More Examples of What MAGA Really Means

Posted on Monday 22 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Items today:

  • How Florida has been designated a dangerous state for blacks, Latinos, and sexual minorities to visit, with Tennessee close behind Florida and Texas on implementing similar policies;
  • Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hypocrisy about drag (she condemns it, except when her boyfriend does it);
  • Horror stories from Texas about women with failed pregnancies;
  • My thoughts on the potential banning in Florida of any alternatives to white bread and American cheese;
  • And quote from Saul Bellow.

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More and more it seems clear that MAGA is about reasserting the dominance in America of straight white Christians, which seems to entail going back to the eras of Jim Crow, of homosexuality being illegal and gays worrying their careers would be ruined if they were found out, and abortions being performed in back alleys. The 1950s, or even before.

NY Times, 21 May 2023: N.A.A.C.P. Issues Florida Travel Advisory, Joining Latino and L.G.B.T.Q. Groups, subtitled “The N.A.A.C.P. urged people to consider Florida’s policies on diversity and race under Gov. Ron DeSantis when thinking of traveling there.” Continue reading →

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Today’s Fantasy vs. Reality Watch

Posted on Sunday 21 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Items today about

  • How Americans feel so negative about the economy, despite actual statistics;
  • How Christian Nationalism is working in Wyoming — the usual evocations of concerns that are not real;
  • How to determine truth, with an aside about science-fictional futures, and the competing attraction of conspiracy theories.

This item goes with the theme of yesterday’s post.

NY Times, Paul Krugman, 15 May 2023: Why Are Americans So Negative About the Economy?
Continue reading →

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Lessons in Media Literacy

Posted on Saturday 20 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How stories about the border are designed to scare you, one way or the other;
  • How right-wing sites promoted a false story about immigrants displacing veterans from New York City hotels;
  • Heather Cox Richardson on the debt crisis and how Republicans are using it for political purposes, never mind the global impact

NY Times, Megan K. Stack, 20 May 2023: If You’re Hearing About the Border, Someone Is Trying to Scare You

Continue reading →

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Today’s Authoritarianism Watch

Posted on Friday 19 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Items today:

  • Heather Cox Richardson on the transformation of the Republican Party since Reagan, from a party of small government to one bent on enforcing Christian nationalism;
  • How Republicans now argue that juries don’t count (when they lose);
  • FDR’s four freedoms (of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear), vs. those of the current Republican party (to control, to exploit, to censor, to menace)

Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, May 18, 2023

Continue reading →

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Budgeting, Firearms, Walls, and Executing Trans People

Posted on Thursday 18 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Several items today.

  • How family and government budgeting are more unalike than similar;
  • How firearms training teaches you that you are in constant danger, and should shoot at once;
  • Thomas L. Friedman on building bigger walls, but also allowing in more immigrants — “both the high-energy, low-skilled immigrants and the high-I.Q. risk takers”;
  • And more examples of conservative animus towards trans people, to the point of executions; donation fraud by conservatives and the Mormon church; and DeSantis’ aim to make Florida students ignorant.

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Another simplistic talking point is making the rounds again.

Politifact, 17 May 2023: A family budget is often invoked in U.S. debt fights. Just how similar is it to a federal budget?

Answer: not very. Continue reading →

Posted in Politics, Psychology | Comments Off on Budgeting, Firearms, Walls, and Executing Trans People

Motivated Reasoning, and Vigilantism

Posted on Wednesday 17 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Two themes today.

  • A prime example of motivated reasoning, from today’s NY Times font page (as if on cue from yesterday’s post), about conservative opposition to transgenders
  • And several examples of the increasing Republican approval of vigilantism

NY Times, 16 May 2023: How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care, subtitled “In the campaign to ban gender therapies for minors, Republicans have amplified a group of activists who no longer identify as transgender, overriding objections from transgender people and medical experts.”

Continue reading →

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Skepticism, Beliefs, and Cognitive Biases

Posted on Tuesday 16 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Familiar topics, but worth another look, especially since if they were broadly understood it would make so many of America’s partisan controversies go away. (But conservatives will never allow concepts like skeptical thinking to be taught in schools, for precisely such reasons.)

Big Think, Jonny Thomson, 15 May 2023: Skepticism: Why critical thinking makes you smarter, subtitled: “‘In order to seek truth,’ Rene Descartes once wrote, ‘it is necessary once in the course of our life to doubt, as far as possible, all things.'”
Continue reading →

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Fear and Guns, Fear of Diversity, and Conservative Misogyny

Posted on Monday 15 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

For today, current events items about

  • How gun buyers are motivated by fear
  • How Republican politicians are motivated by fear of change, and fear of the other
  • How Trump and his fans expose conservative misogyny

For later, I need to move away from my preoccupation with Republican and conservative issues, even though they are important and evidence, to me, that the US is tearing itself apart through the re-emergence of primitive ideology and anti-intellectualism. Yet I suspect this has always been the case. Human society has always been a three steps forward, two steps back, matter. We’re currently, in the US, in a step back. The steps forward will eventually prevail, because steps back are ultimately unproductive, and we live in a competitive world. I need to shift my focus to forward steps. More on that tomorrow.

Continue reading →

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Red Herrings, and AI’s effect on Capitalism

Posted on Sunday 14 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Two items today

  • How Big Oil uses “red herring” issues to deflect attention away from the big issue
  • Ted Chiang on the potential corrosive effect of AI on capitalism

Plus, a brief reflection on the SF writers who’ve had things to say about their contemporary world.

Salon, Kathleen Dean Moore, 13 May 2023: How Big Oil is manipulating the way you think about climate change, subtitled “A logic professor explains how a persistent, subtle fallacy has infected public discussion of climate change”

Continue reading →

Posted in Psychology, Technology | Comments Off on Red Herrings, and AI’s effect on Capitalism

The Upside-Down World of Conservative Values

Posted on Saturday 13 May 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • They’re for discrimination against some (gays and lesbians) against discrimination against others (religious conscientious objectors)
  • Their ideas of freedom involve the freedom to discriminate against people they don’t like (even if that infringes on *their* freedom)
  • Their belief in capitalism and the free market seems to have morphed into their role as “Soviet economic planners” (according to a piece I just read today)
  • The post finishes with some personal thoughts about character, and its relation to the understanding of the world

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In the upside-down world of religious privilege in Florida these days, doctors *can* discriminate against gays and lesbians, but *not* against those who refuse to take vaccines. Whereas generally the latter is of more concern to the medical community than the former. (Cue Hippocratic Oath.)

Continue reading →

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