Trying to keep up with the news this month is hard. Trying to derive patterns from the news in order to blog about them coherently? Even harder, leading to decision fatigue—but I'm going to have a stab at it ...
The big buried lede of the past decade is that authoritarian conservatives network internationally as pervasively as the soi-disant "international communism" they railed against from the 1920s through the 1960s. Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine it's become glaringly clear that authoritarianism is the preferred governmental mode of petrochemical resource extraction economies (money attracts sociopaths, sociopaths like authoritarian leaders because they are convenient single points of failure for corruption-prevention systems, authoritarian leaders appeal to authoritarian followers).
