- Quotes from E.O. Wilson, and Brian Cox;
- Comments about existential threats, base human nature, MAGA and woke;
- More examples, like yesterday’s;
- A report from Nicholas Kristof, who lives in Portland;
- How Trump isn’t responding to a crises, he’s constructing them;
- Final thoughts about how MAGA isn’t concerned about law and order, they just use “law and order” to expel people they don’t like, in service of tribalistic goals.
Let us begin today by recalling this famous quote by E.O. Wilson (which I mentioned back in June):
The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.
Next, this quote by English physicist Brian Cox, a sort of heir to Carl Sagan (and who was once in a rock band), which popped up on my Facebook feed today.
This sentiment echoes a recurrent theme of mine on this blog: there really are existential threats in the world, which many people deny or don’t understand, and if humanity is unable to avoid all of them, it may not last long as a species, especially in cosmic terms. Another few hundred years at best? An eyeblink in the history of the universe. And that, in turn would explain the “Great Silence,” aka Fermi’s Paradox, the observation that, despite the relative likelihood of other species evolving on other planets and becoming intelligent and developing high technology, we haven’t detected any of them. Where are they? Maybe they couldn’t escape their childhood psychologies to develop a means of sustaining themselves as species, rather than groups of warring tribes.
Spelling this out. A deeper recurring theme on this blog is the distinction between base human nature, which resides within all of us, and a more cosmopolitan perspective, the way some people learn to think past that base nature and think more broadly, both to abandon myths and learn about the universe as it is, and to understand that different kinds of people exist and there is more to humanity than one’s own tribe.
Spelling this out. MAGA is all about base human nature, and prioritizing one’s own tribe (white heterosexual Christians, more or less). The opposite is what they call “woke,” the notion that recognizing the legitimacy of other kinds of people is somehow weak, somehow a betrayal of the tribe. While those of us who have grown up, so to speak, and understand culture and reality beyond one’s own immediate circumstances, look at the MAGA folks as, not only as white supremacist racists who aren’t very bright, but also as rather embarrassing atavisms. Failures of a society to educate its population.
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With those thoughts in mind, another round of evidence of humanity’s, or at least Americans’, failure to have grown up.
AlterNet, Adam Lynch, 11 Oct 2025: ‘He’ll have autism by Sunday’: Trump busted for medical ‘hypocrisy’
Hypocrisy (Trump just got his own COVID booster) and ignorance (he seems to think vaccines will cause autism within the week).
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JMG Items.
- CDC Axes Entire Offices In “Friday Night Massacre” — Simpletons destroying what they don’t understand.
- Trump Announces “1000%” Reduction In Drug Prices — Rank ignorance. Apparently no one has explained how this is nonsense.
- Senate Republicans Introduce Bill To Rename Street In Front Of White House As The “Charlie Kirk Patriot Way” — Tribalistic nonsense. Do they really endorse what Charlie Kirk espoused? If so they’re betraying the Constitution.
- Trump: “Every Time I See Portland, It’s Burning Down” — Willful ignorance and lying. Or… simple stupidity. He doesn’t understand that what he sees on Fox News weren’t videos of Portland. (And apparently he has no sources of information other than Fox News? What about all the daily press briefings that presidents usually but which Trump has been ignoring, for years? We see the result.)
- Trump Lies: Chicago Had “Over 4000 People Murdered” — Lying, and tribalistic fear-mongering. Joe notes: “Actually, 331 people have been murdered in the city, compared to 460 at this time last year.”
- MAGA Host: “Godless” Dems Are Inherently Violent — Lying, considering actual statistics. There’s an interesting religious theme here too, the presumption that without (Christian) religion, people would have nothing to “ground” them and turn to violence. Belied by all the studies of religious and non-religious behavior; nonsense, basically superstition.
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From a NY Times essayist who lives in Portland.
NY Times, Nicholas Kristof, 11 Oct 2025: Leave Us Alone
“Portland is burning to the ground,” President Trump warns, and he has helpfully explained that it is a “war-ravaged” hellscape where even the mayor and governor are “petrified for their lives.” Trump purports to be trying to rescue us Oregonians by dispatching National Guard troops to use “full force if necessary” against the “enemy from within.” We asked an intrepid photographer, Rian Dundon, to brave the flames and firefights to capture the mood in this war zone. Here are scenes he captured in what Trump called a “burning hell hole”…
Followed by several lovely photos.
So what explains the gulf between Trump’s rhetoric and the reality? Why did a Trump-appointed U.S. District Court judge, Karin Immergut, pause the deployment of troops to Portland and conclude, “The president’s determination was simply untethered to the facts”?
Oregon officials have argued, in that court case and publicly, that Trump appeared to have been misled by Fox News. “Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump told reporters on Sept. 5, recounting scenes of chaos and destruction. “That was not on my list, Portland, but when I watched television last night, this has been going on.” On the previous evening, Fox News had aired a segment portraying Portland as out of control and included video from actual riots in 2020 in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing.
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And this, about Trump’s general approach to… “peace.”
NY Times, guest essay by Jason P. House, 11 Oct 2025: This Isn’t Crisis Response, It’s Crisis Construction
Nearly nine months into President Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become the administration’s primary political weapon — not to solve problems, but to manufacture fear, provoke outrage and stage an illusion of control. This isn’t a crisis response. It’s crisis construction.
The president’s team vowed to target gang members, murderers and rapists, but we’re not just rounding up violent offenders. We’re arresting working parents, students, asylum seekers and even U.S. citizens, to create made-for-TV crackdowns.
Details. Concluding:
When law enforcement is forced into partisan roles, it stops serving the public. And when the public loses trust in law enforcement, the whole system begins to fail. The blueprint is: Create chaos. Blame the chaos. Then offer yourself as the cure.
This plan is already underway. The question now is if the rest of us will keep pretending this is law and order.
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My take: these immigration crackdowns aren’t about law and order at all. They’re about MAGA, the tribal white-supremacists, doing everything they can to expel non-whites from their neighborhoods, and their nation. One could ask, why is the technical matter about whether they’re ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ immigrants so important? To the extent that immigrants, even the illegal ones, are living calmly in America, working jobs and serving their communities, there’s no difference at all. MAGA is far from punctilious about its political leaders behaving legally or illegally. Matters of principle and legality are of no interest to tribalists; they’re just excuses to pursue tribalistic goals.
