Some Links, 9/26/2025
Jordan Weissmann on Presidential power; Steve Stewart-Williams on evolution; James Marriott on declining literacy; Michael Magoon on early modern Europe
Jordan Weissmann writes,
The United States of America continued crashing down a log flume toward authoritarianism this week, as ABC indefinitely suspended late-night host Jimmy Kimmel over comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The move came promptly after Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr publicly threatened to go after the broadcast licenses of its network affiliates, a startlingly direct government assault on free-speech rights using brute executive force.
If you believe that misinformation is a crime—or at least a sin—then Kimmel is guilty. If you believe that the right of free speech is absolute, then he should not be punished. A few weeks ago, you would have found the left riding the misinformation horse and the right riding the free speech horse. The sudden reversal is head-spinning.
But Weissmann’s larger point is compelling. He says that strong Presidential power is a bad thing. He says that it should not be embraced by Democrats in the future.
President Trump’s supporters say of him, as Abraham Lincoln said of Ulysses Grant, “He fights.” True, but Mr. Trump often punches down. He should have let other people deal with Kimmel. And, to use a different metaphor, he attempts surgery on Harvard not with a scalpel but with a sledgehammer.
On the other hand, I have a concern that in the culture war the academics and the mainstream media act as both a protagonist and the referee. Maybe the right ends up needing a leader who ignores the ref.
Steve Stewart-Williams writes,
according to one rather stunning theory, Caesarean sections are causing evolutionary change in our species. By removing selection against oversized babies, more and more women will need surgery to be able to give birth safely.
Another example: A massive UK study found that genes associated with earlier childbirth in women and higher BMI in men are being favored by natural selection. Meanwhile, genes associated with intelligence and educational attainment are being selected against.
If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. It is probably not an accident that the decline of literacy has ushered in an obsession with cultural “nostalgia”; a desire to endlessly recycle the cultural forms of the past: the television shows and styles of the nineties, for instance, or the fashions of the early 2000s.
Our culture is being transformed into a smartphone wasteland.
Cut off from the cultural riches of the past we are condemned to live in a narcissistic eternal present.
And he is not finished ranting.
Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right.
I could be cheeky and say that his tone of outrage is perfectly suited to new media.
The primary reason why Agrarian empires were able to conquer so many Commercial societies was their enormous population imbalance. Commercial societies were rich and had very effective militaries, but they also had relatively small populations. Commercial societies need to be based around one or a small number of cities. Their combined populations were no match for the massive populations of kingdoms like France, Spain, and Austria (Habsburgs).
During the Late Middle Ages, this did not matter too much as most feudal kingdoms were tiny. A typical rural fiefdom had no more population than a large Commercial cities. But as the kingdoms grew in population, the royal bureaucrats could extract more revenue from the peasantry. They could then use that funding to create powerful royal armies. Gradually, the successful kingdoms gobbled up larger and larger counties and dukedoms until only a few large kingdoms remained.
He goes on to document the trend in which successful commercial cities were conquered by large states.
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This is the most original and enlightening summary of the current situation I have ever read: "in the culture war the academics and the mainstream media act as both a protagonist and the referee. Maybe the right ends up needing a leader who ignores the ref."
"But Weissmann’s larger point is compelling. He says that strong Presidential power is a bad thing. He says that it should not be embraced by Democrats in the future."
Easy enough when you have a permanent bureaucracy firmly on your side. One might say the Ds rehearsed the low-power presidency in 2020-2024.