- David French and Jordan Peterson and competing theories about the problem with men;
- About cuts to science research; do Republicans not understand investments in the future?;
- A report about Lara Trump’s show on Fox News;
- An essay by Tom Nichols about how Hollywood (and also books) have treated the idea of nuclear catastrophe;
- And how the EPA has decided to respond to conspiracy theories about chemtrails.
How does this relate to the item I posted on 19 Jun about the demographic shift to a preference for baby girls over baby boys?
NY Times, opinion by David French, 10 Jul 2025: What’s the Matter With Men? [gift link]
This is a summary of an interview French, who is a religiously-flavored conservative, held with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian public intellect whom I’ve shied away from every time I try reading what he’s said. He strikes me as a regressive conservative who dresses up his opinions in pseudo-intellectual terms, and apparently has a lot of right-wing followers. A main topic here seems to be the so-called problems that boys have becoming men, according to some conservatives. Could there be anything here that relates to that item (noted Jun 19th) about the recent world-wide preference for girl babies over boy babies?
This is a broader point:
The entire conversation was interesting, but there was one moment that I thought crystallized not just how and why so many Americans see the world differently from one another, but also how and why our political disputes become so vicious.
And
Early in the podcast, Peterson, a clinical psychologist, made the case for what I’ll call the ideological explanation: Men are suffering because of what’s been done to them by malign actors, by people who either hate men or see men as fundamentally flawed.
Going on with how “The vast majority of teachers are not only female, but infantilizing female and radically left.” (Really??) But what strikes a chord here is the conservative tendency to claim victimhood: life is full of “malign actors” out to get them.
French reflects that “Peterson wasn’t offering his account as the exclusive explanation for the difficulties young men face, but it doesn’t truly square with the evidence, or the experience of millions of men.” And then thinks back to the Tennessee town where he and his wife raised there son, and where none of Peterson’s accusations were true.
And yet men in rural America arguably struggle even more than the men who live in America’s bluest, most progressive cities. Deaths of despair, for example, are worse in rural America, yet rural America is mostly untouched by the “woke mind virus” that the manosphere loves to hate.
And then French offers a counter-thesis:
There is a competing thesis about the crisis in young men — that it’s much less related to ideology than it is to technology. The Industrial Revolution and the information age have fundamentally changed our way of life, and we’re still figuring out how to adapt to changes that are inevitable and irresistible. Deindustrialization and the age of information have far more impact on men than any element of the culture war.
French expands on this thesis. Here we are in Jonathan Haidt territory, and the territory of my take on science fiction: the recognition that humanity’s changing environment, over centuries, is increasingly at odds with a relatively unchanging human nature. It’s about the kind of change conservatives resist or deny, and not about evildoers around every corner, as conservatives tend to imagine. (Recall Carl Sagan’s title “The Demon-Haunted World.”) And this is why “so many Americans see the world differently from one another.”
One more point.
One reason American politics are so dysfunctional is that we constantly overestimate what politicians can accomplish. Millions of Americans are looking to politicians and political parties to save men, to save the church, to end racism and to provide meaningful, enjoyable work. And when they can’t accomplish the impossible, voters grow frustrated, declare that they’re held back by a “uniparty” or a “regime” and then flirt with increasingly extreme and dangerous politicians and ideas.
I’ve noted before the voters tend to blame the current party in power for things that were consequences of the previous administration. And this:
But none of that changes the fundamental realities of an economic and technological environment that has permanently transformed the way we build a life and provide for our families. There is no political movement on the globe that can undo the seismic technological shifts that have remade our world.
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Once again, why do Republicans, supposedly the party of big business, not understand the idea of investing? My answer: because their thinking is extremely short-term. They fail the marshmallow test. They don’t want to invest in anything that won’t pay off in their current terms.
NY Times, 10 Jul 2025: Trump Seeks to Cut Basic Scientific Research by Roughly One-Third, Report Shows
Subtitled “An analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows the impact of the administration’s budget plan on the kind of studies that produce the most breakthroughs.”
President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.
The group says it would fall by more than one-third.
The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.
I suspect MAGA and the Trump administration consider science research frivolous. And they don’t realize that, where breakthroughs can be me, other countries will be making them from now on, especially China. How different might the Internet be if it had been developed in China, rather than the US?
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I don’t watch Fox News either, and instead rely on those who do.
Media Matters, Matt Gertz, 10 Jul 2025: The president’s daughter-in-law hosts a weekly show on Fox News. To call it “propaganda” is too kind.
Subtitled “Lara Trump’s show is a corrupt showcase for the administration, crypto, and her potential Senate campaign. This is what it’s like.”
Take the canceled Fox Business program of the late Lou Dobbs, of whom Fox’s president once said, “The North Koreans do a more nuanced show.” Now move the show to Fox News, sub out Dobbs for President Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, and give her a guest list culled from the leading lights of the Trump administration, the MAGA movement, and the Republican Party.
You’ve just described My View with Lara Trump, the ludicrous propaganda program Fox airs on Saturday nights.
…
It should go without saying that it is wildly unethical for a purported news outlet to turn over network airtime to a family member of the president so she can relentlessly promote his agenda and routinely interview his top officials — but Fox executives have apparently given up even the pretense that the network is something more than Trump’s personal megaphone.
I’m guessing Fox viewers have no idea why this is problematic.
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Noted briefly…
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 10 Jul 2025: Damn You All to Hell!, subtitled “How Hollywood taught a generation to fear nuclear catastrophe”
…and bookmarked for research. This is an overview of one major theme of science fiction, which I’ve recently revisited beginning with PARABLE OF THE SOWER and soon to be followed by discussions of ALAS, BABYLON and ON THE BEACH and FAIL-SAFE and THE HANDMAID’S TALE, all read this past month. That’s all I’ll say about this for now.
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Is it the government’s business to debunk absurd conspiracy theories?
Salon, Alex Galbraith, 10 Jul 2025: EPA website debunks “chemtrails” theory after Texas flood, subtitled “The agency debunked the airborne conspiracy theory while saying that such concerns are ‘reasonable'”
Well, maybe it is. But only if it also investigates how the Biden administration (as I’m sure they will accuse it of doing) hid all the evidence of the Earth being flat.
The believers in “chemtrails” will not be convinced by anything this administration or any other one says.
