Smash and dash

I've been making a concerted effort to avoid doomscrolling and have been dramatically limiting the amount of articles I read and the sources that I allow that news to come through. My social media time is deliberately curtailed more than it really ever has been.

It's not in an attempt to avoid anything, but rather an understanding that psychological blitzkrieg is the aim here, and even if Trump says something that gets a flurry of headlines and causes spontaneous outrage 1) he's probably only saying it to cause a distraction from something else 2) he's going to change his mind five minutes later because he has the attention span of a particularly stupid cocker spaniel. (No offence intended to cocker spaniels).

That said, though, and lest I be accused of hypocrisy here — I'm not really sure how the situation right now can be described as anything but dire.

Musk treating the US federal government the way he treated Twitter — smash everything up and figure out how to monetise the pieces — was not precisely on my bingo card. Or, I hadn't expected him to get as much chaos through as quickly as he has.

But this is a constitutional crisis of epic proportions; even if the courts tell Musk to stop — and they are telling Musk to stop — the branch of government that's tasked with enforcing those rulings are also under the control with the person who's issuing the orders. And Musk is not known to just accept decisions he dislikes — this is taking "ask forgiveness, not permission" to insane extremes, and he's clearly going to break everything he can and hope it's a moot point by the time anyone might be able to stop him.

There's resistance in the brave civil servants who are refusing to play ball, but yet again Trump et al provide an ample example that the founding fathers never accounted for a scenario where one party would have this much control and everything would rest on the reliability of people refusing to do terrible things.

In other news: I have set up a Bluesky account since that seems to be where everyone has gone. I was already on Mastodon, and will probably see how feasible it is to crosspost to both before deciding whether or not to keep the latter, but feel free to add or engage with me there (or on both!), too.