Category Archives: Human Nature

Annalee Newitz, STORIES ARE WEAPONS

Posted on Thursday 6 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Subtitled: “Psychological Warfare and the American Mind” (Norton, June 2024, xxv + 246pp, including 42pp of acknowledgements, notes, and notes.) Here’s a book that offers a different spin on the ideas of misinformation, fake news, and narratives, than earlier books … Continue reading →

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Triage, and Kittens

Posted on Monday 3 March 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Busy weekend, so I’m behind and have three days of political links to catch up on. I’ll triage. Reactions to the meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump/Vance/et al; Conservatives react by projecting; And links without comments about corruption, witchcraft, getting … Continue reading →

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Moving to the Dark Side

Posted on Friday 28 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

The big news today was the contentious meeting at the White House between Trump, Vance, and Zelensky, which signals an abandonment of US foreign policy as a leader of the free world and a signal that Trump is aligning the … Continue reading →

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Conservatives Espouse Principles, But Behave Very Differently

Posted on Thursday 27 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

With an example of a Florida Attorney General suing Target for selling products the MAGA folks find objectionable; what happened to free enterprise? Let the market figure it out! Our Orwellian fascist government wants to eliminate past social media posts … Continue reading →

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Incompetence and Restlessness

Posted on Friday 21 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Wired on the incompetence of DOGE; Thoughts about why all this is happening now; Heather Cox Richardson quotes James Marriott of The Times about how the post-World War II liberal order has allowed the seeds of its own destruction to … Continue reading →

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Diversity is Out, Racism is In

Posted on Wednesday 12 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Military veterans say the trans ban is logistical nonsense; How Musk and Vance stood up for a self-avowed racist; How Trump and his administration are intentionally on the wrong side of history, favoring “competent white men”; How philosopher Richard Rorty … Continue reading →

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The Roots of All This is an Unchanging Human Nature in a Changing World

Posted on Monday 10 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Heather Cox Richardson explains why the right to vote, not the Second Amendment, is the key to maintaining our rights; Robert Reich wonders where the lawlessness of the Trump regime will end; Paul Krugman sees the end of Pax Americana; … Continue reading →

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Flooding the Zone with Shock and Awe

Posted on Saturday 8 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

How to deal with it; I’m trying to put things into a broader perspective of their deep motivations, which are always about basic, tribalist, human nature; Trump is taking over Kennedy Center because he objects to drag; Plastic straws, racist … Continue reading →

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A Nation vs. a Collection of States

Posted on Thursday 6 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Quite a number of interesting items stacked up. Let’s just start working them. How sending education “back to the states” is problematical for the same reason you don’t run a nation like a business; How Trump creates problems he then … Continue reading →

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Living in History

Posted on Tuesday 4 February 2025 by Mark R. Kelly

Still rainy, still with cold, sleeping half the day it seems, reading a bit. I roused myself about two hours ago and here’s what I came up with. Heather Cox Richardson on the obvious: that Republicans are letting an un-elected … Continue reading →

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