We took both our cars into the indie BMW shop we’ve been going to, for routine maintenance. In my case, I needed my car to be ship-shape before driving down to LA in a couple weeks.
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Infrastructure note. In parallel with similar tasks on sfadb, I’ve spent some time in the past couple weeks updating and databasing my Nonfiction Reviews page, what you get when you click on “NF Reviews” in the menu bar above. I’ve added a couple three dozen descriptions for books I’ve blogged about the past couple years, and added stubs for other titles I’ve read but not yet blogged about. Next, I think, I’ll create subpages by theme (like the one for Math that’s already there), maybe a page listing recently read books chronologically, and maybe a listing just the highest rated (five *) books. And then, similar overhaul of the SF Reviews and other reviews pages. This is quite research; it’s more like, organizing my notes as part of research…
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Time, Sam Jacobs, 12 Dec 2024: 2024: The Choice: Donald Trump
For 97 years, the editors of TIME have been picking the Person of the Year: the individual who, for better or for worse, did the most to shape the world and the headlines over the past 12 months. In many years, that choice is a difficult one. In 2024, it was not.
(Time picked Joseph Stalin, too — twice — and Hitler once. Wikipedia.)
Time interviewed Trump, and then posted a fact-check. Elsewhere I heard today, he’s already walking back his promise to lower grocery prices: It will be “hard”.
(While the pace of food price growth has “already slowed dramatically” under the Biden presidency.)
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Items from today’s browsing.
Salon, Matthew Rozsa, 12 Dec 2024: As Trump escalates war on facts, scientists warn “we are going to get screwed”, subtitled “Trump has declared a war on government scientists as he denies climate change and pursues a pro-fossil fuel agenda”
Key point:
On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”
It’s not clear what’s going on that “prevents” challenging views from coming out; legitimate science welcomes actual data that might conflict with current provisional conclusions; that’s how science works. Presumably this is about official government statements, or some such. Yet why do Republicans want to push “views that challenge the existing consensus”? Because they don’t accept the existing consensus; they prefer to “believe” differently. Why? Because they have vested interests in the status quo. They desperately want to believe that climate change, in this example, is not true. These kinds of conservative demands are never about good-faith, objective discussion of evidence or conclusions. (This is called motivated thinking.)
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A basic principle, illustrated over and over again, and a running theme: There are some people who are simply frightened of people different from themselves.
Boing Boing, Jason Weisberger, 11 Dec 2024: Delicate flower Nancy Mace cries assault after a handshake
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina had an award-winning foster youth advocate arrested for shaking her hand.
Folks who saw the event are shocked, confused, and outraged. The story goes that James McIntyre did nothing more than shake Nancy Mace’s hand and let her know that children needed her support. Mace claimed physical assault and had McIntyre arrested.
Why? Her words:
“I was physically accosted at the Capitol tonight by a pro-trns man. One new brace for my wrist and some ice for my arm and it’ll heal just fine,” she posted at 8:43 p.m. “The Capitol police arrested the guy. Your trns violence and threats on my life will only make me double down.”
Snowflake. (I don’t understand the weird partial-italics formatting.)
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CNN, 12 Dec 2024: Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Defense pick, says allowing gay troops to serve openly reflects a Marxist agenda
Again, I think conservatives throw around words like Marxist, socialist, and communist and synonyms for “bad” without any understanding of what they actually mean. Not to mention, how do gay troops in the military have anything to do with anything? He’s a simple bigot.
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This entails the xenophobia of demonizing everyone in the world but white Christian Americans.
LA Times, Robin Abcarian, 11 Dec 2024: Column: This is why Donald Trump just doubled down on mass deportation of millions of immigrants
With a line from the movie Wicked.
“The best way to bring folks together,” the Wonderful Wizard of Oz tells the women, “is to give them a really good enemy.”
That is the essence of Trump’s immigration policy.
Because, according to Trump:
When [Kirsten] Welker tried to point out that he was misconstruing the data, Trump doubled down: “It’s 13,099, and it’s during the Biden period of time. And these are murderers, many of whom murdered more than one person.”
This is, of course, false. The Department of Homeland Security reported that more than 13,000 noncitizens had been convicted of homicide in the U.S. over the past four decades, including during Trump’s first term. And most of them were in jails and prisons, not walking the streets.
Of course this is nonsense; it’s been observed over and over that actually immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans (which makes sense because immigrants are afraid of getting caught and sent back to their home countries for committing crimes, and so are much more careful about stepping out of line). Columnist Abcarian seems to sigh:
I really can’t believe we are going to be forced to spend the next four years debunking Trump’s apocalyptic fantasies — nor how miserable he will make life for so many people based on his need to make enemies of people whose skin color does not match his own.
Whether immigrants “cost us a fortune” or not is one of the most studied questions in the entire field of immigration studies. Time and again, experts have concluded that immigrants do not cost U.S. taxpayers “a fortune,” depress wages, increase government deficits and debt, or commit a disproportionate share of crime.
With details.
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Another ongoing story that is about people who desperately want to believe that certain things are true, despite all the evidence. They tend to be bigots and fabulists too.
Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 11 Dec 2024: A Reminder That David Barton Isn’t Just Wrong About American History
He’s also anti-LGBTQ, thinks AIDS is God’s penalty for being gay, and is somehow certain there will never be a cure for it.
In addition to being the originator and leading purveyor of most of the bogus Christian nationalist propaganda circulating today, David Barton is also a virulently anti-LGBTQ religious-right activist who has repeatedly said that AIDS is God “penalty” for those who engage in “shameful sexual acts.”
All such bigotry, I’m gradually concluding, is an essential part of human nature, but of primitive human nature, as evolved and established in the ancestral, tribal, landscape. Bigotry and prejudice does not have to be taught (as some liberals think); it’s inherently there. But they’re increasingly maladaptive in the modern, multicultural world. And if the majority of people never get over it…?
