Musings: Should I abandon this blog and replace it with another?

As rational, justifiable distrust rises in the land, a dart recently flew into my in-box. This one came out of nowhere. Well, out of my curiosity first, and then Google. Years ago, when I Google searched the exact phrase "Dissident Politics" this blog came up in the top three hits on the first page. Out of curiosity, I recently asked Perplexity why, when I search "Dissident Politics" now, it doesn't show up in the top 13 pages (130 hits), or at all as far as I can tell. 

After that, things went to hell. 

Perplexity listed a slew of things that could knock me out of Google search results. I understood basically none of it. But one thing that popped up was that I needed to look at the Google Search Console, whatever that is. Not knowing what it was or how to access it, Perp told me how to get there. So I did. 

That's when I found that Google was blocking all of my blog pages from Google searches because of alleged phishing malware buried somewhere in my blog. 

Perp tole me how to find web sites that would scan my blog and find the malware. I did two scans at two different sites. Neither found anything wrong. I then told Perp to scan my entire blog from the first post in 2015 until now. It found nothing alarming, stating that my blog doesn't raise any red flags, e.g., no malicious ads, not violent content, etc..

Then things got very complicated, and I got very confused. It's a very long, very complex story. I checked to see when I installed Disqus on my blog. That happened in 2019, about two years after Disqus changed its install software to eliminate a security issue that Google could have flagged as phishing malware. So Disqus, the only thing external to Google I have installed on my blog was not the issue.

So then I went to the Google Search Console to root around for answers. All the info it gave was incomprehensible to me. It would refer to computer thing X, but when I asked what X was, I was referred to Y, and when I asked what Y was, I was referred to Z, and when I asked what Z was it referred to A, . . . . . and so on, endlessly as far as I could tell. I was in a doom loop of computer gobbeldygook, none of which I understood. 

Then, this morning I found an email from Google with an ominous threat, none of which I understood.

So I clicked on the Open Indexing Report Button. I got this:

As far as I can tell, Google blocks  

all of my blog pages from its search engine results

Well, that being as clear as mud, I went back to Perp. Things got more complicated real quick. Perp explained that Google is saying it can’t index my blog pages because I need to alternate pages with proper canonical tags. In Blogger, not WordPress, what is a proper canonical tag and what does alternate pages mean? The canonical tag is this in HTML language:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>

  <link expr:href='data:blog.canonicalUrl' rel='canonical'/>

</b:if>

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>

  <link expr:href='data:blog.homepageUrl' rel='canonical'/>

</b:if>

Well, you know. Clear as mud. But at least I know how to insert that code into my blog. That is how I installed Disqus in 2019. But If I do insert that code, I don't know if it will blow the whole blog up, and if it does, whether I can fix it by deleting the code. 

A huge issue that Perp mentioned is Google's Blogger rules. If a blogger violates one or more Blogger rules, and Google chooses, it can delete an entire blog without telling the blog owner why. I asked what the killer rules are so I could see if I was violating any.

Two that popped up and scared me were (i) fair use doctrine under copyright law, and (ii) "deceptive content". I studied fair use in law school and several professional legal education meetings. I had a reasonably good understanding of the legal doctrine. Fair use allows someone like me to copy copyrighted content from other places, e.g., the NYT, WaPo, The Hill, etc. Does my use fall under fair use doctrine? Hard to tell. Deceptive content, impossible to tell.

What about "deceptive content" in politics? Perp tried valiantly to explain it, but it was clear that the concept is subjective. Perp and I were locked in intractable disagreement.

Here's the problem with fair use. The analysis is complex and has significant subjectivity in it. My blog has indicators of fair use, e.g., (i) I do not allow ads and thus make zero money from the content I copy and paste, (ii) I use the copied material to inform and educate, (iii) I often add my own original commentary, and (iv) my blog is too small to cause any economic damage to the sites I copy material from. Those are major indicators that what I copy is fair use. But some of what I do copies a fair amount of material, arguably copying the "heart" of copied content. That edges close to or beyond the limits of fair use. The legal call based on all the factors is more subjective than objective.

So now here I sit, unsure of what to do. In these times of MAGA thuggery and sleaze, it is easy to see some MAGA thug doing a wink, wink, nudge, nudge with Google and my entire blog instantly disappearing with no reason given. On the other hand, if I abandon Dissident Politics and try to be even more conservative about not running afoul of one or more of Google's killer rules, the same thing could still happen.

I'm inclined to stick with this blog, but if it disappears, you'll know why.

We live in exciting times for sure! 

Global warming update: Killing a major environmental research report

The NYT reports (not paywalled):

Trump Killed a Major Report on Nature. 

They’re Trying to Publish It Anyway.

The first full draft of the assessment, on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife, was weeks from completion. The project leader called the study “too important to die.”

The draft was almost ready for submission, due in less than a month. More than 150 scientists and other experts had collectively spent thousands of hours working on the report, a first-of-its-kind assessment of nature across the United States.

But President Trump ended the effort, started under the Biden administration, by executive order. So, on Jan. 30, the project’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, sent an email telling members of his team that their work had been discontinued.

The article reports that Levin wrote to other authors, asserting that “the country needs what we are producing.” The key experts who worked on the report, called the National Nature Assessment, are planning to finish and publish without government involvement. One can only assumed that Levin IS FIRED!! for such insubordination.

One of the experts, Rajat Panwar (Oregon State University) who lead the chapter on nature and the economy said the team he recruited sees the work as a calling to help solve one of its generation’s most pressing problems, the loss of nature and biodiversity. According to Panwar, “the dependence of the economy on nature is understated and understudied and underappreciated.” 

Authoritarian and kleptocratic intent roam free, wild and

butt naked within the confines of our democracy and the rule of law

Hiding inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning from the public is a key indicator of authoritarian and kleptocratic (A&K) intent. Just because A&K rhetoric and action are legal under existing laws, does not negate blatantly anti-democratic A&K intent. A&K intent here cannot be much clearer.

What about A&K motive? There's plenty of motive to stop all federal efforts to deal with global warning and all public communications related to it. First, there the cash, a/k/a, free speech. For example, Politico wrote last Sept., Trump pressed oil executives to give $1 billion for his campaign, people in industry say. It was legal, if the fact that there was and will be no prosecution for that request for a bribe.

Also, there is plenty of motive to keep the public as ignorant, disinformed and deceived as possible about the seriousness of global warming. As a rule, As&Ks routinely try to hide as much inconvenient fact, true truth and sound reasoning from the public as their power and circumstances permit. They capture and manipulate government institutions to kill their independence and convert them to propaganda operations. The overarching strategy is to establish and maintain asymmetry of information. They control what the public knows, how they perceive it, and what they can discuss. They do this by a combination of censorship, disinformation, repression, and the manipulation of both domestic and international perceptions.

Poll data makes it clear that most Americans are concerned about global warming. A Gallup poll from December 2024 indicated that nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults (61%) are concerned about global warming or climate change, with 40% worrying about it "a great deal" and 21% "a fair amount". 34% of Americans believe that government climate policies help the economy, 34% think they hurt it. Among Republicans, 56% believe climate policies usually hurt the economy, while 52% of Democrats think they help. Analyses suggest that despite a significant amount of ambiguity, the economic benefits of climate action might be undervalued due to uncertainty. 

The bottom line: American As&Ks are highly motivated to hide, deny and distort all inconvenient climate science. They are equally motivated to use demagoguery and deceptive propaganda to deceive, divide and sow confusion among the public. That is crucial to keep public opposition to climate science denial manageable. 

What's next?

This is what's next, Phase 2: 

We've been warned.

MAGA bits: Poetry; The chaos strategy; Unseparating church & state; Attacking the church!; Heretic pastor!

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand….

A "gyre" in W.B. Yeats's philosophy is a spiral or vortex, symbolizing the cyclical nature of history. The phrase "widening gyre" says the cycle is expanding, moving further from its center, which implies a loss of control or order. The falcon metaphor, is society or humanity that has flown so far from the falconer (authority, tradition, or divine guidance) that it can no longer hear or follow the commands. This symbolizes loss of direction and disintegration of established norms.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold speaks to the collapse of societal structures, moral values, and traditional centers of power or belief. The center here can be interpreted as the core values or the established order that once held society together, now failing to maintain its grip. Anarchy loosed upon the world with the loss of the center refers to unleashed anarchy, or a state of serious disorder.

Are we facing that, or something about the opposite, where authority is taking control of our disordered democracy with its messy civil liberties and messy rule of law? 

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Salon writes about the chaos strategy:

Donald Trump's chaos strategy: Why Americans 

continue to fall for his game of distraction

Be very wary of any political observer or other public voice — or anyone else — who suggests that Trump and his MAGA movement are losing, in disarray, ineffective or somehow confused or weak. Such people are seeing what they want to see and not what is actually happening. Donald Trump and his MAGA movement’s strategy is chaos. Moreover, that chaos is in service to their shock and awe strategy to end America’s pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of autocracy if not outright fascism modeled on Viktor Orbán’s Hungary or Vladimir Putin’s Russia with Trump as de facto leader for life. As Harold Meyerson observes in The American Prospect, “As to the wider world, if we ever sought to be that beacon on the hill, we’re now the bully on the hill. America, Trumpified.”  

America’s center is rapidly collapsing, and it has not been very difficult for Trump and the MAGA movement and the other fascists and authoritarians to break it.

That sounds right to me. Salon gets it. Well, at least that writer gets it.

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Above the Law writes about unseparating the state from the church: 

Folks who were paying attention didn’t really need Project 2025 to know the direction Trump and the far right were planning to take the country in. Back in 2022, it was obvious theocracy was approaching.*** And whether it was labeled Integralism or White Christian Nationalism, it was pretty clear that conservative Christianity would be taking a hold in the White House under a Trump presidency. The only real question was how strong the hold would be. Considering Trump just casually mentioned a Christian task force housed in the White House, it’s gonna be pretty strong. 

*** FWIW: It was obvious to me back in 2017. Harumph!

It's too early to predict how much impact American Christian theocracy have. There will be some impact on society and individuals and groups that God says need to be re-educated, oppressed or more vigorously put in their place. It will probably take 6-8 months before the scope, depth and grasp of the Christian nationalist wealth and power movement comes into reasonable focus. One needs to keep an eye on changes in the the rule of law and more Christian access to tax dollars.  

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Deployment of power by DJT and MAGA seem to be fragmenting in the American Christian world. The WaPo writes: 

High-level members of the Trump administration and allies of the president are leveling attacks on religious groups, including Catholics and Lutherans, who do the same work Bush praised [in 2001], questioning their efforts to help migrants. These attacks may signal a new political approach toward religion, some experts say, one comfortable belittling faith groups — despite DJT’s self-described brand as a champion of Christians. More broadly, it has aligned some Republicans against religious groups that in some cases propelled their rise to power, Trump’s included.

“This is just a complete reversal” of the Bush-era goal of bringing faith groups into public works and elevating their role in American life, said Melissa Deckman, a political scientist focused on religion and politics in America and chief executive of the polling firm PRRI. These actions are “a total abandonment of faith-based groups,” Deckman said.

On Sunday, on the social media site X, right-wing Trump ally Mike Flynn accused Lutheran organizations that receive federal grants to help the needy of committing “money laundering.” Flynn put quote marks around the word “Lutheran” — one of America’s largest Protestant groups — in the post. Billionaire Elon Musk’s then shared Flynn’s post, calling “illegal” multiple Lutheran organizations that work in the United States to provide health care to homeless people, run food pantries, and help migrants and refugees.

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The Daily Beast writes about the heretic in the White House: 

Trump Enrages Christian MAGA By Naming ‘Heretic’ Pastor to White House 

DJT angered some of his Christian supporters on Friday when he named a televangelist who even some conservative evangelicals have labeled a “heretic” as part of his White House administration. The president signed an executive order establishing a White House Faith Office and chose Pastor Paula White-Cain, his ally and spiritual advisor, to lead it. White-Cain, 58, is a megachurch preacher from Florida who has endorsed biblical interpretations that some evangelical Christians believe go too far. She is a proponent of “prosperity theology,” which teaches that God rewards the truly faithful with material wealth and personal success. 

Scott Ross, a Texas-based leadership coach and self-described “Orthodox Christian,” called the move “an abomination.” “Paula White, head of Trump’s White House Faith Office, is no Christian leader,” he wrote. “She preaches the heresies of Word of Faith & Prosperity Gospel, both utterly opposed to authentic Christianity. Worse, she has lived a life of scandal, with multiple husbands, twisting the Gospel for profit.” .... “Arguably, this is the worst and most dangerous thing President Trump has done—putting a false teacher at the helm of faith outreach. Lord, have mercy on our country and this administration,” Ross added.  

Conservative commentator Jon Root, who typically posts in support of Trump, wrote, “This is the worst decision President Trump has made since taking office… Paula White is a heretic, who pedals the prosperity gospel. Plus, women should not be pastors according to The Bible.”

Putting White-Cain in the White House Faith Office is the worst and most dangerous thing?? Women should not be pastors according to The Bible?? 

Well, what can I say? Maybe Ross and Root are right. Who knows? We're in uncharted waters. The ship of state just might hit rocks and sink into only Christian God knows what. Knowing God stuff is waaaay above my pay grade. 

Q: Are splits among Christians and bickering Christian nationalist splinter groups a sign of Yeats' widening gyre?   

American Legal Realism, Legal Formalism, and MAGAism compared

American Legal Realism

American Legal Realism (ALR) is a legal ideology or doctrine that emerged in the early 20th century, primarily in the United States, as a reaction against the prevailing legal formalism of the time. It arose when there were major social and technological changes underway in the US. ALR drew heavily from pragmatism, a philosophy that emphasized practical consequences and real-world effects over abstract principles. ALR emphasizes the actual behavior of judges and the social, economic, and political factors influencing legal outcomes. Realists argue that legal rules and principles are not fixed or objective. Instead, they are often ambiguous, contradictory, or incomplete, leading to multiple possible interpretations in judicial decision-making. Under ALR, the law is seen as an instrument for achieving social ends, reflecting the belief that judges should consider fairness, public policy, and societal needs in their decisions. Here, there is an understanding that judicial decisions should be influenced by more than just legal doctrine, including social norms and empirical realities. 

Legal formalism

Legal formalism posits that law is a set of rules and principles that are independent of other political and social institutions. Formalists believe that by applying a consistent set of legal rules to a given case, sound legal decisions will be the outcome of logical deduction. The law is seen as a rational, scientific system where judges merely apply existing laws without considering external factors like social interests or public policy. Here, judges are expected to align their decisions with current laws without alterations. The role of the judge is to interpret the law, not to analyze or change it. This approach assumes that common law can only progress by following a specific set of principles drawn from legal authority, leading to predictable outcomes

MAGAism

MAGAism does not strictly adhere to either legal realism or legal formalism. Instead, it exhibits characteristics that align more closely with authoritarianism. The MAGA movement has been described as authoritarian, with tendencies towards nativism, opposition to pluralism, and a focus on maintaining power through various means, including undermining democratic institutions (1, 2, 3, 4). The movement's approach to the rule of law appears to be more about using legal mechanisms to achieve political ends rather than adhering to a specific legal philosophy. This includes threats to prosecute political opponents, invoking the Insurrection Act, and plans for mass deportations. The influence of the Federalist Society, which promotes originalist interpretations of the Constitution, suggests a formalist approach in judicial appointments. However, this formalist stance is often used to advance a political agenda rather than a pure commitment to legal formalism. For MAGA, the law is a means to desired ends.

The problem with writing laws

During Brett Kavanaugh's Senate confirmation hearing, senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) made these comments, which reflects a major problem with many important American laws:

“. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

Here, Sasse a MAGA extremist was voicing criticism of the evil deep state, the damned bureaucrats. He wanted congress to do it job. That is something that congress is not competent to do because congress does not have the expertise that those hated federal bureaucracies have. MAGA got rid of Sasse because MAGA wants DJT to do congress' job. Sasse criticized that. That criticism made DJT angry and MAGA drove Sasse out of the Senate. 

See the problem? Which legal doctrine would you want, assuming competent judges acting in good faith, not Trump judges, ALR, legal formalism, or MAGAism?  

Secrecy & opacity: Regarding authoritarian MAGA's 180-Day Playbook & public trust

The secret plan

The fourth pillar of Project 2025 is our 180-day Transition Playbook and includes a comprehensive, concrete transition plan for each federal agency. Only through the implementation of specific action plans at each agency will the next conservative presidential Administration be successful.

Pillar IV will provide the next President a roadmap for doing just that. To learn more about Project 2025’s vision for a conservative administration, please read our recently published book, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.

This plan has not been made public. It is not conservative. It is kleptocratic and authoritarian. The reason for secrecy is to hide the authoritarian and kleptocratic intent of America's corrupt, authoritarian radical right elites. From what I can tell, essentially no one in the MSM or the public generally seems to care that massive government changes are kept secret from the American people. Reporting about it has been minimal, with little or no mention of how morally rotten and anti-democratic it is to keep the American people in the dark about massive changes in their federal government. 

I guess the MSM and public trust DJT and MAGA elites to do the right thing. Well, as Zuckerberg would say: 

Masha Gessen's opinion

 Gessen sees what I see. It deserves a stand-alone post. Masha Gessen opines in the NYT (not paywalled): 

In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn’t stop talking about what they’d seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret.” One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they’ve been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

I was 11 when my mother couldn’t stop talking about “Cabaret,” and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I’d seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible.

Now, in Donald Trump’s America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris for president.*** It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the “cultural tipping point” that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump’s frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out. 

*** For me, it began in August or Sept. of 2016 if I recall right. Gessen also saw it early and said so publicly in the New York Review on Nov. 10, 2016. So, what she really means is that we're once more living through the rise of a corrupt, cruel, bigoted dictatorship and other forms of corrupt authoritarianism. I never saw an end of the rotting process since 2016. Biden was a flicker of hope for a while, but it was clear to me early on that he was probably going to fail.

I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will.

The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this “anticipatory obedience.” In his 2017 book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” lesson No. 1 was “Do not obey in advance.” Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are “teaching power what it can do.”  

.... 

....

Next comes the pragmatic argument. Rational people do not stand on principle for the sake of principle. They pick their battles. Or so this argument goes. Perhaps this was the logic that led the country’s largest private funder of biomedical research to halt a $60 million diversity program, Target to scrap its D.E.I. goals or ABC News to settle Trump’s libel suit. As cynical as this argument sounds, it too is rooted in values and obligations to others — shareholders, business partners, clients.  

Last, we have the zeitgeist argument. “We are in a new era now,” Zuckerberg observed when he announced that Meta would end its fact-checking program. Companies should have more “masculine energy” and have “a culture that celebrates the aggression” more, he added a few days later, speaking on the Joe Rogan podcast. This kind of argument is the very definition of rational. Societies define sanity as conforming to dominant beliefs and culture. In totalitarian societies, cultural and intellectual rebels are often confined to psychiatric institutions. In the Soviet Union, dissidents were often diagnosed as insane — and by the standards of that society, they were.

Gessen goes on at length. Having had first hand experience and a reasonably rational mind, she really understands cruel, corrupt, vindictive tyrants.