Tribal Warpaint

Posted on Sunday 27 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Trump doesn’t want to govern, and rejects the idea of American government as a collaboration;
  • How the idea of consumer choice led to the idea of being gay;
  • Trump and covid.gov rewrite the history, as authoritarians do;
  • How Trump has severed America from the world in 100 days;
  • Another item about JFK Jr.’s upside-down understanding of science;
  • Guardian’s Simon Tisdall on how Trump will destroy himself;
  • How MAGA Glam is, it seems to me, tribal warpaint;
  • And how MAGA supporters claim divine intervention to save Trump from assassination;
  • And my take on such claims, and the idea of a father-figure god.
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No doubt there’s a hierarchy of systems of government, that fairly obviously would align with the political spectrum in the US, with (as it seems) MAGA Republicans on one end, and Democracy at the other. For example.

NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 26 Apr 2025: Trump Doesn’t Want to Govern
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History Rhymes? Will Humanity Ever Advance?

Posted on Saturday 26 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How history rhymes, about tariffs: Smoot-Hawley and Trump;
  • How Musk lives fantasies about expanding the population (of people like him) without a grasp on numbers;
  • How DOGE has cost taxpayers $135B, while claiming to have saved $160B — even that is far less than its goal.
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The experts understand, and the science fiction writers imagine, realms beyond the conception of the vast majority of ordinary people. Science fiction, I think, is about speculating what lies beyond the most abstruse things the experts understand. That’s a core theme here. Will humanity ever advance? Or are we forever mired in primitive thinking?

LA Times, Veronique de Rugy, 24 Apr 2025: Economic nostalgia woos voters, but it leads to terrible policies
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The Cowboy Myth, Presidential Corruption, and Disingenuous Cuts to Science Research

Posted on Friday 25 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Heather Cox Richard on the “cowboy myth” that informs the Trump presidency;
  • How Trump et al are giving billionaires a bad name;
  • How Trump has done the most corrupt thing any president has ever done — getting rich from anonymous investors — and how barely anyone cares;
  • How the administration’s cuts to science research echo the disingenuous schemes of the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel companies.
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Heather Cox Richardson: April 24, 2025

She writes about Trump and his scandalous administration, beginning with his “Vladimir, STOP!” entreaty on social media yesterday morning. But I’m noting this for her summary of the “cowboy myth” that still permeates some sectors of American political and cultural thought. I noted this in my summary of her book (beginning here).
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Conservative Intellectuals, and the Wrong Way to Do Science

Posted on Thursday 24 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Robert Reich collects comments from conservative intellectuals about the Trump administration;
  • Reich summarizes ten points that demonstrates Trump’s ineptitude and incompetence;
  • Similarly, Salon’s Brian Karem on how Trump has turned the White House into a joke;
  • How RFK Jr.’s approach is the opposite of how actual science works;
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So of course there are *some* conservative intellectuals. Even if they’re to the ‘left’ of the MAGA base, if only because they think things through (rather than react simplistically) and they’re not driven by raw tribal hatred of The Other.

Robert Reich, 22 Apr 2025: The view from the right, subtitled “Conservative condemnation of the Trump regime is almost as vehement as is progressive condemnation. Will they give cover to business leaders who have so far remained silent?”
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The Latest Cultural War Conservatives are Losing

Posted on Wednesday 23 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How Conservatives keep badgering the law even as they lose the culture war;
  • Specifically, the Supreme Court case about banning books that Christians are uncomfortable with;
  • Related: HHS is proposing defunding the LGBTQ+ suicide hotline; and Sam Alito misreads a children’s book, exposing his animus toward gay marriage;
  • And noting how the White House bragging about following science means the opposite.
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Last year I read and reviewed that book by Stephen Prothero called WHY LIBERALS WIN THE CULTURE WARS (EVEN WHEN THEY LOSE ELECTIONS), whose basic point was that as society changes (as it inevitably does) those uncomfortable with change, i.e. conservatives, complain only once such changes are well under way, by which time they’ve already lost the battle. (Save for once in a generation or two authoritarian crack-downs… which are part of this cycle too. And which most of us thought America was immune to.)

Here’s a perfect example from the Supreme Court this week.

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What Conservatives Mean by the Deep State

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Namely, anything that interferes with their agenda, in effect the entirety of Jonathan Rauch’s “constitution of knowledge,” since MAGA conservatives don’t truly believe in the Constitution or our system of government;
  • Robert Reich on the billionaire class, that doesn’t care about anyone else, and who are planning for an “event” to further isolate themselves from the real world;
  • Once again, Republican elites tolerate Trump because they want the tax cuts;
  • Checking in with Michael Hobbes, and his comments about how conservatives have turned against reality;
  • A new conspiracy theory: JD Vance killed the pope!; Numbers on autism, despite RFK Jr; and conservatives shielding their kids from the reality of the world through library boards.
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To conservatives, anything that interferes with their agenda means they’re “being framed by the deep state.”

Or: what conservatives mean by the “deep state” is the entire set of government institutions that keep our society running — including the functions of law and order. (See Rauch.) They think it’s some kind of conspiracy, waiting to pounce when they try to take advantage of the system, or impose their worldview on others, since they don’t truly believe in the Constitution.

These thoughts triggered by this relatively incidental example in the news today:

JMG, 22 Apr 2025: Fired Hegseth Aide: I Was Framed By The Deep State

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The War Against Intelligence

Posted on Tuesday 22 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Trump’s rage against smart people;
  • Defunding Harvard will hobble medical research that would benefit people like us;
  • Historian Lauren Thompson compares the Gilded Age to the Trump Age;
  • Trump and Vance praised b conservatives for lying about abortion; Hegseth purges books based on word searches; Hegseth, one of Trump’s “best people,” keeps blundering; and how a former beauty pageant contestant is in charge of removing “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian.
– – –

Trump’s war against war against intelligence and expertise isn’t strategic; it’s personal.

Paul Krugman, 21 Apr 2025: Trump’s Cultural Revolution, subtitled “The first thing we do is we kill intellectual inquiry”

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Civic Uprising?

Posted on Sunday 20 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Conservative David Brooks calls for a civic uprising against the Trump administration;
  • How Salon executive editor Andrew O’Hehir reacts to this;
  • How psychopaths and financial services seem to go together;
  • The extent to which JD Vance lies;
  • Aid to foreign children has ended; many of them will die; the administration doesn’t care;
  • The office on foreign disinformation has been shuttered;
  • And the CDC will cease collecting consumer safety data;
  • There’s a pattern here, as identified in the Brooks piece.
– – –

I neglected to note this latest David Brooks piece that appeared in Friday’s New York Times, or Thursday when it appeared online. It’s getting attention.

NY Times, David Brooks, 17 Apr 2025 online: What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
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The Most Sublime Moment in Classical Music

Posted on Saturday 19 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Asimov on Heinlein, about libertarianism;
  • More about “viewpoint diversity” in science, and how scientists react;
  • About another stupidly doctored photo by Trump, to prove something to his dimwitted followers;
  • How the history Trump wants to erase hold the answer to his future;
  • How elections seem to swing back and forth parties, and whether this will continue;
  • And Bruckner 8, movement 3, and the history of classical music.
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Another item seen in passing on Facebook today, from more than one person. I’ll save the image rather than linking it.

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Today’s Notes on the Destruction of America

Posted on Friday 18 April 2025 by Mark R. Kelly
  • How the quality of American life depends on the regulations that Trump and his vandals are discarding;
  • Paul Krugman on Trump’s trade war and how they don’t know what they’re doing;
  • Dana Milbank on how Trump’s first 100 days are an historic failure;
  • Slate’s Fred Kaplan on how “Trump’s Delusional Belief in Himself Has Become the World’s Problem”.
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People who don’t understand what we have will miss it when it’s gone. Trump and DOGE are vandals that are ravishing the library and discarding any book that’s too heavy, or too ugly.

NY Times, Coral Davenport, 15 Apr 2025 (in the print paper 17 Apr 2025): Inside Trump’s Plan to Halt Hundreds of Regulations, subtitled “The White House will soon move to rapidly repeal or freeze rules that affect health, food, workplace safety, transportation and more.”

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