- How conspiracy theorists think most people agree with them;
- How Trump’s administration is purging climate data;
- How JD Vance thinks some Americans are more worthy citizens than others;
- Paul Krugman on ICE and New York City;
- Three items from JMG: repealing greenhouse gas regulations; how Homan doesn’t believe the polls; how a confirmed judge has an agenda at odds with the Constitution.
- And Bruce Springsteen’s “Paradise.”
This is interesting. Why would this be? Because these people live in bubbles? Put another way, because they don’t get out much — of their bubbles? They don’t read books or any media outside what their bubble endorses?
Ars Technica, Jennifer Ouellette, 22 Jul 2024: Conspiracy theorists don’t realize they’re on the fringe, subtitled “Gordon Pennycook: ‘It might be one of the biggest false consensus effects that’s been observed.'”
Belief in conspiracy theories is often attributed to some form of motivated reasoning: People want to believe a conspiracy because it reinforces their worldview, for example, or doing so meets some deep psychological need, like wanting to feel unique. However, it might also be driven by overconfidence in their own cognitive abilities, according to a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The authors were surprised to discover that not only are conspiracy theorists overconfident, they also don’t realize their beliefs are on the fringe, massively overestimating by as much as a factor of four how much other people agree with them.
It’s partly an interview with study co-author Gordon Pennycook, at Cornell University.
Ars Technica: Is this overconfidence related to the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect?
Gordon Pennycook: It’s because of Dunning-Kruger that we had to develop a new methodology to measure overconfidence, because the people who are the worst at a task are the worst at knowing that they’re the worst at the task. But that’s because the same things that you use to do the task are the things you use to assess how good you are at the task. So if you were to give someone a math test and they’re bad at math, they’ll appear overconfident. But if you give them a test of assessing humor and they’re good at that, they won’t appear overconfident. That’s about the task, not the person.
So we have tasks where people essentially have to guess, and it’s transparent. There’s no reason to think that you’re good at the task. In fact, people who think they’re better at the task are not better at it, they just think they are. They just have this underlying kind of sense that they can do things, they know things, and that’s the kind of thing that we’re trying to capture. It’s not specific to a domain. There are lots of reasons why you could be overconfident in a particular domain. But this is something that’s an actual trait that you carry into situations. So when you’re scrolling online and come up with these ideas about how the world works that don’t make any sense, it must be everybody else that’s wrong, not you.
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These people are saboteurs. They will go down in history as villains. Also, ask yourself, if climate change is a hoax, why would they be doing this?
Vox, Kate Yoder, 21 Jul 2025: Inside the federal government’s purge of climate data, subtitled “Climate facts are inconvenient — so Trump is making them disappear.”
For 25 years, a group of the country’s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, late last month, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.
…
This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at the Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”
By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing.
…
Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration’s actions actually go beyond erasure. “They’re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced — the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,” she said. Her biggest concern isn’t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. “That’s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what’s real, and what’s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.”
All inspired by Project 2025.
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Remember ANIMAL FARM? “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
NY Times, opinion by Jamelle Bouie, 23 Jul 2025: JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own
“America is not just an idea,” Vance declared. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” And although he did not say it explicitly, Vance seemed to suggest — in recounting his personal connection to the heritage of the United States — that American identity was less about our national ideals than it was attachment to “a homeland.”
He’s made similar blood and soil statements before.
At Claremont, Vance made his meaning clear: “If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time,” the vice president said, taking aim at traditional American creedal nationalism. “What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.”
Nonsense; this is akin to a straw man. All the millions of people around the world who admire the principles of the Declaration are not asking to be “admitted.”
He goes on to cite Zohran Mamdani, Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, who called America “beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.”
“Has he ever looked in the mirror and recognized that he might not be alive were it not for the generosity of a country he dares to insult on its most sacred day?” Vance said. “Who the hell does he think that he is?”
Vance and Mamdani are equal citizens under the law, but the vice president seems to believe that his heritage entitles him to speak in ways that Mamdani can’t. There are tiers of belonging, according to Vance, one for those who can trace their lineage to one of the nation’s two founding revolutions and another for those who can’t.
For Vance, this is something close to common sense. And for some Americans it was, before the Civil War.
And so on, concerning Dred Scott and the Civil War. The piece concludes,
Vance sees the egalitarian ideals of our founding documents but says, as Taney did, that we must look elsewhere for our vision of American citizenship. And that elsewhere is your heritage — your connection to the soil and to the dead.
It’s here that Vance truly speaks for Trump, who entered American politics as a demagogue denouncing the nation’s first Black president as a foreign usurper. And it’s here that we see the logic of Trump’s attack on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, which wrote the egalitarian promise of the Declaration of Independence into the Constitution itself.
Trump and Vance envision a world of tiered citizenship, each in his own way, where entry depends on heritage and status rests on obedience. The best traditions of our country make this difficult. And so they have found refuge in our worst.
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Paul Krugman on the threat of ICE in New York City, and how, yet again, the GOP lies.
Paul Krugman, 23 Jul 2025: The Hellscapes of Their Minds, subtitled “ICE says it’s going to ‘flood’ New York. Good luck with that”
But Queens is nothing like that. Last year there were 56 murders in the borough, which has more than 2 million residents. That’s down from 312 murders in 1990, when the borough had a lot fewer immigrants. Queens’s murder rate per 100,000 inhabitants is also well below the national average. And I have a lot of friends in Queens. Although New York does have rats (and always did) I haven’t seen any feces, and my friends aren’t afraid to walk across the street.
The rubes in the red states will feel validated by that graphic. They know what they know. Krugman goes on about guns and vehicle fatalities, which are higher in the US than in other ‘rich’ countries.
Again, however, that’s not how Trump’s people see it. Sean Duffy, the transportation secretary, has been waging a nonstop campaign against New York’s highly successful congestion pricing scheme, which has led both to faster travel and to a reduction in car crashes. According to him, liberals
force people into the subway, and the subway’s not safe.
I guess I’m one of those people forced into the subway. I mean, I could take a taxi to the office or drive myself (but where would I park?), but the subway — which feels pretty safe to me — is both much cheaper and faster. Tyranny!
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And from my favorite aggregate site:
JMG, 23 Jul 2025: NYT: EPA Plans To Repeal Greenhouse Gas Regulations
From NYT
That finding is the foundation of the federal government’s only tool to limit the climate pollution from vehicles, power plants and other industries that is dangerously heating the planet. The E.P.A. proposal, which is expected to be made public within days, also calls for rescinding limits on tailpipe emissions that were designed to encourage automakers to build and sell more electric vehicles.
Sabotage, or death wish.
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JMG, 22 Jul 2025: Homan: “I Don’t Believe The Polls” About ICE
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JMG, 22 Jul 2025: Senate Confirms Judge Who Compares LGBTQ Rights To Pedophilia And Declares Christianity “Must Be Imposed”
So, they’ve confirmed a judge who clearly has an agenda at odds with the US Constitution.
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My favorite song from Springsteen’s THE RISING. Though “Further on up the Road” is a close second.
I visit you in another dream
I visit you in another dream
…
I sink ‘neath the water cool and clear
Drifting down, I disappear
I see you on the other side
I search for the peace in your eyes
But they’re as empty as paradise
They’re as empty as paradise
I break above the waves
I feel the sun upon my face
