- 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. 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
