Wednesday Potpourri

First, you know that President Trump consistently declares that the Ukraine war would not have started on his watch.

Mario Nawfal offers some remarks from Jeffrey Sachs, reporting conversations he had with former National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, in the leadup to the war:

Jeffrey Sachs: U.S COULD HAVE STOPPED THE UKRAINE WAR FROM STARTING “On December 15, 2021, I had an hour call with Jake Sullivan in the White House, begging, Jake, avoid the war - you can avoid the war. All you have to do is say NATO will not enlarge to Ukraine. And he said to me, oh, NATO is not going to enlarge to Ukraine, don't worry about it. I said, Jake, say it publicly. No, no, no, we can’t say it publicly.”

Second, the Democratic Party is in very serious trouble. Not only is it lacking a reason for being, but it is floundering electorally. As it happens, according to The Daily Wire, Democratic donors are abandoning the sinking ship.

Several Democrat donors said this week that they have paused their donations to the party because of how weak and ineffective it has become in the wake of President Donald Trump’s return to office.

“I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f***ing terrible. Plain and simple,” a major Democrat donor told The Hill. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse.”

The donor said that the 2024 loss was much worse than the loss in 2016 because the party is currently “so weak and so diminished.”

A second donor told the publication that they were equally as turned off about the party.

“They want us to spend money, and for what? For no message, no organization, no forward thinking,” the donor said. “The thing that’s clear to a lot of us is that the party never really learned its lesson in 2016. They worked off the same playbook and the same ineffective strategies and to what end?”

Third, you will be thrilled to notice that the lowest recorded poll ratings belong to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson:

New poll has Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson with a 6.6% favorability mark and 80% unfavorable.

Fourth, if it looks like a really bad idea, it probably is a really bad idea. Happily, the New York Times begins its story about therapists who are really chatbots with instances where these machine-made artificial therapists did a bad job.

And yet….

I-t ought to be well enough known by now that the human connection between patient and therapist is one of the most helpful treatment aspects. 

S. Gabe Hatch, a clinical psychologist and A.I. entrepreneur from Utah, recently designed an experiment to test this idea, asking human clinicians and ChatGPT to comment on vignettes involving fictional couples in therapy, and then having 830 human subjects assess which responses were more helpful.

Overall, the bots received higher ratings, with subjects describing them as more “empathic,” “connecting” and “culturally competent,” according to a study published last week in the journal PLOS Mental Health.

Chatbots, the authors concluded, will soon be able to convincingly imitate human therapists. “Mental health experts find themselves in a precarious situation: We must speedily discern the possible destination (for better or worse) of the A.I.-therapist train as it may have already left the station,” they wrote.

Dr. Hatch said that chatbots still needed human supervision to conduct therapy, but that it would be a mistake to allow regulation to dampen innovation in this sector, given the country’s acute shortage of mental health providers.

Fifth, now Andrew Sullivan, not an unintelligent writer, comes forth with an essay to comfort us-- if we have not been reading his musings we have not missed anything.

His latest jeremiad about the decline and fall of the West shows us a good mind going to waste. What wastes his mind, as he recognizes and denies, is Trump Derangement Syndrome.

To state the obvious, if  it took Trump exactly one month to destroy Western civilization, then either the civilization was markedly weak or Trump was exceptionally powerful.

Sullivan sees Trump as something of a thug who is aggressing nations around the world, especially in the West. The fact that Trump has not invaded Canada or Panama, but has merely spoken ill of them, suggests that Sullivan cannot distinguish between rhetoric and reality.

That doctrine now reflects Trump’s deepest conviction: that might is right, that weak countries should surrender to strong ones, and that this is in America’s interests, because we are the strongest. Trump’s aggression toward Canada, Panama, Gaza, and Denmark is not just trolling the libs. It’s of a piece with his view that the strong should always control and bully and plunder the weak. This is Ukraine’s real crime to Trump. They dared resist absorption by a bigger, stronger neighbor.

We do not know where Sullivan conjured his fantasies, but apparently Trump;s willingness to sit down with Russia to negotiate an end to the war with Ukraine involves sucking up to Putin. As does refusing to give Ukraine a place in NATO.

Trump is clinically incapable of understanding any system of mutuality, because he cannot tolerate being anyone’s equal.

Of course, among the suspects that Sullivan abhors is the prime minister of Israel. Why miss out on a chance to add a little anti-Semitism to the mix.

Russia’s re-occupation of all of Ukraine and the Baltic states, or Israel’s looming ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. My own view is not that the US could have continued its current course indefinitely; but that any retrenchment should have kept the architecture of international law and support for liberal democracies, as much as we could. Trump has effectively thrown in the towel; and handed large swathes of the world to Putin, Xi, and, to a lesser extent, Netanyahu — the only world leaders he respects and understands.

Sullivan does not mention the recent remarks by one JD Vance, to the effect that the Western European democracies, besides having consigned themselves too military weakness, have been persecuting and harassing their citizens for thought crimes. 

By the West, I mean the idea that the democracies that beat the Nazis and outlasted the Soviets were and are instinctively America’s friends — “We were with you then; We are with you now,” in Reagan’s words — that the world is divided between autocracy and democracy, and that although we need to deal with tyrants realistically, and accept limits on our power in this new multipolar world, we are still emphatically the leader of “the free world.”

Sullivan concludes:

This is a Rubicon, I’m afraid, that cannot be fully uncrossed. But I have a feeling that the American people, including many who voted for Trump, will see this new alliance with Putin against a beleaguered, little democracy with the same disgust and nausea that I do.

As you know, the leader of that beleaguered little democracy is going to be in Washington on Friday, to sign an agreement whereby America can share the profits from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals.

Another foreign policy success. Another miss for Andrew Sullivan. The Sullivan post appeared on his Substack. The moral of the story is that you would do better to subscribe to my Substack.