Big Think, Jonny Thomson, yesterday: A philosopher’s guide to thinking for yourself in an age built to think for you
Subtitled: Jonny Thomson walks through Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 3 conditions for stupidity that destroys societies: outsourcing your thinking to an authority, willful ignorance, and conformity.
Which is to say, the conservative mindset.
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Of course this is bunk. Modern civilizations rests on the ability of people to empathize with foreign tribes.
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Vox, Zaid Jilani, yesterday: The right says “suicidal empathy” is destroying the West. Here’s the truth., subtitled “A new study debunks a popular conservative meme.”
I think the right wants an excuse not to care about anyone outside their own tribe.
The billionaire tech right cohort Musk belongs to has long looked for a way to unshackle itself from the leviathan of basic social responsibility. With the concept of suicidal empathy, they have found an intellectual framework to argue that their policy preferences and bottom lines aren’t just about greed or self-interest, but a matter of cultural survival.
Then this:
In their quest to make this argument, many on the right have pointed to a study that they see as a sort of intellectual checkmate. In 2019, a group of psychologists gathered participants across political ideologies and asked them to express their level of concern about different groups ranging from their close family to animals to all things in existence. In one section, you see a series of heatmaps that appear to show that liberals focus their moral concerns on groups further away from themselves, whereas conservatives value their close loved ones.
But new studies overturn that one, which conservatives were motivated to support. Their conclusion challenged the basic defaults of human nature.
“The assertion going around was that liberals had come to care more about strangers and distant causes than about their own families and communities, and that claim is testable,” he told me. “It also sat awkwardly against decades of evidence that favoring close others is a widespread default in human social cognition, so we wanted to check it directly rather than assume either side of the debate was right.”
The problem, in Law’s view, was that the 2019 study was not robust enough to really tell us who liberals and conservatives prioritize.
If there are problems with science, is that it’s difficult to ask the right questions. Too often, researchers have something in mind they want evidence for. The same problem exists in polling surveys: how you ask the question greatly influences the results. Yet repeated research, and poll, eventually sort this out and reveal the biases. And so:
What Law and his colleagues found was that it isn’t so much that progressives value foreigners and other distant groups more than their close family; they simply extend their moral concern outward further than conservatives do.
Exactly. The expansion of the circle of moral empathy. Peter Singer.
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Briefly.
- The New Yorker, Chris Kelly, yesterday: Bari Weiss Is On It
- Satire. But apt. Conservatives blowing things up.
- JMG, today: Stupid Liar: Windmills Are Sign Of A “Failing Country”
- Nonsense. China leads the world in energy production from wind.
- NY Times, yesterday: ‘You Aren’t Going to Like What Comes After America’
- Blame Canada for everything.
- About Anthony Fauci’s testimony before Congress today.
- JMG, today: Hawley Attacks Fauci: “No Honest Person Pleads The Fifth” (Trump Invoked The Fifth Hundreds Of Times)
- Headline says all.
- He just makes things up.
- AlterNet, Nick Hilden, 27 Jul 2026: CNN fact check obliterates Trump’s ‘completely made up’ stories
- He just makes things up, and his followers believe him. This is a comment about human nature.
- Do these people not understand how to proselytize?
- Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta, yesterday: Christian preachers are turning airplanes into unwanted worship services, subtitled “Evangelists are exploiting captive audiences who can’t walk away—and broadcasting it online”
- How to be obnoxious. Do they really think they’re attracting people to their religion?
