool of helpful data for the team to use.
“There’s a billion images of cats on the internet, so if you wanted to train a machine learning algorithm and find cats, you’d be fine. There are not many thermal images of koalas taken from a drone,” Hamilton said.
