Monthly Archives: February 2017

Is Trump the problem, or also his voters?

Posted on 27 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

I have a link saved from a few days ago of a column by Nicholas Kristof called Trump Voters Are Not the Enemy, which he tweeted a cautionary note about not demonizing the people who voted for Trump. It’s a … Continue reading →

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Steven Pinker on the future under Trump

Posted on 27 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

An interview, conducted by Phil Torres, of Pinker: The United States Is Not an Apocalyptic Wasteland, Explains Steven Pinker. Pinker is well-known for his book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) arguing (with copious references to sources of evidence) … Continue reading →

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Quotes on American Anti-Intellectualism

Posted on 24 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Isaac Asimov, 1980: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false … Continue reading →

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Two Big Science Stories

Posted on 23 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Two big science stories this week. Highlighted in New York Times weekly Science section on Tuesday, this piece by Dennis Overbye: Cosmos Controversy: The Universe Is Expanding, but How Fast?. It’s about some discrepancies in data that should align and … Continue reading →

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Krugman and Republican Tax Policy

Posted on 23 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Paul Krugman is one of my go-to pundits, relentlessly pointing out the evidence of history as undermining conservative goals, even though his scope, politics focusing on economics issues, results in his rehashing certain themes over and over. Here’s one: On … Continue reading →

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Anthropocene and Harari

Posted on 23 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Is the ‘Anthropocene’ Epoch a Condemnation of Human Interference — or a Call for More?, by Wesley Yang. Noticed firstly as continued evidence of the currency of the term ‘anthropocene’ to refer to … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Reason; Christian victimhood; dead progressives; dystopias; Republican blondes; the fight for reason; fake history

Posted on 21 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From an Elizabeth Kolbert essay in next weekend’s New York Times Magazine: Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, subtitled “New discoveries about the human mind show the limitations of reason.” One way to look at science is as a system … Continue reading →

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Freedom of Media and Partisan Divide

Posted on 21 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From the opening essay in the March issue of Harper’s, Tyranny of the Minority by Rebecca Solnit. It’s about Repubican efforts to disenfranchise people unlikely to vote Republican, with this interesting aside: In 1987, for example, Republican appointees eliminated the … Continue reading →

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Science v Religion: New v Old

Posted on 21 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s another way in which religion and science are unalike. (Aside from one being a deference to the supposed wisdom of the ancients and to primitive myths about the nature of the universe and the centrality of humanity within it; … Continue reading →

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Zuckerberg and Harari

Posted on 18 February 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Mark Zuckerberg’s new Facebook manifesto has been much in the news lately; Vox’s Ezra Klein characterizes it as Mark Zuckerberg’s theory of human history. “History is the story of how we’ve learned to come together in ever greater numbers,” Zuckerberg … Continue reading →

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