Is it possible that we have come to feel responsible for too much, for everything, even things outside of our control, and that this makes us feel like gods who have been unfairly disempowered? Isn’t it depressing, feeling like a demoted god? Doesn’t it fill us with despair, which might make us less effective if a time comes when we actually can do something, and might also mess with the enjoyment we should be feeling re the rest of our lives?
— George Saunders, “Five Thought Experiments Concerning The Underlying Disease,” The New Yorker
A Skeptic’s View of the President’s Actions
In January, I tried to track Trump’s executive actions, but a handy website beat me to it. But with a new authoritarian at the helm, banal summaries don’t cut it. So now I’ve set up a ChatGPT task to do the heavy lifting: provide a brief analysis of each week’s presidential orders from a radical left perspective. No blind trust, no propaganda—just a bullshit detector for the modern age.