A post from Facebook. I don’t know the poster, but I like his point.
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It reminded me of this post that I saw yesterday, which illustrates the same idea.
LGBTQNation, Daniel Villarreal, yesterday: Conservative pastor knows what turns men gay, & it’s not what you think…, subtitled “Dale Partridge’s explanation for homosexuality is… highly doubtful, to say the least.”
Conservatives just know what they know.
American Reformed Christian pastor, podcaster, and self-confessed plagiarist Dale Partridge says he knows one of the major causes of homosexuality among men, and it is “liberalism.”
Because all liberals are homosexual? Don’t look for consistency, let alone evidence, in conservative thinking.
But I noticed this for this later passage:
Partridge said, “Not only does liberalism make men gay, it makes them incapable of thinking, okay? Liberalism is just, like, feminized politics. So the moment you hit them with equivalency or make them think in categories, they shut down.”
Key: “or make them think in categories”. See first item. Again, a running theme here: those humans who express basic, simple-minded thinking, who think the world is black or white and nothing in between, who think there are firm categories that everything in existence must fit into, are conservatives.
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He’s well along all of the scales, but especially the ones for “creating a cult of personality” and “using power for personal profit.”
NY Times, Editorial Board, today: The Iran War Worsens America’s Democratic Erosion [gift link]
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There was a piece in the NYT a few days ago called Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All. by Anna Louie Sussman. Her conclusion was that the modern age is too scary and uncertain for parents to want to bring children into the world.
Letter-writers to the Times, yesterday, have other perspectives. Yet again, as with the book I just reviewed, as with so many different ideas between liberals and conservatives, this is about where you start from. What are your priors, what are your values, how narrow or wide is your perspective.
From Stephen Reichard in Portland OR:
The hand-wringing over America’s declining birthrate mistakes a public health triumph for a demographic crisis.
The inverse relationship between wealth and fertility is one of the most ironclad findings in demography. As nations prosper, birthrates fall. The United States arrived late to this reality because we have long been too prudish about contraception to achieve what other wealthy nations accomplished long ago.
The numbers are striking. Teenage pregnancies have dropped 85 percent since 1989. Among 18-to-19-year-olds, 70 percent. Meanwhile, pregnancies among women over 35 have been rising. Women are choosing when, not whether, to have children.
And this perspective from Michael Smith in Georgetown KY:
Looking back at the Depression in the 1930s, world war in the 1940s, mutual assured destruction in the 1950s and social upheaval in the 1960s, I struggle to see today’s uncertainties as uniquely grim. Perhaps they seem so because young people today are less tolerant of uncertainty and more apt to avoid it when possible.
If that is the mind-set, they are not wrong about parenthood. Life will offer them few prospects that come with less certainty.
Yet another running theme, that most people don’t appreciate: life is better now than at virtually any time in the past. It’s a fallacy of human nature that tells you otherwise.
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So-called experts vs. Donald Trump
Paul Krugman, today: The Apotheosis of Willful Ignorance, subtitled “All of this was predictable and predicted”
The so-called experts ridiculed Donald Trump’s claims during the 2024 campaign that he would bring grocery prices down on Day One and cut energy prices in half.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s tariffs would raise consumer prices while failing to bring back manufacturing jobs.
The so-called experts said that Trump appointee Pete Hegseth’s emphasis on “warrior ethos” rather than competence and his purge of officers he doesn’t consider sufficiently loyal to Trump would degrade the U.S. military and be disastrous in a war.
The so-called experts warned that Trump’s attack on Iran would lead us into a quagmire and cause a global energy crisis.
The so-called experts said that Trump’s contempt for international agreements and his threats to friendly nations would undermine the world’s trust in America, and that we would find ourselves without allies when we needed their help.
The so-called experts were completely right.
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Briefly:
- Right Wing Watch, Peter Montgomery, today: Christian Nationalists, Grifters, Charlatans & More: A Guide to this Weekend’s White House-sponsored ‘Revival’ to ‘Rededicate’ America to God
- Sean Feucht, Mark Driscoll, Greg Locke, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson…. Paula White, Robert Jeffress… so many others. Sigh.
- Washington Post, today: White House to host 9-hour prayer festival focused on Christian roots of U.S., subtitled “Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio and Mike Johnson will speak at the event, which centers on the idea that the founders wanted the U.S. to be explicitly Christian.”
- No, they didn’t.
- The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn, yesterday: RFK Jr.’s War on Science Is Really a War on Scientists, subtitled “A unified theory that makes sense of MAHA’s contradictions—and Kennedy’s place in the Trump administration.”
- Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, yesterday: May 12, 2026
- “The biggest story in the country, today and always, is that the president of the United States is mentally unwell.”
- JMG, today: Burgum: Solar Doesn’t Work When The Sun Goes Down
- Do EVs stop working after sundown? He’s a moron.
