Now It’s Concentration Camps

  • Concentration Camps, and Republican salivation to send 65 million immigrants to the alligators;
  • Trump thinks brain scans measure IQ;
  • American science’s brain drain;
  • How societies maintain national myths to survive.
– – –

What’s next? Dungeons and shackles? Do Trump voters know what they’ve done? Are they really fine with this? I fear that some of them are.

The New Republic, Melissa Gira Gant, 2 Jul 2025: The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp, subtitled “The Republicans are proudly calling it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Let’s call it what it is.”

What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday.

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A Facebook friend made this point:

Der Trumpenfuhrer has actually added a new page to the proverbial Hitler playbook. Hitler didn’t proudly tour his new concentration camps. He actually tried to keep them out of sight. Maybe he was afraid that ordinary Germans would have more compassion left than MAGAs do.

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And

Daily Beast, 1 Jul 2025: Nancy Mace Floats Bringing ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to South Carolina: ‘Gators Are Ready’

Nancy Mace wants to bring “Alligator Alcatraz” to South Carolina.

In an X post Tuesday, the congresswoman expressed her desire to replicate Florida’s controversial new migrant detention facility in South Carolina, touting that her state’s alligators were “ready.”

These people are salivating at the prospect of subjecting people they don’t like — brown-skinned people, apparently — to, at best, psychological torture, if not physical mutilation.

Who voted for these people?? Do they realize what they’ve done?

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As is often the case at the end of each afternoon when I sit down to write a post about events of the day, I regret not saving a link to something that stuck in my mind. Today it was a Facebook post about one of the MAGA politicians floating the idea that there were 65 million people she looked forward to becoming alligator food. Commentators pointed out that that’s the number of Hispanics in the nation.

Wait, here it is. Laura Loomer.

Latin Times, 2 Jul 2025: ‘Sick’ MAGA Influencer Hints at Feeding Immigrants to Gators: ‘Alligator Lives Matter’

As Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” garners national attention, far-right activist Laura Loomer fueled controversy with her suggestion that immigrants will become food for alligators.

“Alligator lives matter,” Loomer posted Monday on X. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”

Laura Loomer is not (just) some loony. She has Trump’s ear. Example from April:

NY Times, 3 Apr 2025: Trump Fires 6 N.S.C. Officials After Oval Office Meeting With Laura Loomer, subtitled “During the 30-minute meeting, the far-right activist excoriated National Security Council officials in front of the president and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser.”

This is where we are. Are there any Trump voters out there who have regrets?

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One more about our idiot president.

JMG, 1 Jul 2025: Trump Thinks Brain Scans Can Measure IQ

From

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Stepping out toward the bigger pictures.

Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 2 Jul 2025: American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history, subtitled “Over the first half of 2025, the US has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science may be a gift to the rest of the world.”

Key Takeaways

• Throughout the 20th and the first quarter of the 21st centuries, the US became a world leader in science, technology, healthcare, and education by investing in scientific research. • In 2025, that is rapidly changing, as unprecedented federal cuts, the defunding and closing of many institutions, and devastatingly reduced budgets present an extinction-level event for American science. • Just as the exodus of scientists and scientific projects from Nazi Germany became known as “Hitler’s gift” to the rest of the world, the actions of the US today seem similarly poised to reward the rest of the world. Here’s an insider’s view into what’s happening.

Then:

From World War II until 2024, the US stood unchallenged as the scientific leader of the free world. Across practically every discipline — physics, materials science, astronomy, chemistry, biology, medicine, geology, etc. — American scientific missions and initiatives, often in collaboration with European, Canadian, Asian, and many other global partners, brought us new advances and breakthroughs, paving the way for generations of scientists to thrive. In a society that values facts, scientific truths, education, and the public good, this recipe led to multiple generations of continued breakthroughs and advances.

Now I wonder if this was by accident, i.e. historical contingency. For a century or two, the United States was the destination for refugees from oppressive regimes that valued ideology and religion over science and the ability to work with the real world to improve the human condition.

Since late January of this year, however, all of that has rapidly changed. Many of the most valuable scientific organizations in the world, including NOAA, NASA, the NSF, the CDC, the EPA, and the FDA, have experienced a set of unprecedented internal attacks.

  • Funding streams have been terminated.
  • Grants that have been successfully competed for and won have been pulled.
  • Fellowships and scholarships have been revoked.
  • Contracts have been broken.
  • Thousands upon thousands of employees have been terminated, often in defiance of court orders.

And now, at the start of the second half of 2025, a new budget is on the verge of becoming law, which would largely eliminate science as we know it across universities and colleges, research institutes, and national labs. This isn’t a horror story; this is a real-life nightmare for the most educated and skilled American workers of all: scientists.

But times change, and the more settled the culture of the United States is, the more base human re-emerges. Thus the cycles of history. The next one is China.

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Social via personal truths.

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 2 Jul 2025: The noble lie: Why countries that lie together, stay together, subtitled “This is my country and this is what we stand for. At least for now.”

Key Takeaways

• In this week’s Mini Philosophy interview, I spoke with historian Dan Snow about national identity, national values, and national myths. • We discussed Plato’s noble lie, the concept that all nations require a shared narrative to unite them. • In a revisionist age, what role does the national narrative play today? And if we do away with them, will we also do away with national identity?

This goes to a key idea of human nature. Humans evolved to survive, and understanding the real world helped, but only to a degree. It’s more important to survive. And so the “noble lie” about any society. In my grand theory: another kind of story. And humans live by stories.

But as with so many things, the smart ones understand this, while the majority believe these stories are actually true. The spectrum of human intelligence creates society, in all its variety.

Posted in authoritarianism, conservatives, Human Nature | Leave a comment

Implications

  • Do justices not foresee consequences?
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the big beautiful bill;
  • How JD Vance reveals the administration’s true motivations; cruelty is the thing;
  • Jonathan Chait on Republicans’ “incomprehensibly reckless plan”;
  • Robert Reich on conservatives’ animosity to empathy (never mind Jesus Christ);
  • Initial thoughts about Springsteen’s “Western Stars”.
– – –

Sometimes you wonder if lawyers, judges, and justices are so focused on the validity of a particular law that they don’t consider the implications of their ruling. Obsessed with the technical details and missing the big picture.

Slate, Heidi Feldman, 30 Jun 2025: Supreme Court Rules Some Americans Have a Constitutional Right to Insist on Theocracy

Mahmoud arose when parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, demanded from the school board that they receive notice and the right to refuse their children’s attendance whenever books with LGBTQ+ characters and themes will be used during classroom instruction. The parents argued that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment entitles them to these accommodations. They posited that any exposure of their children to the books interferes with their right to instruct their children in religion.

The article details the arguments for and against. The gist is that, according to the conservative justices, religious sensibilities trump everything.

–But does that mean parents can ask public schools to set up different accommodations for white and black students so children don’t have to be exposed to, what their religion tells them (and they can claim this about anything, according to religion, which has no root in reality), are inferior and offensive people? Where does this end?

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Heather Cox Richardson summarizes the bill.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: June 30, 2025

“This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT).

“[W]e’re debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It’s going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don’t need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We’re obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we’ll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don’t throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don’t close so many rural hospitals. It’s gonna be a long day and a long night.”

“This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I’ve got a great idea. Let’s give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’… I’ve been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”

Recall Adam Serwer: The Cruelty Is the Point.

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A story going around today is this statement by JD Vance, which reveals maybe more than he intended. The photo is the one that got someone arrested, or maybe even deported, because ICE agents found it on his phone.

Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 1 Jul 2025: US Vice President Vance says terrorizing people is job one

The JD Vance post:

Everything else–the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy–is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.

The take by someone on Bluesky named Karl:

The vice president is opening saying [their] only goal is to fund the infrastructure of industrial death at all costs and that nothing else matters because their goal is to murder as many of their opposition as they can as quickly as possible.

This is an admission of genocidal intent.

And Boing Boing‘s take:

United States Vice President JD Vance claims there is no job more important for the Federal government than the seemingly random abduction, detention, and deportation of people off the streets.

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Cruelty is the thing. Everything up to and including healthcare for the elderly is unimportant compared to funding the round-up and deportation of folks who contribute far more to their communities than JD Vance. The “big beautiful bill” is about cruelty.

Again recall Adam Serwer: The Cruelty Is the Point.

Again and again, as I see it, self-professed Christians are not Christian, in the sense of following the teaching of Jesus Christ. Rather, they express base tribal animosity toward everyone unlike themselves. And have no sympathy for anyone in need.

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Obviously the reason Trump wanted to pass his “Big Beautiful Bill” all at once is because it has so many provisions that, examined individually, even most Republicans would not stomach.

The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 1 Jul 2025: They Didn’t Have to Do This, subtitled “By passing Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, congressional Republicans have talked themselves into an incomprehensibly reckless plan.”

From the middle of this piece:

One explanation is that they don’t understand just how unpopular the bill is apt to be when it takes effect. Many Republicans rely on party-aligned media for their news, and these sources have mostly cheered the bill while ignoring its downsides. Both chambers of Congress have rushed the bill through with minimal scrutiny, shielding members from exposure to concerns. Even the White House seems unaware of what exactly it’s pressuring Congress to do. Yesterday, when a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the megabill’s proposed tax on wind and solar energy, she appeared totally unfamiliar with the measure and punted the question. (The tax provision was later removed.)

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Once again, how conservatives are not Christian, even though they say they are.

Robert Reich, 1 Jul 2025: Trump, Musk, Republicans, and the Empathy Bug

Recalling Elon Musk’s comments about how “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

When a reporter asked Trump if he had located the latest detention facility in the Everglades swamp so detainees who tried to escape would be eaten by alligators he said “I guess that’s the concept. This is not a nice business.” He then joked that immigrants will need to learn how to run away from alligators. “Don’t run in a straight line. Run like this,” he added, while hand-motioning a zig zag. “And you know what, your chances go up by 1 percent. Not a good thing.”

It’s all the opposite of empathy — treating people as if they aren’t human, as if they’re the “other.”

Both Musk and Trump are experts in taking selfish advantage of everything, anything, and anybody. Both have altered government programs and regulations to reap personal financial gain. Both have been quick to fire people. Both demand loyalty to themselves but have no loyalty to anything or anyone besides themselves.

They are the tribal past. The world will not survive until we get over this. Reich understands.

They’ve got it all wrong. Empathy is a necessary precondition for a society.

Without empathy, we’d be living in a social Darwinist jungle animated only by selfish individuals pursuing selfish needs, like Musk and Trump.

If everyone behaved like Musk and Trump, we’d have to assume everyone else was out to exploit us if they could. Much of our time and attention would be devoted to outwitting or protecting ourselves from other Musks and Trumps.

Without a shared sense of empathy and responsibility, we would have to assume that everyone — including legislators, judges, regulators, and police — was acting selfishly, making and enforcing laws for their own benefit.

Of course many conservatives do assume that everyone is out to get them. (I recall my father, alas, as he sat in front of the TV news.)

Reich goes on with more examples, and finishes,

Our core identity as Americans — the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us — consists of the ideals we share and the obligations we hold in common. We are tied together by these empathic meanings and duties. Our loyalties and attachments, guided by empathy, define who we are.

If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming blacker or browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing the ties that bind us together, our collective empathy.

Musk and Trump typify what has gone wrong. Their most damaging legacies may be the erosion of the trust and empathy on which our society — any society — depends.

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Listening to Western Stars.

I’m sure I listened to it a couple times when it came out. But I need to listen to it again, and again.

I had forgotten that this is one of Springsteen’s low-key albums, like NEBRASKA and THE GHOST OF TOM JOAD.

It takes two or three, or maybe four or five, listenings to album, to absorb it. Pop songs are designed to be instantly catchy. Softer, more complex songs, take multiple listenings, but will take root in your soul in a way catchy pop songs never will.

Posted in authoritarianism, Human Nature, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

Octavia E. Butler, PARABLE OF THE SOWER

(Four Walls Eight Windows, October 1993, 299pp)

In June I focused on reading classic science fiction novels, partly to see how many I could get through in one month, considering other obligations (answer: 6 and a bit), and partly to revisit two novels that have, in the past couple three years, become semi-permanent residents on extended bestseller lists, just as Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHT-FOUR and Bradbury’s FAHRENHEIT 451 have been for decades.

The first of these is Octavia Butler’s PARABLE OF THE SOWER, from 1993. I read it shortly after it came out (that’s the first edition shown above), and thought it a perfectly decent novel, if not especially outstanding. There have been plenty of other near-future novels about the collapse of society, the survivors having to fend off criminals and live off the land. What made it distinctive, perhaps, is that it was apparently set in Altadena CA, where the author lived at the time, and involved a female black main character. (And that the author was a female black author.)

What brought it recently to prominence, I suspect, is two things. First, the author herself has gained posthumous fame beyond her fame while she was alive. In this way she’s like Philip K. Dick; both had fine careers while they were alive, but were known only within the SF community. Second, this particular book is set in 2024, and features a right-wing presidential candidate, then president, named Donner, whose plans include ending wasteful government programs (for the Moon and Mars) by privatizing them, and suspending all sorts of laws to get people back to work. He doesn’t literally say that he’ll “make America great again,” but the flavor is there.

As the book opens society is collapsing in various ways, and Robledo, the town where the protagonist, Lauren Olamina, lives, consists of walled-up neighborhoods with only perfunctory law enforcement. (The book is confined to Lauren’s point of view, so we only know what she knows, mostly first-hand.)

The plot of the book consists of Lauren having to flee Robledo as family members are killed and neighborhoods burn. Walking, she heads west along the 118 freeway to route 101 and then north, collecting various fellow travelers along the way. Oddly, big trucks are still on the highways, but not cars given the price of gas, while the centers of towns they pass seem oblivious to the refugees heading north. The one science-fictional element is that some kind of drug, nicknamed pyro, that makes people want to set fires, is behind a lot of this mayhem.

In parallel, Lauren, having become skeptical, even cynical, about the traditional religion of her family and neighbors, develops a philosophy of her own, which she calls “Earthseed,” whose core idea is change. From the first page of the first chapter:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

There are many more passages from “Earthseed: The Books of the Living” throughout. When I first read the book I noted that this philosophy yielded “a few pretty lines of poetry, but is only about as deep as a puddle on the sidewalk.” Actually, I saw more to it this time, as Lauren writes about intelligence as an adaptability, how stability disintegrates, about power struggles, how Earthseed is life that perceives itself changing, about embracing diversity. Eventually it becomes clear that the purpose of Earthseed is to spread humanity to other planets, for Earthlife to take root in new ground.

There was a second book, PARABLE OF THE TALENTS (1998), which I haven’t read even once. (My copy is signed, and personalized!) And according to Wikipedia, Butler planned several more PARABLE novels, apparently planning a series about humanity settling other planets. But she died in 2006 and didn’t finish even the third volume.

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The book ends with Lauren and her band settling a remote peninsula near Mendocino, and naming their community Acorn. The final page quotes the “parable of the sower” from the King James Bible, Luke 8: 5-8.

The second book is set in the community they build there.

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So this is a fine novel, though not much different thematically than many other sf works as far back as the 1950s. At the risk of sounding somehow sexist, Butler was not a “lady writer”; she writes scenes of danger and violence as well as anyone. Also, she’s great at writing tense scenes between characters in which we don’t always immediately perceive the source of their antagonism. But has us draw conclusions.

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Geographical notes. I think readers have assumed the book is set in Altadena, because that’s where Butler lived at the time. (Indeed, another reason the book gained recent attention is that the fires in Altadena and elsewhere in SoCal this past January were seen as “fulfilling” the “prophecies” of this book.) Yet, if Butler had that setting in mind, she changes all the names. Streets mentioned in the text don’t exist in Altadena. Though the proximity to the nearby mountains matches.

Then there’s the matter of when Lauren sets off on foot to head north, they walk “down” [south?] to the 118 and turn west. Well, the 118 freeway currently ends in the San Fernando Valley, some miles to the west of Altadena. OK, the original State Route 118 originally ran on surface streets as far east as Pasadena. But it wasn’t a freeway then.

So the locations in the book are some kind of collage of real places. Not to be taken as a literal depiction of Altadena.

 

Posted in Book Notes, Reviews, science fiction | Leave a comment

Stories, Archetypes, Morality

  • Does anyone take Jung or Freud seriously any more?
  • OnlySky’s Bruce Ledewitz on the contemporary idea of “evil”;
  • Robert Reich on “the worst bill in history” and fact-checking claims about tax cuts;
  • How local communities fight back against ICE;
  • Republicans about cuts to services: “They’ll get over it”;
  • Paul Krugman on Republicans’ racist claims about Zohran Mamdani;
  • Springsteen’s “Down in the Hole”.
– – –

I saw a Fb post a day or two ago — here it is, but it’s not public — that began:

My sister, who has a somewhat sentimental attachment to Jung, sent me a youtube video of a Jungian therapist explaining the rise of MAGA as a collective embrace of the American Shadow and trump as an expression of the archetype of The Fool. It makes sense, but I don’t consider it particularly useful. …

Setting aside the Trump angle, my thought was, Jung? Does anyone take his archetypes any more seriously than they do Freud’s psychoanalytic theories (id, ego, superego)? I took a psych course at UCLA and these things were discussed, but that was 50 years ago.

Meanwhile my impression has been that psychology has in recent decades finally become a science to the extent that it’s based on the evolutionary theory of mind, rather than sets of unsubstantiated hypotheses — notions, or models, without any actual clinical evidence — from armchair theorists like Jung and Freud.

On the other hand — this may well be another example of “levels of understanding” or “nested stories” that we’ve read about — presumably Freud and Jung can be broken into motivations based on evolutionary principles. Which is to say, their ideas are stories. Which might or might not be useful.

For now, let’s look at this.

OnlySky, Bruce Ledewitz, 30 Ju 2025: The future of evil subtitled “Secular culture needs its own understanding of what shapes our character.”

I just mentioned, two days ago, that morality is circumstantial. Is this also true of the notion of “evil”?

So, is “evil” also circumstantial? I would think so, since morality is.

As America and the West continue to drift away from the assumptions of Christianity, what is the future of attitudes about human evil? How will Western culture regard suffering? How will parents raise their children to enhance their humanity?

All cultures have a basic orientation to the nature of human beings and their relationship to ultimate reality. We can learn about the possibilities, and about the inheritance of today’s secular culture, by considering a few from among the spectrum of options.

The article goes on to explore different religions — which I don’t think would get us anywhere. There’s a section on how “Secular culture needs its own philosophy.” The writer goes on to consider tabula rasa, and genetic determinism. And decides,

However, science has largely discredited this approach as well. Genes may create tendencies one way or the other, but are no longer considered to give rise to inevitable destiny.

We really end up back at having to formulate a comprehensive understanding of human nature. If we don’t take this basic question seriously, we can fall into careless and harmful assumptions.

This is a question that many people are taking seriously, e.g. Steven Pinker, in HOW THE MIND WORKS and THE BLANK SLATE. And in THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE from 2011, not completely written up here yet.

But let me check my notes. In Chapter 8 of that book there’s a section called “The Moralization Gap and the Myth of Pure Evil.” The gist is that everyone has a drive to present themselves in a positive light, thus each side in a conflict sincerely believes it is in the right. Therefore the other side is “evil.” And yet, “evildoers always think they are acting morally.”

Which is to say, evil is something assigned upon others, and to the extent humanity remains tribal — conservative — it will always seem to exist.

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Short items.

Robert Reich, 30 Jun 2025: The Worst Bill in History, subtitled: “Trump’s giant budget-busting, Medicaid-shattering, shafting-the-poor-and-working-class, making-the-rich-even richer bill is a travesty.”

With answers to these questions: 1, Did the tax cuts pay for themselves?, 2, Did the tax cuts supercharge economic growth, create millions of jobs, and raise wages? and 3, Did the tax cuts benefit everyone?

No; absolutely not; heavens, no.

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Fighting back.

Slate, David Mack, 30 Jun 2025: Melting ICE, subtitled “As Immigration and Customs Enforcement continues their raids, local communities are finding some pretty creative ways to fight back.”

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“They’ll get over it.”

Slate, Heather Digby Parton, 30 Jun 2025: Not Trump’s baby: The “big, beautiful” bill’s father is really Grover Norquist, subtitled “Republicans are close to seeing their long-held fantasies realized”

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Paul Krugman, 30 Jun 2025: We’re All Rats Now, subtitled “Time to take a stand, again, against racism”

Concerning NYC candidate Zohran Mamdani, and this post by Stephen Miller: “NYC is the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration.”

It’s hard to adjust to how vile such statements are, now that the Trump administration’s racist attitudes have become so normalized. Do people not remember what an egalitarian society was like?

Krugman:

Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, declared that New York is about to turn into “Caracas on the Hudson.”

And Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama basically declared New York’s voters subhuman, saying:

These inner-city rats, they live off the federal government. And that’s one reason we’re $37 trillion in debt. And it’s time we find these rats and we send them back home, that are living off the American taxpayers that are working very hard every week to pay taxes.

These reactions are vile, and they’re also dishonest. Whatever these men may claim, it’s all about bigotry.

Miller isn’t concerned about the state of New York “society.” What bothers him is the idea of nonwhite people having political power.

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Continuing my way through the late, or most recent, Springsteen albums. High Hopes is a 2014 album of “unreleased material from the past decade” and included a couple versions of previously known songs, like “The Ghost of Tom Joad.” Listening through it twice today, this is the most striking track: “Down in the Hole.”

Posted in Music, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

Can You Hear Me?

  • Robert Reich reminds us of the three branches of American government, and how, in plain site, Trump is attacking two of them;
  • How Donald Trump doesn’t align with William McKinley so much as William Jennings Bryan.
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Outlaw Pete”.
– – –

Robert Reich puts the latest Supreme Court decision into perspective. There used to be a “civics” class in 6th grade, or junior high school, and I gather there isn’t any more.

Robert Reich, 29 Jun 2025: Sunday Thought: The One Branch of Government that Trump Wants to Keep Alive, subtitled “While eviscerating the two others:

As every American school kid learns, the U.S. Constitution establishes three branches of government that are supposed to check and balance each other.

Every school kid, that is, except Donald Trump and the people around him who have been usurping congressional authority and going to war against the judiciary.

Trump and his lackeys want there to be only one branch of government — the executive branch, under Trump.

Congress has now all but disappeared because it’s controlled by Republican zombies who will say and do whatever Trump wants.

This leaves the federal judiciary as the only remaining check on Trump. So far, federal courts have paused about 80 of Trump’s executive orders until judges have an opportunity to hear arguments and sift through evidence at full trials.

But even this is too much for the dictator-in-chief.

On Friday, a majority of the Supreme Court — at the prodding of Trump’s Justice Department — decided that federal judges could pause executive actions only for the specific plaintiffs that bring a case. (Previously, any of the nation’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halted government policies across all 50 states.)

On Tuesday, Trump and his lackeys filed a lawsuit against 15 federal judges who serve on the bench in Maryland, seeking a court order that would block them from making any ruling that might “interfere” in “the president’s powers to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

Beyond these are Trump’s personal attacks against federal judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters” who want America to “go to hell,” and “radical left lunatics” or worse — even demanding their impeachment.

This is Trump acting like he’s a king, or a dictator. And the last quotes resemble those from a couple posts ago — actually it was on the 20th — how if you’re not on Trump’s side, you must “hate America.” Simplistic, even lunatic thinking.

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From a couple weeks ago.

The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr, 16 Jun 2025: Why Donald Trump Is Obsessed with a President from the Gilded Age, subtitled “William McKinley led a country defined by tariffs and colonial wars. There’s a reason Trump is so drawn to his legacy—and so determined to bring the liberal international order to an end.”

Typically long, exploratory New Yorker piece, which I haven’t had time to read deeply. But there’s a revelation beyond the idea in the subtitle. The piece opens:

As a historical figure, Donald Trump is oddly hard to place in time. He was an icon of the nineteen-eighties, yet he’s also the defining figure of the post-Obama era. His politics oscillate between knuckle-dragging conservatism and manic accelerationism. He longs for a time when America was “great,” though when that was is unclear. His historical enthusiasms include the America First movement of the early nineteen-forties, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln (“Most people don’t even know he was a Republican, right? Does anybody know?”).

Pause for a moment: no Lincoln was not a Republican in the modern sense. The great shift, or switch, between the two parties occurred in the 1960s, over the issue of civil rights. As detailed in many other places. And modern conservatives ignore this, if they knew about it in the first place.

Here’s the point of this essay:

If Trump resembles any Gilded Age politician, it isn’t William McKinley but his electoral opponent, William Jennings Bryan. In 1896, Bryan ran an anti-establishment campaign that took aim at the global financial élite. (A “bleak and gloomy” outlook, Rove scolds, and one that attracted antisemites.) Bryan received nominations from both the Populists and the Democrats, though Democratic Party insiders tried to block him. To support his improbable candidacy, Bryan gave some five hundred and seventy fiery speeches in twenty-nine states. Freaked-out businessmen wrote big checks to stop him. This allowed McKinley’s amply funded campaign to carpet the country in pamphlets while the candidate stayed home, in Canton, Ohio, serving lemonade to well-wishers on his front porch. It was charisma versus capital—and, in this case, the money won. Still, Bryan’s electoral map looked broadly similar to Trump’s in 2016.

The essay does not mention Bryan again. But Bryan was, of course, famous for his participation in the famous Scopes Trial, defending the literal truth of the Bible. His side won on a technicality, but history has come to regard him as a doofus. And the legitimacy of evolution has become unassailable. See my take on the movie and play.

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Continuing to explore the late Springsteen albums, which I’m defining as everything past The Rising. Here’s the first song on the 2009 album Working on a Dream: “Outlaw Pete.”

I’m sure this is obvious but: with the great songwriters, and singers: read the lyrics. Listen to them. Most pop songs succeed by virtue of catchy melodies and beats. Dance music.

Songs like this one, and many of Bob Dylan’s, are stories. The stories are energized and dramatized by the music. There’s a story here, and it all comes down to the plea: “Can you hear me?” And yet, who is asking who? Who needs to be heard?

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Music, Politics | Leave a comment

Morality Is Relative; Reality Is Not

  • An undistorted map of the world;
  • Jesse Being on “commonsense”;
  • How morality is circumstantial, e.g. in Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, which I just reread this week;
  • Website matters involving drop-down menu bars, here and on sfadb.com;
  • Short items about Christian panic that did not come true; Kari Lake’s ad hominem tactic; how Anderson Cooper fact-checks Pete Hegseth’s claims; and how the slogan “Peace through Strength” was not invented by Trump, despite Karoline Leavitt.
– – –

From X via Facebook: Actual size of countries on the world map, without the Mercator projection distortion.

Alas, there’s no provenance (reliable source) indicated, and I don’t have an X account to read comments there. But this looks about right. The problem with all the Mercator map projections everywhere (even on the backdrop of the Saturday Night Live “Weekend Update” news segments!) is that they imply areas to the north and to the south are far larger than they actually are. To see things more accurately, just swirl a globe around and back and forth and look at, say, the US straight on, then swivel around to look at Greenland straight on. Similarly for Africa, and Russia. (Alas, I suspect many people, especially the flat-earthers, do not own globes.)

Greenland isn’t nearly as big as most people (including perhaps Trump) think it is. Nor is Russia. While Africa really is huge. I’ve seen some similar map arrangements on Fb that show how, as the map here suggests, that when you keep everything to scale, the US, China, and Europe, plus maybe even Greenland (!), can fit within the area of Africa.

A running theme here is how “common sense” perceptions are usually wrong, because they’re based on experience in very limited circumstances.

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In fact, one of my Facebook friends (not a personal friend, but a professional writer who accepted my friend request), Jesse Bering, posted this comment yesterday. (He’s the author of a book that deeply influenced me, many years ago: The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life.)

Facebook, Jesse Bering, 27 Jun 2025: Hearing a lot… [friends-only post]. This is his complete post.

Hearing a lot of sociopolitical discourse surrounding “a return to commonsense” or “it’s just commonsense,” as though “commonsense” is somehow incontrovertibly right and moral. More often than not, it just implies low-effort, automatic, or intuitive reasoning. At best, it has no connection whatsoever with morality and, at worst, it creates a dangerous sense of righteousness due to ease of psychological and emotional processing. Think about what was considered “commonsense” in, say, the Deep South in the 1930s. Such framing often amounts to a trust-your-gut model of unchecked social reasoning, no learning, critical reflection, or hard thinking (i.e., uncommon sense) required.

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Morality is circumstantial. (For example, I just finished re-reading Margaret Atwood’s THE HANDMAID’S TALE, since first reading it in 1987. Arguably, the “morality” of Gilead is appropriate to a society in which, for whatever reason, only a small proportion of women remain fertile. Without the morality of Gilead, the race would likely die out, given those circumstances. But we don’t live in Gilead, and we don’t live in the world of the Old Testament and the 10 Commandments, either.)

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Website issues. I mentioned a couple days ago that the drop-down menus on this site were in chaos. (They looked like those on File 770.) I think they are fixed now. I was experimenting with fixing the drop-down menus on sfadb, which are still not fixed. I’ve been through rounds of suspects. Something with the php? No, both sfadb and this site have the same version of php installed. Not css, obviously. Something with the javascript? Currently the leading suspect. My personal site, right here, uses WordPress mechanisms to assign “pages” to a hierarchy of menu drop-down lists. Sfadb does not. When I set up sfadb some 13 or 14 years ago now, I found a javascript app called ddsmoothmenu, that allowed you to set up a personalized drop-down menu on your site, with drop-down menus assigned to specific pages. I could even use a css file to customize colors and fonts on the drop-down menu items, even into a table, as I did for the drop-down under “Names.” Why, after all these years, would they have stopped working? I don’t know.

I do see on that github site that many of the files I must have installed way back then have been updated, 9 or 10 years ago, more recently than when I set up the sfadb site. That doesn’t explain why those drop-down menus were working until only three or four months ago.

So I spent a career in software development, and I know how to do a problem analysis. A basic step is, in this case, you set up a duplicate state, site in this case, replicating the original, and then start changing one little thing at a time, to spot where the error is. In this case, I will do it a little differently. I will set up an alternate sfadb homepage, and re-install ddsmoothmenu as if from scratch, using the current files on that site. If it works, then I’ll transfer all those files to the current sfadb installation.

This has to be done very carefully. You never want to screw up the current, live, site.

I already did that with this site, but in doing so I discovered something new. For years, as I’ve set up “pages” on markrkelly.com — post of content not tied to dated “posts” — I thought they needed to be assigned to the hierarchy of drop-down menu lists. (There are fields in edit mode for pages that let you assign parent and order.) That’s why for several years the drop-down menus here had so many subitems. But this week I discovered that WordPress has a “menus” function that allows you to define the menus explicitly. The menus don’t need to include every “page” on the site, and they can even include custom external links. So I could put a link to sfadb.com as an item in the drop-down menus on this site, if I wanted.

Will continue this in the coming days.

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Short items.

LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 26 Jun 2025: Christians warned marriage equality would end civilization. 10 years in, we’re still standing., subtitled “Why does anyone still take them seriously?”

Another example of Prothero’s thesis, perhaps.

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Ad hominem, a time-tried tactic. And for conservatives, accusing someone of being gay is apparently the worst thing they could possibly be.

JMG, 27 Jun 2025 Kari Lake Accuses Dem Rep Of Having “Gay Lover” After He Lists Her Many Insane Election Fraud Lies [VIDEO] (from Phoenix New Times)

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You see these stories again and again. Over and over, Trump and his henchmen make claims that do not conform with reality. And why do they get away with them?

LGBTQNation, Alex Bollinger, 27 Jun 2025: Anderson Cooper slams Pete Hegseth’s media complaints… & he brought receipts, subtitled “Hegseth raged at the media for not covering the Iran strikes correctly… but Cooper showed that the complaints didn’t match reality.”

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Another absurd lie. “Peace through Strength” has been around for ages. Wikipedia: Peace through strength

JMG, 23 Jun 2025: Leavitt: Trump Coined “Peace Through Strength” Motto

Posted in Morality, Politics, Psychology, reality, Website Issues | Leave a comment

Progress, and the Forces Against It

  • We have been here before: comparing 1940 to 2025;
  • Steven Novella assesses whether skepticism has made any progress in recent decades;
  • The irony of MAGA being outraged by a Muslim candidate for New York City’s mayor;
  • Conservative presumption and arrogance in RFK Jr.’s new advisory vaccine board;
  • Heather Cox Richardson undermines Pete Hegseth’s claim about “the most complex and secretive military operation in history”
– – –

This too shall pass.

OnlySky, Katie Malone, 27 Jun 2025: Do not despair, subtitled “For we have walked this path before.”

The darkness of fascism was gathering on the horizon. Politicians rose to prominence by demonizing the alien and the other, spreading fear of imaginary enemies within as they grasped for dictatorial power. Violent, cultish political movements banned books, scorned intellectuals and rejected tolerance, worshipping the leader and promising to restore lost greatness. The rule of law was under siege, and fear stalked the streets. The drums of war beat in the distance.

Some people saw the threat clearly, but many more dismissed it.

“It can’t happen here,” some assured themselves. “It doesn’t affect my life,” shrugged others. “They make some good points; they’re not all bad,” said far too many.

And then there were those who saw the darkness for what it was and despaired of ever glimpsing light again.

This was the world in 1940, and this is America in 2025.

A point by point comparison of now and 1940. It’s especially notable how people we now regard as heroes, or pioneers, like Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, were in fact racist, isolationist, and/or antisemitic. And how other people we now regard as heroes, or pioneers, were champions of idealistic American values. Sinclair Lewis, Charlie Chaplin, and his film The Great Dictator (the article includes a YouTube clip of its concluding speech). (Which I confess I’ve never seen.)

The big picture here is, of course, human nature. Life now *is* better than in the past, but the tribalistic, xenophobic aspects of human nature keep undermining human progress.

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One way life is better now than in the past is our increased understanding of the flaws of base human nature, how it has become optimized for survival, not understanding reality, a reality humanity needs to understand to solve existential problems. But such progress, as in the above item, proceeds by fits and starts.

Skeptical Inquirer, Steven Novella, from July/August 2025 issue: After Decades of Skepticism, How Are We Doing?

What we’re talking about:

Skepticism, which includes not only scientific literacy but critical thinking skills and media savvy, has evolved into a sophisticated skill set—arguably the most important skill set there is—in a world simultaneously flooded with complex science and information along with misinformation, disinformation, and outright fraud.

And whether it’s been successful:

I think we have been almost entirely correct. At least in the broadest sense, we have been on the correct side of science pretty consistently (especially once there is enough time to work out any internal disagreements). To be fair, this is partly because we pick a lot of low-hanging fruit. Whether or not Bigfoot exists, we are being visited by aliens, astrology works, or homeopathy is anything but magic water is not, scientifically speaking, a tough call. Our job there is not to make difficult decisions but to understand why so many people are attracted to and believe things that are clearly not true.

But, I would say, the low-hanging-fruit are what the general population notices.

In practice, what kind of track record does this skill set have? Pretty damn good, even if you move past the low-hanging fruit. Do vaccines or any vaccine ingredients cause autism? Nope. Are GMOs causing massive public toxicity? Doesn’t look like it. Is the alternative medicine “revolution” going to start spitting out safe and effective natural cures? I wouldn’t bet on it. Cars that run on water? Zero-point energy? Alien autopsy? Three strikes. Evolutionary theory continues to thrive, while intelligent design has predictably faded into intellectual obscurity.

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The most telling and ironic story today is the conservative outrage that a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City.

The New Republic, 25 Jun 2025: MAGA Enters Racist Meltdown Mode Over Zohran Mamdani’s New York Win, subtitled “Zohran Mamdani pulled off a stunning upset to win the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City.”

A progressive won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary Tuesday, sending the far-right media sphere into a tailspin.

Zohran Mamdani’s campaign platform was practically the opposite of the president’s, arguing for higher taxes on corporations and the ultrawealthy, pitching new green initiatives for public facilities, making the city an LGBTQIA+ sanctuary, and advocating for raising the city’s minimum wage. It also planned for “Trump-proofing NYC,” lobbying for countermeasures against Donald Trump’s ICE raids, skyrocketing prices under his tariff proposal, and saving vital social services for working New Yorkers.

So Trump’s allies did not take kindly to the news.

New York Representative Elise Stefanik derided Mamdani as a “radical, Defund-the-Police, Communist, raging Antisemite,” arguing that New York Governor Kathy Hochul and state Democrats had “fully embraced Marxism, antisemitism, anti-capitalism, and sheer insanity.”

Aside from the fact that *many* people oppose Trump’s agenda, and the lack of any actual evidence that Mamdani is any kind of Islamic fundamentalist, my take is this: why is a Muslim candidate any worse than a Christian candidate? Especially since the extreme MAGA Christians *are* trying to enforce their religious agenda on the rest of the country?

For example, on Facebook today:

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Conservative presumption and arrogance.

NY Times, opinion by David Wallace-Wells, 18 Jun 2025: ‘I Think He Is About to Destroy Vaccines in This Country’ [gift link]

This concerns RFK Jr.’s firing of the 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, and replacing them with like-minded vaccine skeptics. And RFK Jr.’s bizarre claim that no one in the world knows how to do science properly, other than himself.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary, staged his night of the long knives a week ago Monday, firing all 17 members of the vaccine advisory board, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, in one fell swoop — a historically unprecedented action and one that broke an explicit promise he made to Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana and a physician, as a condition of his confirmation as secretary. The epidemiologist and immunologist Michael Mina called Kennedy’s move a “code red” for vaccines in America.

Much more; this is a gift link (I’m allowed ten a month) from NYT and I haven’t used them all up for June. The piece ends by anticipating what would happen if RFK got autism implicated as a vaccine injury.

Adding autism, Offit says, would break the program, making it immediately untenable for manufacturers to continue producing or delivering shots in the United States. The liability would be simply too much for drugs that offer the companies almost no profit. Suddenly, we would be faced not with problems of guidance or coverage but of simple accessibility — all those shots that brought such miraculous ends to centuries of infectious diseases in the second half of the last century no longer available in this one.

“I think we are on the verge of losing vaccines for this country, from this country,” Offit says. “And the reason is that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will hold up a paper, in the next four or five months, that says it’s aluminum in vaccines that are causing a whole swath of problems, including autism,” he goes on. “I think he is about to destroy vaccines in this country. I do.”

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson challenges a claim by Pete Hegseth.

Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: June 26, 2025

This morning’s press conference with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth featured an apparently angry Hegseth yelling at the media for contradicting President Donald Trump’s claim that last weekend’s strikes against Iran had “completely obliterated” its nuclear weapons program. Hegseth seemed to be performing for an audience of one as he insisted on the made-for-television narrative the administration has been pushing. He said: “President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history, and it was a resounding success resulting in a ceasefire agreement and the end of the 12-day war.”

D-Day, the June 6, 1944, Allied invasion of France, took a year of planning, involved 156,000 Allied soldiers and 195,700 naval personnel, and required cooperation of leaders from thirteen countries. It remains the largest seaborne invasion in history.

Never mind the disputes about how successful the Iran strikes actually were. Trump and Hegseth make claims; they don’t need evidence.

Posted in conservatives, History, Politics, Psychology | Leave a comment

This Is What Will Be

  • How right-wing violence has become normalized;
  • How perhaps “totalitarianism” is better than “authoritarianism” for what is going on;
  • How Republicans trying to roll back same-sex marriage are fighting a losing battle, cf. that Stephen Prothero book;
  • A psychiatrist explains how changes in definitions of autism resulted in the apparent increase in autism rates;
  • Bruce Springsteen’s “Magic.”
– – –

Saying violence on the right is “extremist” isn’t correct; violence on the right has become normalized.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 21 Jun 2025: Right-Wing Violence Is Not a Fringe Issue [gift link]

It is simply a fact that the far right has been responsible for most of the political violence committed in the United States since the start of the 21st century, with particular emphasis on the past 10 years of American political life.

Examples from 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022.

What’s critical for us to understand that this isn’t a problem of the fringe. Not only was President Trump permissive of right-wing violence throughout his first term — consider his reaction to the violence in Charlottesville — but after losing his bid for re-election, he also led an organized effort to overturn the results, culminating in a riot in the Capitol. And what was one of his first acts back in office? He pardoned the rioters, in as clear an endorsement of violence on his behalf as one can imagine.

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Maybe “authoritarianism” is no longer the adequate word.

Salon, Mike Lofgren, 22 Jun 2025: America slides into totalitarianism — and it won’t be easy to reverse, subtitled “‘Authoritarianism’ is so 2018 — Donald Trump and his minions want to conquer all of civil society”

We’ve seen a spike over the last few years in the use of the word “authoritarianism.” This is the predictable result of the recent rise of authoritarian regimes which, to a greater or lesser extent, work to subvert and dismantle the institutions and practices of democracy and the rule of law.

A survey of more than 500 political scientists found that they believe the United States is headed towards authoritarian rule. A majority of Americans, according to a PRRI poll, now believes Donald Trump is “a dangerous dictator.” (It remains an enduring mystery why this majority didn’t stumble onto this conclusion before the November election).

There is, of course, another term for modern dictatorial regimes, one that gained considerable currency during the Cold War after the 1951 publication of “The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt, but which has somewhat fallen out of favor.

How does authoritarianism differ from totalitarianism? There is no precise description of either; like other political terms, they are subject to questionable definitions that often depend on the viewpoint of whoever is using them. Marxist writers shunned the word “totalitarian”; Nazi Germany was invariably referred to as “fascist,” while the Soviet Union was a “people’s democracy.” But “totalitarian” was a favorite term of anti-Communists throughout the Cold War.

Fairly long piece. I’ll quote a couple of their pull-quotes.

Totalitarian leaders tend toward charismatic styles and have a genuine bond of loyalty with their followers, who often express extreme, exaggerated enthusiasm for the leader and his movement.

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America presents a paradox similar to early 20th-century Germany: It leads the world in science and technology, its universities are the finest anywhere, its cities are hubs of economic vitality. Yet much of the interior is economically and culturally backward.

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Political absolutism has been a temptation throughout American history. But its most recent outbreak is unique; the intellectual ground had been prepared by religious fundamentalist theocrats and white supremacists for more than four decades.

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An illustration of the theme of Stephen Prothero’s WHY LIBERALS WIN THE CULTURE WARS (EVEN WHEN THEY LOSE ELECTIONS), which I reviewed here.

NY Times, guest essay by Kristen Soltis Anderson (a Republican pollster!), 22 Jun 2025: Roll Back Legal Same-Sex Marriage? Republicans Are Getting It Wrong. [gift link]

Almost 10 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex marriage would be legal across the country. Today, sensing a political shift toward socially conservative policy, Republican policymakers in states from Michigan to Tennessee have begun proposing bills that would roll back same-sex marriage.

These lawmakers may discover to their dismay that they have the politics of the issue quite wrong. Though the cultural winds have shifted on many issues, Republican voters are not clamoring for an unraveling of same-sex marriage rights. Republican voters have objected to socially progressive policies that they believe incur a cost to themselves or others, but the experience over the past decade with legal same-sex marriage has persuaded many in the party that it is nothing to be feared.

The last line here evokes the zero-sum thinking of some conservatives, who worry that granting “rights” to people unlike themselves will somehow deprive them of rights. In most cases, it doesn’t work that way.

And yet there’s a paradox in conservative thinking. The writer notes:

There are two main lines of argument that seem to resonate most strongly with Republicans on preserving same-sex marriage: Live and let live, and leave well enough alone.

And follows this line of thought to the end. Without mentioning the strain of conservative (MAGA) thinking, religiously based, that is certain of what is true and right, because Bible. And would repeal marriage equality and many other things that don’t conform to their thinking.

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Someone who was “in the room where it happened” explains. Not that such testimony will have any effect of RFK Jr or any of the others who know what they know, because they just *know*. (Based on primal biases, as I’ve explained.)

NY Times, guest essay by Allen Frances, a psychiatrist, 23 Jun 2025: Autism Rates Have Increased 60-Fold. I Played a Role in That.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the causes. I should know, because I am partly responsible for the explosion in rates.

The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins, but rather is the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was the chair of the task force charged with creating the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the D.S.M.-IV. Sometimes called the “bible of psychiatry,” the D.S.M. influences medical practice, insurance coverage, education and treatment selection.

And so on. This essay is fascinating for how the writer’s task force tried to balance the needs of care workers, parents, and patients. It included the new diagnosis of “Asperger’s syndrome.” But they didn’t anticipate some of the consequences, e.g. how some school systems over-diagnosed, to enhance their own funding. The writer admits that their conclusions back then had unfortunate consequences. (This is the complexity of real life.) And then concludes:

Mr. Kennedy’s statements that people suffering from autism don’t pay taxes, implying they are useless, has created outrage among patients and families. His proposed autism registry is a scary invasion of privacy.

Figuring out how to accurately diagnose and appropriately treat autism is incredibly hard and the source of many fraught conversations among researchers, clinicians, people who have autism and their families. We need a health secretary with the good judgment to judiciously help us navigate these thorny questions and properly allocate scarce research resources. Instead, we have Mr. Kennedy, who has only served to sow confusion with false promises, to trigger anger with disparaging comments and to replace funding for real science with wasteful false science.

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Note the drop down menus at the top of this page are currently in chaos. I’m experimenting in order to figure out why the ddsmoothmenu functions on sfadb.com aren’t working. (Update 28 Jun: I think these have been fixed. See comments in that day’s post.)

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Listening to Springsteen. I have all 21 studio volumes lined up in a row…

This page quotes a 2007 Springsteen interview about this song:

In an interview dated 17 Oct 2007 and published in Rolling Stone magazine issue # 1038 (01 Nov 2007), Bruce Springsteen told Joe Levy: “The song ‘Magic’ is about living in a time when anything that is true can be made to seem like a lie, and anything that is a lie can be made to seem true. There are people that have taken that as their credo. The classic quote was from one of the Bushies in The New York Times: ‘We make our own reality. You guys report it, we make it.’ I may loathe that statement — the unbelievable stupidity and arrogance of it — more than I loathe ‘Bring it on’ and ‘Mission accomplished.’ That song, it’s all about illusion: ‘Trust none of what you hear / And less of what you’ll see / This is what will be’ — we make it. Until you get to the last verse: ‘There’s a fire down below / It’s coming up here… There’s bodies hanging in the trees / This is what will be.’ That’s the heart of my record right there.”

Posted in Conservative Resistance, conservatives, Music, Psychology, Science | Leave a comment

Paths Away From and To Reality

  • “Doing your own research” mostly leads to false conclusions, unless you’ve done your “homework” — i.e. have an education in the subject matter;
  • Example of a claim about Sodom and Gomorrah and an asteroid or comet airburst;
  • How simpletons think they can cut costs to “overhead” without realizing what overhead costs do;
  • A philosophy graduate explains why it’s better to doubt than to know;
  • With thoughts about whether philosophy is useless, as some scientists say, and how religions establish arbitrary certainty, despite the evidence of the real world.
– – –

Variation on another recurring theme of this blog: the world is more complex than most people think; and most people know less than they think they do. And so draw wrong conclusions.

Big Think, Ethan Siegel, 24 Jun 2025: You can’t do your own research without doing your homework first, subtitled “Here in 2025, many of us claim to come to our own conclusions by doing our own research. Here’s why we’re mostly deluding ourselves.”

Key Takeaways

• Many of us frequently embrace conclusions that are contrary to the scientific consensus, instead preferring to find out what the facts are for ourselves and draw our conclusions based on what we find. • Yet this strategy is usually doomed to failure, as nearly all of us aren’t even competently equipped to do the homework, or accurately understanding the foundational background, necessary to even comprehend the issue at stake. • What most of us call “doing our own research” is wholly unrelated to research of any type, and instead exemplifies what happens when you haven’t even done your homework correctly: we get it wrong when it counts the most.

This isn’t a political essay per se, but it does discuss government agencies that do the work to make sure we (i.e. Americans) don’t have to personally worry about every little thing. EPA, FDA, departments for agriculture, highway safety, weather, disease control.

Yet much of this (and similar) work — work conducted by bona fide experts over many decades — is being or has already been undone, in favor of allowing individuals to fend for themselves, make their own decisions, and do their own research about life-and-death matters like public health, public safety, and issues that affect the long-term future of the planet. The truth is not that consensus undermines science, but rather that our modern rejection of expertise, and our newfound embracing of the “do your own research” ideology, is a recipe for societal disaster. In truth, most of us aren’t even well-enough equipped to do our own homework, much less research, on these and other issues. Here’s what that’s all about.

The key is understanding that we “inhabit a reality that obeys rules and that those rules can be, at least in principle, understood.”

  • that we have a real, physical, material-based (e.g., made of atoms) system,
  • that there are underlying rules that govern the behavior of that system,
  • that we can observe, measure, control the conditions of, and experiment on those systems,
  • gathering results about what happens to those systems in a repeatable, replicable fashion,
  • and then that we can draw conclusions about how that system will perform under the real-world conditions we’re likely to encounter.

It goes on with the idea of “doing your homework” and examples of claims made by people who haven’t. “Chemicals,” vaccines, fluoride in water, climate change. Then there’s the denialist playbook, as we’ve read about in two or three different books lately.

As biologist Sean B. Carroll noted, there’s a six-step denialist playbook that seems to work to sway public opinion every time:

  1. Doubt the Science.
  2. Question Scientists’ Motives and Integrity.
  3. Magnify Disagreements Among Scientists and Cite Gadflies as Authorities.
  4. Exaggerate Potential Harm.
  5. Appeal to Personal Freedom.
  6. Reject Whatever Would Repudiate a Key Philosophy.

And concluding:

The path back to reality is instead to value actual expertise, and those who have devoted their lives to the betterment of humanity through discovering scientific truths about reality. This isn’t to say that the notion of a scientific consensus should never be challenged; only that those challenges are only legitimate when they come from experts who’ve already sufficiently and scrupulously done their homework. If we can take this path, and return to reality, then we can once again aspire to having a functional society where we all work together to make policies for the collective long-term good of all. Without it, the thin veneer of civilization is likely doomed to crumble.

My own insight about these matters, another theme of this blog, is something most articles like this never mention. The challenges to science come from deep-seated prejudices, or biases, built by evolution into human nature, because those biases — deference to personal experience, resistance to anything that might like polluting the body — were useful at one time, thousands and millions of years ago. These biases remain in modern human nature, even as our current environment has changed from the ancestral one. Only a relatively small portion of humanity, it seems, has the ability to think around those biases, and understand how they mostly don’t apply in the modern world.

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An example of a specific claim and its retraction.

Scientific American, Mark Boslough, 25 Jun 2025: A Sodom and Gomorrah Story Shows Scientific Facts Aren’t Settled by Public Opinion, subtitled “Claims that an asteroid or comet airburst destroyed the biblical Sodom captured the public’s imagination. Its retraction shows that scientific conclusions aren’t decided by majority rule in the public square”

Personally, I think it a fool’s errand to try to “explain” things reported second/third/fourth/hundredth-hand via oral stories told and retold — usually to make some moral point — before they were ever written down, and then translated and retranslated across different versions of the Bible. It’s building complex infrastructure on a foundation of sand.

Still, let’s see what this article says. It begins by referencing a 2021 claim that a “Tunguska-sized airburst … destroyed a Bronze Age city near the Dead Sea.” How the story went viral, but was then retracted due “to faulty methodology, errors of fact and inappropriate manipulation of digital image data.”

The Sodom airburst paper instead represented the nadir of “science by press release,” in which sensational but thinly supported claims were pitched directly to the media and the public. Press releases, rife with references to Sodom and biblical implications, appeared to be focused as much on titillation as on science.

An example of a meme that, like many other memes, isn’t true.

Contrary to that bastion of error, scientists know that humans use more than 10 percent of their brains, vaccines don’t cause autism, “detox diets” don’t cleanse our bodies, toads don’t give us warts, and bulls don’t hate the color red.

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Simpletons who don’t understand, or dismiss, complexity and subtlety, like the ones currently running our government, are doing real damage.

LA Times, David L. Valentine, 24 Jun 2025: Those cuts to ‘overhead’ costs in research? They do real damage

As a professor at UC Santa Barbara, I research the effects of and solutions to ocean pollution, including oil seeps, spills and offshore DDT. I began my career by investigating the interaction of bacteria and hydrocarbon gases in the ocean, looking at the unusual propensity of microbes to consume gases that bubbled in from beneath the ocean floor. Needed funding came from the greatest basic scientific enterprise in the world, the National Science Foundation.

My research was esoteric, or so my in-laws (and everyone else) thought, until 2010, when the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded and an uncontrolled flow of hydrocarbon liquid and gas jetted into the deep ocean offshore from Louisiana. It was an unmitigated disaster in the Gulf, and suddenly my esoteric work was in demand. Additional support from the National Science Foundation allowed me to go offshore to help figure out what was happening to that petroleum in the deep ocean. I was able to help explain, contextualize and predict what would happen next for anxious residents of the Gulf states — all made possible by the foresight of Vannevar Bush, the original architect of the National Science Foundation.

With discussion of what “overhead” costs cover. Lab coats. Electricity. Disposal of chemicals.

Ending:

The scientific greatness of the United States is fragile. Before the inception of the National Science Foundation, my grandfather was required to learn German for his biochemistry PhD at Penn State because Germany was then the world’s scientific leader. Should the president’s efforts to cut direct and indirect costs come to pass, it may be China tomorrow. That’s why today we need to remind our elected officials that the U.S. scientific enterprise pays exceptional dividends and that chaotic and punitive cuts risk irreparable harm to it.

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Philosophy. Certainty is dangerous.

Washington Post, Clary Doyle, 25 Jun 2025: I just graduated with a philosophy degree. Here’s my message to the Class of 2025., subtitled “Why it’s better to doubt than to know.”

Today, I receive a degree in philosophy. Which, as many of my relatives have pointed out, means it may be a long time before I pay off my loans. So, I am both literally and figuratively indebted to Northwestern because I got to spend the past four years trying to answer questions like: What is the meaning of life? How should I live? And what is the right thing to do?

But I’ll let you in on a secret in my field: Philosophers are less concerned with finding the right answers and more concerned with asking the right questions. No one is quite as famous for this as Socrates. When the Oracle of Delphi supposedly prophesied that he was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates was shocked because he was sure that he knew nothing. He then went around all of Athens, meeting with those who called themselves wise, and asked them questions to find out what they knew. And what he discovered was that they, too, knew nothing. So, indeed, he was the wisest man, because at least he knew that he knew nothing.

There’s a strain among some scientists that claims philosophy is useless. Only science can establish provisional truths. I think I slightly disagree. Philosophy will ask, or wonder, why is science pursuing certain questions and not others? Because certain questions appeal to human vanity? A very open question.

The writer tells her personal story.

I grew up in a religious town, to a religious family. My entire life everyone around me championed faith — belief in the unknown and a steadfast trust that things would work out. They urged me to set my doubts aside, but I remember, even back then, my dissatisfaction with blind faith. I pestered our parish priest with questions about why we ought to do what God said, why women couldn’t be priests, and how we could know if God was real.

Going on with what she learned at college. Then about current regressive politics:

We are now in an unprecedented moment in history in which universities like ours are under attack. And why? Because some people believe that in universities we are being inculcated into the cult of science and liberal ideology. But, in fact, the real reason is because we are not being taught faith. We are not learning to blindly believe. We are learning to doubt and to question and to criticize. And, make no mistake, it is precisely this skill that is powerful and is being attacked.

Exactly.

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I take religions as cultural mechanisms to establish arbitrary certainty, without any basis in objective reality, for the sake of tribal conformity and solidarity, and simplicity of living. Despite which, there’s always been a minority of people who are curious about what the real, objective world is like. They are the ones who developed science and invented technology and created our modern world.

Posted in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Social Progress | Leave a comment

Is Religion Simply a Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game?

Since it’s obviously not about objective reality.

  • Lance Wallnau says Trump’s strike on Iran is setting the stage for the Antichrist;
  • With thoughts about what humanity is “for”;
  • Trump confuses supercells with sleeper cells;
  • Vox on how Trump’s actions aren’t actually very popular;
  • Trump challenges AOC to a cognitive test — sure, bring it on!
– – –

A follow-up to yesterday’s title item.

Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 23 Jun 2025: Lance Wallnau Says Trump’s Strike On Iran Is Setting The Stage For ‘The Antichrist Emerging’

I’ll only quote just a bit.

On the supernatural side, Wallnau said that the strike on Iran was setting the stage for the End Times.

“Jesus is coming back and I believe that this is all part of him setting the stage for his return,” Wallnau said. “It’s going to be an opening of the window through the State Department for the gospel of freedom to be preached into the Middle East, into Asia during these a couple of years we’ve got with Trump. We’ve got to move fast [to see] that this Gospel of the Kingdom goes into all the nations.”

Once again, this is nonsense; it’s people acting as if they’re in a demon-haunted fantasy novel, or game: an MMRPG, which I’m going to define as “massively multiplayer role-playing game” an analogy with MMORPG, Massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Religions aren’t online.

The RWW piece has this bio of Lance Wallnau:

A former oil executive turned right-wing evangelist, Wallnau is a self-proclaimed Christian nationalist and a leading proponent of Seven Mountains Dominionism, which seeks to place right-wing Christians atop the seven primary “mountains” that shape society: government, education, media, arts and entertainment, family, religion, and business.

Once again we can step out to the big picture and wonder what humans are for. (But even that begs the question that humans are “for” something. Maybe we just *are*.) Are we servants to a creator who must be worshiped, as slaves worshiped their masters, and should society remain static in order to maintain this function? Or are we an evolved species, a product of the workings of an immense universe, a way in which the universe has become aware of itself, as Carl Sagan put it, and are only beginning our journey into awareness? If there’s anything like “progress” over human history — which I think there has been, in terms of human health and longevity, and in terms of humans understanding their place in the vast universe — it’s not come from religious movements seeking to maintain the status quo.

This seems to be the central issue in the future of the human race.

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Meanwhile, our president, endorsed by those evangelists because he’s fulfilling their prophecies, supposedly, doesn’t know the difference between supercells and sleeper-cells.

JMG, 24 Jun 2025: Trump Says “Biden Let In A Lot Of Supercells” [AUDIO]

“Biden let a lot of supercells into the United States. He was an incompetent president. He had no idea what he was doing. It was gross incompetence. Among everything else, he let a lot of supercells in, many from Iran. But hopefully we’ll take care of them. What Biden did to this country should never be forgotten.” – Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One while en route to The Hague.

Clearly, Trump is the incompetent one, and it’s telling that his fans don’t care. (A supercell is a meteorological term.)

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Here we are. Buyer’s Remorse?

Vox, Christian Paz, 24 Jun 2025: Trump keeps reminding the American public to dislike him, subtitled “The public doesn’t like it when the president actually does something.”

President Donald Trump is now the most unpopular he has been during his second term.

More than half of American adults disapprove of the job he is doing, and he’s underwater on nearly every important issue of the day.

The polling averages show this net disapproval clearly: On the economy, he’s down 13 percentage points. On inflation, he’s down 20 points. Even on immigration, he’s down 2 points. (Those negative marks include foreign policy, though it’s too soon to say how the public is reacting to Trump’s decision to join Israel’s bombing of Iran.)

Still, Trump’s popularity decline has been a dramatic development: After entering office with a positive approval rating and popular support for his agenda, he’s squandered much of it away through various political fights, policy decisions, and public spectacles.

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By all means, let’s do this.

JMG, 24 Jun 2025: Trump Challenges “Stupid AOC” To Cognitive Test

Trump:

“Stupid AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the ‘dumbest’ people in Congress, is now calling for my Impeachment, despite the fact that the Crooked and Corrupt Democrats have already done that twice before.

“When we examine her Test Scores, we will find out that she is NOT qualified for office but, nevertheless, far more qualified than Crockett, who is a seriously Low IQ individual, or Ilhan Omar, who does nothing but complain about our Country, yet the Failed Country that she comes from doesn’t have a Government, is drenched in Crime and Poverty, and is rated one of the WORST in the World, if it’s even rated at all. “

Bring it on! Do it live on TV! But it has to be a real, legitimate test. Note again how Trump is obsessed with superficialities: IQ scores (which no one cares about once you’ve been admitted to college, if you have), and ratings.

Posted in Human Progress, Lunacy, Politics, Religion | Comments Off on Is Religion Simply a Massively Multiplayer Role-Playing Game?