Nic Babarskis

The Pitt is the first TV show where the reaction videos are more intriguing to me than the drama of the show itself. Maybe its just the anti-science cultural moment we seem to be living through right now, but there is something mesmerizing about watching what I presume to be subject matter experts break down the difference between drama and reality featured in the show.

I’m sure some of the reaction videos are just algorithm chasing, but for now I’ll lean into them and hope we haven’t become socially isolated by our media echo chambers that we can no longer accept expertise as a valuable resource for policymaking.

Side-note: television programming rarely makes me cry, but a particular scene from the show where the main protagonist starts having PTSD related flashbacks to COVID era ER memories momentarily broke me. Our understanding of what happened that first year of COVID has become so obscured by our partisan bickering over public health policy that I feel like we completely forgot the absolute hell our medical providers were subjected to not only by the wave of deaths, but the politicized backlash they received for their efforts to flatten the curve.

Reflecting on some of the recent posts I’ve seen about my state (Michigan) senators. Due to my chosen profession (Higher Ed) and the news interests (Ed Policy) that come along with it my social feeds generally skew left leaning or flat out leftist. The general vibe is that my feeds are mad at Peters and Slotkin. Lots of “good riddance” takes on Peter’s retirement announcement.

Mallory McMorrow is jumping into the race. She’s most known on the political scene beyond Lansing for a viral floor speech she gave after being accused of being a “groomer” for advocating for LGBTQ+ civil rights. Given that there has been lot of chatter about the (IMHO gross) “She’s for they/them not you” ad from the most recent presidential election cycle she’s a natural foil for that wedge social issue.

I see parallels to Whitmer’s early defining viral speech on a different wedge social issue…

…That’s all a side-track from the crank theory I wanted to share for a “heterodox” take on Peters compared to the general vibe of my feeds: that for all the derision I see heaped at Peters I think one could spin a yarn that he shrewdly saw it’s better to leave his seat during a cycle when Democrats are primed for a legislative wave. Maybe it was better to leave the seat now when it Ts up a McMorrow (as opposed to a centrist) to gain momentum instead of an opening in 2032 when the off-presidential-cycle-election could be correction against a Dem administration.

Pulling this series of quotes from an interview between Ross Douthat and Christopher Rufo. I was listening as a means of trying to understand the justification for all the pain being wrought upon the educational bureaucracy. This is such an ideologically driven take on what a government bureaucracy is and how it functions that I don’t know where to start with common ground or compromise.

It’s the worst sort of cavalier slash and burn policymaking:

Rufo: Here’s the problem, though: It’s very easy to cut external contracts. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an institution and the permanent bureaucracy of that institution. I know for a fact that at the Department of Education, replacing the management within the building does not really replace the broader culture… I just think that there has to be a kind of binary choice, agency by agency. Can this agency be reformed or can this agency only be abolished or dismantled to the maximum extent permissible by law? I think the Department of Education is then in the latter camp. I think the F.B.I. could maybe be reformed. Other agencies can be perhaps reformed. But the Department of Education in my view is beyond reform. You have to spin off, liquidate, terminate and abolish to the furthest extent you can by law. All while maintaining your political viability and your statutory compliance for those things that are essential, required by law, and that are politically popular. You always want to maintain the popularity, but can you take those things away ——… Conservatives cannot fully compete for education grants, or university-level research programs. No, conservatives can’t do any of those things.So we have to figure out what we can do. Where can we have leverage? Where can we take over or recapture an institution? And if we can’t do those things, then what do we have to shut down? Shutting things down is actually a very effective strategy.

I don’t know what sort of objective standard you use to ascertain the level of “wokeness” for any bureaucratic agency. The general gist under the current administration seems to be how quick they are to implement structural change that favors the incumbent president–jurisprudence or constitutionality be damned…

Good policy-making is NEVER a binary choice. It is always a sequence of calculated, often provisional, frequently complicated series of balancing acts that requires an informed perspective on national history, the law, the current cultural moment, and domain expertise of the subject matter (e.g. education, law enforcement, national defense, energy, land management). You can’t summarize the bureaucracy’s value and operation in a pithy Tiktok video, podcast interview, or scintillating video essay–it takes decades of usually quite and monotonous work to see a positive social transformation. That is partially what is so gut-wrenching about what I am seeing happen to the Department of Education–and the federal bureaucracy more generally–I may not always agree with our bureaucratic leaders, but to see the centuries of institutional knowledge and domain expertise demolished with glee or a shrug fills me with dread.

The Andor series dropped a season 2 trailer announcing an April 22 release date.

Instead of posting the new trailer, I’m just gonna post one of the many moments of writing that made this show a revelation:

I fear for you.

We’ve been sleeping.

We’ve had each other and Ferrix, our work, our days.

We had each other, and they left us alone.

We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone.

We took their money and ignored them. We kept their engines turning and the moment they pulled away we forgot them.

Because we had each other.

We had Ferrix.

But we were sleeping. I’ve been sleeping. I’ve been turning away from a truth I’ve wanted not to face.

There is a wound that won’t heal at the center of the galaxy.

There is a darkness like rust, reaching into everything around us.

We let it grow and now it’s here. It’s here and it’s not visiting anymore.

It want’s to stay.

The Empire is a disease that thrives in darkness. It is never more alive than when we sleep…

Fascism is a term thrown out so often as a pejorative in some of the online social circles I travel in that I can miss the forest because of whatever individual tree warrants a callout day to day.

I found this essay from Jeremy Rios to be a helpful taxonomy of facism, particularly from someone who holds a Christian worldview. This isn’t to say other takes on facism from a different worldview are illegitimate, but he uses language and framings that I think will resonate with folks from my religious circles.

The article gives a 4 part taxonomy and then gives 3 observations about how fascism may appeal to Christians. You should read the whole thing, but I’ll pull out 2 quotes here–this link also includes other highlights from the essay I found helpful:

In simplest terms, Fascism is a concept of political governance that prioritizes the authority and power of the central government. To render this in what might be an effective political slogan, Fascism believes that “Power gets it done.” Give me power, and I’ll get it done. Give the leader power, and he’ll get it done. Give the government the power, and they’ll get it done. In fact, the only thing standing between these agencies and the solution to whatever problems we face at the time is that we haven’t yet given them the power.

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So, what is Fascism? It is not really a model of governance. Instead, Fascism identifies a cultural state where high level figures bargain with society for a pact of power. Give us power, and we’ll get things done. The bargain plays upon a series of common emotions in the human heart: the feeling of a lost past, the grim realities of the present, the incompetence of current government. Fascism promises to solve these unsolvable problems through the application of special power which must be granted to it by a constituency. These generalized feelings of societal distress are, in turn, localized on a sub-group who can act as a focal point or scapegoat for the problems. Fascism thus comes to life when a Fascist leader sings his song to the Fascist Heart—a heart that is, to be explicit, present in all of us—and the Fascist Heart in turn gives power to that leader.

Ari Schulman writing in The New Atlantis about the concept of ‘normalized deviance,’ and how organizations we presume to be paragon’s of procedure (in this case aviation safety), through their own practices, develop organizational protocols that lead to disaster:

In safety studies, normalized deviance is the pattern by which a system creeps from labeling specific behaviors “dangerous” to labeling them “abnormal but not yet a proven danger” to labeling them “well, I know, but we’ve been doing it this way all along” to labeling them “normal.”

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It is insane — absolutely insane — to have an official helicopter flight path cross over a final descent path of one of the busiest airports in the country.
 It is insane to do this while having the helicopters and landing planes use radio systems that don’t let them talk to each other.
 It is insane to have the helicopters often be military craft on training missions, running with barely any lights, in the middle of a sprawling urban lightscape, at night.
 It is insane to have those pilots often use night-vision goggles that block out their peripheral vision when the planes they have to watch for are arriving from the side.
 It is insane to have the air traffic control tower managing this setup be understaffed, at just 63 percent of its FAA-recommended level as of September 2023.
 It is insane for all this to happen below 1,000 feet, where the standard collision avoidance system for commercial aircraft by design shuts off.

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When an organization gets stuck in the rut of normalized deviance, extraordinary things must happen to shock it back out. It can be bold, charismatic new leadership. More often it is a dramatic, public catastrophe.

This little reflective essay by Robin Sloan gives an approachable and succinct encapsulation of the pro vs. con Large Language Model viewpoints.

The con viewpoint:

Here is the ultimate act of pulling the ladder up behind you, a giant “f*_k you” to every human who ever wanted to accomplish anything, who matched desire to action, in words, part of Everything. Here is a technology founded in the commons, working to undermine it. Immanuel Kant would like a word.

The pro viewpoint:

If super science is a possibility — if, say, Claude 13 can help deliver cures to a host of diseases — then, you know what? Yes, it is okay, all of it. I’m not sure what kind of person could insist that the maintenance of a media status quo trumps the eradication of, say, most cancers. Couldn’t be me. Fine, wreck the arts as we know them. We’ll invent new ones.