Notices by Alfie Kohn (alfiekohn@sciences.social)

How Not to Be a Human Being - chapter 83 and 84

BAD: running a government like a business

CATASTROPHIC: running a government like Trump ran his businesses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/04/05/tariffs-tech-retaliatory-imports-silicon-valley/

Fox News stumbles onto something important by referring to anti-fascist graffiti as "anti-Trump"

BREAKING: In an effort to avoid being seen as craven enablers of authoritarianism, the top decision makers at Columbia, Harvard, and several Trump-compliant law firms will show their solidarity with defenders of democracy and free speech by beginning a one-hour hunger strike today at 4:00.

Maybe decimating efforts to deal with the climate crisis can be explained as putting short-term financial gain (for fossil fuel companies) ahead of long-time survival. But THIS - destroying the CDC - is pure nihilism, devastation for its own sake, for no reason and toward no end.

This is MAGA rule.

https://www.alternet.org/cdc-mass-firings/

I've been thinking about this a lot lately: "Part of what makes it so easy for democracy to slip away" is that "there are a lot of features of daily life that continue to exist long after a country has stopped being a democracy": https://smotus.substack.com/p/liberty-can-actually-die-pretty-quietly

RFK, Jr. & the GOP aren't just eviscerating critical medical research and replacing science with pseudoscience. They're creating "a new age of public-health libertarianism" - a "war on all the things that make health a 'public' good, sustained by mutual aid," instead "seeing individuals as perfectly autonomous and inviolable units and defining everything outside individual control as either an irrelevant consideration or a violation of 'bodily autonomy'": https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/opinion/public-health-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8E4.waA9.DbyTkbS3GcGB&smid=url-share

"All of our institutions are the Republican party now....
"We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states....The only way to win is people power."

Important read: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-think-and-act-like-a-dissident-in-trumps-america

Attention universities, law firms, other corporations, and former allies & trading partners: It appears that Disney's craven capitulation to Trump's unreasonable right-wing demands has resulted in ... more unreasonable right-wing demands: https://www.avclub.com/fcc-launches-disney-dei-investigation

Honestly, now - do we even need The Onion when a headline like this is for real?

Can't understand why the NYT hasn't reached out to me by now to offer me a job as a headline copy editor

FROM: Director of Comms
March 205

As one of this country's most esteemed universities/corporations/law firms, we're excited to be rebranding this spring with our new slogan "Give up! Give in! Give fascism a hand!"

A sad day for academia and democracy; a triumphant day for those devoted to the destruction of both.

The headlines (about Columbia, Paul Weiss, Facebook, etc.) shouldn't say just "...Bowed to Trump" or "...Gave in to Trump" but also something like "...Empowered Trump to Accelerate His Destruction of Democracy"

Masha Gessen points out that, unlike most people, Trump doesn't lie to persuade us. His lies are more like those of the bully who's wearing your hat while denying he took it. He's "asserting control over reality itself" to force us either to live in *his* reality or to "resist and become his enemies by insisting on facts": https://mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlosbaez/114112649885387310

So when we look at these two posts together, we learn that those on the right believe that people have no responsibility for doing immoral things if they're either (a) following orders or (b) giving orders.

McSweeney's weighs in

Serwer puts Trump's abduction of Khalil in context

Expect more of this from countries that are still committed to democracy, equity, intellectual freedom, and such. Remember way back, like, four months ago, when it was just red states experiencing a brain drain?

https://bsky.app/profile/paulgowder.bsky.social/post/3lkbtznde6s2h