I was flying from California to Texas, 35,000 feet, gazing downwards at how utterly tiny a human being is in comparison to the planet. Invisible. The houses, buildings, are the tiniest of dots. The oceans are vast, the desert stretches on endlessly……
….and then it hit me: The fate of much of the world depends on the chemical neurotransmitters, hormones and synapses inside the head of just one man, a tiny speck on the planet……Donald Trump.
Like, how? How did we humans invent this absurd system? Where the dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and cortisol inside the brain of just one human being - an individual so tiny one couldn’t spot him from 35,000 feet - determines the fate of laws, elections, the well-being or misery of many millions of people, the whole U.S. economy and part of the world economy? That whether me or my fellow Americans/human beings on this planet prosper or suffer may very well depend on which chemical is being transmitted from one neuron to another, or the intensity with which electrical impulses are firing in the synapses in his brain? That whether war in Europe is won or lost solely based off of how much GABA and dopamine he feels in a given month, or how his prefrontal cortex and hippocampus is doing, 5,000 miles away from the battlefield? Our nation’s wellbeing hinges on the condition of his amygdala!
… but generally considered to be better than the alternatives.
A fair bit of my personal wellbeing is dependent on those same neurological interactions within my own noggin … and if it’s not I can just cast a vote to change it.
1/3rd of voting ‘merkins wanted this guy. 1/3rd of ‘merkins were sanguine. Based on his polling it seems both groups are reasonably happy with the way things are going.
I blame the U.S. Congress for not passing a law concerning the nuclear weapons situation.. It is essential that nuclear launch authority be in the hands of a committee, not just the President.
I think if a nuclear launch authority committee law was in place, the Defense Department would carefully honor it.
As far as Trump having dictatorial powers in other areas, like tariffs, SCOTUS is at fault. DJT is illegally ruling by decree.
Here, I’ll “settle” your mind. It’s not just Trump. Putin could also end the world on his say so (like Trump, he has no naysayers left that could stop him), and I’m sure Kim Jong Un could do enough damage with his 50+ nukes to ruin a lot of shit, and potentially the world depending on which theories you believe (nuclear winter, or just enough disruption to our interconnected world to cause a lot of misery and starvation). Thankfully Pakistan and India seem slightly more sane at the moment, as does Israel when it comes to using Nukes (lots of different issues there, but not so much the nuclear option, but that’s a different thread or six).
That’s a relic of the Cold War, and MAD. The thinking being that if the Soviets were launching missiles, they might have as little as half an hour to identify if missiles were launched, if they’re a threat to the US, make a decision what to do, transmit the orders to the US nuclear forces, and have them execute those orders before the incoming Soviet nukes eliminate them.
Having one man making that decision makes sense in that light. In 2025, when Soviet missiles coming over the North Pole isn’t such an existential threat, maybe a committee of some kind for first-use or even limited retaliatory strikes makes sense.
Ultimately, it’s because we are descended from tribal apes who typically had a single dominant male leader. Our social structure is optimized for the reproductive advantage of such males and the females they attracted to themselves; not for good governance, much less military nuclear decision making. It’s a core reason why human governments are so consistently bad at their jobs - not just morally bad, but incompetent.
They’re trying to make a psychological setup evolved for one job do an entirely different one; the surprising thing is that it works at all, not that it works badly.