- Peter Leyden on how the arc of human history is toward cooperation;
- Once again, evidence shows that same-sex marriage is a “win for children and society”, and I suggest why this may be so;
- While Stephen Miller resorts to bigotry to accuse immigrants of crime, despite the evidence;
- Slate’s Molly Olmstead on Trump and Jesus images;
- Short items by Amanda Marcotte and Jason Campbell;
- And a Cri de Coeur by Adam-Troy Castro about how the Bible is an excuse for not knowing anything.
Step out far enough, as most people, huddling fearfully together in their tribes and afraid of everyone different, do not, and this is the big picture. If conservatives don’t dismantle everything, they way they are the US.
Big Think, Peter Leyden, 14 Apr 2026: The arc of human history is toward cooperation, not division, subtitled “Globalization did not fail — it improved the lives of billions of people. The next phase of human development could push us to a new level of global abundance.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- In this op-ed, futurist Peter Leyden argues that humanity is fundamentally interconnected, with shared decency revealed through lived experiences across cultures.
- He describes modern history as a shift from a divided post-WWII world to a globalized era that greatly improved living standards but also triggered backlash in the West.
- Leyden contends that despite rising populism, the world will continue toward deeper integration and a new stage of progress driven by advanced technologies.
And here’s the opening of this essay:
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time.
I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved hitchhiking because it offered a fantastic way to get to know an amazing cross section of people from many different classes and races and walks of life. Hitching is particularly good at connecting you to those living at the margins of society — the kinds of people many of us don’t encounter often through normal channels and the media. Upper-middle-class people almost never pick you up.
I learned something hitching that I later used in my career as a journalist. Everyone is an expert on at least one thing: themselves. All you have to do is ask a person open-ended questions and be genuinely interested, and they will talk forever about almost anything they have ever done. I used to climb out of trucks after 10 hours of driving through the night and know the most intimate details about the truck driver’s life — and he would not know a single detail about me, including my name. I was fine with that. I knew my story, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about him.
The cure for conservatism, I suspect, is to meet lots of people unlike yourself. Get out of bubble. Move out of your small town.
I was friends with all of them, and they each were friends with me. We were all just human beings on planet Earth.
The essay then summarizes three or four stages in recent human development, which I’ll indicate by his headings:
- Stage One in human development: The post-World War II era
- Stage Two in human development: The era of globalization
- The current backlash to globalization from the incumbents
- Stage Three in human development: Toward planetary abundance
And the world isn’t going back to some mythical ‘golden age,’ despite Trump and MAGA. I haven’t heard of this author before, but he has a Substack, The Great Progression, on which this essay is his current post, and a book on this topic coming out in January 2027.
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If actual evidence matters (it doesn’t seem to, to conservatives), here’s yet another study that challenges the animus of conservatives against same-sex couples. Conservatives are perpetually scared of things that don’t exist, or that won’t come true — anything different.
LA Times, Benjamin Karney, 14 Apr 2026: The results are in, and same-sex marriage was a win for children and society
Prior to the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell decision, opponents raised alarms about the severe and immediate harms that would surely occur if marriages between same-sex couples were recognized nationally. Afterward, when those harms failed to materialize, those voices grew quieter, but some have been returning with renewed vigor, in hopes that the current Supreme Court, after overturning Roe vs. Wade, may be willing to overturn the Obergefell decision as well — though the justices declined to do so in November.
To build public support for rolling back marriage rights, new campaigns have been repeating the claims that legal recognition of same-sex marriages may harm children or even the stability of different-sex marriages. These are some of the same concerns that were raised in the years prior to the Obergefell decision. They were groundless then, and, more than 10 years later, the data confirm these fears to be unfounded.
In 2024, for the 20th anniversary of the first legal marriages of same-sex couples (in Massachusetts), my lab at UCLA joined with a team of researchers at Rand Corp. to review what social scientists learned over those two decades about the consequences of legalizing same-sex marriage.
And,
After 20 years of legalized marriage for same-sex couples, 96 independent studies confirm there is no evidence for the harms critics predicted. Our review identified not a single study that observed significant negative consequences of legalizing same-sex marriage. Instead, the research literature identified many significant positive consequences.
Why would this be? The article here doesn’t identify the obvious answer. When same-sex couples have children, they’re making a deliberate, and sometimes very expensive, decision. They’re far more invested than straight couples, who often have children by accident, so to speak.
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Similarly.
Robert Reich, today: Stephen Miller’s Strait of Hormuz, subtitled “His crackdown on immigrants is assumed to be good for America as long as it causes immigrants more pain than it does us. Same ‘logic’ as Trump is using in Iran.
Friends,
Trump’s chief bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“Not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
Again, look at the evidence; this isn’t true. Immigrants work hard to get into the US, and have every motivation to behave and not break the law and work hard. Just as the ancestors of Stephen Miller and millions of other descended from Europeans did. (As my family did.) Back to Reich:
Bullshit. The children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a recent paper, researchers found that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago. In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great-great-grandfather was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus. He came to America in 1903 with $8 in his pocket and spoke no English. Three generations later, little Stephen was born in 1985 to American parents but somehow developed a visceral hatred for immigrants.
Well, I would say, their visceral hatred is an expression of base, tribal, human nature, in which everyone different is assumed to be inferior.
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Briefly noted.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, today: It Turns Out, the President Can’t Get Away With Insulting the Pope and Portraying Himself as Jesus, subtitled “At least, he can’t anymore.”
There’s a typical pattern when Donald Trump does something outrageous: His critics get angry, his defenders are belligerently inflexible, and everyone walks away mad—except for Trump, who breezes through to the next news cycle. But this weekend, when Trump went on a posting spree about the pope and Jesus, Trump’s defenders went off script. Instead of taking a stance of trollish defiance, they condemned the president.
The two posts, published Sunday night on TruthSocial, hit different nerves. The first, a wall of text, responded to Pope Leo’s criticism of the war in Iran by blasting Leo as “WEAK on crime.” In the post, Trump told the pope to “get his act together,” and suggested that Leo should be grateful to him because if Trump “wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.” The second post, which he published an hour later, was an A.I.-generated illustration of Trump as a Christ figure in robes healing a man on his sickbed while surrounded by troops, medical professionals, fighter jets, bald eagles, and praying Americans in a state of awe.
Also, I saw suggestions on Facebook today that someone might have told Trump that that Trump-as-Jesus image was “doctored,” and he thought that meant he was being portrayed as a doctor, and so he went with that. Makes as much sense as anything else.
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Salon, Amanda Marcotte, today: Trump is right: He is MAGA’s Jesus, subtitled “The president’s blasphemy exposes the truth about the Christian right”
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Media Matters, Jason Campbell, 14 Apr 2026: Even some in right-wing media are now asking questions about Trump’s age and mental acuity
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Let me end with this screed, or Cri de Coeur, by Adam-Troy Castro, on his Patreon yesterday.
Adam-Troy Castro, yesterday: Life Wisdom: The Bible As An Excuse for Not Knowing Anything
Look, I understand the category confusion, but the existence of a sub-category called “religious assholes” is not the same thing as saying that the pie chart of people who are religious and assholes is just a drawing of a circle.
I am so not saying that.
I have known many, many religious people who read widely and well, outside their opiate ofd choice.
But there are certain behaviors that indict you for using your religion to justify being a asshole, as when people hold up their religious tome of choice and declare that they just don’t see why anyone would ever pick up any other book. I am talking about people who say that the Bible tells them all they want to know and that any other book is superfluous, or that the existence of any other book is a foolish insult to their faith, or that books aside from the one they claim to base their lives on but apparently have not read are suspect objects that probably need to be banned.
I am finally talking about Speaker Mike Johnson, who upon being asked how his religion affects his stances, says that he can just pick up the Bible and get anything he wants to know about “any subject under the sun.”
There seem to be many people who believe this. As if — as I’ve said again and again — they think nothing has been, or can be, learned since the Bible.
Castro then imagines asking Mike Johnson various questions. I’ll quote just a few.
I would like to ask him to quote the Bible verses, in New or Old Testaments or in the apocrypha, that help him with the following vital problems:
Mike, what can you tell me about the transmission of epidemics?
Mike, what can you tell me about the things that can go wrong with jumbo jet passenger planes, including one from a few years back that literally made planes override pilots and navigate into the ground?
Mike, what can you tell me about the specific history that led to ethnic strife in India and Pakistan?
Mike, did our founding fathers really intend this to be a “Christian” Nation, or did they bend over backward preventing that terrifying fate from overtaking it?
Mike, what specific arguments between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces led to regional conflicts before our Civil War?
Much else. And quoting a wise passage from The Lord of the Rings:
Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.
Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”
Much more.
